memonicOfficial Blog

“If you can’t make it good, make it BIG. If you can’t make it BIG, make it RED!” — Paul Rand

Six months ago we decided to take the brave leap of questioning our brand, UI, and core product. The result is not big or red. It’s good (and getting better with every new Sprint release). In a nutshell, here’s how we did it.

The first step was to get internal sign off on what we wanted to achieve. Having clear goals is crucial in measuring success and keeping such an involved project on track. If you are starting something from scratch, begin by filling out a simple Creative Brief. Then, even if you’ve been around for years, you should still thoroughly research your competition. Our main UI goals were to simplify the interface while adding new functionality.

Way Before

Before

After

“A brand is not what you say it is. It’s what THEY say it is.” — The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier

Some of you may remember the outrage over the Tropicana re-designed packaging. It was one of the proudest moments for user feedback and the power of social media. In order to avoid disaster, we not only reviewed user testing results and user feedback from the previous year, we also ran a few new surveys to help us understand what you want. Especially when the tricky question of color came up, we turned to you for help. Dark blue won. Thank you.

“Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso

Once we did our homework, we started a process of iterative design. The bottom line is not to get caught up in details too early. Pixel pushing can get in the way of innovation. User testing kept us on our toes. Paper prototyping was a new tool for us and worked beautifully. Even if you only have time to recruit and run tests with five people (as was our case), the results are invaluable: because 4/5 testers thought our (then) version of the top navigation looked like Facebook, we revised the design and introduced a light grey background with dark blue links. (Watch Toni’s short video).

Other highlights during our re-design include the birth of our fearless mascot, the squirrel. Created by the talented Rahel Vils, this little critter is ready to help you gather all the web content you need.

Need more information? Here are our Top 10 UX & Design Resources. Feel free to add a Comment with your own.

IxDA
A List Apart
UX Magazine
SVA Interaction Design Blog
SwissMiss
Factoryjoe on Flickr
Lynda.com
Information is Beautiful
Letting Go of the Words
Brand Identity Essentials

It’s part of a startup’s nature to grow, evolve and change. We’re in the middle of rethinking our brand – and we’d love to get your opinion. It’s your opportunity to inflluence the look and feel of Memonic! Please don’t hesitate and take part in the survey. It’s only 5 questions long and will take no more than a minute. We’ll be forever grateful.

Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/memonicbranding

Last month we conducted our first online survey, because we wanted to find out how YOU felt about us, and what else we could offer you.  It was a great success, with 157 responses full of valuable feedback. Here’s what we learned:

Be brave.

Writing a survey can feel like you’re asking the world if you look fat. You need to be prepared for answers which aren’t rave reviews. Keep in mind: when you’re trying to make your product better, constructive criticism is more valuable than blind praise. And sometimes you’ll be in for a pleasant surprise: only 2.5% of respondents think Memonic is NOT user friendly. We’re still planning an overhaul of our brand and user interface, but it’s a relief to know we’ve been moving in the right direction.

Forget what you think you know.

Let go of all assumptions about your product and audience. Some people in our company thought asking users how much money they would pay for a yearly membership was a waste of a question. “Of course everyone will say: Nothing“, everyone assumed. We included the question anyway, and found out that this was not the case. In fact, 63.9% would pay upwards of CHF 20 for a premium account. Based on this finding, we’re offering a January promotion and lowering our paid membership from CHF 44 to CHF 28.We listen.

We were also surprised to see how many of our respondents found out about Memonic through a friend. Thanks to this, we’re putting our Friend Affiliate development on the fast track. All this helps so much!

Choose the right survey platform (SurveyMonkey.com rocks).

Having the right tool to do the job is crucial. SurveyMonkey.com has an easy to use interface with powerful features. They make it easy to create, collect, and analyze your survey. With in-depth tutorials, even a monkey can run a questionnaire (though I take issue with their website language detection…). If you have used another online survey tools you love, please share it with us.

Keep it short and simple.

SurveyMonkey also gave us tips on how to get the best results. They analyzed 100,000 surveys and concluded that: “the more questions per survey, the higher the respondent drop-off rate.” Thus, we aimed to limit our surveys to 20 questions or less. We wanted to find out how popular mobile devices are with our audience and ask various questions – but we still limited specific mobile questions to 2 for this survey, as it was not mobile-specific. Once we begin development on our improved mobile apps, we’ll create another survey and go after a targeted group of participants.

The type of questions you ask also affects response rates. Our biggest pet peeve is the matrix and rating question: The labels “1 – Strongly Disagree” … “5 – Strongly Agree” make us shudder, basically, and then shut down.  We think it’s much more effective to allow users to add extra comments at the end of questions.

It worked. Here’s one of our favorites: “I’ve used both Memonic and Evernote for clipping web content, and I vastly prefer Memonic because the interface is much friendlier.”

Be thankful.

With one or two exceptions, everyone who completed our survey was respectful and generous with their comments. It’s still surprising how willing people are to give feedback. We spent CHF 35 for a SurveyMonkey PRO account and a couple of days to gather invaluable data. It’s only fair to give something in return, so we have offered a fabulous new Kindle to one lucky winner. (Extra tip:  giveaways encourage participation).

On that note, we are thrilled to announce the winner of our Kindle giveaway: Yoon Soo, living in Seekonk, Massachusetts. Congratulations,  Yoon Soo,  and thank you everyone who is helping us make our product better!