First and foremost congratulation to Dave Morin from Facebook. His place on Fast Company’ss Top 100 Most Creative list is totally desevered. Creativity is in my world way more than just design – and I salute Fast Company for celebrating that. Also a big thanks to the mag for including me on the list. While I am not so sure I deserve being listed along so many of the people I idolize – I am non the less incredible proud and thankful for being on it too.
Top 100 most creative in business: http://origin-www.fastcompany.com/100/
The last year or so, I have been obsessing over what I call ‘flow over feature’. Its is the maybe somewhat obvious idea, that you can not think of individual features or products in isolation, you have to think about how you solve problems in the context of the users ‘flow’. Now while that thinking is somewhat already embedded into the notion of user cases, I find that use cases themselves are often too specific and overlook emotional flow-based-insights that are important. We focus too much about solving the specific problem, rather than understand the mental space the user is in – and thus we might solve the problem but the experience is not fluid. Let me give you an example. The other day, I stayed at the W hotel in San Francisco. As I was stepping into the shower I noticed that the bath mat towel used when stepping out on the floor after showing was rolled instead of folded. This meant that I could tap it with my foot just before stepping into the shower instead of bending down and un-folding it. I then turned on the shower and noticed that the shower head had been pointed towards the wall, making the first bit of cold water that is always in the pipes go onto the wall instead of me. Finally, as I went out of the shower, I found the bathrobe next to the shower with the string tied in a way so I could just pull the string and the bathrobe would open instead of having to untie the knot. Future more the string was secured to the side of the bathrobe so it didnt fall down on the floor. Overall the W hotel had managed to identify my user flow and optimize each elements of the features instead of just seeing them as independent ones. The W have realized that a user is in a flow when using the bathroom features – making my experience much better as the features was adaptive to the flow.
I think when we develop sites and products, we often forget to fully understand the physical or mental flow properly of a user, e.g. where was the mouse pointed at last, what are a user thinking about as they use a feature or do they hit a page from the side door (e.g. google) or our frontdoor of our site. In order to make successful products, we need to increase this understanding – so we can wrap our technology more invisible around human behavior.
Made this twitter the other day in celebration of an excellent experience with ZipCar. “Really impressed by zipcar. Their signup process is really slick – and its perfect for ‘living in a big city like london’ usage.” Now today, I recieved the email below thanking for that twit. Now, in a world where there are many options for consumers, I really love the way that ZipCar make me feel special.
I relelize that there are compeditors out there (even some that are cheaper I think), but its really consumer dialog like the email below that creates loyalty and, not to forget, vocal viral promoters. Even renting a car, is for me not only about getting some wheels in a given time period – its about the totally end to end experience; From booking easy online, to getting a nice working car, to feeling some what part of a cool brand. So again and for the last time (otherwise people will think I work for them ;-). Well done ZipCar.
————-
Hi Henrik,
Laura from Zipcar UK here. I noticed your enthusiastic post on Twitter/May 3rd about your Zipcar drive in Mini Minaret. Hope it did the biz for you! As a little gesture of thanks I am adding £15 in free driving credit to your account today, lasting for 30 days (we love our happy Zipsters!) Hope you enjoy it however you choose to use it.
And yes, to your post point, we think we are helping people to overcome traditional private car usage and reduce car usage making London a better place to live and travel in.
Just to add: if you’re in Hammersmith, Southwark or in Tower Hamlets watch out for a slew of new Zipcars coming your way this spring/summer, making Zipcar an even more simple personal and business lifestyle choice.
Thanks again, and happy Zipping.
Kind regards,
Laura
Communications manager
