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Better, Faster Design
On October 2, I will have the great delight of sharing the stage with Jeff Veen at Startonomics, a one-day workshop for entrepreneurs in San Francisco. Our session is Marrying Design & Development: a Match made in Heaven, not Hell. (I didn’t name it, but the topic is close to my heart.)
They asked me to write a useful blog post to give a taste of our talk. I am reposting it here just for you. I hope it is, in fact, useful.
When start-ups come to us looking for help with their product design or branding, the first question is “How long will it take?”, followed immediately by “Can we get it done faster (and cheaper)?”.
Yes, you can. Maybe.
Whether you are working with an internal or external design team, instituting a few key practices can get you much further much faster. Ignoring them can bog your team down in frustration.
1. Begin with the goal in mind. Make it an important goal.
This sounds like the ultimate duh. However, it is continually surprising how frequently start-ups hire designers based on a vague sense that their product is ugly or clunky, and nothing beyond that.
Without a clearly articulated goal, there is no way to determine whether the design work has succeeded, and it is possible to go around and around, iteration after iteration, feeling stuck in subjectivity, and never knowing which design solution is the right one.
Or, you and your team can end up debating which goals have precedence while the design work is already going on. Even if you ultimately approve and implement the work, a lingering dissatisfaction can remain.
Likewise, if the design goal you choose isn’t important to the success of the product or tied to a business goal, it’s easy to set design work aside while you focus on things that feel more important to you. Your designers will get frustrated and lose momentum that is impossible to regain.
If the state of your interface design or branding isn’t impacting your progress towards your particular business or development goals, don’t hire designers. Many products can get very far without the aid of visual designers (see: Craigslist, Google).
Having a clear goal has the added benefit of making design decisions easier and less subjective. You can ask, “Does this solution meet the stated goal, why or why not?” rather than, “Do we like it?”.
2. Don’t skimp on the initial discovery.
Entrepreneurs hear the word discovery and specters of interminable brainstorms, puerile mood boards, and general expensive wankery start dancing before their eyes.
Whether you call it discovery, research, planning and strategy, or just getting everyone around a table, this initial piece of work is critical. It is part of the design process, as much or even more so than cracking open the Photoshop. Design is ultimately making and documenting decisions. You want those decisions to be as informed as is possible or practical.
Discovery serves to get all of the project stakeholders on the same page before they have an artifact to react to and evaluate. If there are fights to be had or questions to be answered, handle this in the first week or two of the project before skilled people are off making things that are of questionable value. This will ensure that everyone is making the best use of their time.
The amount of upfront information gathering required depends on the scope and complexity of the work, the size of the team, and the stage of the company or product. The further along you are with any of these, the more you will need. And, as a general rule, involve as many people as possible early in the project, and as few as possible in the following decision-making process.
Productive activities can include: a general kickoff meeting, interviews with your team, interviews with representative users, competitive analysis, branding worksessions, and conducting or reviewing additional research.
Don’t do focus groups.
The outcome should be a document that summarizes goals and aspirations, success criteria, target audience, constraints, and approach. It can be as short as a page. Even if you never look at it again, having gone through this process with your team will decrease conflict and misunderstanding and increase the chance of achieving what you set out to.
3. Have a clear decision-making process.
If you have defined an important set of goals and you have gotten everyone’s input at the start of the project, this should be cake. Identify who should provide feedback, and who has authority to make and approve design decisions. The feedback team should represent all key points of view (e.g. business and technology) with as few people as possible. The decision-maker/approver should ideally be one person.
Have a process for gathering and evaluating feedback and presenting it to your designers in one unified voice. Nothing slows down design iteration like relying on the designer to interpret multiple points of view.
And make decisions quickly. If you have done your homework in the first part of the project, you should have a strong sense of why certain design solutions are more or less likely to work. You won’t know for certain until you put it in front of your users, and then you can always modify it incrementally to better meet their needs.
Be very clear and honest in your evaluation. Once again, shocking how many times we have been encouraged down a path by a positive response, only to be told “We never really thought that was right.” For some reason, design can elicit tender sensibilities that waste a lot of time.
So there you have it. Clarity of purpose, understanding, and process will make any design project go faster.
Written by Erika Hall on September 18, 2008 with 1 comments | 
Six Apart Deals Itself a New Hand
The big news in the blogging world today is Six Apart’s expansion out of the software and blog hosting provider fields with their announcement of a new line client services. With the purchase of Apperceptive, Six Apart gets the benefit of some of the most experienced Movable Type site builders out there, and with its new partnership with ad network Adify, presents the possibility of a complete money-making ecosystem for bloggers of every level. It’s an ambitious move, and could be very good for both Six Apart and the people who use its entire range of products, from Vox to Movable Type Enterprise.
It remains to be seen, though, exactly what shape the new services branch will take. Some smaller Movable Type developers are wondering if the provider of their software is going to be taking away their customers. I don’t see that happening because, frankly, the market is still huge, and there are plenty of other software vendors with their own client services departments that also support a thriving market of smaller client services companies. In the best-case scenario the experience of the client services department will benefit the smaller developers directly: When a Six Apart client requires some custom functionality, that functionality will make it into the developer community’s hands in some way, even if it becomes a paid plug-in and not part of the core product.
It could be quite a trick for Six Apart to juggle its related but distinct products and communities: Vox, TypePad, and Movable Type all have their target markets. And now there are the side-by-side commercial and open source versions of Movable Type, both of which are dependent on having a healthy developer community. There’s still a huge need for plug-in developers who know Perl, especially as more people move to MT4, whether the commercial version or the OS one, and find that some key plug-ins don’t work. If Six Apart shares the wealth of knowledge that they’ve gained by bringing in Apperceptive, their developer community could flourish, which would benefit everyone.
See also: An interview with 6A’s Anil Dash.
Written by mccreath on April 21, 2008 with 0 comments |
Muxtape
If you didn’t hear about Muxtape.com this week, then you were living under a rock. The virtual mixtape-making app went live on Tuesday morning and by lunch that day, all of our internet friends had mixed some of their favorite tunes. Why did it take off so quickly?
Simple design and user interface, observe:
People love both hearing about and sharing new music. There wasn’t a super easy way to do so before.
Muxtape, with it’s name and concept tapped into a nostalgia for mixtapes that has been floating around lately. For example, this USB drive, designed to look like a cassette was a popular Christmas gift last holiday season.
Justin Oullette, the creator of Muxtape offered these stats, from the first 24-hours:
8,685 users / 19,731 songs / 35,000 visits
Here are some of our favorite muxtapes. If you haven’t made yours yet, well what are you waiting for? If you have, please link to it in the comments.
Written by David McCreath on March 28, 2008 with 0 comments |
Judging a Book by Its Cover
The debate about the future of books rages on. Personally, I love them and still buy them by the (UPS guy’s) armload. Many of us got into design for the ability to treat every gorgeous monograph coming out of the EU as a legitimate business expense.
The other day, I saw someone using a Kindle on the train. It really resembles a piece of hospital equipment. But I do read virtual reams of stuff online, and I’m glad we’ve stopped wasting paper on ephemeral technical documentation.
The interactive design industry has matured to the point where there are enough authors and readers to support a lively amount of publishing. Sadly, the actual books themselves often lack what we would call good design. As objects they disappoint—rough, flimsy, and poorly typeset—with terrible, uninspiring covers that fail to serve the ideas inside.
So, I was overjoyed to see the cover of Indi Young’s new book Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior.
That is a sweet cover. The appealing, abstract illustration relates to the material inside and reminds me of all of those swell, evocative mid-century covers. And, the material inside is useful, substantive, and nothing less than what I’d expect from Indi.
Lou Rosenfeld founded Information Architecture as a profession. It’s heartening to see that, as a publisher, he also promotes professional book design.
If you’re going to bother to embody intangible ideas in a material form, do it right and do it well.
Written by erika on February 28, 2008 |
Typewriter Ribbon Tin Collection
Janine Vangool of UPPERCASE has posted pictures of her collection of typewriter ribbon tins on Flickr and written a post about it for Poppytalk. I love these little things and the multiple layers of nostalgia they invoke: nostalgia for some of that design style, nostalgia for a time when design was as much a mechanical trade as a white-collar office job, and nostalgia for old typewriters and the level of ubiquitous mechanical precision they represented. But mostly I love them because they’re so nice to look at.
Written by mccreath on February 12, 2008 with 0 comments |
The "Genius" is always in quotes
Over the Christmas holidays the Mini that I bought for the boy a year and a half ago died. Kernel panic. Seizure. Kaput.
Tonight we went to the Apple store and bought him a new one. Got it home plugged it in, booted up; all good. Plugged in the speakers. No go. Checked the jack, shone a light in the hole; all good. Odd. Tried the internal speaker; no sound. After fiddling with the system preferences and googling “mac mini audio jack” I decided I had a dud.
Normally, when you buy a dud at a retail store you take it back, show them the receipt and there’s an exchange, more or less. But the thought of taking a product back to the Apple store fills me with tremendous anxiety.
Tomorrow I’ll attempt to exchange it, meaning I’ll wait for 3 hours at the “Genius” Bar then be made to feel stupid for not being able to use something that “just works”; except that it doesn’t. I can feel the anger rising inside because there’s nothing quite as frustrating as a customer service experience that starts with the premise “we’re the geniuses; therefore YOU’re not.”
That’s not to say that I’ve never gotten great service at the Apple store. I have. The guy who sold me the mini tonight, for example, total ace. Friendly, helpful, had no way of knowing he was selling a dud.
But the thought of walking up those stairs to that “Genius” Bar is not unlike some Tim Burton-like landscape where a counter manned by snarling tattoed and studded devil mimes and a giant backwards-moving clock emanating striped Leopard snakes and spider-legged laptops walking on the ceiling while some Oliver Platt-like pirate creature wearing a black turtleneck with “sense of child-like fright” written across the front whispers “what seeeeeeems to be the PROBLEM?!?” in my ear just barely flicking his tongue into my earlobe and I wake up SCREAMING.
Maybe I can live without the audio.
Written by Mike Monteiro on February 4, 2008 with 10 comments |
The Art of the LP Cover and the Digital Music Upheaval
Somebody pointed me at LP Cover Lover a few days ago. Go ahead and take a look. You might get stuck there for a while like I did; it’s pretty fun. There are a lot of funny oddball covers over there, but there are some shining examples of beautiful LP cover design, too. Come back when you’re done.
Okay. We listen to a lot of music at Mule. All of us have strong feelings about it, we have detailed conversations about the weirdest aspects, we understand critical differences between minor subgenres. But the thing that doesn’t get talked about much is the artwork. Which is a shame, because I remember I used to have excited conversations with my friends about a favorite band’s new album and wondering what the cover would look like. Of course, this was when albums were 12" disks of vinyl that came in pressboard covers. Other than some indie labels that painstakingly create amazing covers for each release (Catbird Records, for example), I can’t remember the last time I gave a crap what a CD cover looked like.
Written by mccreath on January 31, 2008 with 3 comments |
Chip Kidd on the Kindle
The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a “thing” in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to. But books were always physical objects, and the printed book as a piece of technology has yet to be improved upon. And won’t.
And don’t miss this gem in the comments:
Do you love to read books but hate reading books? Amazon.com finally has the answer for you.
Delightful. Really.
Written by Mike Monteiro on November 28, 2007 with 0 comments |
In defense of Comic Sans
Vincent Connare originally designed the typeface for Microsoft Bob.
Comic Sans was NOT designed as a typeface but as a solution to a problem with the often overlooked part of a computer program’s interface, the typeface used to communicate the message… The inspiration came at the shock of seeing Times New Roman used in an inappropriate way.
The man makes a good point. When seen in context with the original problem it was solving it works just fine. However, as anyone familiar with Oppenheimer can tell you, a well-meaning initiative will hardly protect your creation from future misuse.
Written by Mike Monteiro on November 28, 2007 with 0 comments |
Kindle design not sinister enough.
Lots has been written on the Kindle already, but what struck me while taking the product tour this morning is how painful it would be for a left-handed person, like me, to use.
Definitely not available in the Ned Flanders’ Leftorium.
Written by Mike Monteiro on November 23, 2007 with 1 comments |