One. Pay attention to what users care about. Remember, you can never get too close to your user base.
You can learn a lot from Craigslist:
“I hear this all the time,” Buckmaster says. “You guys are so primitive, you are like cavemen. Don’t you have any sense of aesthetic? But the people I hear it from are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site. In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them. Time spent on the site, the number of people who post—we’re the leader. It could be we’re doing one or two things right.”
… Only after I have spent every spare hour on craigslist—browsing the ads, tracking the spam, reading the help forums, contacting users—do I finally begin to grasp something of his situation. The truth is that a lot of people complain about craigslist. Buckmaster is correct that few of them complain about the design. They complain about spam, they complain about fraud, they complain about the posting rules, they complain about the search, they complain about uploading images. They complain about every way a classified transaction can go wrong. They seldom complain about amazing new features they imagine they might possibly want to use, because they are too busy complaining about the simple features they depend on that don’t work as well as they’d like. …
Two. Find out what makes the business successful. Double down on that.
Business should be its own priority:
Designers who don’t understand that websites are business assets which must achieve specific business objectives, which in turn are tied to revenue goals…are not actually designers at all. They are artists. Giving them your money is not an investment in creating a business asset—it’s a divestment of capital that is never going to come back (let alone with friends).
Three. Make it so what’s good for users is good for the business.
Remember, you only need approval from the people who use the product:
It didn’t matter that under empirical measurement more people visited the site. It didn’t matter that the changes we made ensured more of these visiting people told us they were interested in our products and wanted to write us cheques. It just mattered that it ‘didn’t feel right’.
And don’t forget to enjoy yourself.
Craigslist Is Ugly « Irrational Design Blog