Interaction Design ScienceTop Influencer: Dave Hogue, Google
I feel that applied behavioral psychology and behavioral economics provide a fundamental model for understanding the irrationality and predictability of human behavior. Alone, they cannot design an application or feature, but they can help elucidate human behavior - explaining the 'why' behind our observations.
My Product Example: When designing Intuit's global navigation, I had to fully understand how customers perceived the existing navigational paradigms, while having to reimagine the cohesiveness of the experience. |
Habits & Behavioral EconomicsTop Influencer: Steve Wendel, O'Reilly
Habituation of use determines a product's market viability. The economy of attention is ultimately scarce and we are constantly competing to change human behavior. It is imperative that we understand a customer's internal and external triggers, their ability to take action, the subsequent reward, and build up intrinsic and extrinsic investment in the experience.
My Product Example: When designing realtime auction statuses for Auction.com's mobile apps, I discovered that customers were delighted by in-app "In Auction Now" notifications, even if they were not bidding on a property. They became accustomed to checking these notifications and, hence, began to bid more often. |
The Value of MetricsTop Influencer: Debbie Kawamoto, CreditKarma
We develop products in the context of a business environment. As such, we must be cognizant of the underlying business value, metrics, resources, and timelines that influence the scope of our initiatives.
My Product Example: When building Auction.com's internal auction platform, I identified the core metrics that executives could digest in order to understand the value of the initiative. These intermediate metrics were task efficiency, customer satisfaction, and data integrity - all which fueled our primary business metrics to increase sales rate and revenue. |
Adapting to ConstraintsTop Influencer: Nathan Rahn, Smugmug
Design processes must be adaptive. We must constantly make trade-offs and embrace the constraints of the business, customer, and technological contexts. In doing so, we must constantly diverge and converge in our problem, solution, and implementation phases. However, we must else adapt the process to suit the broader business environment.
My Product Example: When leading CellBreaker's design, I had to embrace the rapid growth expectations of our investors and the equally rapid timeline. To do so, we had to rapidly experiment and launch features by testing in production. Though this introduced risk, it allowed us to learn and iterate quickly. |