Ux reader

this idea?” And, the most important: “Is this idea worth building?”

To kick off a release cycle, I’ll get together with MailChimp’s lead engineer, Eric Muntz, and our CEO, Ben Chestnut, to discuss possible features and refinements to work on.

Sometimes ideas come from past research and design on the UX side, sometimes from engineering-related discoveries, and sometimes straight from Ben as he talks to customers and formulates ideas. Between the 3 of us, we settle on high-level features and try to estimate the scope of what we’re going to build. And we essentially ask and answer those same questions for every big idea we discuss.

The key here is that these are high-level ideas, but they’re based on things that we’ve been thinking about for a while. For example, we decided to build comments and collaboration into MailChimp months after we launched a small labs app called OnStage, which mimicked some of the functionality we were after. We figured out what worked in OnStage and what didn’t, and then we took those ideas and crafted them into a plan for the app. Once we decided to proceed, we had a clear idea of what