Whoa, check this out. We just made the prestigious Inc. 500 list ! #55 no less!!
Crazy how this little, 4 year old company has become all grown up so fast. Kudos to the whole team here!
We also made:
#5 company run by a woman (for my money, we have the best CEO in the world, not just the best woman CEO)
#4 company in IT Services ( hate the category, but we’ll take it :)
#2 company in Denver Metro
At the surface, Microsoft’s Bing may look like Google, but once you dig in a bit you notice a lot of nice little enhancements that make a huge diference.
Microsoft's Bing Search Results
I’ve only been using Bing for the last 2 hours and I’ve already decided it is my new favorite search engine. The search results look very similar to google’s, but Microsoft’s added a ton of little useful features. My favorite is the left sidebar with search history and related results. I also really like the pop-out details you get whenever you hover over any search result. The site is very ease to use, but obviously has a lot of deep complexity in its design; a lot of “spit and polish”. Small things you may not even notice, like how the image search’s counter (IMAGES;”>1-16 of 1,510,000 results) will update as you scroll – pretty nice little feature that I’ll miss if I ever go back to search images on Google.
If you agree that Bing is useful, you may get frustrated if you are a Mac user because you can not update your Safari search bar to default to Bing. Luckily, I found a helpful little utility and how-to that remedies the situation.
I know there may be a temptation to argue the quality of the results – that somehow google’s search algorithms are somehow better and more sophisticated. First, good luck with that discussion, the results I am receiving are just as good as I get from google for my “real world” use . Second, who really cares? There are countless studies from Forrester and Gartner that prove people value ease of use more than they value content. Bing has the “ease of use” thing down. It’s pretty ironic because Google beat out Mapqwest’s user experience years ago with Google Maps, but they failed to innovate in search UX and now have been leapfrogged by Microsoft.
It is obvious to me that Microsoft has a renewed focus on user experience. Thy are investing heavily in us (the end user) and that investment is truly paying off.
Well, I am excited to say we have launched our new website:
In an earlier post, I talked about the difficulties we were experiencing with designing and building our own website. I think, given our company objectives, the team hit a home run. What did we want to accomplish?
Obviously, the site needed to “show” what we do rather than just writing clever copy & creating pretty graphics (not that wit & sex appeal aren’t important – something that I lack on both counts). We fundamentally believed our site needed to be “rich” while also delivering the appropriate marketing messaging. We are a little worried that our site might make us look more “interactive agency” than “user experience agency”, but that is a hard line to balance.
We really needed to overhaul our messaging. We have changed quite a bit over the last 3 years and our previous site made it very difficult to highlight our focus on the 3 key areas all good UX companies care about: strategy, design and technology execution.
The team did an awesome job doing things you may not notice, like creating a flash based website and make it easy to update the content. They also incorporated deep linking and HTML/Flash mixes in a very sophisticated way. I’m really proud of the way this thing was built.
I’d love to hear your feedback on how you think we did. Go easy though, I do bruise easily :)
Rebecca Flavin, our CEO and one of our clients, Stephanie Copeland (Vice President Business Market Solutions at Qwest Communications) presented an awesome session today at the 2009 Forrester Customer Experience Forum. The session was packed (in fact, it was the most attended session of the hour) – it was my first real attempt at being an iPhone videographer, so please excuse the shaky nature of it :
How a User-Centered Approach Can Attract Customers, Drive Revenue & Deliver Competitive Advantages
abstract:
Today’s enterprise executives are asking themselves:
- What impact do customer-centric applications have on brand perception and ROI?
- How can businesses harness the power of Web 2.0 applications to increase customer loyalty, despite a struggling economy?
- How can greater user experiences serve to empower customers by driving a greater adoption of services?
- Is this the right time to focus on improving the customer experience?
apologies for the shaky video and framing – was my first iPhone video recording
done
It is quite nice working for a company that is constantly adopting new technologies. I can justify purchases of new gadgets to myself saying “its for research, after all I’m in the biz” :D One of my favorite gadgets of course is the iPhone.
I went out and bought a first gen iPhone 3 days after launch. I would not go so far as to say the first iPhone I bought changed my life, but it did considerably change how I used a device. Before the iPhone, I owned every other smart phone; Treo, Blackberry, Nokia 9100, Palm, sidekick. All of these devices just wound up being a big bulky phone. I never really used the “smart” features because they were inconvenient. But the iPhone was different. It had less features, but all of the things it could do I found extremely useful. Mail, TXT, Maps, Stocks, Camera, ipod, Calendar, Safari, Weather, and my favorite feature of all time, visual voicemail.
Then the 3G iPhone I bought last year made improvements, but they were honestly moderate at best. As a user, I could care less about the 2.0 SDK (but as a software services company, we LOVED the new busines opportunities the SDK brought us). The app store was introduced, but the applications offered were more novelty than really useful. Even today, I own probably 50 apps from the store and i still use the native applications 99% of the time on my device.
Yesterday, I bought the 3Gs (32gig, black). I instantly noticed that performance significantly improved. But my old iPhone’s performance was not half bad, so I really didn’t care about it. I played with voice control, I can see how useful it will become for me, but certainly not life changing. Then, I played with the camera. All I can say is WOW ! The quality of the 3 megapixel pictures and the video is jut awesome. Don’t get me wrong, my sony camcorder and canon camera produced MUCH better quality, but they mostly sit on a shelf at home. I don’t use them because they are inconvenient. (That’s the second time I said that, maybe I’m just really lazy).
I can’t tell you how many times I thought to myself “I wish I had my video camera right now”; and I’ve thought that in my personal and professional life. Often times at work, something special is happening in a workshop or strategy session where I wished i could have captured the moment. And there are countless times that is true with my two daughters at home. This new device allows me to capture those moments ad-hoc. That is life changing for me. I have one device that will always be with me and it acts as my personal assistant, my communications device, my information portal, entertainment & content management hub, and now will serve as my documentarian. Best of all, the features and the software are all elegantly designed. Everything about the iPhone is engaging & useful.
It is VERY rare in life that I am satisfied with technology. My dissatisfaction is the primary reason why I started EffectiveUI in the first place, to help fill the gap I saw between what people wanted from technology and what businesses were actually building. The folks at Apple have done an amazing job at respecting all of our desires for technology that “just works” – I’m in awe Apple, well done…
[Minor Update and Rant]
Just found out that AT&T no longer includes SMS with the iPhone data plans- the folks at the AT&T store failed to tell me. SMS just was turned off on my account with no notice. I missed several important messages. AT&T’s lack of customer focus can damage consumers’ impressions of Apple…
