Novaurora Blog | For Designers, Marketers, and Entrepreneurs

By Jason Putorti
San José, Calif.
Lead Designer, mint.com
Latest Project: Capitol Circle
Latest Interview: DesignersCouch
Twitter: @novaurora



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Designing for Emotion I

This talk made it’s debut at the Rethink Hawaii 2009 Conference. A bit of background: I’m the Lead Designer at mint.com, and solely led design through the initial launch of the product. Prior to Mint, I ran a creative agency in Pittsburgh, doing web, identity, and advertising work for clients. The slidedeck is available on slideshare, or PDF.

What is Design

First, what is design? Let’s start by by saying what design isn’t: decoration. Startup founders commonly believe that a designer is there to make things look pretty, because they think it should be, but aren’t really sure why. I like this quote from Joe Duffy:

“What is design? It begins with ideas—ideas based in purpose. It requires a plan or a process. It yields innovation, invention or creation. It is successful if it elicits response—attention, desire, interaction or purchase.”

Emphasis on the last four words: attention, desire, interaction, or purchase. So design is really about getting a response from your users. Design is you communicating to them. What do you want to say? What do you want your users to do? How do you want them to feel? That’s design.

Design is also a process. It’s gathering information around the problem by asking questions, then comprehension, formulation into a solution, and culminates in user engagement.

Why Design Matters

The design, and user experience, of your product, is the most critical success factor of your startup. Business model is very important, and investors evaluate that first, but clearly without design you’re not going very far because you won’t engage users. Anecdotally, early adopters who love it, will evangelize for you and really spark growth. This is what happened with Mint.com. Marc Gobé, author of Emotional Branding, explains:

“Understanding what the consumers want and bringing solutions that will inspire them is the most powerful way to support any business strategy…
Putting consumers and the product at the center of the equation is fundamental to a brand’s success…
[Design is] proof of a company’s commitment to people and to innovation.”

People is a key word there. Gobé also explains that consumers buy, and people live. Meaning that today, you’re not just marketing at consumers, successful companies are engaging in a two-way dialog and building around people and their needs.

Another reason why it matters so much comes from Stig Gustavson:

“Design is the message. It helps us communicate our strong point of difference. What you say is not as believable as what you show.”

What does that mean? Successful products and brands just have to be themselves to be successful in the market place, rather than work so hard on marketing and messaging. A great example is the Herman Miller Aeron. I’ve never seen an advertisement for Herman Miller in my life but the Aeron is absolutely iconic and has been positioned in my mind as the best chair on the market. Make design the message, and people will enthusiastically spread the word, with very positive feelings attached that will drive others to have a look.

Another critical socioeconomic truth of our day, is that we’re in an emotional economy. We’ve gone from an industry driven to a people driven economy, from production to consumption driven. We’re not in Don Draper’s world of attacking the consumer anymore. Phones and computers are no longer pieces of technology, they are positioned as pieces of your lifestyle. With the advent of fMRI, which can measure blood flow to different parts of the brain in real-time, scientists have found that we’re much more emotional, and much less rational, than we say we are. People tend to “go with their gut” first, and rationalize later, or sometimes not at all. I like to draw on my love of politics, so let’s take a look at the ’08 elections. The average voter was simply not breaking down policies between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and deciding that way. (They were incredibly similar, but we’re ignoring that for now.) The ‘08 Democratic primary was simply about how people felt about these two people. The rallying cry for Obama wasn’t a technical idea about health care mandates it was “change you can believe in,” in every possible way. Hillary was about being tough, a fighter, and harnessing the feelings around being the first serious woman contender. None of these are rational reasons, nor translate into policy, they appealed to emotions.

In my talk I illustrated this point by saying we’re a lot less like Spock from Star Trek, meaning rational, considered, and logical, and more like Kirk– intuitive, emotional, instinctive.

But why does all of this matter? It matters because design is the most powerful tool we have to affect emotions. Visual design, experience design, product design– the end result is visceral and tangible, and provocative. More from Gobé:

“In an emotional economy, success is judged by a profound and indelible connection with people through sensory experiences.
By forgetting to focus on the way your product will be experienced, and failing to respond to people’s need to be stimulated, you fail their expectations.
No amount of money can buy the media to fix a boring product, no PR message will work once you lose that trust.”

Brand 101

Brand is a word tossed around as much as, if not more than, design. So let’s talk about it a bit, and how brand and design are related. First, a brand is not your name, or your logo. Think of a brand as a personality, or what other people think. Apple’s brand is in the hands of its users. They influence and nurture the brand through their actions towards that audience. Design is a major tool for them. From Brand Gap:

As an exercise, what words come to mind when you think of Steve Ballmer? Steve Jobs? Rush Limbaugh? Try it again for companies, like Zappos, Walmart, or AT&T. What likely came to mind is how you feel about those brands, and that’s exactly it.

The next segment will be about taking advantage of this thinking in startup building…

“This time it’s going to be different, trust me.”

How Mint.com Won

Last September I wrote an article called Startup Success Factors. The second half of this article, originally titled, How We Are Going to Win went unpublished, until now. With Intuit announcing their intent to acquire Mint.com, almost exactly a year after I wrote it, a new title is in order.

You could have the best idea on Earth, but a common saying among entrepreneurs is that it’s all about execution. Here’s how we are going to take our idea and win:

1. Positioning

In the minds of our consumers, we need to be the anti-Quicken both from a brand and a product standpoint. Quicken is a desktop app, so we go for the web app. Quicken requires manual downloading of OFX files, so we make ours update automatically. Quicken requires a long and painful setup process that requires a fair bit of financial know-how. Mint can be up and running in 2 minutes. Quicken cost $50 or more, Mint is free. Quicken has 11 products, Mint has one, and so on. Be disruptive. Be the opposite of the market leader from your feature set to your color palette. We need to redefine what this category is after everyone before us tried to train people to be accountants rather than building tools for the rest of us.

From a brand perspective, Quicken has all the baggage I mentioned earlier, and Mint can start fresh, no pun intended. Their marketing imagery is red, corporate, and what I like to call Microsoft cliché: Lots of fake people doing fake things, like being on the beach– probably because they don’t want to use the product. Mint is green, friendly, fun, organic, and simple. I’ve tried very hard to create materials that are delightful, and trustworthy at the same time. Quicken recently launched an online offering, but they called it Quicken Online, thereby giving their new baby the gift of all that baggage. They are banking on the brand recognition, but again, this isn’t always good. See Crystal Pepsi.

2. Thoughtful design.

The Mint web site has amassed a trophy case like no other in the nine months it’s been up, including two four Webbys. Design has given us the credibility we need to overcome the downsides of being the new kid on the block. It isn’t easy to convince people to give their credit card numbers to a company with a dot.com in its name, let alone all of their online banking passwords. Design matters.

3. Listen to your customers, or don’t.

Six Sigma says that anything that can lead to customer dissatisfaction is a defect. Not so fast Bill Smith. Listening to your customers and using metrics is obvious, knowing what to do with the information shouldn’t be. The obvious solution is not always the right one. Resist the urge to pile feature on top of feature, but identifying problems and knowing either how to properly bake the solutions or to decide that, “the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few.” Sometimes you need to sacrifice features to keep things simple and preserve your user experience. Twitter did this, Pownce did not. The Quickens and Microsoft Moneys didn’t make decisions, they just kept adding things. After all, you need a reason to pay for those upgrades. As for user testing, it’s not the be all end all. Apple does little to none of it, they have a very deep understanding of design and they are their own target market. There’s no customer in the world you know better than yourself. If you can, do so.

4. Sweat the details.

Don’t confuse deciding which features to build and which to skip, with being diligent on the details. Once of the nice things about working for a product startup is that the only clock you’re on is your own. You can’t go overbudget on yourself. Take the time to do the little things, no matter what role you’re in. Don’t fall into obsession, but sweat the details a bit. It can be tough when there’s so much to do, but it’s what separates the great companies from the mediocre ones. People notice, especially when it comes to design and copywriting. They don’t always know exactly what makes it great, but they know it when they see it.

5. Build credibility and acquire customers through PR

We had an aggressive blogging strategy before launch, namely finding the right people and getting them, and their friends, fired up about our service. We built a beta list of over 20,000, and people in San Francisco knew what Mint was before it started up, and wanted it. It was a hype machine to be sure, but we delivered. We used TechCrunch 40 to launch, won it, and built from there. We abandoned all paid search and concentrated 100% on PR and organic search. Atomic PR successfully won us glowing reviews in every publication imaginable by having the right pitch for the given readership. Innovating in the money space is a powerful thing with a lot of mainstream appeal, especially in an economic slowdown. What’s your appeal to segments across America? Make the right connections, and find the right stories and angles, for you.

Who doesn’t love the E-trade baby?

Apple Fan Fires Back With ‘iDon’t’ Spoof

Possibly the best designed site on the web: Nike+

Possibly the best designed site on the web: Nike+

We [solve problems] by tapping the local knowledge, and if it’s insufficient, we go looking for specialists. But what if we’re following the wrong protocol? We should stop looking for experts and start looking for analogues. It’s a big world: Chances are someone has solved your problem already. And she might be an anteater. Dan & Chip Heath

Why the Verizon 'Droid' campaign is a huge miss

I came across this bit of funny recently:

“The Droid ad — which ends with the Verizon Wireless logo — highlights iPhone’s weaknesses, saying “iDon’t” have a real keyboard, a 5 megapixel camera, the ability to take photographs in the dark or the ability to run more than one application at the same time. It ends the ad by saying “Droid does.”” -Reuters

Why did I laugh? Because I’ve seen this before. Companies have been trying to challenge Apple on features for years. I’m not sure if it’s a product decision, or an advertising pitch, or where this comes from, but here we go again. Motorola is marketing its phones by taking on the iPhone head on, apparently by competing on features.

Remember the Creative Zen? Probably not. They tried to compete on features with the iPod too. The Zen was a clever device with a lot of things built in that were not in the iPod, but it ultimately got crushed because the Apple was easier to use and fulfilled their brand promise much better– namely that it was a fun way to listen to your music anywhere. Remember those great commercials? Remember any features?

The new battleground isn’t features, it’s user experience. User experience, as defined by Jesse James Garrett, is how the product behaves and is used in the real world.

Sound familiar? It’s how Apple does all their ads, and what they have in mind when they design their products. Apple has demonstrated a mastery of user experience, and of communicating how their technology fits into your life. The iPhone ads are filled with very clear visual examples of how your lifestyle will be fundamentally changed by having one. The benefit of being able to book a restaurant while you’re out, or not getting lost, or finding movie times. They’ve plucked pain points right out of our lives, and shown you how they no longer exist with an iPhone.

Now enter Motorola / Verizon, who apparently in their marketing research, uncovered that what people really want are ‘widgets’, 5 megapixel pictures, and open development. This is unfortunate on so many levels. What exactly is a widget to a cell phone consumer? I would think that people want a device that does what they need as quickly and easily as possible.

Maybe I’m missing the point here, but it doesn’t seem so far that Verizon is interested in selling to the mass consumer market. Thoughts?

What if Microsoft designed the iPod box? Old but, there’s many design lessons here.

The best strategy behind design is all about collection and collaboration—of people, talents, ideas, perspectives. It’s about truly seeing vs. just looking. It’s about being curious about what you’re seeing, what it means or what it could mean if used in a new way or combined with other ideas or images. It takes a certain appetite and ability to digest. Honestly it’s simple. The best talent understands that…

To be successful, the business of design must deliver truth and unique beauty. To breakthrough, design must deliver creative differentiation.

Joe Duffy
UX humor from Eric Burke

UX humor from Eric Burke

“You can’t believe everything you read on the Internet. That’s how World War I got started.” -New PS3 ad campaign