Slice of Lime's Twist on User Experience

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Interview with Slice of Lime CEO & Founder, Kevin Menzie

When you look at the array of companies in Slice of Lime's portfolio, no doubt you will recognize the majority from the Colorado startup scene. This year alone, they’ve worked on projects for KidRobot, MyWedding, Oz Architecture, Arrow Electronics, Orbotix, TechStars, Symplified, and Portico, to name a few. While that’s quite a mix, what they all had in common was the need for strategic thought to help grow their business. And that is exactly what the Slice of Lime team provided. Founder and CEO Kevin Menzie pointed out that along with steering strategic vision, the 20 person team's core value is empathy.

"We look at our work through two different lenses: empathy for the end-user and empathy for the client." According to Kevin, the team finds great value in putting on the end-user’s shoes. A huge part of their process is observation, research, and conducting interviews, because observing how an end user performs a task often leads to realizations of how they can improve the user-experience. Thus, the end product and final vision often shifts over time. This can become unsettling for the client. Like commissioning a piece of artwork, the client and designer's vision has to synchronize expectations, user experience, and design. "Over-communication and aligning with the client on the best direction to take the project is key."

The close knit team that comprises Slice of Lime has a mantra “Create Amazing Experiences.” While this pertains to the end product and their client experiences, it also applies to the experience each team member has within the company. This could be climbing a fourteener together, enjoying an Avs game in a VIP suite, or putting themselves in their client’s jobs for a day (they once traveled three miles into the earth to hang out in the nation’s largest marble quarry to better understand their client’s business). But perhaps the most notable "teambuilding", or "Sliceness", excursion was when they took a trip to California for a quick laugh in the Green Room at the Conan O'Brien show and spent the day at Universal studios.

Communication is something that is important not only with clients but between the team as well. "Everyone on the team is incredibly talented, but that’s not what we initially look for. What’s more important is excellence in collaborating and communicating with others."

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1. Describe the day-to-day culture of Slice of Lime.
We work with a wide range of clients, from startups like SendGrid to big-brands like MapQuest. We don’t do back-end development so we often find ourselves teaming up with our clients’ internal developers or external agencies like Pivotal Labs. As a result, we’ve spent a lot of time mirroring the way developers like to work; we work in weekly sprints, do daily startups, iteration planning, and other processes that are familiar to developers. This allows us to work seamlessly and in tandem with development efforts.
2. What's next?
As we move forward, we’re beginning to apply our UX Design process to the “internet of things.” We feel that as more of the objects in the world become connected, our definition of “User Experience” will expand to not just a desktop monitor or mobile device, but to the human experience of everything around us.
3. How does Slice of Lime integrate itself into the Colorado startup community?
Colorado is a wonderful place to start your business. If we were to boil it down to one reason it would be: the people. There’s a generosity here that is incomparable to other cities, in our opinion. Getting assimilated into the community is as easy as showing up at a few events like Boulder/Denver New Tech Meetup or Open Coffee Club. You’ll be greeted by friendly faces wherever you go. Besides people being outgoing, they are made up of incredibly smart entrepreneurs and investors. We’ve had the good fortune of being connected to the VC firm, Foundry Group, through the years, which is at the epicenter of many exciting initiatives in the startup community.
We love mentoring, speaking, and sponsoring startup related events. That’s meant sponsoring things like TechStars, Boulder Startup Week, Denver Startup Week, Venture Capital in the Rockies, and Startup Weekend. We host webinars, speak on panels, and hold free workshops on Rapid Prototyping. All of this is are our way of giving back to a community that has been incredibly supportive.

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