Iteration Group

Meet Our New Chief Technology Officer - Charles Tseng

Charles is a long-time friend of Iteration Group - in fact, he and Yarone have been involved in several successful startups together.

Charles has over 20 years of experience building software, managing engineering teams, and leading tech startups. He was previously the Co-Founder and CTO at REX, a venture-backed startup based in Los Angeles that has raised over $26M and is disrupting the Real Estate market. He is an aggressive, hands-on full stack engineer and a creative problem solver with a balance of business and technical acumen. Over the past several years, Charles has successfully launched multiple products into the market.

He has a proven track record managing enterprise projects with large engineering teams and budgets up to $10 million for companies like Realtor.com, Yamaha, Molina Medical Centers and Schlumberger. Previously, Charles also led the engineering team at Zumbox from its launch to raising over $35M in total.

by Iteration Group

Iteration Group is offering Design Thinking Training!

Last year, we had great success leading on-site Design Thinking workshops for a handful of clients, and are excited to extend this offering to all teams, big or small, looking to improve their business.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, "Design Thinking" refers to a human-centered design methodology in which designers find and propose solutions to complex problems through logic, research, ideation, prototyping, and user participation. In a nutshell, "Design Thinking" is the overarching essence of user-experience design, and who knows UX better than us?

Our team of experienced practitioners will train your team to:

• Identify the biggest pain-points in your customer's digital experience that hinder revenue and business.
• Conduct in-depth interviews empathetically that enable you to extract unbiased feedback and uncover latent user goals and motivations.
• Ideate and test solutions immediately, without having to write a single line or code or invest in any development efforts.
• Create collaboration with cross-functional teams and build consensus in order to create progress.
• Prioritize design and development initiatives based on ROI and business goals.
• Ultimately, take the reigns on improving your digital offerings in order to grow your company and increase customer satisfaction.

We'd love to provide you with a free consultation to discuss if this might be a good fit - just reach out to Lana at lana@iterationgroup.com or contact us here.

by Iteration Group

StudyCoup: Helping Students Suceeed

We recently wrapped up an initial project with StudyCoup - an EdTech startup focused on providing better communication and study tools for students and universities.

The platform allows students to connect with classmates, coordinate study group sessions, keep track of their unique course schedules, and more - all in one place!

The product was inspired by recent graduates, Michael Razny (CEO & Founder) and Misha Zaslavasky (Director of Business Development & Partner), who realized during their time in school that there was a need to streamline peer-to-peer learning. Learn more at: studycoup.com.

by Iteration Group

Redesigned PRC Toolbox

We're proud to announce that earlier this year, we wrapped up a fourteen month-long project with Prentke Romich Company (PRC), a leader in production of AAC (augmentative/alternative communication) devices. Their devices are used for communication by people who can’t speak. Most of their users live with autism, or cerebral palsy, or another condition that makes speech impossible.

In early 2016, we embarked on a journey to redesign a piece of their AAC software. Specifically, they wanted us to update the design of the “toolbox” area used by parents, teachers, and others. This is the part of the AAC device where crucial settings happen – like how a user interfaces with the AAC device (by touching it, by having it track their eyes, etc.) what appears on different screens, or how long a user has to press on a button before the press registers. Clearly, there were many challenges that our team had to think through in redesigning the toolbox, and many different user types that we needed to speak with (most toolbox users are fully able-bodied people – speech-language pathologists, teachers, parents, spouses, and caretakers).

Overall, the project was very successful (see redesigned toolbox menu screen above), and we received plenty of positive feedback from various types of users to validate the new design. Stay tuned, we'll be sharing a more detailed case study of this project soon!

by Iteration Group

Redesigning FocusIT's Pulse Software

We're excited to announce that we've just wrapped up a project with FocusIT, the largest provider of CalyxPoint Hosted Service in the country and innovator of the Mortgage CRM, Pulse.

Pulse is a premium customer relationship management software for loan officers and other mortgage industry professionals. It provides robust marketing and lead management tools.

The Pulse Team came to Iteration Group with the goal of making the product easier and more efficient to use and, in so doing, helped expand its user base to include loan officers. This meant that existing screens would need to be streamlined to reduce redundancies and to emphasize the most important features.

In addition to streamlining workflows and making the system more intuitive, the FocusIT team asked Iteration Group to help drive customer engagement (afterall, it is a customer relationship management software). Iteration Group collaborated closely with the FocusIT loan officers, loan processors, and customers to identify critical touch points and put together a plan of execution on how to optimize them. As a part of this initiative, we also created e-mail templates that were tailored to customers’ needs and motivations.

After many iterations, we validated the designs with real users who expressed that the new designs exceeded their expectations. The designs are currently in the hands of the FocusIT's development team and is set to launch later this year.

by Iteration Group

User Heatmaps and Recordings with Hotjar

We recently stumbled across Hotjar, a simple-to-use tool that allows you to view how users are interacting with your site. Hotjar will create heatmaps (like the one below) that represent how users are clicking, tapping, and scrolling. The tool also provides recordings of real users as they navigate across your webpage (with mouse tracking too).

Of course, the tool alone will not give you all the answers around a user's needs and expectations, but it's an easy and insightful place to start.

by Iteration Group

Watch "What's Next for Texting" By Yossi Langer

It's up! Check out Yossi's talk at Inman Connect San Francisco this past August, and don't forget, if you want a copy of the presentation and full user interview notes, click here.

Feel free to leave us a comment below - we'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

by Iteration Group