Open House - A behind-the-scenes view of Manage My Home

User Experience - Can It Really Be Agile?

For the last three years, we have been on the forefront of an experiment in conducting user experience and creative design for consumers with an agile software development model.  In my continuing effort to blog about the work that we are doing, both good and bad, you will read about this effort, and its benefits and challenges often.

There are three principles that I believe are critical to great experience design in an agile model:

1. Do you know the core features of your product?  If you know what the core features of your product should be, you can then use a very good collaboration model to continuously iterate and evolve the product as an experience and a technology.
2. Do you know what users you care about?  Everyone will have an opinion about the early versions of features you release.  Often, you will release features that are not as robust as you want them to be so you have to be ready to know what feedback matters and what feedback is distracting.  Knowing your users helps you manage the clutter.
3. Do the different team members appreciate the value of each others skill?  A critical component to making product development get the full value from an agile model is skill appreciation.  The engineering team much appreciates the craft of experience design and the designers value the importance of solid technical foundations with iterative software releases.  It sounds "duh" to make sure the team understands each other, but the collaboration required to get the full value out of agile models can no underestimate the importance of appreciation versus understanding.

If you can answer yes to the above principles, the rapid nature of design, develop and release can become a powerful factor in your time to market and reaching the user base you care about.  We are definitely not perfect in implementing these principles - in fact, it has led to some pretty interesting experiences for our users, but more about that next time.

-Jim, Chief Home Manager

The Product is About the User

Everyday, there are hundreds of new entries in the field of "nifty features" for your website.  Everyday, people make suggestions about your site good and bad.  So the question is - how do you make sure you build a great, simple product, stay focused and also make sure you take advantage of new technology and experiences.

It sounds a bit "duh" but the simple answer - focus on the user.  This means understanding their feedback, looking at how they are using your features, but also bringing to your product the design and experiences that led you to start building it in the first place. 

On Manage My Home, I received feedback from a user yesterday suggesting changes to how you look up an owners manual that was identical to how we used to do it.  And you can imagine, the way we used to do it would get feedback on more ways to find the manual which led to the improvements we instituted.  So who is right?  The users complaining about the old way or the users complaining about the new way.

As the product leader in any good experience, you know one thing - they both are right.  The question is, who do you listen to?  I follow three simple rules: 

1. If you can bring all the feedback together in a cohesive simple experience, that should be the goal; 
2. If the feedback is in conflict, remember the users you want to love your product because you can't always be all things to all people - and design for them;
3. Most important, use the opportunity to create a lasting dialogue with all of your users.  Someone who is giving you real feedback is incredibly important - both as a user that cares enough and one that could be a goldmine if insight.

So, as always, we would love your feedback on Manage My Home. 

-Jim, Chief Home Manager

Jim is currently working on organizing his closet - something that the casual observer would say has already been done but its not perfect until it looks like a boutique store in the West Village.

Designing: Whoa Man

There's an interesting link pairing on Kottke today examining two different views into the design process at Google. Crudely (and broadly) categorized, it's either "Numbers" or "Guts".

These kinds of peeks behind the curtain--while frustrating insomuch as they fuel the notion that the design process is ever fully visible--are exactly the kind of thing that fill my Google Reader with starred entries. For what its worth, I've been around enough "numbers" people (hey Alex) that I can say, almost completely unironically, that they make design more interesting rather than less.

That's not to say that my ideal design process involves myself, Diet Pepsi, and a user trend report but I'd rather have someone tell me blue doesn't work as well as green and give me numbers to prove it than challenge my "gut" with their own.

-Aaron, Desginer

Ad it up

We're always working to get the word out about Manage My Home. And since we're committed to helping you get more done at home, it makes sense that we'd partner with zillow.com to get the word out.

We've been getting a great response to our ads on the site, but it never hurts to get some extra opinions. If you haven't seen the ads on zillow -- or if you're reading this because you did -- check out the example below and let us know what you think. Does it grab your attention? Does it seem inviting? Do you find it wildly offensive? Feel free to comment -- we promise you won't hurt our feelings.

-Sam, Copywriter

Picture perfect

I'm a fortunate person. Very rarely does my writing have to do all the work on its own. Usually, the lines are paired with imagery and layouts that help tell the story.

To pick an example from the site, here's a unit we use to point users to our answers section:

Our goal is to point out that we have a way to find fast answers focused on your home. Between the phrase "Stop searching" and the image of the magnifying glass on the house, we think we did the job.

What do you think? Do our images and words tell the right stories together? Is there anywhere we need to do a better job? Feel free to let me know in the comments.

-Sam, Copywriter