1-800-PetMeds Launches Redesigned Website
Congratulations to our client, 1-800-PetMeds, who recently launched their redesigned website 1800PetMeds.com!
Early last year, the company asked Iteration Group to completely redesign and modernize their current e-commerce website (for desktop and mobile). The site is a leading online retailer of pet-related products and is responsible for the vast majority of the company's revenue. The project was led by Iteration Group UX Strategy expert, Jaime Levy, who carefully laid out and tested the new designs with the aim of improving important performance metrics.
1-800-PetMeds Director of Marketing, Alex Irvin stated that “The fresh, functional new responsive design was developed with ease-of-use for the customer as our top priority. [...] Our customers will find great improvement in our navigation and check-out process, as well as a fresh presentation of all of our educational articles. ”
You can read the full press release here.
Clareity Security Releases New SSO Dashboard that has Customers Raving
Congratulations to our client, Clareity Security, who recently launched their new Single Sign-On Dashboard! Version 3.0 was released in October, and the feedback has been very positive with users raving that the new design is sleek, modern, mobile responsive and easy to navigate.
Hey @MFRMLS - I really like the design upgrades for the web portal! Sleek design, more options too. Great job!
— Nico Hohman (@TheNicoHohman) October 21, 2015
In their press release, Clareity states that:
With Iteration Group’s design expertise and Clareity’s knowledge of the real estate industry, the two teams collaborated to create the “dream dashboard” for agents, brokers and other real estate professionals.
Yossi Langer Presents "How to Uncover Your Next Million-Dollar Idea"
Iteration Group Principal and expert on product strategy and user experience design, Yossi Langer, was invited to speak at the 2015 ASI Power Summit this November in Dana Point, California where he presented "How to Uncover Your Next Million-Dollar Idea."
The ASI (Advertising Specialty Institute) Power Summit is an exclusive conference for influential business leaders and decision makers within the promotional products industry (a $20.5 billion dollar market here in the U.S.).
Following his presentation, Yossi led a workshop where executives and staff members from leading companies within the industry discussed how to create great ideas from scratch.
Special shoutout to the ASI Summit team who put together this fantastic event and allowed us to be a part of it.
A Note About Initial UX Thoughts and Observations
Sometimes we are asked by clients to provide some initial thoughts, observations, and feedback regarding the user experience of their existing web site, web application, or mobile app.
In the spirit of imparting a sense of how we think and how we work, we're happy to do so. But, we always caveat our comments by saying that normally, we would first want to spend some time:
- With you, the client, better understanding the situation, what users have told you about what they like and don’t like, what you think is working / not working, what is the business trying to accomplish, etc.
- With users, listening to what they have to say about the application, what they like, what they dislike, how it fits into their life, how they think it can be improved, etc.
- Looking at competing / similar / adjacent applications. What can we learn from the similar products that have been designed, built, released, and refined many times over many years? What do we think about them? What do these products tell us about what we want and what we don’t want? What do users tell us about these products? How do these similar products actually perform when presented to users?
While we are user experience design professionals who can apply web and mobile design best practices and also have strong intuitions (due to our experience designing dozens of products over the years) around how to improve usability, we believe that domain expertise (e.g. knowing the business inside-and-out) and listening carefully to users is critical to designing a great tool to make the user’s life easier.
UX Designer
Looking for a UX Designer?
Iteration Group is a "boutique" firm that works with a small number of clients, helping them with expert UI / UX Design and App Development for web and mobile.
We work closely with large consumer and enterprise brands to help them nail their product vision, distill their rough product ideas into concrete product designs, create wireframes, create final designs, build prototypes, build-out their products, and more.
Our clients are in Financial Services, E-commerce, Healthcare, Education, Ad Tech, Loyalty, Food Service, Entertainment, and other industries.
Iteration Group's Jaime Levy Releases "UX Strategy" Book, Published by O'Reilly
We're proud and excited to announce that Jaime Levy, Iteration Group team member and Engagement Manager on client projects, recently released her book UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want. This guide breaks down the complexities of UX Strategy into lightweight techniques and tools that can be employed on any web, mobile, or desktop software project.
Throughout her career, Jaime has taken a hands-on role consulting in the areas of research, product definition, and interaction design for large consumer and e-commerce web projects at AOL, Honda, Target, Disney, ABC, and other industry leaders. In addition to working on client projects, she served as a Professor of User Experience Design at NYU, Art Institute of California, UCLA, and USC, where she is currently teaching a graduate level course (part-time) titled “User Experience Design and Strategy.”
Jaime has recently held multiple book launches and presentations across the country including New York City (as seen above) and Santa Monica, CA. Over the next few months, she will be speaking at multiple conferences and events to share her knowledge as a world-class expert in User Experience Strategy. Grab a copy of her book today on Amazon.com.
FitnessBuddy - Great App, Can Be Even Better
Some of us here at the office use FitnessBuddy for our workouts. Great way to get some guidance when you hit the gym. The app helps you choose a workout plan, shows you how to do each exercise (in a highly visual animated gif-like style), and more. They recently released a new version with lots of changes, including:
- Some kind of audio guidance feature (wasn't immediately understandable to us)
- More step-by-step tracking for a workout ("do this workout" button
- Slightly updated user interface: buttons, icons, typefaces.
Overall, there are some improvements, but we think there is room for a lot more.
For example, here's the screen you see after tapping a particular workout. We think there's too much unformatted text here (if we recall correctly, there was less text in the previous version). Text fills almost the entirety of the screen (iPhone 5), and most folks simply don't read (old, but good information). Further, the text is likely only useful to first or second-time users. Repeat users (like us) have to swipe down to proceed.First thought would be to cut-back on the text, if possible. Next thought would be to format it in such a way that it's scannable (using bullets, paragraphs, boldness, etc.). Another thought would be to hide most of the text and intuitively enable the user to reveal more, if they're interested.
In the following screen, we see a list of exercises that comprise the workout. We find the images to be especially valuable here, and we're not sure why they're so small. They could be significantly increased in size (probably 30% or so without even changing the app design), which we think would be a big improvement in the user experience (again, most folks don't read and the images convey most of the information, at a glance, especially if the users, like us, have done the same workout many times before).
Lastly, here we've tapped on the "Barbell Bench Press" exercise, and we're shown how to do it. Great. We're also presented with a whole bunch of icons, which aren't especially clear. What do they do?
The top-right icon, for instance, shows an actual video of how to do the exercise. It's a really useful feature! And one of us used the app for one year before we knew it existed (we tapped the icon by mistake one day).
FitnessBuddy may want to consider:
- Removing / consolidating some of the features
- Re-organizing the features visually on the screen in such a way that what they do becomes more apparent. Grouping them logically, for example. Introducing a global menu system, for example.
- Improving the icons / adding labels.
Overall, we find the app very useful. We think the company can significantly improve the user experience, accelerate new user adoption, and increase engagement with some additional investment in user interface design.
Modern, "Clean" and Simple Tools You May Want to Check Out
Great "101 Entrepeneur" Event Last Night in Agoura Hills!
Last night we sponsored an event local to our Westlake Village office.
Thank you to all who attended. Turnout was great. Lots of smart interesting folks building companies (tech and otherwise) in LA, Ventura, and Santa Barbara counties.
Special thanks to Gerhard Apfelthaler (soon to be Dean of School of Management at CLU) and Brandon Highland for your contributions and spreading the word.
We love to see the community come together. Like many of you, we plan on planting deep roots in this area, expect to start many companies here in the coming years, and we really believe that developing rich personal relationships with others will benefit us all.
Welcome Yossi!
Reflecting Back
We started Iteration Group back in March of 2011 with our first client, ChowNow. I was "in between gigs," kicking around ideas for my next startup, when I met the ChowNow founders. They were two non-technical guys, extremely bright, and a bit over their heads building an online ordering system for restaurants, from scratch. It just so happened that I knew the online ordering space very well - months earlier I had explored a way to scale online ordering to the tens-of-thousands of restaurants in the U.S. and beyond. Well, we hit it off, Iteration Group helped ChowNow for many months until they gained a solid footing, raised additional capital, hired a terrific technology team, and were on their way.
Like that, Iteration Group kind of happened by "accident." Over time, several more startup founders and company executives came to us asking if we could help them nail their product vision and distill their rough product ideas into concrete product designs.
Since that time, I've been looking for a counterpart here at Iteration Group that could run the shop "day to day." I needed someone who, like me, has a deep passion and interest in software design, human-computer interaction, usability engineering, and all things user-experience. Also, this person needed to have a wide range of experience - managing multiple teams of folks, working on startups, working on large enterprise projects, and more.
Welcome Yossi!
I'm really proud to announce that Yossi Langer has joined Iteration Group as Principal. Yossi will be directing all of the work we do for our clients (in fact, he's already started).
complementing my almost complete startup focus). We've opened up a new office in Santa Monica to be closer to our clients and prospective team members.
Yossi is a world-class expert and leader in the field. He's held various product-development related roles at Viacom, Fotolog, AOL, and American Express. He will be cultivating our staff, work
ing shoulder-to-shoulder with our clients, and ensuring that our research, wireframing, designing, building, and other activities are of the highest possible quality.
I met Yossi almost one year ago at a UX Happy Hour event, put on by my friend (and longtime designer) Kai Gradert. We immediately hit it off, stayed in touch, and started collaborating on a few side projects. Right away, it was clear that Yossi had the perspective, experience, passion, and attention-to-detail that we were looking for.
Looking Ahead
Today we enter a new phase. We've tremendously increased the breadth and depth of our capabilities. We've already, for example, started doing more extensive research than we've ever done (user interviews, task analysis, etc) under Yossi's direction. We've got more big-company, big-data, and enterprise experience (complementing my almost complete startup focus). We've opened up a new office in Santa Monica to be closer to our clients and prospective team members.
We're extremely excited about the road ahead and we have big plans to further integrate ourselves within the LA Tech Community (and beyond) to help folks build great products.
The Press Release
Expands Management Team to Build on Leadership Position
SANTA MONICA, CA – March 26, 2013 – Iteration Group today announced seasoned media and technology executive Yossi Langer as Principal, expanding its management in support of the company’s growth. Langer brings an extensive career of product design, product development, and user interface design experience to his role, where he will oversee mobile, web, and other interactive software projects for Iteration Group customers.
Previously, Yossi was at Viacom Media Networks, where he was responsible for search, content recommendations, and machine learning initiatives for over 100 digital properties. While there he founded the ground-breaking Lean Testing Lab.
Yarone Goren, Founder and CEO, Iteration Group, said: “Yossi is a world-class expert and leader in user experience design, usability, and human factors. He will work side-by-side with our customers to conceive, design, and develop innovative mobile and web products.”
Yossi has led product development at early-stage companies and established enterprises including AOL and America Express. He was Co-President and Chief Product Officer of Fotolog, an online social network with 30 million members worldwide, where he managed day-to-day operations, long term strategy and increased membership by 33%.
At AOL, Yossi ran mobile content strategy for AOL’s Europe, Canada, and Latin America offices. At American Express he led product development and editorial strategy as Online Editor of Travel + Leisure magazine.
Yossi Langer said: “I am thrilled to join the talented and innovative Iteration Group team. There is a tremendous need for expert product development services in southern California. This need is evidenced by the growing investment in technology projects, the proliferation of software into all industries, and the increase in non-technical startup founders and business leaders. Iteration Group fills this gap, enabling its customers to design, build, and deliver beautiful and functional products.”
More information:
ABOUT ITERATION GROUP
Iteration Group is a boutique product-development consulting firm with offices in with offices in Los Angeles and New York City. The company works side-by-side with startup founders and business leaders to help them nail their product vision, distill their rough product ideas into concrete product designs, create wireframes, create final designs, build prototypes, and more.
Iteration Group is privately held and is headed by Yarone Goren, a passionate expert in software product design and co-founder of multiple venture-backed startups, including Academy123 (acquired by Discovery Communications) and Zumbox. Longtime technology and media executive Yossi Langer directs all work as Principal.
Since its launch in 2011, Iteration Group has designed mobile, web-based, and desktop software products for social networking, productivity, online ordering, online marketing, ecommerce, and other applications.
For more information, please email info@iterationgroup.com or visit www.iterationgroup.com.
Media contact: Ashley Moje +1 818 851 1080 Skype: almoje42 ashley@iterationgroup.com