[EN] Interview - Making a Product - In the Play Pen at ThoughtWorks

A brief talk with Joshua Eckblad, Director of Product & Marketing. Behind the scenes interviews about the making-of a new webservice, by Yohann

Winner of this year's mini Seedcamp Paris, Kwaga's Philippe Laval (CEO) and Joshua Eckblad (Director of Product & Marketing) were given a unique opportunity to work with User Interface (UI) consultant Eewei Chen at the London branch of ThoughtWorks.



You've been to London to meet UI consultant Eewei Chen. What for?

JE : How often do we get to engage someone who has extensive user experience and a deep understanding of the underlying communication problems that users face? Meeting Eewei was fun. I wanted to understand Eewei's visceral reaction to the problem of email overload and discover how an expert copes with his own personal and professional stream of emails.


What does such a session look like?

JE : It's rather intense. We found ourselves in a designers play pen where we could draw on just about every surface. The approach was collaborative, iterative and non-linear. We'd start with one idea and end up elsewhere. Abstract to concrete. Back and forth. It's exciting though 4 hours is not enough to make all the break-throughs we'd like to. We've invited Eewei to Paris for a subsequent work-session.



And what did you want to get clarity on?

JE : The goal of the product is to make email fun again by reducing stress and by helping email users make decisions quickly. Our question to Eewei was how would he go about doing this? What's the simplest way to help people make better sense of their inboxes? What is an email assistant? What does he think of what we have today?

Did you get answers?

JE : Yes, we discovered that even a software expert has difficulty managing the sheer number of professional emails. We learned that what might help Eewei the most is a prioritized view of which emails to act on. The notion of an automized email assistant was validated and we delved into how users might want to employ what semantic technology can offer. This session is part of a process to gain clarity on how to leverage our linguistic technology for an overall simple product and user experience.

That sounds very promising. When will we see these improvements?

JE : We would like to organize more sessions like this one before we start investing too much of our energies in one specific product direction. It's useful to talk to as many people as possible and learn how they reduce email overload and we look forward to engaging users face to face as well as capturing more feedback from beta users via our GetSatisfaction forum.

Stay tuned...