Offline experience can guide web application interface design

April 5, 2010

To continue on my blog’s current theme of better user interface design for expansion stage software companies, here is another great blog post on user experience design from the popular blog Feedgrids: UX lessons learned from offline experiences.

This article is particularly interesting because it highlights a fact often missed by user interface designers: great design principles work in both online and offline situations, and you can make something like a order-checkout line more user-friendly and functional just as you can make your website more streamlined and easier to use. In fact, bad design in offline situations are easier to detect but probably harder to address, for obvious reasons: it is harder to move brick and concretes than to move web interface elements around and edit CSS stylesheets. Great product and development experts should always be thinking about how user experience can be improved in both online and offline situations.

I can actually relate quite well to the experience described in the article because I too was recently a victim of bad design at Chicago O’Hare airport.

Furthermore, any Salesforce implementation can be further customized so that each data field has its own tool tips to help guide users, as shown below:


Our offline experiences can inspire design tweaks that make a big difference in the user experience, which then leads to higher sales and retention, the drivers of profitability and growth.

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.