Our Blog

Our founding philosophy is that user experience needs to become a total business leadership approach instead of a subset of digital asset development.

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What do UX-centric Leaders Do?

They envision a valuable user experience and then build systems to support that experience. They then iterate within the slices of the experience to ensure constant improvement.

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Our first iPhone app

We've made Paleo List into an iPhone app! It's available for $0.99 on the App Store. Check it out.

The process was a bit harder than anticipated, but the same simple and flat navigation that we enjoy made it into the iPhone app, without much issue.

The experience has been enjoyable, and we're looking forward to producing more native apps in the future

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Move Over Product Design, UX Is The Future

For decades, the most successful businesses thrived on product innovation as the natural strategy to increase revenues, market share, and loyalty. Fast forward to 2014: today’s product innovations, and the growth they create, are often incremental, narrow, and fleeting. Take TVs or PCs--every competitor quickly matches the latest features, speed, brightness. As a result, companies are finding that returns from product efforts are harder to rely on. Among the Global Innovation 1000, R&D spending rose 5.8% last year, yet revenue for those companies increased less than 1%. Global competition and technological diffusion mean that competitors quickly catch up with most improvements, while the transparency of digital and social media also prompts consumers to quickly switch allegiance with each new alluring offer.

Enter: the experience. More...

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My half-year

It’s been almost six months since I officially joined UX Foundry. It’s been amazing working with Patrick. You read about these amazing companies and wish you could work for them, but the difference here is that I don’t work for anyone, I work with someone, on things that matter to us.

The best ideas win here. Strengths are played to, but no one has the last say. It’s always an iterative process. We’re always making things better. We always put the customer and the user in the centre - for every decision. We make decisions fast. There is no committee and there is no dictator. We ideate quickly. We design quickly. We prototype quickly. We get our products and services into the wild as quickly as we can. We test the water before jumping in for the long haul. We love amazing services and products. We make stuff we believe in. We believe in the stuff we make. We believe in simplicity. We don’t take on work for short term rewards. We skate together. We work remotely. We talk a lot on Skype. We talk a lot about customer experience, user experience and usability. We recommend more new startups and services to check out in one sitting than most blogs do in a month. We’re agile and change track quickly. We get things done. We explore new technology. We explore old technology. We do as much in house as possible and work with amazing people when we don’t. We trust each other. We work most when we work best. We relax. We celebrate.

Not many people have an opportunity like mine. I’m grateful and excited. It’s been a weird process of jumping out of the agency model of the sausage machine and into this model, which can hardly be defined, especially in Durban.

A year in review :

You Choose - a cellphone contact calculator concept for high-usage customers.

Paleo List - a shopping companion web app for people on a Paleolithic diet.

Gather - a web app for all those important, but hard to remember numbers.

KZNEW - a mobile web app to find the new and old road names for Durban and surrounds.

Object of my Affection - A more human way to shop online, that features makers and ethically & sustainably produced goods that we love.

Deliva - a local mobile web app for online shopping and delivery.

TillSlip loyalty - a mobile web loyalty app for redeeming rewards at your favourite outlets.

The Space mobile experience - a mobile e-commerce prototype for The Space.

And that's it for 2013. I think that 2014 is going to be a very different year. It's going to be a good one.

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7 Traits of UX-Led Businesses

The 7 traits of UX-Led Businesses from Patrick Carmody

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Introducing OOMA: Curation with a Conscience

Object of My Affection/ooma.co.za is our new curation site that serves a small group of discerning and thoughtful people. We are keeping it small as we think scale is the root cause for so many commerce-related problems (unsustainable value chains and poor user experiences). Too many customers means less care per person and less thought being put into the value chain.

We reckon commerce is in a pretty dire place. Most industries are stuck in a cycle of systematic abuse of human and natural resources. It all starts with a visionary leader who sets out to build a great brand and then the earls of efficiency (accountants) step in and drive the soul out of their business. It becomes a race to the bottom. How can we hollow out the brand, yet still remain in business?  

From soft drinks and sofas to toys and transportation, commerce is addicted to growth at all costs. Yes there is reform and great plans afoot, but what most consumers don’t see is that the product itself is inherently unsustainable and unnecessary. So-called sustainability leaders like Unilever and Coca-Cola are doing so much, whilst ignoring the fact that we no longer need their products. They think that the lie is too big for them to fess up to, so instead they spend millions of dollars on spin. All of this is done behind the scenes of brands that own fallacious real estate in the minds of consumers.

Most of the world’s biggest, best known brands have become a façade for problematic supply chains that have no consciousness or conscience. If we achieve something via ooma it will be making this clear to people and demonstrating that there can be a better approach to commerce and branding. 

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The future belongs to those that care and those that believe

Seth Godin

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Gather's thinking

Gather could've been an iPhone app, a Windows app, a Mac app, an Android app and synchronised its content and info between devices and the web. It could've done more, been more, shouted from the roof tops and made the whole earth's jaws drop open with graphics that oozed with style and with a list of features like none other. But what this app actually does is serve your most needed info in time of need - your wife's shoe size, your tax number, your old postal address, your club card number, your serial code when you're installing software again.

Gather, like our previous apps, Paleo List and KZNew offers shallow navigation - do what you need to do and get out. We've designed it so that you have to click or tap as little as possible. There's no layers of content. There's no save buttons. When you write something on a piece of paper, do you ever click a save button? Well we don't. So why should you need to on the web?

We believe in software that tears down features and delivers simple and intuitive user experiences. So why no iOS app? Why no Android app? Well that would take longer to develop, take more money to make, and would leave other users uncatered for. We've made the app responsive, and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Simple.

And then we've made it secure. SSL, Thawte certified, data encryption in and out of the database.

Signup today.

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Never go digging for your important numbers in dusty folders or congested email inboxes again. Access all your admin numbers with one login from any device.

Gather is launched! Sign up and start gathering and storing your numbers.

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UX-Led Business Hall of Fame: Jack Dorsey

For the simplicity, accessibility and universal impact of Twitter & Square Jack Dorsey is the first nominee in our UX-Led Business Hall of Fame. 

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Hey, our first little web app has made into onto the telly! We feature from 2mins33s into the vid. 

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Our new web app: a quick reference guide to the new and old street names in KZN. 

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Everything I know: Jeff Bezos

When Amazon acquired zappos.com a few years back via a one billion dollar share swap Jeff Bezos made a short video for the zappos people to impart a sense of the Amazon culture. The following "4 things that Jeff knows for sure" really strike a chord with us and seem like a good approach to creating a strong ux culture: 

1. Obsess over customers

“When given the choice of obsessing over competitors or obsessing over customers, we always obsess over customers.”

2. Invent

“Any time we have a problem, we never accept either/or thinking. We try to figure out a solution that gets both things.”

3. Think Long Term

“It requires and allows a willingness to be misunderstood.”

4. It's always day one

“There’s always more invention in the future. Always more customer innovation. New ways to obsess over customers.”        

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Interaction Models

Dan Saffer, the UX designer behind the term microinteractions has pointed us to the idea of the Interaction Model or "the overarching framework that ties the functionality together into a unified whole." As Dan says, "If we consider what interaction models really are, we begin to realize that they are nothing less than the designer’s attempt to help the user generate a mental model of the device. Mental models are the cognitive method of understanding a device that may or may not be how the device actually works, but allows the user to interact with it."  

Brands as "Meta Interaction Models"

If you think about it a brand is a kind of meta interaction model because the consumer forms a mental model of the brand and forms expectations around this model. If a brand behaves outside of the consumer's mental model we might say that it has become an incoherent interaction model. (An iPhone has a particular interaction model but the brand itself is a meta interaction model. So we form "meta expectations" around interactions within a particular brand's suite of products and experiences.) 

The TV-industrial complex was particularly poor at forming coherent interaction models as invariably ads set the mental model inaccurately. Brands that take a ux-first approach to interaction modelling end up having a more coherent and enduring brand. Google would be a classic example of this as most of their "branding" efforts are in fact ux efforts. In contrast, Pedigree dog food (much like many other TV-industrial complex brands) might be an example of a faulty brand interaction model as they feature happy dogs in their ads but google searches for 'pedigree dog food' reveal distraught owners of dead dogs (an incoherent interaction model if there ever was one).

We hope to see a trend towards brands aiming for coherent interaction models through the value chain. UX-focus is a great place to start.

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UX Led Business: Our Latest Presentation

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Microinteractions

They are the features within the features that build trust. Tiny, humanising details that make up the difference between a product you tolerate and a product you love. The heightened affinity I have for the iPhone over the S4 lies in the minutest of touches, sounds and sensory subteleties that I get from the iPhone. The satisfying click of the sleep button, the confident feel of the charger cable being in, button design etc. all enhance my experience despite not being key features of a mobile device. There are also many examples of microinteractions in the service design space. You are a regular at a restaurant and the waitress tells you that the gluten free bread, an item that you always order, will cost you more. Not a great microinteraction at all. On the flipside when a front of house person asks about your kids and remembers their names, the result is a microinteraction that knits you closer to the place in one quick stitch. 

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UX Leader: Hu Kitchen's Jordan Brown

Read about Jordan Brown's NYC paleo restaurant, Hu Kitchen here