An interview with Tony Hsieh – CEO of Zappos.com

 

There is a huge buzz around Zappos recently. I had some questions on my mind regarding the great culture of that company (which is clearly it’s competitive advantage). The main thing was whether this culture was born in lengthy strategy meetings or was it more of an evolution of the company.

WeekMarks – June 20, 2008

The WeekMarks will include some interesting user experience, design and business links that I have bumped into in the last week.

So here goes:

Colleen Jones writes about the creation of better bills. The T-Mobile case study makes a point about the business value.

I really loved Affective Design’s iceberg analogy to explain the difference between Visual Design and User Experience. 

Alaska Airlines is changing the Check-In user experience. 

Dan Saffer on making better design decisions.

Wells Fargo is thinking about the users

ATMs have been here for a long time now. So it’s nice to see how Wells Fargo has made an effort to innovate and change the traditional interaction of those machines. They have hired a great design agency, Pentagram, and the results are sweet – a great and clear user experience. The banking and financial industry is a complicated market and we usually see how users fail to understand how things work.

By crafting this new experience with the ATMs, at least one bank/user interaction is solved.

You can read the full story of this redesign as written by Holger Struppek.

The experience hierarchy of needs

I really love Challis Hodge’s pyramid of needs. Reminds me of the famous pyramid by Maslow. This comes in a great timing. The web is buzzing about iPhone2.0. Talk about DESIRABLE.

Pay your employees to quit

Better employees = Better service. Zappos continues to innovate and change the rules. Sweet…

UX is good for your shareholders

Although a couple of months old, I thought it would be interesting to mention the Teehan+Lax’s UX fund experiment. On November 1st 2006, they have invested $50K in UX centered companies like Nike, Progressive, Apple, Netflix, Jetblue and more. They wanted to compare the stock performance of those companies with the general market performance.

The results are stunning. Those stocks gained 33% during a single year and have beaten the general market performance.

Conclusion: UX is good for your shareholders.

See the full results