Last Thursday, our MASC491: User Experience class was fortunate enough to have a guest speaker, Jake Mitchell from CarMax, explain to our class how he uses design targets (user personas) all the time in his profession. An interesting takeaway from the lecture was that this was the first time I’ve ever heard a user persona be called a design target. Jake talked to us about the in-depth research CarMax has been using to make the car buying experience for customers feel less of a shady experience and more of a compelling and retail-like one. He also discussed about their uses for heat maps and using apps like Hot Jar and Crazy Egg to analyze these heat maps. He went in-depth about the three people that make up a product team for CarMax: an engineer, designer and product manager. He also mentioned that in his opinion, the difference of being a junior versus senior designer is that the seniors can understand the outcome and look at the big picture before even seeing the outcome. Another thing I learned is that a product needs to be three things in order to be produced: valuable, feasible and usable. In other words, the product needs to solve a problem, generate revenue, and is easily understood by customers on how it’s used.
Some other interesting topics he discussed that I was not aware about is that CarMax is originated from Circuit City. Also, that the top four companies that efficiently use user experience with their customers is Google, Amazon, Spotify and Facebook. He also mentioned what a minimal viable product (MVP) is, which is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and to provide feedback for future product development.
Some other key quotes that I really took away from Jake’s lectures was, “The outcome is greater than your output is the primary goal of your result”, and “A prototype is worth a thousand meetings.” Most importantly was his hypothesis statement, “We believe this [business outcome] will be achieved if [these users] successfully [attain this user outcome] with [this feature].”
