In my head, the UX Daily, was my idea. Yet, it’s not the first time the idea of a magazine style offering has been kicked around at the IxDF HQ but it is the first time it came into fruition. It turns out that though the UX daily was my idea; it’s been a lot of other peoples’ ideas first. We recognize that in trying to bring people the best possible design education for the lowest possible price that we need to add value through the kinds of article we write here and the content that we collate from on the rest of the web.
So Why Now?
Author/Copyright holder: Tom Fishburne. Copyright terms and licence: All rights reserved Img source
So what made the time that I had the idea different from the times before when other people had the idea? I think it’s that I came with a plan. I had some of the details worked out (how the back end of the system would work – no rocket science this, it’s based on the ideas of Wordpress and Joomla and other CMS systems) and how that might link to other social media marketing activities (I am, in the rest of my work for IxDF, the Global Community Manager – so this seemed important to me).
The details made my proposal appealing to Mads (who is ultimately in charge of what any of us do or don’t do in the name of design via IxDF). An execution strategy took an idea from being interesting to viable.
That doesn’t mean my attention to detail was perfect. Mads and the rest of the team and I have been working round the clock to keep an eye on the details of UX Daily and to work towards making it better tomorrow than it was today too. We’ve also had the occasional bump in the road when we’ve realized we all want the same thing but we’ve all been expecting to achieve it in a different way.
However, despite all this – it’s the details that got us started on this road.
Details Matter a Lot Everywhere
Author/Copyright holder: Martin Heigan. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
OK, but so what? You got something done by paying attention to the details. Does it matter everywhere else too?
Yes, we think it does. How about this fantastic idea. A tiny change in BestBuy’s website (a single step in a process) made the company umm… $300 million in a year! What was the change? They let their customers decline the sign up process when they were paying for items online. That’s it. It was worth $300 million in annual revenues! The devil is in the detail there.
Karl Sabino’s (now defunct) article on Think Flower Interactive showed that a change in wording on an error page led to an extra £27,000 a month in sales completions. That’s over a quarter of a million British pounds a year.
Summary
So we’re not alone in this. Details are important. Once the big brush strokes work is done and the idea is in place; you need to pay attention to details to get an idea moving and then you need to pay even closer attention to improve that idea. This is the essence of the user experience; it’s details that make the iPod the best-selling MP3 player and the Microsoft Zune an also-ran.
Header Image: Author/Copyright holder:Tebin-Art. Copyright terms and licence: All rights reserved. Img
