PLAN FOR IMPROVISATION

Originally posted on ForeverCar Blog:  https://blog.forevercar.com/an-easier-way-to-decide You probably have far more important priorities than taking the time to research vehicle service protection plans. That’s where we come in. When we set out to create the latest innovation to our consumer shopping platform, we vowed to keep it simple. If you are not shopping for vehicle service protection at  forevercar.com , you are likely sitting across the desk from a loan officer at a bank or a finance manager at a dealership. There are a couple problems we've identified with this scenario: It’s bad timing.  You are typically involved in a larger, more complex loan transaction involving your vehicle. Taking the necessary time to research the offering is impractical and highly unlikely to happen in that moment. That’s why most people pass on vehicle protection at the bank or dealership. Wrong amount of detail.  There’s a lot to this. A service contract is ...

This is from a product I use daily. Who wrote this code and thought they were done? Who approved these two button styles next to one another? I have this vision of a developer choosing a library that made their development life easier. I picture this code going straight into production use without review. Next, I picture the designer who works there rolling their eyes, checking out, and heading to LinkedIn to see what other opportunities exist. I'm being unfairly harsh, but it makes me wonder what other sloppiness is happening inside this product.

Image by Lars Plougmann I got asked by an investor recently how we at Digital H2O do design. I liked the conciseness of my response and thought it was a good example of how to tie user centric design into a business plan. Here goes: Our design philosophy is best described as user centric design. Our goal is to only design and build features our current, or potential customers, find valuable and that substantially help our business continue to grow. We spend significant time listening to our customers’ needs throughout the sales process. We then form hypothesis what customers’ needs are and what they can accomplish in the application. While designing features we show mock-ups and prototypes to customers in order to get feedback and incrementally improve the design. After the product is built and released we continue to test our hypotheses about how customers will use features we have built. We utilize automated event tracking in the app to monitor u...