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

Rapid Creative Design - Does It Make The Experience Better?

In the past two weeks, we have been heads down on a project at Manage My Home that will greatly improve the way in which we help people truly Get It Done as part of our new to do list capability.

However, after being heads down means real-time collaboration, change on the fly, creative and wireframe development being done simultaneously, engineering estimates and planning being done in a room thats beginning to get stale - you step back and say, is this going to make it better?

I've come to a tentative conclusion -- all things in life are subject to change (well, many things).  Rapid, deep collaboration will take a product experience to a much better level on the broad brush strokes of the experience but when you get to refining the experience, the beauty in detailed design, detailed engineering and detailed execution needs focus and time.

Our current example is the to-do list.  We prototyped the basic work design and elements of that experience in less than two weeks and had the outlines of exactly what we have implemented.  The teams were highly collaborative, engaged in a way that limited distraction and the experience was put in front of users with a lot of great feedback.

We then took a few weeks after that to let the practitioners architect, refine, design the details -- and bring it back together.  This gave people the mental breathing room they needed to add the details like simple drag-and-drop, the ease of adding the to-do, the simple ability to get help but not have it distract the user if it wasn't needed.  These details, that also provide the hint of delight, emerge after the intense collaboration in the stillness of a practioner doing the work of their discipline. 

After this experience, and many others like it, we have moved to a more consistent way of working.  It beings with an intense explosion of collaboration across the product creation disciplines followed by a time of quiet detailed refinement.  We aren't perfect at it -- and sometimes the intense collaboration feels like what used to be called fire-drills -- but it is getting us closer to a better way to deliver great experiences through a rapid design process.

In the spirit of always challenging our work and making it better, I would love to know how you do it!  Let us know your ideas.

- Jim, Chief Home Manager

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.

Speak Up and Be Heard

Last week we reached out to the SK-You community, Sears and Kmart's web interface to engage customers in decisions about the brands. Since Manage My Home is a part of Sears Holdings, we were able to contact this group and ask them to help shape our Answers application.

The results were pretty definite and, luckily for me, along the direction I was planning to take our marketing, so I only had to make minor adjustments.

 Before I get to the results, let me give you the setup.

Before answering the questions below, please consider the following service and let us know what you think! Manage My Home is a new kind of online neighborhood, where you can connect with home experts and other passionate homeowners. Each of our members can ask our team of professional home-care experts questions and receive personalized answers in about two days. Our experts are 25-year veterans in over 60 home-care and product categories. Members can ask our experts anything - on any subject at any level of expertise in any area of the home. And expect definitive answers. Even better, the Manage My Home community - including "Smart Neighbors" that we have recognized for their contributions to our community - can also provide answers and advice, creating a rock-solid knowledge base for home ideas and problem-solving.

To summarize our findings, you like the terms expert and home. You are concerned about home care costs and are looking for product and service recommendations as well as deals. When you get an answer from our experts you want easy, step-by-step instructions and would like to have your answer in less than two days.

Do you agree? Speak up. It's your chance to be heard and to help shape Manage My Home.

-Alex, Marketing