Successful brands must be both memorable and expandable.

Mint Analytics is the epitome of this requirement. It has both a memorable name (http://www.haveamint.com), and a website analytics package that is tailored to that name.

Why is this brand successful? It invites consumer memory by engaging multiple senses at once.

First, the brand name gives the website a natural color scheme. Mint green is an enjoyable color scheme.

The word “Mint” conjures up color: that particular pastel shade of green. There’s also the taste of mint. Peppermint. Wintermint. Mint gum. Minty breath. There’s freshness and newness. And then there’s the fact that mints are where money is made. That conjures up an entirely new set of images.

The word Mint is a Lego brick, because it forms the base component of a dozen different words. Because of this, it also invites memorable modules and extensions. In other words: expandability. Peppermill is the name of one extension that’s been programmed into the software. Some of the other module names include Prank, a module that provides Page Rank data, and Crushes, like the peppermint kind.

A service must be packaged in a user-friendly format. The user experience of Mint goes above and beyond my standard user experience with Google Analytics. The brand invites me to enjoy a delicious environment while I view statistics, and this makes doing web analytics faster and more profitable to my employers.

The lead users of a product are those who use it the most. They are also the first to ‘break’ the product, or find limitations in it. Increasingly, they’re more likely to blog about those weaknesses or limitations, and even fix some of them.

It has never been easier to be near those who will adopt your product. Using some simple techniques borrowed from Anthropology, you can find out exactly what your consumer needs, and how to implement it. All you need to do is find the earliest adopters and lead users of a product in your niche and observe what they are saying about the product. Once you’ve developed a product from their advice, you’ll find a lot of other consumers adopting that product as well.

Why does this happen? The needs of lead users are the future needs of mass consumers in a given niche.

The key is to follow the advice of the most voracious adopters first. Bring your product to a shared work location like Portland’s Cubespace, where dozens of supporters will be poised and ready to give constructive feedback and advice. Ask this group of people what they find themselves frustrated with. What current limitations do they face in technology? Follow them around for a day, and, with their permission write down what they do. What is efficient? What is not? What products do they keep coming back to again and again?

Then, pick a problem and engineer a solution. Market that solution, and test it with the lead users. If it fails, it’s probably not going to move to the next stage of early adopters and routine users. Who were the lead users of Twitter? Why did they find Twitter to be useful? Did it help them communicate during their travels to tech conferences around the world?

Product development is about asking a lot of questions, and engaging yourself with your consumer’s needs. You can’t just get a group of geniuses together in a conference room and tell them “lets develop a product!”  I’ve done that countless times, and it is really fun, but creating a product seperately from the consumer’s input is generally a hit-or-miss process that often ends up in tears.

Embed yourself in your target market. Invest your time researching the consumer’s needs. This product is for them, not you. The more you make it for them, the more they will like you. Product development is engineering success by engagement and inference.

Aside from developers, visitors will be accessing your site to learn about your product, or to download/demo it, because they were referred to it from another source.  The second type of user is here to grab the app, install it, and fly out.

Never make your users search for a demo or dowload button. Lead them through the steps they should be taking to get to the information they need.

Developers who come to your site will tolerate small links to source code, but the average visitor will not. If they have issues with the app, they’ll run back for support. Make sure they can find it! If not, they’ll try looking for help from other sources such as blogs and forums. If you provide a support forum, they’ll be more likely to stay on your page while looking for help, and you’ll be able to better understand your users through their comments.

Provide an experience flow that gives the user immediate direction from the first step onto the page. A series of later steps that are given to the user exactly when needed. It should be fun for them - as easy as a dot-to-dot. At the end, they should have a clear picture of the services your product gives, or they should have already downloaded and begun to use it. The user should not see or care about step two until step one has been completed.

Case Study: PicLens Firefox Plugin Landing Page.

With dark grey backgrounds, and cheery, pastel colors, this site has great readability. Yellow (the natural color of attention) used sparingly, and with extreme care. Grey is neutral, much better than black. Light blue could be <h3>, pink <h2>, and yellow <h1>. The download button is light blue, massive, and somewhat three dimensional, allowing it to pop right out of the page. It’s like oil painting with attention.

The website knows that the user has Firefox installed, and that Firefox’s pop-up blocker script will interrupt the download process. PicLens handles this issue brilliantly by drawing the user to the top of the screen with a trip of text with a  yellow background to direct the user’s attention to the problem area, and how to solve it.

Overall, the website is arranged like a good piece of art. The focal point is chosen to be the Firefox logo, then the install, and then the Demo. Everything runs 1-2-3. Just like a dot-to-dot. I had a great user experience while installing the program, and I enjoyed using it. Kudos to the B2C team that created the PicLens page.

Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Christopher Alexander. Really widely applicable philosophy. Every architecture student is taught this, but hey are taught that it is very difficult to put these concepts into play, because it contradicts the institutional structures of architecture, because architects plan places beforehand in a very modular way.

Pattern Language

Christopher Alexander, an architect and author, coined the term pattern language. He used it to refer to common problems of civil and architectural design, from how cities should be laid out to where windows should be placed in a room. The idea was initially popularized in his book A Pattern Language.

Alexander’s book The Timeless Way of Building describes what he means by pattern language and how it applies to the design and construction of buildings and towns. However, the system has been used in many fields of design, from designing computer programs to designing a classroom curriculum.

The Oregon Experiment - his third book.