Last Thursday my class had the honor of listening to Jake Mitchell who works as the Principal Product Designer for CarMax. Mr.Mitchell walked in and should us how in-depth their customer research is. He then went in to show us the famous Honda Commercial and the one they made in return. Mr. Mitchell also went into detail about their new app feature, 360 views. The idea was something I had no idea I needed! He showed us the reviews and reactions people had to it and I myself have been using it a lot when I look at cars online. On top of that, he told us how his team went to Best Buy, brought the cameras and went straight to it. They could have easily waited for the research, but they took the initiative into their own hands and was a huge success. He also told us about MVP, a Minimal Valuable Product. Something just good enough to get the task down, but good enough to get feedback to help improve the products in the future. Mr. Mitchell also sprinkled this little piece of magic to us, called “Heat-maps”. I had never heard of Heat-maps before, except for like certain cameras… but these maps are layouts on where eyes look at the most on a website. Something that will definitely help my website look more inviting. Then he left off by saying “One good prototype is worth a thousand meetings”. He also escalated my outlook on Personas, Carmax came up with a small movie to make the rest of the people in the room feel like they were in that person’s shoes and showed how important cars were.
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