Archive for September, 2009|Monthly archive page

Side Benefit of User Testing: Team Unity

For the last several months, we’ve been undergoing a large redesign of a critical and complex user flow at Adroll. At this point, several hundred hours of work have gone into the project. Our UX intern started the project with a company-wide customer identification exercise that got everyone focused on who we’re targeting with our product and who we should be designing for. We then conducted extensive user testing with target customers throughout development which resulted in radical shifts from what we thought would be the “right” solutions out of the gates. The result is not only a better and easier to use product, but also a unified team. User testing not only focused our team on our target users’ behavior but also virtually eliminated internal debate and the resulting tension regarding who thought what would be best for our users.  In the long run it’s very possible that the side benefit of team unity will match the value of the much improved product.

Gear Burger: Outdoor gear deals straight to your inbox

gear_burger_logo

My buddy Chad and I launched Gear Burger a while back as a little side project. When you sign up for the service, you select your preferred gear type and gear brand preferences (e.g. men’s hiking and skiing gear made by Patagonia, Salomon and Volkl).   Gear Burger then monitors one-deal-at-a-time sites like Steep and Cheap and Tramdock and sends you email alerts when an item that matches your preferences goes on sale.  The sales we see are generally 10 – 20% cheaper than the cheapest sale prices on the web.  You can also browse past deals within the catalog where you can also find individual products that you would like to follow and get alerts when they go on sale.   The live deals section contains all of the deals we are seeing that are currently active.  To date our system has seen 21,740 deals and tens of thousands of alerts.  We find it super useful for snagging great gear deals and we hope you do too.

Better can beat better + cheaper

I recently met a scrappy entrepreneur who is working on some very interesting technology that has potential to help large enterprises. He described his product as “ten times better and ten times cheaper than the competition.” It’s easy for entrepreneurs to slip into the mindset that their product needs to beat the competition on all fronts: price, service, technology, etc. The truth is that if you build something that really is 10x better than the competition, there is no reason to massively cut the price as well.