We at Rebtel have chosen to contract Mårten as an interaction designer and I’m very satisfied with that choice. Mårten has proved himself to be very good at facilitating the creative process through his extensive experience and passion for usability. He asks all the questions we’ve stopped asking ourselves and he’s not satisfied until we really focus on the user’s perspective. This can sometimes be exhausting but the results are sure worth all the effort.
Rebtel offers users in over 50 countries cheep international calls on a highly competitive market. Our services may greatly simplify peoples’ lives and help them save a lot of money. But in order to get these benefits, they have to pass a number of hurdles in terms of understanding the service, and it seems that only the highly motivated users get the whole way. Once they’ve experienced the service however, they tend to love it and be very loyal. Making our services easy to understand and easy to use it therefore an absolute top priority.
The thing I appreciate the most in working with Mårten is the methods he uses. Instead of jumping to quick conclusions and presenting pretty pictures Mårten promotes a more methodical approach to designing an interface. Together we start out with defining clear goals, and thoroughly explore both the problems and the possibilities before deciding on a final solution. With Mårtens methods we feel that we are focusing on the right things at the right time which leads to better results in far less time.
The use of hand drawn conceptual sketches is one of the key tools in Mårtens way of working. Using sketches in this way was new to us but turned out to make perfect sense. The cool thing with the sketches is that they can be drawn in an instant and be very precise in communicating an interactive idea, yet leaving out all unnecessary detail. Before, we often got caught in details too early and could sometimes experience resistance to improvement because we’d already put so much work into defining a particular solution, the result not being as good as it could have been. That doesn’t happen anymore.
Mårtens way makes gradual improvement easy and effortless. We feel more confident letting the solution evolve step by step into something great that is easily implemented and really works for the end users.
/ Maja Lindström, Head of Product at Rebtel