Interview by Adriana de Barros and Nuno Martins

• Jump to: Jordan Nielsen Weinman Mullenweg Finck Purgason Sodaplay WWFT

Eric Jordan:
Technical details aside, we build all our websites with emotional response in mind. We attempt to identify who the target market is, what makes them tick, and how we can best appeal to them…bringing our own emotional response to the product or company to bear on it. Whenever we develop a site for a client, we have to BECOME their audience. We must ask ourselves questions, such as “What would make me want to buy this product?” It is only through this type of projection that we come up with any sort of meaningful approach to the design / implementation. It allows us to decide how much of a presentation layer is needed versus straightforward information. Some audiences know when they are being marketed to, especially nowadays. You want to be able to cut through the market speak and touch the audience on a personal level.

Jakob Nielsen:
The biggest question is always, "what do users want?" If you know that, then you can focus on the second question, which is making it easy and selling it to them. But if you offer something that people don't want, you can make it wonderful and it still won't sell as much as something that they want.
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Lynda Weinman:
I don’t build many projects. For the lynda.com web site we care about performance, ease of use, searchability, accessibility, approachability. We have a lot of challenges because we push so many terabytes of movie data to so many subscribers. We’ve built a flexible infrastructure that supports multiple web and database servers and load balancing so all customers have the fastest possible connection to our content.

Matt Mullenweg:
The first question I ask before even considering the tech: Is this something people want? The most brilliantly executed idea in the world is useless if it doesn't fill a real need in peoples' lives. If it's not something you would use yourself everyday, then it isn't likely you'll find any other folks who will.

Nick Finck:
The goals need to be clear for the user, the business and the technology. No one goal should trump the others, its a matter of finding the balance or sweet spot between all three. This is the cornerstone for a successful web site.

Todd Purgason:
Well I’m more concerned with the concept, content and experience than the technical detail. It is more about doing relevant things for specific audiences to us. The technical details is the sweat work the concept, content and approach is the brain work. Both are important but we have all see sights with amazing technical detail and no real purpose or really lame content, it is a bit like watching one of the last 3 star wars movies that came out, all detail no substance.

Sodaplay:
That it works. For sodaplay.com to work it must support a burgeoning ecology of creative play and learning. For irrepressible.info to work it must attract more than 40,000 signatures to an Amnesty International campaign in time to be delivered to the UN this November. To work means different things for different projects, the medium must always be a means to that end.

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WeWorkForThem:
We stopped designing websites a longggg time ago because we wanted to do sites properly and people do not want to pay for a site that they ‘need.’ So we gave up. It takes a lot of technical skill and a lot of time to design a site. The last site we designed was YouWorkForThem and I think it will stay that way for a long long time.