The Lady with the White Pointy Shoes
April 15th, 2009 by Peter Stern · comments · http://blog.zenbe.com/rwoxrI did head out into the pouring rain last night to get some bourbon, which, as you probably knew, cannot be substituted with brandy in bourbon and bacon ice cream.
I guess I should not have been surprised at the people you find in a downtown liquor store minutes before closing. In particular, there was one woman in particularly white, non-functional shoes, garish red lipstick, and boldly dyed hair, buying a bottle of vodka, talking about the trip she was about to take, how the store keep would not see her for awhile, but it wouldn’t be as long as her last trip. Not sure where you can go, that time of night, in that weather, in those shoes, with luggage and vodka in tow.
Been getting some feedback from users about how soft the Zenbe design is. The buttons are muted, they say, a bit sleepy, a bit like a washed out movie. They want some boldly dyed hair, some red lipstick. Maybe some white shoes.
There was no shortage of intelligent, spirited debate on every aspect of Zenbe, and still is. I used to be firmly in the “add more lipstick on those buttons” camp.
But I am glad to have lost a few rounds of that particular argument, because invariably, the next message from these very same people amounts to, “I get it now, Zenbe really is making my email better-the design really works!” While you might think you want a bold send button, and sharp edges everywhere, what you really want is to focus on your communication, not a row of buttons. Minimalist controls that fade into the background until you want them might seem a bit washed out the first time you look a them, but make sense once you start using them. Those white shoes are not getting you very far.
After much scrutiny and feedback, maybe we got the basics of Zenbe down pretty good.
So now we can have spirited debates about everything else: marketing, features, finance, customers, and where to hang the neon art.
At least the ice cream was a big hit.
Hey there, I’m the experience designer at Zenbe. I thought I’d add to Peter’s excellent post.
First, I’d like to mention that in addition to the occasional request to splash up the Zenbe user interface, we get many, many nice comments from users about the overall design, experience, and aesthetics of Zenbe, which are much appreciated by the whole team.
There’s a lot of each of us in Zenbe, and you can believe Peter when he says the details are often hotly debated. The winners of those debates are the Zenbe users. They get to use an interface that has carefully considered.
Granted, Zenbe and the broader landscape of personal communication changes daily. What seems appropriately muted one day might be too muted the next. That’s why we continue to revisit, reconsider, and redesign features and interface elements. There is no “one size fits all,” and we’ve tried hard to design Zenbe as a flexible system that you can adapt to your own workflow. We’ve even started laying the foundations for themes and skinning, so that someday users will be able to adjust the visual elements of the interface to their liking.
At the end of the day, Zenbe is an application designed to be used by productive people, every day, all day long. So it will probably never be the lady with the pointy white shoes. Think more her responsible, smartly-dressed younger sister. You know, the one in the stylish clogs.