Howdy! I’m Leslie Chicoine, a designer for Satisfaction. I’m excited to be working with a great team on a simple and powerful concept: people-powered customer service. Part of what’s great about this team is the leeway I’m given as a designer to work collaboratively with the whole team.
Designing a web application can really isolate team members into their screens. We’re fighting this tendency in a number of ways beyond holding regular discussions. On the design side we’ve posted the site map up on a wall with wire frames and screen shots after each iteration so that everyone can discuss the current state of the design. On the development side any team member can check into our Campfire account and get minute-by-minute plain English updates on code check-ins. The point is to give everyone a lightweight view into what everyone else is doing. I’ll talk more about this Agile Design process in future posts.
This working process is similar to our philosophy of better customer service. Opening up walled-in design and development processes leads to seamless collaboration, just like opening up walled-in customer service allows customers to be heard, get involved and share a stake in the results. This makes for happier teams, customers and companies.
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[...] Anyway. Grubb designed mobile services for Yahoo and Vodafone and knows a thing or two about adding mobility to web services. When he’s not thinking about mobile (or inverting stuffed animals), he’s busy working on Rubyred’s first product called Satisfaction — a web-based “people-powered customer service,” for which the company is raising money. He had 8 words of advice (he’s got an OCD for lists with #8) for adding mobility to the web: [...]