Kadir's Blog on Everything

Once of the sessions I attended was on how to target digital mums. 

WD Pearce (UC Berkeley) had an interesting presentation. His hypothesis was digital is a tool to make her a better mom - it is not digital mom but moms in digital era. There is no separate segmentation as all moms are adapting digital gadgets and mediums faster than any other segmentation. She has 3 hours less everyday due to parenting and technology helps her bridge that gap.

All moms have some digital gadgets and 65% of them use more than 5 technologies to make their lives better.

Amazon doesn’t usually come out with any information. Liza Utzschneider gave a brief background on how Amazon approach and drives development of a product. 

She suggested they always start with the customer and work backwards - listen to customer (not just for UX and features), invent on behalf of the customer and personalize it for them. As all companies do, she said that they look 10 years ahead but interesting twist here is that look for things that doesn’t change for customers. Low prize, convenience, and selection will still be a top priority for a user even after 10 years. 

It is pretty simple but they do apply this well and you can see it in their existing products. Of these, personalization is key in my opinion. Without it, it will be cold and uninviting for the user even with an awesome UI. This in turn affects the sales - one of the things I learned from ad:tech SF is that personalization drives sales. 

Take their website as an example - it is highly personalized for a commerce portal. It knows who you are, recommends with relevancy, promotes convenience (like one-click), and discovery of new products. They also put customers first throughout the fulfillment process as well.

Both Apple and Amazon have similar goals but their approaches to product are different. In some ways it is due to the nature of the business they are in commerce vs. hardware. It will be interesting to see how Amazon approaches Kindle in lot more detail.

I was discussing user experience around sign ups and how much is too much to ask upfront. We all agreed on asking very minimal information from the user upfront but there was a split on email validation. We agreed to let user into the app and restrict after a week. 

Few weeks after I came across this website on gradual engagements sign ups by Lee Munroe.

If you need email confirmation (to prevent spam accounts) let the user continue to use your website in the mean time. Maybe close the account after a week or a month if they still haven’t verified, or restrict access to certain parts of your app.

Lee compared different sign up workflows from popular websites.