Lesson: Designing Your Experience with Jeff Veen

Step #3 Customer: Learning to profile and plan for your customers

We had a pretty broad sense of our definition for customers when we were building Typekit. It went for everything to big, big enterprise stuff like we were on the New York Times website, and AOL.com and stuff like that; very, very enterprise deals to the individual web designers.

But even farther removed, I would say, to doing integration and things like WordPress where people used a font menu like they would in Microsoft Word. They didn't need to know anything about the technology. And that was deliberate for two reasons. One, we were just so ambitious. Day one of Typekit, we thought, "Let's put fonts on every single page on the web. All right what kinds of pages are there?"

We just looked at where people were publishing and how and decided to try for all of them, but took and approach of "Let's go after the geekiest like alpha designer," the people that like hand code to get their designs like really technical. If we can build something for them, and then figure out how to trickle it down in a user experience, it works for everybody. I think that will be really great as oppose to "Oh, just make something for consumers, and then we'll see if we can sell it elsewhere."

Kind of the other way around that was also deliberate, but again, we had had a lot of experience in that web design world, that community there, and understood the needs of that very contemporary designer. But allowed us to build an incredibly sophisticated platform that would work in all kinds of contexts. So that worked really well.