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.

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

Deloitte is believing in User Interface

So, the consulting and accounting firm Deloitte has published it’s Technology Predictions report for the year of 2007. There are some fresh point of views in the report, and also some points shouldn’t have made it (they could fit better in the 2005 report…), but from my point of view the most interesting part in the report is concerning user interface.

The second chapter’s title is “Re-Inventing the User Interface”, and I quote:

In 2007, technology companies will have to make concerted efforts to reduce product complexity. Many will focus on redesigning the user interface, using both existing technologies and newer solutions, from haptics to artificial intelligence. Companies able to minimise product complexity may achieve greater success than competitors with superior, but relatively inaccessible, technology.

A consulting firm understanding the power of user interface. Music to my ears…

Please leave our website now…

So, I was looking to buy tickets for the Blueman Group show in NYC. I rushed to ticketmaster.com and performed 2 searches to find out the best date for me. Trying to perform a 3rd search I get this page:

I thought I was hallucinating. This is definitly one of the worst messages I have ever seen on a commercial website. Not to mention the poor usability of the site which makes everything so complicated, irritating, slow.

On the other hand, it is a sweet reminder that there is so much work left to do in our field.
By the way – blueman is a MUST!! So, if you are around NYC…