Things have been quiet on the blog for the past week due to the accelerating pace of development. We have completed all of the major features except for the gift certificate system. We are thrilled that the core of uSnacks is a reality. Now we begin the process of making tweaks and adding the uSnacks secret sauce. Over the next few weeks we will send invitations to the individuals who indicated they were interested in getting a sneak peek of uSnacks.
This is part 3 of a 3 part series on the philosophy and birth of uSnacks. Enjoy.
Why uSnacks?
If this concept is so great why doesn’t it exist already? This is the great question which we have been mulling over since we started building uSnacks. We don’t know for sure, but we have a few ideas. First, there are currently a few schools where students have put together websites that sell snacks, however these websites have not gained much traction outside of their respective schools. We believe that the websites are clunky, poorly styled, and fail to recognize they are selling to college students not techno geeks. We believe that good design is imperative. Secondly, none of these sites were designed with expansion in mind, therefore they are incapable of dealing with the demands of hosting hundreds of unique operations across the country. uSnacks is different. We built the uSnacks platform from the ground up with the latest Internet technologies in order to accommodate hundreds of unique operations across the country, while allowing each operation to run things the way they want. Our model is different than 99% of “franchising” companies. Our rationale for this is simple, each school is different, and we feel it would be quite arrogant to assume we would know how to run their operation better than the people who actually live at the school. With this in mind, all uSnacks operations are completely autonomous and are able to seamlessly manage their products, customers, sales, and orders with Springboard. We built Springboard from the ground up as a revolutionary new web application designed for uSnacks managers emphasizing ease of use.
This is part 2 of a 3 part series on the philosophy and birth of uSnacks. Enjoy.
Why a Snack Delivery Service?
We exist to make buying snacks easier for college students, period. Buying snacks while away at college has always involved compromises, either in price, convenience, or selection. Students have not had a reliable alternative which deals with all of these compromises. uSnacks eliminates all three. We sell in bulk which allows us to pass savings on to the students. We deliver to the dorms, which helps those who can’t find a ride to the store and don’t want to lug groceries back to campus. We have hundreds of the most popular candies, drinks, snacks, and even toiletries that are easily accessible on the site. The concept is simple and obvious. Amazon delivers books, iTunes sells music, Facebook connects over 6 million people, uSnacks sells snacks. These companies have succeeded and will continue to succeed because they solve a common problem in a simple and intuitive way. uSnacks is not based on some groundbreaking technology or amazingly complicated concept, and that is precisely why it is so compelling.
This is part 1 of a 3 part series on the philosophy and birth of uSnacks. Enjoy.
What is uSnacks?
uSnacks was founded with the goal of making the pastime of college snacking easier. Amazon changed the way we buy books, iTunes changed the way we buy music, we believe uSnacks will change the way college students buy snacks. uSnacks is about taking what used to be tedious and hard and making it simple and easy.
Why Should I Care?
uSnacks was started by college students for college students. The idea was to make it super easy for students to buy snacks in bulk and have them delivered right to their dorm. While putting this vision into action the uSnacks team experienced how hard it was to build a business from scratch. There were issues with money, partners, business plans, website design, marketing, legal drafting, the list went on and on. We found ourselves spending 80% of our time and money dealing with startup issues that seemingly had nothing to do with our business operations. Then it dawned on us. There must be college students all across the country that have the desire and motivation to run their own business, but for whatever reason have trouble executing due to these daunting obstacles that come along when starting a business. uSnacks provides these motivated students with the opportunity to run their own uSnacks operation at their college or university without dealing with these frustrating issues.
I recently stumbled upon this Dilbert comic and it really hits the nail on the head. In most companies the people in charge don’t really care about the user experience on their site. They know their sites are important, but they don’t put themselves in their user’s shoes. When these executives decide to add a new feature or change a feature to better align it with a company centric goal they sabotage the real people who will eventually be using their site.
They get so caught up in the business objectives for the addition that they forget about the details. They forget that filling out a 3 page checkout form is annoying or that having to resubmit your login 5 times because you didn’t see the little * is amazingly frustrating.
Adding more “stuff” is usually the wrong thing to do. It increases clutter, reduces readability, and dilutes the page of its purpose. We are always looking to reduce the buttons on the screen, reduce the number of words on the screen, and reduce the number of forms to fill out. While everyone else looks for things to add, we are always looking for ways to subtract, making uSnacks easier and more fun to use.
Most products we love “feel” good because they behave the way we expect. They rarely have the longest list of features or have that whiz-bang thingamabob the kids are all taking about. They have a focus which guides each and every decision. Because of their focus they remove the clutter; everything that doesn’t really matter. The iPod nano is one of these products, it lets you find and play your music really, really, easily.
There are dozens of other MP3 players on the market, yet Apple has nearly 85% of the market. How can this be? The Creative Zen does more than the iPod and is less expensive, why isn’t it selling like mad? While it’s true the Creative Zen packs more features into its player there are significant tradeoffs as a result: the interface is clunky, the buttons are stiff, the typography is careless, and the information displayed is overkill.
We work to make uSnacks “feel” good. Every time we make a change we make sure it makes the site “feels” better. It can be tempting to slap a bunch of features together and call it a site, but then you end up with junk. On paper it may have everything, but in reality it ends up being a nightmare to use. We started with buying snacks. That is what uSnacks is all about, making it more fun to buy snacks. We think about the details, like logging in and singing up, making the checkout process simple and easy, making the site easy to navigate, allowing you to see the items in your cart without shuffling you to another page, reducing the number of forms you fill out, making product images big and clear, and making it super easy to add items to your cart, these are a few of the things we think are important. The details are what make things special. We care about the details.
After more than a year of brainstorming, sketching, drafting, doodling, researching, and coding, uSnacks is almost ready. When we first set out to create a better way to buy snacks online we thought uSnacks would simply service the University of Miami. Since then we have expanded our plans substantially.
We designed uSnacks from the ground up to accommodate hundreds of unique operations (no small feat). The inherent complexity in building a new class of online store could have easily overwhelmed the user interface, however we spent a tremendous amount of our time and energy focusing on keeping the site clean, simple, and easy to use.
We had the unique advantage of building uSnacks with the knowledge of over 10 years of online shopping conventions. We studied some of our favorite sites and thought long and hard about what made us love them and what made them “feel” good. We think we have some pretty sweet features in uSnacks, many of which have never been seen before on the Big Boys sites. Over the next few weeks as we draw closer to launch I will detail the parts of the site we think are super cool. So hang in there, we are coming into the home stretch!
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