Kevin K Chen

Tell me about a product that was designed poorly. Slack. Slack is useful... I know a lot of people love Slack. It's no doubt useful. Sometimes, you have a quick question or announcement that might turn into a conversation; you don't want to send an email because the email will get lost; you don't want to click on a bunch of emails. As a programmer, Slack is also great for sharing quick code snippets in a formatted way. I don't have to make a commit, share a GitHub link, and share the line numbers for me and my colleagues to discuss code. As a non-programmer, Slack is also a great way to share quick links to Google Docs or (ir)relevant news throughout the day. Slack is also useful as a digital water cooler. But it's still digital -- obtrusive. Slack does not live up to its motto: "Where Work Happens". Two reasons - combined - make their mission hard to achieve: (1) Slack disincentives human interaction As a digital water cooler, Slack...

How would you improve Google Hangouts? Before jumping in, I want to clarify everything that Google Hangouts does. It: helps you text, call or video chat with people on the desktop and on mobile app lets you send emojis and pictures maintains a contact list of all your GMail contacts lets you save favorite contacts lets you group chat It looks like Google Hangouts has a pretty exhaustive list of features already built out. I think it might help to identify for who we want to improve Hangouts -- we can figure out more features from there. For who do you want to improve Hangouts? Let's look at a few different groups. At a high-level, we can look at either the Consumer or Business markets. For Consumers, we can look at how to improve this product for: Families Friends connecting with friends of friends For Businesses, we can improve Hangouts for: Salespeople - as a salesperson, I need a chat application that better organizes all my sales leads Offic...

How would you improve Nerdwallet's Homepage? (This relates to a design exercise I worked on in 2017.) Goals & Constraints Before I dive into solutions, let's first understand what Nerdwallet is trying to achieve with their home page today. Highlighted in the image, three things are clear: The primary goal is - as the header says - to help people compare options across different financial products. With that said, Nerdwallet specifically wants to help people figure out better options for credit cards. Just look at the header in the top left highlights credit cards, and... The second box highlighted also shows that Nerdwallet wants to compare credit cards. The third goal seems to be to get users to join or sign into Nerdwallet. Now that we know what the home page is trying to achieve today , let's think about what we would like our redesign to accomplish tomorrow . What is the purpose of the redesign? There are the business objectives: Increas...

How would you improve Slack? Here's how I would improve Slack:  I'd look make sure we understand our goals and constraints; then I'd explore the user and the use cases; and lastly, I'd prioritize the use cases and focus on brainstorming solutions for the most urgent use case. To summarize: Goals and constraints User and use cases Prioritize use cases Brainstorm solutions Goals and Constraints As a product and a company, there are two main things we can look at: Revenue Engagement However, we should also consider other goals like: Mission - How is the product performing with relation to its mission  Slack  is where work flows. It's where the people you need, the information you share, and the tools you use come together to get things done. Cost - Are we in a period where we need to be concerned about profitability? User Acquisition - Do we need to get more users onto our platform right now? This might be important if our product requir...

Tell me about a product you like and use frequently. Why do you like it? Surfline. Because it's innovative, useful, and understandable. Surfline's Main Innovation:  Acquiring, Centralizing, and Unifying All Surf Data  At its core, Surfline makes it easy for surfers to catch the best waves. To do that, the company combines meteorological statistics with twice-a-day, qualitative forecasts -- written by a surfers and scientists. To top things off, they - in a sense - know that they might be wrong on their forecasts; so, they provide hundreds of hourly surf cam recordings across the world, so you can assess surf conditions yourself. (To provide these surf cams, Surfline has partnerships with beaches and hotels to record the ocean.) Surfline is useful Surfline gives me all the information I need to decide whether I should drive one hour, round trip to my favorite surf spot, Pacifica. Surfline tells me: 1. the surf (or wave) height, so I know if there are any wave...

Today, let's critique one of the best features on Mint.com -- its Trends. What do I think of its Trends feature? Is it well designed? To answer these questions, let's think about the Trends feature across the dimensions listed below. Is the Trends feature: Innovative Makes a product useful Aesthetic Understandable Unobtrusive Honest Long-lasting Thorough down to the last detail Environmentally friendly As little design as possible Above, I've bolded what Lewis Lin thinks are the more important aspects of good design. The only bullet I won't be consider is #9; I do'nt think Mint is hogs real-life resources. 1. Is it Innovative? Maybe. This feature has been around a long time. Yet, newer, personal finance competitors like Trim or Personal Capital don't provide trendline data across your Spending. Perhaps the best comparison is to Trim. Its "Trends" feature displays all the spending you made within the month. One note, to see t...