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19Jan/10N/A5

Falling in Love with UX

I may now be a "born again product guy." Yesterday, I came to love the practice of UX (User Experience).

My revelation came towards the end of a 5 hour-long UX marathon/hackathon we had at AnyClip, led by our (amazing) UX consultant Lis Hubert and AnyClip's own lead designer, Gabi Moore.

In the hackathon, we went over several user "personas" and related research Lis and Gabi had compiled over the past few weeks and looked at our current site navigation and interface relative to how users would expect to experience the site. Then we started planning for some major updates to our site with all this in mind, constantly checking our ideas against the research, and allowing our user feedback to guide major decisions.

None of this would be that revolutionary, had we actually done some of this in the past. But this was our first time really starting from user stories and research, rather than the "pages" and "features" us creative "product guys" like me LOVE to start with.

The results were awesome.

Not only did we start designing a better product, but I felt more confident about our decisions, because they were backed by real work -- not just our gut.

So, as a "product guy," this whole UX process has been tremendously eye-opening. I certainly want to thank Lis for her time spent working with us at AnyClip (I whole-heartedly recommend her) and thank Gabi for encouraging us to put more resources into User Experience.  It was a great call and our company is better for it.

Now the challenge will be to bake User Experience into our process going forward. It was valuable now, and forever will be.

About Nate Westheimer

Nate is the Co-Founder and EVP of Product & Technolog for AnyClip. He is also the Organizer of the 13,000 member NY Tech Meetup.
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  • Never said how completely flattered I am by this article! Thanks so much. I can't wait to come back and have more UX fun... I love the AnyClip crew.
  • I'm so thrilled to read this, Nate. Happy to chat UX with you anytime :) I'm not at all surprised that Lis was a huge help to you, she's wonderful.
  • Do you think it's possible to become a UX-based product person? I mean, I've always designed from my head instead of personas and all and would love to start the other way around, but is it realistic to change your approach so dramatically?
  • I do. I think if you do your UX homework and then use that as a filter for your "brilliant" product ideas you can have the best of both worlds. too often i think we take our "brilliant" product ideas and then dont modify or distill them to fit reality.
  • Great! I'll keep going in that direction with "homework", trying to do more thinking about users instead of just jumping into "brainstorm" mode ;)
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Who is Nate?

You've found Nate Westheimer's blog. Nate wears many hats. He's the EVP Product & Technology and Co-founder of AnyClip, the Organizer of the NY Tech Meetup, and Advisor to Flybridge Capital Partners. More about Nate can be read on his Bio page and you can follow his thoughts on Twitter

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