Want to own FullContact’s UX Philosophy?

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Bart Lorang

Author: Bart Lorang

@bartlorang

A few weeks ago, Brad Feld wrote the post: Who owns your UX Philosophy?

This post came the morning after a FullContact Board Meeting in which we decided to use the time to perform an all-hands-on-deck-board level usability testing session.

Obviously, we were one of the companies he discussed in his post.

This forced me to look extremely hard at the composition of our company.  As Brad mentioned, we’ve got a great designer.   We’ve got amazingly strong engineering chops.  We’ve got great front end developers.

But as I examined our founding team, it was apparent that we all came from what I’d call “Big Enterprise Software.”

We were pretty good at it and highly successful.

But from a UX perspective, that means all we had to do to win deals was be better than SAP or Oracle.   If you’ve ever used either of these, you know that’s not exactly hard.

Even so, if our software had an imperfect UX, that was not a problem!  We’d sell the customer a few training classes for $5,000 a day. Upsell!  It was still orders of magnitude better than the software enterprise users had to endure every day.

But in the new, consumerized-enterprise world, our UX is competing with Apple, Dropbox, Evernote, 37Signals, Path, Facebook, Twitter and the likes.   Users judge us against the applications they use every day.

If our UX is not absolutely excellent on all fronts, we’re dead in the water.   Jason Calacanis has an awesome post on the Age of Excellence that hammers this point home.

A 6 or a 7 simply won’t cut it.   We’ve got to be a 9 or a 10.

After a ton of analysis, introspection and internal and external discussions, we’ve come to the conclusion that FullContact needs to bring in someone with immense talent that completely owns the UX.

Not Visual Design.  UX.

FullContact’s mission is to solve the world’s contact information problem. We like to say: “If you’ve got an address book, you’ve got an address book problem.”  FullContact wants to solve this problem by providing a ridiculously smart address book in the cloud – all accessible via an open API.

That means our UX has to be killer.   It has to be the absolute best address book experience in the world.

Think you or someone you know has the chops to craft the UX of the world’s future address book?

Go ahead and apply to be our new Director of UX.

And yes, the job includes Paid, Paid Vacation.

  • http://www.about.me/nninoss Ninos Youkhana

    I had removed myself from your subscription list. As feedback, I find it a bit out of courtesy, if you ask for email addresses from users to send an invites, then it is better to send an invite before start sending other emails. I had posted about this on linkedIn.

    • http://fullcontact.com/ Bart Lorang

      My apologies Ninos – I tried looking in our system and can’t find a record of you. If you send me an email: bart@fullcontact.com I’ll make sure you don’t receive any new job postings from us in the future.

  • john hager

    nsa has a big new building out in utah that has ALL email addresses from everywhere! I bet they could help you.

  • http://twitter.com/dona_teresita Teresita A Krueger

    Gee – where were you guys back in the day? Submitted my resume but honestly, I’m a New Yorker – although the beer option caught my eye. Besides your Paid Paid blog was passionate – I just had to submit – but I ain’t no coder, I do respect them. Good Luck with your enterprise.