Imagine two scenarios. In the one, you are using a brand new app on your smart phone to help you order a sweet bacon pizza. You open the app and find no instructions. There is just a list of options, none of which make sense! You are eventually able to order your pizza, but are not quite sure where its coming from, or how to pay. The experience is awful (And you REALLY want your bacon pizza)! In the other, using a different app, you are walked through your pizza creation process, put in touch with a local pizza business(organic even! you like that!), had your payment taken, and even received a 15 minute delivery guarantee message. How about that? Hot dog! Or since were talking about pizza, Hot pizza!

Pizza is a serious, delicious subject indeed, but I am going to be talking about something monumentally important to almost any and every business/product that exists. User Experience. Before you rush on reading the rest of this oven baked, hand-tossed article, stop and think about it. User. Experience. Our lives are dictated by our experiences, we can be up or down, happy or sad, down or out on a moments notice because of one experience! An experience will excite us to the brim of fantastical explosion! -or- It will drag us down into the dumpy doldrums of mediocre, flat, boring every day life (Yuck).

Here at Century Interactive(CI) our design team is always thinking about the user because we like our users and want to delight them *gasp*. I know, its crazy, I’ll explain. We think of our users from product conception at a high level all the way through to that one tiny line of text at the bottom of a page. In order to create a user experience that really delivers boatloads of pepperoni – I mean – delightfulness, you have got to think big and think small. You have to think about the entire system on a high level in order to create an experience. You also have to think small – the tiniest detail can throw the whole thing off. Think about the last time you tried to find a contact number on a company website and you spent 10 minutes digging around for one. One small thing can send users running to the hills of delightfulness that exist somewhere besides your company!

An experience will excite us to the brim of fantastical explosion! -or- It will drag us down into the dumpy doldrums of mediocre, flat, boring every day life (Yuck).

In our pursuit of creating a delightful user experience we have had to develop and cultivate empathy for our users. We put ourselves in our users shoes and evaluate everything. Every detail and feature needs to be put in the brick oven and toasted – tested. Will it be beneficial to the user or will it hinder them? How does this specific feature help the user, and when do we present it to them as an option? We might not be making them a mouth-watering, tummy-satisfying pizza, but we are creating a delightful user experience for them (because we love them)!

So how did we apply these concepts to a practical project here at CI? In our newest product, Service Hook, we put the user first at every stage of design and development. Our design team was brought in at the very beginning when Service Hook was an idea on a post-it. We brainstormed about how to get users on the product – freemium. We removed all barriers that would hinder the user from signing up – that’s not a novel thing, but it was a very important decision for us as a company. Next, we looked at hundreds of ways other companies and products “onboard” their users, then we designed our own process. We get the user, in three steps, from sign up to being smack in the middle of Service Hook.

Great, they are in the product, now what? More brainstorming. How do we get the user oriented quickly and functionally productive in our product? Our solution was to design a help wizard, yes we used a literal wizard (Gandalf would be proud!), to walk the user through a few basic things. We didn’t just stop here though, our thinking of the users experience cant end right now. We watch what they do and how often they use features, then we reach out to them to ensure they are having an amazing experience. We have a consultant team that welcomes them, provides suggestions on how to grow their business, and shows them how to really utilize Service Hook. Do we stop here? No. Because our users journey is still not over. They are our users for life.

One small thing can send users running to the hills of delightfulness that exist somewhere besides your company!

Thinking big picture about the entire user experience in the beginning enabled us to better design the details. We are able to tie in details (like buttons, text, and even the website) to the look and feel of the overall experience. Our aim was and will remain high – to delight our users with a great experience. Now go forth, and order that bacon pizza!