Download PDFYesterday, we participated in a panel at Web 2.0 Expo called “Corporate Makeover, Web 2.0 Edition”. We were joined by Nadav Savio of Giant Ant and Tom Hobbs of Adobe. The original mandate for our presentation was to apply “Web 2.0″ thinking to the corporate world. Several months ago, we collectively decided to focus on the banking industry as we all agreed it was an area in need of improvement and easily related to by a wide cross-section of users.
Both Nadav and Tom presented some interesting information. Giant Ant brought forward new thinking not only around the user interface but also around the business model. Tom followed up with a great view of the user needs and the mandates it places on experience designers everywhere.
Our presentation was focused on the daily lives of the everyday banking customer. We put together a Rapid Prototype in a few days that showed some of the potential areas worth investigation (we’ll be posting a detailed review of the prototype soon). As we worked through the design, we asked ourselves repeatedly: “What’s the center of my universe?” We worked without constraints and presented many possibilities.
The conversation got interesting at the end, however, when a representative from Washington Mutual (who’s banking interface we chose to redesign) brought forth some interesting insights from behind the firewall. The key point, in my opinion, was that introducing new experiences to users is a very difficult process. We were asked by another member of the audience how to deal with entrenched users and the reply was simple: “You don’t have to be radical, be better.” Tom Hobbs disputed the notion that users are actually resistant to change, suggesting, rightly so I believe, that when provided with a process that extends and enhances their current mental model and understanding, they will find success. I noted that if you’re building against current customer feedback and pain points, your likelihood for failure or frustration is lowered as well.
In the moments after the session, we had some very interesting conversations with a number of other individuals. One issue that seemed to crop up consistently was the value of user testing. It is often easy, we’ve found, to fall on your own sword when it comes to testing. The most difficult proposition is trying to unseat your own thinking and logistics as you design your testing regime. Consider this simple example. When considering the font size for a header, you can phrase the question as “Is this font too large?” or you can phrase it as “Is this font too small?” Both will result in information regarding the sizing of text on the page. Of course, each elicits a different type of response based solely on the language chosen.
Ultimately, change is hard, largely resented, and often needed. Ask the hard questions up front, break your mind, and work backwards from there.
Technorati Tags: adobe, giant+ant, rapid+prototyping, washington+mutual, web2.0, web2expo
May 4th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
When is the presentation going to be posted? The slides of the screenshots really clarify.