Strategy Blog: Viget Labs

Stephanie Hay - Project Manager :

When you’re a smaller company competing with a larger, more established (read: name-brand recognition) one, you have to find new ways to separate yourself from the ingrained competition.  We’ve talked about this often around the lab, particularly in association with brand personality discussions around everything from MINI to Southwest to Coke. 

So Peerless Faucets, as Tom learned, is taking that notion of brand personality and applying it whole-heartedly.  When he chose the Peerless faucet over other brands like Kohler or Moen, for example, he was at first concerned.  However, as he dug into Peerless’ rather personal and hilarious installation instructions, he converted from a skeptic to a fan in a matter of moments. 

It’s not everyday that the user experience of installing a faucet, which is normally led by hard-to-read graphics and poorly labeled directions, is so enjoyable. The instructional content isn’t just funny, but it’s also MUCH easier to follow thanks to their brevity and detail.

Peerless established itself to Tom—and probably lots of other people—as an approachable company that understands you’re a person trying to do something you don’t do everyday. They understand a little humor is the perfect remedy to what otherwise can be a frustrating process, and made their mark by jumping outside of the box to communicate installation in a personable way.

Jackson Fox - User Experience Designer :

There are number of things in life we know we should do more often, but tend to avoid because they’re kind of a pain. In my job, that tends to be user testing (aka usability testing). Testing can provide invaluable insights for designers and developers at any stage in our process, but it can be a major hassle. There’s the planning, the recruiting, the scheduling, logistics, analysis, and then the all-important reporting. Silverback is a new app from Clearleft that promises to take a lot of the pain out of the process. It’s lightweight, easy to use, and requires no hardware other than that built-in to your laptop (assuming you have an Apple laptop of recent vintage).

Continue reading "Initial Impressions of Silverback"