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By rphillippi, July 8, 2009 2:30 pm

I use my Twitter account mainly for work and gathering information from my friends about the latest and greatest going on in the UX community. With following 88 rather active Twitters, it’s often hard to keep up with all the articles they post so in an effort to not only summarize for myself but also pass on to anyone reading, here’s what I have seen over the last week:

Whitney Hess has posted the following:

Jess Bezos’s, the founder of Amazon.com, says, “Obsess over customers“. More importantly:

Obsess over customers: “When given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers.”

Invent: “Any time we have a problem, we never accept either/or thinking. We try to figure out a solution that gets both things.”
Think long term: “It requires and allows a willingness to be misunderstood.”

It’s always Day 1: “There’s always more invention in the future. Always more customer innovation. New ways to obsess over customers.”

What I like about this video she has posted is it gets back to a point I have made about never losing touch with the customer. In all my experience with Six Sigma, Change Management, and User Experience, I think the only thing that really touches the customer is a culture of asking and consistently testing and iterating on your product line with your customers (or users). Hence why I have fallen into User Experience as a career.

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On top of this Business Week recently posted an article about the IDEA 09 Design Awards calling the article, “Designing a Better World” where they said, “Business leaders should care about design because it hits the bottom line… more than anything else, design builds a business.”

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By rphillippi, January 13, 2009 12:30 pm

Whitney Hess recently published an article on mashable.com called 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design.

The short version that UXD is not is as follows:

Dan Saffer, founder and principal at Kicker Studio, agrees that it’s common for design to be mistaken for being solely about decoration or styling. “I’ve had clients tell me not to worry about what their strategy is,” he says, “because why would a designer care about that? UX is more than just skin deep.”

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UX is more than just skin deep. As UX designers we should be buried in the process from step one, the concept, to assist with feeling and experience around a certain product. We can mesh that with strategy and business needs and goals throughout the project lifecycle to ensure a win win for all involved. After all without an engaging product that is a feel good experience from start to finish your marketing will fall flat and your customers will slowly walk away.