User Experience in the world of entrepreneurship- Evernote and Kickstarter

 

evernote ui

http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/02/evernote-web-client/

http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2014/10/02/new-beautiful-evernote-web/

Garrett defines user experience as “the design of anything with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as an explicit goal”. This was an interesting shift for me as most of class has been covering aspects of machine learning and the limitations of communicating unstructured data to computers that lack the emotion, sensitivity and empathy of humans.

User experience, on the other hand, brings the viewer to the forefront. I enjoyed his breakdown of the structure of contemporary vision into the different layers- surface, skeleton, structure, scope and strategy, with the surface being the most concrete and strategy being the most abstract.  Expounding on the necessary qualities for good design, he also urges the need for designers to understand their product’s “emotional and psychological context of use” to inspire passionate connections.

This has become a pertinent concern in fields of computer science and app development, and most developing companies seek UI/UX designers who are able to translate the functions of their companies to technological devices and web applications. A recent update was Evernote’s newly redesigned web interface, which makes the process of notetaking more streamlined and expedites the process of note taking on a tech device. As opposed to a desktop app, the “interface fades away to showcase your thoughts” and “re-emerges” when you need it. The app also has the ability to guide you “to the content you’re looking for”. Rather than an appendix or secondary attachment, it has integrated itself to become a “destination for the creative mind” that simulates the interconnected space that probably sits between our ears.

While it often appears that a product’s needs govern its design, Evernote seems to have demonstrated that a good design alone is capable of rethinking and even dictating a product’s function given the capabilities of technology. This inversion has created interesting results, where several startups are focused on simple ideas that are executed thoughtfully and resourcefully. The idea of note taking is neither new nor revolutionary, but the design’s ability to engineer choices with underlying user psychology means that UI/UX is no longer a slave to the product in that it requires strategy defining a story- it embodies rather than merely represents the very personality of the product.

This makes me curious about skeletons that lend themselves to easy use and manipulation- take Kickstarter for example. As a company whose product is its service platform, Kickstarter relies heavily on developing an interface that is user-friendly, and flexible enough to allow different product creators to market their products. Given the competing needs of users to market their unique products in different ways, I am curious to know what their web designer was thinking given that their product was such a complex intangible i.e. to accommodate as many products as possible.