4M

Okay, think hard. When was the last time your website provider caught a cold on your behalf?

After our intake meeting at San Francisco Soup Company this morning, we decided to go and research their customers in person at several of their stores in downtown San Francisco. It was freezing cold, gustyy and pouring rain, the first all-out winter storm of the season. We trudged up and down the financial district. We tasted some really delicious soup. We timed customers from the moment they walked in to the moment they walked out. We critiqued their fashion choices. We took stealthy pictures. We thought and talked and argued about the user experience in the store, the points of differentiation, the signage … you name it. We got sopping wet.

When we say, “Everything that gets you there,” we mean it. A lot of web companies … heck, all the web companies we know ask you for your content, turn it into html pages and walk away with a pile of cash in their pocket. But that’s just not the way we operate. We believe passionately in User-Centered Design. And to do UCD, you have to really know, intimately, who the user is. And that’s why we spend so much time and ask so many questions of our clients before we ever sit down at our computers and start banging out (pristine hand-coded beautiful) code.

At YVOD, we know that our clients are depending on us to create the ultimate marketing vehicle for their business or organization. They know who they are and they know what their goals are, and we want to know all of that. But at the end of the day, we care the most about the people at the end of the line… the people who sit down and stare at their computer screens, hoping their co-workers won’t notice they’re surfing, or stealing 3 minutes of time while dinner is finishing, trying to find that elusive product or piece of information they really need. We want to give it to them so they can get back to work or dinner and go on with their lives. See, we really hate bad websites. And we refuse to build them. There are enough of them out there and there’s enough mediocrity in the world as it is. We will not add to it. So we trudge through the rain to ask those people what they really want. And then we give it to them.

Simple really. Not easy, not common, but simple. We treat our clients’ business as if it were our own, because we know that when they succeed, we succeed. We could say “we consistently deliver top-notch service that goes above and beyond what you’d expect your website provider (or even your best friend) to deliver.” But that’s too hard to say, so we just shrug our shoulders and smile, and say “Everything that gets you there.” And we mean it.

Keep your eyes out for the new and improved San Francisco Soup Company website.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.