We have great news to break to you: Supercharge has officially launched its office in London. The beautiful Metropolitan Wharf building is now our second home, with a grand view of the Thames.

Can anyone guarantee that a product will be successful? Probably not, since customers vote with their money (or their equally valuable attention), and that only happens when you go live. But the real question is: Can we promise that a product will be loved by customers? We believe the answer is yes. We believe we are a creative bunch here at Supercharge. Creativity is the source of innovation and originality, therefore it is an essential quality for any sound product development team. But creativity itself won’t result in great products. You need to have the right process - with constant validation and iteration - if you are to succeed. And creating great products with the right process isn’t an art, it’s a craft, with predictable results.

If it is too good to be true, it probably is. That flat we rented for a great price but had the loudest neighbours. That Kickstarter product we ordered that turned out to be a joke. That outfit we bought which only looked great online. The value just wasn’t as substantial as we hoped for. But we went for it anyway - against our gut feeling - since the savings were tangible.

The saddest part of any UX practitioner's career is when a product based on the designs becomes reality, but looks and behaves nothing like imagined. It happens surprisingly often in any kind of environment - I have observed this phenomenon in enterprises as well as startups. In my opinion, this problem normally stems from one of two possible root causes, or in the worst cases from a mixture of both.

As companies reach a certain size, they often get separated by borders. In the classic multinational model, companies usually serve local needs in a specialised way, which creates differences in services and products across countries. Partly due to strong regulation, companies in financial services and telecommunication tend to work within this model. It is a significant challenge for them to efficiently launch cross-country product developments as the process is plagued by large differences in business needs, difficulties in coordination and internal politics. At Supercharge we work with companies that are determined to take the leap despite the challenge. They aim to build a unified user experience for their customers across countries. One of these products we helped to build is a state-of-the-art mobile self-care application. Among the many challenges during product development, let’s focus on the ones around technology.

Oliver is a New York based startup that is determined to disrupt the Big Apple’s residential rental market. They seem to be on the right track to cut out the unnecessary middlemen from the rental business: the broker. Until now brokers were essential in finding suitable apartments in NY taking a hefty commission for their services. In the age of information technology this process seems unnecessary and full of friction: Oliver’s team decided to build a platform where renters and landlords can easily connect without paying expensive fees. We are proud that we aided them from early stage through their successful launch of the product focusing on client-side and back-end development. We believe that the robust, scalable and maintainable solution that powers the product is a solid foundation that the Oliver team can build upon.
In the following interview we asked Amir, co­founder of Oliver to tell us a bit more about their business and future plans.

A digital product is worthless if it doesn’t provide value to its users and even the best technical implementation won’t save such a software from fading into oblivion. Users are especially quick to judge mobile applications. We always helped our clients in creating exceptional products, not just working software. However during the last year we felt more and more pressure - from inside and outside likewise - to do more than just advise on UX. We wanted to make sure that we not only create products that are usable, but ones that are also useful. We decided to create a leadership role dedicated to ensuring that anything we develop provides exceptional user experience. A UX Lead at Supercharge is the champion of the users: his task is to keep us user-centered while we plan product features, design the user interface, or do the actual coding. The UX Lead formulates a clear UX Strategy for every project and ensures that the various product development related activities work in harmony towards the same final goal: creating products that have a positive impact on people’s life.
In an interview we asked Balázs - who strengthens our team since March as a UX Lead - to tell a bit about himself and his take on UX.

You might have heard about our rebranding (if you haven’t, read the story here). As we decided to bring our team to the next level we didn’t just spice up our corporate identity. Our level up also included a more physical upgrade: we moved into an awesome new office.

If everything goes well a company evolves with time. Ours surely did. We arrived to a point where it seems pretty distant when our business was just a handful of university students in a livingroom. Every day we have the amazing opportunity to work on products that potentially impact the life of millions of people. But it took a number of critical decisions to get here and this is the story of our efforts to give our company the appearance it deserved.

We believe that creating UX concepts are great exercises for our team. In real projects business needs, deadlines, technical and budget constraints bind the imagination, while concepts let creative ideas flow freely. They provide opportunity to experiment, explore new tools and try out long cherished ideas in a safe environment. If something doesn’t work great in a concept you can just throw it away, no harm done. That being said we always make it sure that we select solid goals and set clearly articulated constraints for our concepts - these give focus for the creativity and turn doodling into exercising. Besides the satisfaction we always learn something new from these little passion projects that we can use to enhance our client’s products.