This is a post by Tom Boates, who has been moonlighting with RunKeeper since January, and recently joined full-time as our Director of User Experience.
Though I’ve been moonlighting with RunKeeper for the past 10 months, yesterday I started my full-time career here as the Director of User Experience. While I’ve designed graphics, helped build user experiences at a number of startups, and studied thousands of other websites and applications, I thought I’d take a moment and explain to you why I feel as though RunKeeper’s user experience stands out among the crowd, and how we hope to use it to improve our product going forward.
Believe it or not, my formal background is in music business. In the music industry, digital distribution radically changed the landscape of the music market, and gave any savvy indie musician the ability to get their music in the hands of whoever was willing to listen. There are many success stories of small-time artists who used social media to not only build a big-time fan base, but to create a relationship with their listeners on a level that had never been seen before. This experience gave listeners the opportunity to influence and inspire the artist in all new ways, generating a dialog that left the user feeling ownership and pride in an artist’s success. Ultimately it created an experience that was 10 times more rewarding than what they got from a superstar.
With the introduction of the iPhone platform and the App Store (and other app markets for the other major mobile platforms), a similar change in the landscape is occurring in the mobile application space. Smaller companies are given an opportunity to get their product in front of anyone with a mobile device without the need for a big name or a large marketing budget. After studying this kind of opportunity in the music industry and the success stories it generated there it seemed like a no brainer to me that in addition to having a great app, any smaller company who knew how to leverage social media could see similar success to that of larger corporations.
Enter RunKeeper.
There’s no question that I strongly believe in our product and the value it provides to our users on it’s own, but the level of interaction between company and user is what makes the RunKeeper user experience stand out from other experiences. Sure the user experience still relies heavily on the look and feel of our application and website and how you interact with them (and trust me, I’m looking forward to making it the best!), but we want your experience to extend beyond that, and include having an open dialog with us. We could make some educated guesses as to what you’d like to see and move in a direction that we think is in your best interests, but the truth of the matter is no one knows what direction that is better than you, and we want to hear what you think so that we can process that information and be even smarter about the direction we need to move in order to serve the needs of you, the user.
We’ll be the first to tell you that we see ourselves as more than just an app, but the fact that we started there has shaped how we’re able to approach our user experience in a deeper and more meaningful way. That’s what has me so excited about taking this position. I’ve already seen what kind of results can be achieved with this approach in the music industry, and I am excited to see what happens when we apply that knowledge here!
Tell us what you think!