This comes at a particularly apt time in my career, as I'm the CTO/lead designer for PrepChamps.com, a startup company intended to help high school athletes get recruited into college. In such a respected crowd as IXDA, I won't pretend it's my best design work, but just wanted to provide context for the rest of this post, should you happen to take a look.
The most difficult position to be in, as a designer in a pre-funded startup company (we love our angels), is when the business model is 100% geared toward acquiring VCs. This is my third such startup, and it's always a challenge to reconcile the need for the design to simultaneously be enjoyable by its members (so they come back and want to use the site) AND for the design to over-inflate metrics that no one in their right mind really cares about anymore: page views and click-throughs. When the business model doesn't truly require the core business's application (in this case, our web site) to achieve its technical objective, designing for either users or administrators can get extremely difficult. On the other hand (I'm happy to report), we recently shifted our objective entirely toward improving the technology to more effectively meet its stated goals, rather than just pumping thousands of page views at an app that isn't finished yet. I helped make the case that if our application truly excels at its intended purpose, we'll actually spend far less money acquiring and keeping members, and be more attractive to VCs by our app's own merits. It took awhile to get here, but I feel much better now to be working within a company where all of us are focused on satisfying our user's needs (including partners and advertisers), rather than trying to invent a better way to attract VCs (I'm convinced there really is no easy way to do that, until you don't need them anymore). Related to another discussion: We auto-play videos on our home page. I'm not a big fan of that, but when they brought me on to build this version of the site, I insisted that wherever we auto-play a video, we have to turn the sound off. Folks can still turn it off, or stop the video with an obvious Play link, but since making the change, we've received no ill feedback regarding the design, nor that the videos are intrusive in any way. As for fighting with the business about user needs: Yes, we often argue about our member's needs vs the need to attract more members and drive revenue. However, I try to justify all of the risks in terms of revenue costs and benefits. That is, rather than argue, "we can't force athletes to pay for contact with coaches", I state that our stated mission is to level the playing field for all athletes to get recognized and recruited for college. If we prohibit the crucial piece of that process by charging membership, we have reneged on our promise and will drive away athletes in droves. We found a compromise that meets our business goals while allowing free contacts throughout the site. -- Bryan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=33433 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
