Design Tips from Lessons Learned in 2009

December 9, 2009

We had some fun and rewarding design projects this year.  Open Mountain has a new logo and Web site, and we executed a new ad campaign.  We also designed sites for our clients and were involved in many creative projects throughout the year.  I think it’s time for a little retrospective.  Before I take you through some of work, I thought I would provide some lessons learned from the year.  Assuming you are following a healthy design process, here are some tips to help you achieve success with your creative endeavors:

1) Start from a creative brief

A creative brief synthesizes the desired results or impacts of your project.  I recommend a single page brief that has 3-5 words that describe the emotion you wish to evoke, a sentence describing the impression you are trying to create or message you are trying to communicate, and then 5-10 bullet points listing everything that should also be considered.  We skipped this step a couple of times only to find out later that our lack of alignment was driving the design in different directions.  Resist the temptation to dive right in creating images before you collect your thoughts.

2) Use multiple visuals where ever you can

This one seems obvious.  Of course you are going to create visuals of your design.  We recommend using more than one as much as possible and use existing work for inspiration.  We started our logo project by creating a page of logos we liked from other sites and a page of logos we didn’t like.  Our Web site went through many prototypes before we started working in HTML.  Our design partners deliver 3 to 5 design choices per deliverable and that gives us plenty to discuss as we strive for something creative, intuitive and unique.

3) Plan to reset or start over at least once

All our best design projects hit the inevitable “we’re stuck” moment at some point in the project.  The current trajectory has run its course.  Where do we go from here?  Starting over allows you to dump the bad parts of everything you did while retaining the best of your brainstorming and thinking.  For our logo project, we liked the two-tone nature of the images but couldn’t converge on colors.  We realized that using brown to represent the strength of mountains was putting a damper on our brand.  Hills in California offer other choices such as green for spring or gold in fall.  The logo design direction was good but we dumped our color palette and started over.  You’ll see that progression below.  We recommend you embrace the set back as a healthy part of a creative process.  Try not to resist just because you are under deadline.  It may take you longer to make a bad design better than create a new design that works.

Here now is a trip down some of the design projects from our year and how we came to learn these valuable lessons.

Open Mountain Gets a New Brand

Our first project of the year was a new logo and Web site.  As I mentioned above, we did the logo ourselves starting from a creative brief.  Open has strong connotations for approachable and transparent but also open in the open source sense implying community and knowledge.  Mountains are strong, substantial and impressive.  The image below shows our progression from earthy colors toward what we have today.  This project benefited from all 3 tips listed above.  We used a brief.  We created mountains of visuals to consider different options, pun fully intended of course.  Our earth tones palette was replaced by something green, open and fresh.

We tackled the Web site next.  Below is our first attempt starting from our existing creative brief.  Do you see any major issues with this perhaps after reading our previous post about design?  You see a guy in a kayak against a mountain range exactly where the eye looks first on the page.  How informative is that?  We had hoped that the serenity of the lake we create a peacefulness when perusing the site.  One reviewer thought we were a travel Web site.  Furthermore, most people didn’t even look at the content at the bottom because it appears secondary to the overall page.  Time to start again.

Our new design started by utilizing our own advice and putting meaningful content in key positions.  We decide to use Flash animation to make the experience more engaging.  Below is our first shot at the flash panels for the animation.

Next we played with color and attributes to encourage the users toward different sections of a page.

In the end, we feel we created a site that is informative and engaging, and delivers the right message about our company.  Take a look and tell us what you think.

We Have Ads Now!

Our next project was creating advertisements for our business.  We procured several 250 by 250 spots on various Web sites through pay or partnership.  Due to timing constraints, we were forced to create something quick and dirty to meet a deadline.  This is what you get when you don’t follow good process or utilize any of the design tips we mentioned above.

Is there anything in this ad that is the least bit engaging?  What incentive do you have to explore this company?  What service do they really offer?  Right, you get the point.

We reset the entire project and thought hard about what were trying to do.  An expert gave us some advice on how to think beyond our current approach.  She talked to us about advertising and about how you create something like a “Got milk” or “Just do it”.

We have said from the beginning that we wanted to be different from what customers have come to expect with outsourcing.  We strive to overcome the separation between organizations and instead work to provide insight into what is really happening with the remote development team.  Working with Open Mountain should not feel like typical outsourcing.  It should feel like your own team.

Outsourcing never felt like this!

That was it.  We knew right away this was our “Got milk”.  When you outsource with Open Mountain, it should not feel like any previous experience you might have had.  Below is our first concept piece with the new approach.

Happy smiling people.  People actually enjoying outsourcing.  Exuberance.  Feedback from our experts confirmed this had appeal and communicated the right message.  We created 4 ads.  Here are the two favorites and we also used the one in the upper left corner above.

If you outsource with us, you’ll be as happy as a kid sledding or a crazy guy eating a huge lollipop.

These ads still crack me up.  They are quirky and unique and communicate our core message.  Of course, we rejected some ads as well.  Here are the two most controversial.

Outsourcing should feel like you are about to eat a huge hamburger, right?  People said he looked constipated or nervous.

Reaction to the woman eating cake was truly mixed across woman and men.  At the time we rejected the ad, one woman reviewer was saying this degrades our business while another said this would get the attention of our target audience.  Let’s just say that the ad did not fit well with our corporate values.

Clients Restart Projects Too

Design tips were learned working with clients as well.  Our client ThriveOn.com launched their site based on the design below.  As we added features to the solution, we soon realized that the design was creating some challenges.  This design is more consistent with a Web portal such as iGoogle or my.yahoo.com, and didn’t fit well with upcoming product changes.

The client went back to the drawing board and created a design more suited to the long-term growth plans of the product.  Below is an interim step from when we experimented with different color schemes.

The final site is presented below.  You can read more about our work with ThriveOn in our case study on the OpenMountain.com.

A Look at a Work in Progress

The year isn’t over yet and we’re designing new products all the time.  We strive to follow good process and utilize the tips mentioned at the start of this post.  Here now are two final mock-ups from a product we are working on.  The project is in stealth mode and some content is redacted.  Overall, the design process has gone very well.  Our favorite approach is not displayed below however.  You’ll have to wait until launch to see where we ended up.

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Posted by bbenedict

Understanding Development from a Day In the Life

November 23, 2009

Monday morning is the time when our teams interact the most about projects and the coming week.  I’ve decided to capture events typical of Monday to provide insight into our work developing products for clients.  I’ll do my best to include everything warts and all even if that means sharing something I would not normally share.  In support of full disclosure, I took sparse notes over a period of time and came back later to clean up the text and add commentary.  Here goes nothing!

Our high-tech revolution has plunged us into a state of continuous partial attention.

iBrain by Gary Small, M.D. and Gigi Vorgan

- A typical Monday starts by pulling my canoe out into the various communication streams.  Logging on to Skype is the watershed event.

- Skype is running.  Firefox is open with tabs for email, calendar, several Google docs, WordPress for this post and YouTube for a side project I am working on.

- I check in with my lead on Skype.  I have the same guy across a few of my projects.  This certainly streamlines the communication.  He’s in Costa Rica.  When I worked at Adobe, we used IM all the time as people worked on different floors and at different locations.

- I am acting as the product owner for one project and I clarify something about a feature we are implementing.

- On another project, our client provides detailed specifications and we review the documents to make sure we are in sync.  We are, which is good.

The new promise of collaboration is that with peer production we will harness human skill, ingenuity, and intelligence more efficiently and effectively than anything we have witnessed previously.

WIKINOMICS by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

- Our newest client jumps on Skype to validate the release, our testing and the schedule.  There is a lot to discuss so we move to a Skype call. He does a good job managing his business to create an active and valuable community.

- Another issue comes in about how a feature should work that requires some thought.  I ignore chats and emails for the next 30 minutes and open specifications in Google docs and mock-ups in Preview.  We clarify the issue.

- By late morning, the major communications have been completed.  Projects are moving forward and our teams seem to understand what needs to happen this week.  I am responsible for a couple of releases that are in full swing.

No matter how clever the idea or great the implementation, an invention typically lives or dies depending on how well it can be integrated into a larger social or technological context.

Juice by Evan I. Schwartz

- The marketing text for our Web site update is long overdue.  Some tasks on the docket this week are for corporate business.  But I decide to focus on that side project and YouTube.

- I started a project called ReachGivers.org to help charities and non-profits get their message out over the Internet.  ReachGivers.org uses Ruby on Rails and has Twitter integration.  I added a poor man’s blog a while back as well.  This week I want to add video support.  Side projects help me stay connected with technology.

Economics is above all a science of measurement.  It comprises an extraordinarily powerful and flexible set of tools that can reliably assess a thicket of information to determine the effect of any one factor, or even the whole effect.

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

- Off to Starbucks for a Mocha and a blueberry scone.  This happens so often that people know me by name there.  The Ethos water billboard reminds me I wanted to blog about that on ReachGivers.org after finishing the video work.

- My brain stumbles on some concepts for the marketing text and I jot down some ideas.

- I was working on a product a while back and was not that impressed with the end user documentation.  I sent a book proposal out to a technology book publisher, which turned into a series of titles, and I have been writing every since.  I love it, I really do.  I even enjoy working on marketing text and ads.

Execution is not a one-time event.  Nor is it a process where you check off goals as if your sixth-grade teacher were looking over your shoulder.

The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki.

- Shorty before noon we get a curve ball. Mid-cycle, our client needs to shift direction on a project to change the prioritization and the release date.  I’ll spend the next few days updating user stories and validating the new plan. Sometimes I feel like we’re actually better at hitting a curve ball.

- The Agile software process, which is intended for flexible development, actually advocates against this type of mid-cycle change.  Release cycles are purposely shorter so that a direction shift simply influences the next cycle.  For start-ups, next month can be years away.  We have to be more flexible.

- A site we monitor generates an alert right before I can escape for lunch.  I used to get a little rush on these mini-emergencies like working as an EMT. Now I am the ambulance driver who knows that most pick-ups are not at all like the show ER.  Still, up-time is important and so we resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

- It occurs to me that this post demonstrates why people Tweet.  Expressing myself effectively with 140 character didn’t work well for me.  I decide to try it again because I am enjoying creating this running dialog.

- We’re trying to send large Photoshop files with mock-ups.  Some days technology just seems to work against us.  We’re hitting proxy issues and time out issues.  Eventually we solve the problem and remind ourselves yet again we should standardize on an approach.  Problem is, email and Skype are so convenient and work well enough most of the time.  I guess this would be one of those warts.

Agile software development methods should be able to survive in an atmosphere of constant change and still emerge with success.

Agile Management for Software Engineering by David J. Anderson

- After 40 plus years of eating sandwiches, I still love a good sandwich.  The best sandwich in town is from the deli in Vallergus and the people at the cash register all know me by sight.

- I never get back to the post after lunch.  Clients and partners all eat at different times and issues were waiting for me when I got back.  That is definitely a typical Monday.

- I didn’t finish the marketing text either.  The text I came up with was not remarkable.  I made some small updates to our corporate site instead and also finished my changes on ReachGivers.org.  Perhaps I will think of something while winding down for the night.

- My iPhone sits by my bed.  With several releases in play, there is always a chance a developer is still working and will fire off a question.  Of course, I can’t just let the device sit there, now can I?  I pull my canoe back out into the stream and see what else I might have missed during dinner.

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Success And Failure Contribute To The Experience It Takes To Succeed

October 23, 2009

Experience matters when it comes to advisers, vendors and employees.  A recent post by Eric Ries on gigaom.com challenged the conventional wisdom that people who worked at previously successful start-ups hands down have the solid experience you need in your employees and advisers. If you had a good run at a Google or an Amazon or an eBay you are without a doubt the person a start-up should bring on board. The problem is that founders and companies get so caught up in the name that they don’t look behind the curtain.  How do you choose between employee 100 at eBay versus someone who did time at HP and Apple but the one start-up they worked at hit the deadpool after two years?

We can’t discount the impact of having big name success in your company pedigree.  We see it all the time at Open Mountain as we work with start-ups and investors.  We had one prospect use the pedigree of advisers to a consultant he briefly hired in his pitch.  Sort of like his company hired the guy who dates the sister of the guy who walks Steve Job’s dog if you know what I mean.  Another case the person with the pedigree had joined one of the Internet giants after the battle had been won and during the time the business plateaued.   In both cases, we observed first hand that the viewing audience accepted the pedigree on face value.

Remember Webvan?  Webvan was one of the high flying companies of the first Internet boom that spent obscene billions on grocery delivery infrastructure only to go belly up at first sign of trouble.  Who would ever hire a person with that on their resume?  If you were to hire that person, the first thing he or she would tell you is don’t over build and make sure you have ways to reduce  costs during economic down turn.  That seems like really valuable advice to me.  If you hired someone who had been at Amazon, he or she might tell you to build like crazy and run up huge debt because it’s a land grab and we’re playing for keeps.  This is exactly what Amazon did and it certainly worked for them.  Which approach would be better for a start-up in today’s market?

Let’s dispel a few myths of our own.  With the exception of the leadership at the top, the job done by most people at say etoys, Webvan or uBid was not much different than the same people at eBay, Yahoo or Amazon.   There were plenty of good people at the first three companies just as surely as there were bad people at the success stories.  We tend to assume that everyone who worked at a runaway success was a home run hitter.  Yet we all know many great lessons are learned by failure.  Your experts need to know how to succeed for sure, but they also need to know how to avoid failure.

Here are 3 tips on how to get the best people and avoid the glossy eyed acceptance from talking to someone who worked at a runaway success story:

1) Don’t hire anyone who doesn’t have at least one significant failure they are willing to talk about.  The failure means they have learned.  The “talk about” part means they are being as honest as reasonably possible in the vetting process.  Here’s an interview tip.  After hearing about the failure, ask them for the name of someone else who also went through the failure with them that they still like. Then ask the candidate to describe their impressions of the themselves from perspective of the other person.  In an excellent interviewing class I had a while back, the teacher explained that the possibility you may actually know or contact the third person increases the chance your candidate will give you an honest answer.

2) Go rent season 4 of the TV show House.  In season 4, House is forced to build a a new team.  The process is entertaining but also valuable if you are interested in characteristics of a great team.  You should probably watch some of the earlier seasons so you understand the show.  House understands that to build the best team, you have to hire people who compliment your skills, who are not afraid of failure and who are willing to look for the best solution no matter the cost or process.  Most importantly, don’t just hire people who think like you if you want to benefit from the unique experiences of individuals with different points of view.

3) Hire people with great pedigrees in their past too!  Yes, I know the focus of this post was about how not to let pedigree cloud your thinking.  Simply put, experience matters and working with people who have done great work and achieved great success makes a difference.  My point is that you need to look beneath the surface and make sure the experience is real.  That is also the point of Eric Ries in his post.  He provides all the ways people with pedigree experience may not have earned that experience or learned from that experience.  I would suggest you review the post before the interview and do your best to determine if the person in front of you fits one of his profiles.

Any day of the week, I’ll take the person with substantial experience that includes brand names and failures over the person with only one great success story in their past.  I like to see some start-up experience, but I like that most when it is balanced with large company experience too.  After all, I’m not saving people’s lives like my good friend Dr. House, but I do want to have a team that can save a company in need and to do that they must know what to do when things don’t go as planned.

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Posted by bbenedict

Facebook Should Use Feedback Loops During Development

March 23, 2009

Many facebook users are unhappy with the new interface that launched recently.  A poll of facebook users showed 94% of users do not like the changes.   Just search for “facebook interface” on the site and you will see what people are talking about.   Finally, we can all see the benefit of online software with the possibility of immediate feedback!

How do you end up making changes to a site that so many of your users don’t like?  This question is hard to answer without more insight into the organization.  One way to reduce the chance of producing unwanted changes is to create healthy feedback loops during development.  Users love to give feedback if you provide the opportunity as we can see through the numerous responses to the new interface.

How to gather feedback

Here are some ways developers can gather feedback on their ideas and proposed changes.  I must say up front that I am not connected to facebook and have no idea if any of these processes were used:

Do usability testing – Usability testing is simple and effective.  Put your new site in a protected location online that users with permission can see.  Ask your approved users to do a series of actions on the new site.  Most importantly, ask them to speak their reactions out loud even if the reaction is negative.   You will hear and see first hand what changes you are making are good and what changes are perhaps not so good.  Here’s an online service to do usability testing that some of our clients have used.

Use focus groups – Find users who live within driving distance of corporate HQ, bring them in for pizza and project the new interface on the wall.  Start asking questions.  Take a lot of notes.  Repeat.  There is actually a methodology around focus groups, but an unstructured approach can also be very effective.

Prototype – Long before you code anything, create simple graphic mockups and email them to prominent users, bloggers (provided they are willing to hold their posts until launch), family members and employees.  Ask participants to email you their reactions along with any suggestions they might have.

Have a REAL beta! – Create a group of a thousand or so users who are willing to actively participate in a beta.  By “real” beta, I don’t mean putting out incomplete software for all users to play around on (gmail, your beta period is over!).  Let your beta users directly access the new site for a few weeks so they can get a feel for the workflows and functionality.  Provide a simple form for them to email you feedback.  Make sure you find users willing to try new features who will make the effort to email their comments to the team.

After reading about these various processes for gathering feedback, do you think that the developers at facebook might have been able to determine that users might have issues with the new interface?

If you want to avoid making similar mistakes, make sure that gathering and responding to feedback is an integral part of your development process.  Leave time in the schedule to make product changes.  One of the top reasons feedback loops fail is development teams don’t have time to address highlighted issues.

Let’s talk brass tacks

One of the top complaints about the new interface is that users are confused and often have to hunt around to find areas that should be easier to locate.  Some basic user interface elements might improve usability and decrease this confusion.  I have listed a few ideas below.  After all,  what good is pointing out issues if you are not going to offer solutions:

- Provide a consistent site wide bread crumb trail to help users see exactly where they are.   For example, how about showing something like Home > Photos > Albums > Napa Fall 2008 > Photo 2 of 18  on the page?  With a bread crumb trial , users can see exactly where they are and how to navigate back.  Some areas on facebook have a bread crumb trail and some don’t.  To be effective, this needs to be consistent and present everywhere.

- Provide site wide navigation that is always available.  Would it be so bad to have a menu bar or left side navigation or some other common control to access the entire site?

- Use labels and hints to help users understand what they are looking at.  For example, take the word “Highlights” on the home page.  How about a little helper text like popular updates from friends or something like that?  Labels with hints set the context for users and help reduce confusion.  I suggest reading Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.  I had my own don’t make me think moment a few months back.

A real example – Events

Let me provide an example of what I am talking about using the Events feature.

I see more and more people putting birthdays into facebook.  Current birthdays shows up in the upper right corner of the home page.  I’ve never used the Events feature before and had thought these were just notifications.

On the current site, you have to click twice in that corner to get to Events.  That seems to be the only way to get there as Events don’t seem to belong anywhere.  I don’t see them in the menus or as links in other places.  These next changes would help users navigate Events, which would hopefully increase site usage as well as improve user satisfaction:

1) Put the label Events on the home page above the daily events.  This tells me this is an actual area of the product.  Heck, go crazy, even put small hint text like where you see birthdays or create your own events.

2) Provide general navigation to get to the Events area.  If you put them under your Profile, which may or may not be the best place, then have a sub-navigation under Profiles that lists Events and the other sub-areas that are part of Profiles.   This needs to always be available to users through the primary navigation I suggest above.

3) Show Home > Profile > Events when users go to the main Events page.

These changes reinforce Events is a feature and that it is located under Profiles.  Overall, users won’t feel as lost when they come to understand the layout of the site.

With a little bit of development process to support integrated user feedback, developers can determine the changes users want to see, which should in turn lead to a happier and more productive user base.

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Posted by bbenedict

Agile Development Is Worth It

July 10, 2008

We moved to more of an agile mode of software development a year ago. We noticed some significant advantages, but also some pitfalls. In the end, the change the was the right decision for us and hopefully you will see why after you read about our observations.

I had a really good reason for being hesitant to adopt Agile development. This process is always brought up to me when I must explain that delivering X,Y and Z in the product will take some period of time like 3 months instead of 3 weeks. The product manager/senior exec person in front of me inevitably asks the question:

“Why can’t we do iterative development?”

Iterative development to them represents a way to go faster. The implication is that if we changed the way we managed development, the team could code faster. Iterations are definitely faster than releases in the waterfall sense. You can of course release more often. However, I have a hard time believing that changing the way you develop can’t change the fact that the coding and testing of X, Y and Z takes time. Like it or not, coding is physics and the time to do the actual work is what it is no matter how you slice it.

I throw out the usually compromises of course. Can I have more people? No. Can we cut something else? No. We’re already working more hours. Check. So given the same amount of people and no changes in the functionality, X,Y and Z can’t be done in 3 weeks.

I sat down with my good friend, Steve Greene, an industry veteran and the champion of Agile at Salesforce.com, and explained my delima. I asked him if I was wrong. If I move to iterations, can I compress 3 months of development time into a much, much shorter period of time?

Steve’s answer was definitely reassuring. The reality is, moving to Agile is not about going faster, but about going better. My response to the product manager/senior exec should be we can achieve more flxibility in releases. This allows us to be more responsive to customers. But no, Agile can not provide a unified theory for physics and code development.

Steve continued and of course I am paraphrasing what I heard versus what he may have actually said over the course of a lunch :) You are right, Bob. Completing all of X, Y and Z takes the same time* whether you use waterfall or Agile. But what you do get is**:

1) More predictability in your development – Checking in every month is better than waiting 3. Developers make a mental shift. They no longer get X merely to 80% knowing they can finish up during the mad dash bug fixing in the end. They get to 100% in month 1. There is a better focus on completion.

2) Better quality in your result – Waiting to the end to do quality increases the complexity of quality issues. Stabilizing X, then Y, then Z is easier then stabilizing X,Y and Z as a group.

3) Better flexibility in releases – We all know how expensive it is to be ramping on Y, and then find out we need W. Product teams fight hard to get W in because waiting for the next 3 month cycle for W puts the release of W out 5 to 6 months. With Agile, W can be slipped in and released, and that only pushes something else out a month.

In case you have any doubts about the benefit, I refer you to a presentation by Steve and others in his group at Salesforce.com about how releases are more frequent, customers are happy, and the development organization is not floundering under their own success. The most important part of this presentation, to me anyways, starts at slide 31 which simply states, “How’d we do it?”. I have already purchased this book on Agile development by guru Ken Schwaber. I am creating my product backlog in Google docs this weekend.

Back to my original topic, the key to a successful rollout of Agile development must include setting appropriate expectations with your product manager/senior exec stakeholders. They won’t get everything the want in month 1. But perhaps that desire comes from the fact that they don’t see anything until month 3. And worse, if they want anything else they have to wait to month 4 even to discuss it. With Agile, each month is a new day!

* Steve made the point that Agile is a bit more efficient than waterfall so really you might get X, Y and Z in 2.5 months with Agile versus 3 months with waterfall. This made sense to me.

** I did not list better product as one of the benefits simply because I doubt anyone would debate this. More collaboration within product teams and more interaction with customers will of course lead to a better product. That said, there is no reason why that can’t also be part of the waterfall process which is something I will discuss in a future post.

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Posted by bbenedict