A little background on me:
I was a co-founder of a startup that we built and ran from 2005 - 2011. Nowadays I head up Business Development at Slice of Lime. I’m a husband, father, and mountain biker.
At Slice of Lime, we only do one thing: User Experience Design.
We don’t do back end development. We don’t do branding and identity work. We are in the business of helping our clients create software that their customers love to use.
For context, this is what some of our work looks like…
Henry Ford is quoted as having said: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”
While we know Ford probably never actually said these words, history has show that he probably believed them. What’s more, if had said them, he would have been right.
As customers, users of products, we all tend to envision the solution that we’re familiar with.
In 1907, before the Model-T was introduced, the solution we were familiar with was the horse. It’s how we got from Point A to Point B.
So it made complete sense, that we’d just envision a faster horse to get around.
But what Ford seemed to intrinsically know was, we didn’t just want a faster way, but we wanted…
A safer way
A less dusty way
A less stinky way
A more stylish way
And when he gave us the Model-T, we realized that this, in fact, was what we actually wanted. He had created a product experience that amazed us.
We also looked at their database and found that on average, there were 21 days from start to finish of a photo book.
They started with a desktop web app prototype, but actually wanted to kill the desktop app in favor of mobile.