Strategy Blog: Viget Labs

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

Simplicity has been at the core of the web's philosophy of design for the last five years. Whether it's a major part of the visual approach, with large amounts of negative space, simple color palettes, and a focus on strong typography; the interface approach, with fewer things on a given page; or the product approach, with products that do "one thing well"; nearly everyone has carried the banner of simplicity at one point or another.

But while this approach has indeed helped us make products on the web that can appeal to a mass audience, it is starting to show its limitations. After a few months (weeks?) of using a simplicity-centric product like Basecamp, you start to run up against its limitations: it may facilitate the way that the creators work best, but you're not quite like the creators. Maybe you've outgrown the simple feature set and need more for your modestly-growing needs. Maybe you no longer have a few months' worth of content in the system, but now have years of content, and managing it all has become a bear. Simplicity is beginning to fail.

Part of the problem is that simplicity is the solution to a problem poorly-identified. Life is complex, and tools to conquer life's complexity need to instead embrace it, rather than ignore it.

Continue reading "The Shackles of Simplicity"

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

Dear Aspiring Twitter Speculators,

Congratulations on your new idea. You’ve come up with, and perhaps already built, a product that is genuinely useful to almost every Twitter user, filling one of the many feature canyons left open by the Twitter product team. Perhaps you’ve already gathered a respectable following on the interwebs, with a few thousand people using your service on a regular basis. All that, and it only took you a couple weeks to build on the side.

Now you’re waiting for the big moment to happen: the call from Ev or Biz or whomever. You’re sure they’re going to want to purchase your product for loads more money than it took you to build it. It fills a clear gap, after all, and there are already people using it. They bought Summize, right?

Continue reading "An Open Letter to Third-Party Twitter App Founders"

Jackson Fox - User Experience Designer :

It can be an odd experience attending a conference in a recession, and my trip to the 10th Anniversary IA Summit in Memphis, TN, didn’t disappoint in that regard. The event was smaller, tinged with uncertainty, and chock full of people trying to figure out what the future holds for themselves and for their profession. I left feeling both frustrated with the angst, and brimming with new ideas and a deep desire to return next year. It took me a while longer to get all of these thoughts down than I thought it would, about a month longer in fact, but I’ve enjoyed re-visiting my favorite talks in order to share them with others.

Continue reading "IA Summit 2009"

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

If you're in the US, there's a good chance you have April 15th on your mental calendar, if not circled on your desk calendar with a bold, red sharpie. It's the due date for individuals to file their tax returns, and while about 60% of us file well ahead of time, the rest have a fair propensity to procrastinate a bit and file within the two weeks leading up to the deadline. There's good reason for this procrastination — no one likes paying taxes.

Last week, our landlords friends upstairs at Tax Analysts (great tagline: "Respectfully Disagreeable Since 1970") asked us to take a look at the website at the center of this early-spring anti-holiday, IRS.gov. While they were looking for input around functionality and a bit of visual design, we noticed some interesting things that we thought were worth covering here.

The short of it: you almost definitely hate IRS.gov, but not because it has no redeeming qualities.  You just can't help hating the IRS.

Continue reading "‘Tis the (Tax) Season"

Stephanie Hay - Project Manager :

Last December, I visited a financial planner.  It was well worth the time and hassle of tracking down recommendations from folks whom I trust.  It was enlightening but also daunting -- I had a lot of work ahead of me to get prepared for retirement at 30.  (Tsk, and some call me an idealist).

Anyway, among the many great recommendations was to explore investment opportunities available in any of a number of companies.  So, I started doing some research and now have intimately experienced the user flow and options available to me behind three major financial institutions, which I refuse to name because I don't want anyone to steal from me.

Here are some observations I've found in my micro-research:

Decision paralysis on the home page is alive and well. One of the companies had no visual or content hierarchy -- it was literally line item after line item of everything I could use them for.  This is OK if I'm just scanning for a certain keyword, but it's also anxiety-inducing.  Another company had much better visual hierarchy -- for example, there was a question on the home page that asked "New to Investing?" -- but then led me to a landing page with enough choices for a seasoned investor.  The conversion funnel could be more effective if I felt a guided experience rather than a free-for-all.

Two of three companies structured their user experiences around their own internal organization. This is amazingly annoying when I want to move money from point A to point B and have to sign into two different interfaces and have confirmations from both.  Why on Earth would you require your users to jump through these hoops just because your internal territories are so deep?  However, one company did invest obvious love and care into audience research and ease of use, which then made the other two seem even more bureaucratic.

Pop-up explanations are everywhere, but never seem to help.  Maybe this is just me, but I don't really need a glossary when trying to manage my banking online.  Instead, I need answers to questions that seem nowhere to be found (like, when setting up bill pay for an individual, does the date I choose dictate when the check is cut or when it's delivered?).  Or the answers are off on some page beyond my current view, which makes keeping things in context very difficult.  But, to remedy this, see the next point:

Live chat works.  I feel weird typing this, but it's true.  On each of the three companies I was researching, I used the live chat option and found stellar results -- one of which was so pleasurable thanks to friendly customer support that they earned my business.  (A follow-up call afterwards gave me the warm fuzzies, too.)

Overall, I was amazed that two of three financial institutions I surveyed are capable of managing millions (billions?) of dollars for people but aren't better equipped to manage their users' experiences intuitively.  Maybe I'm expecting too much?