Continue Reading]]> (We’re two web software geeks who decided to make a move to mobile. Our first app– built mostly on a part-time basis while we were wrapping up other commitments– is TouchBase Calendar, an iPhone Calendar app (iTunes link). It’s #5 or so in Paid Productivity as I write this. This series is about what we’ve learned so far.)

Post #1: Genesis & Backstory (note: a little light on data/techniques)
Post #2: Evaluating a (Paid) Mobile App Idea: How Much Could it Make? (coming soon)
Post #3: Launch Strategy & Sales #s (coming soon)
Post #4: Ongoing Marketing (coming soon, if we learn anything interesting)

Genesis and Backstory
(note: post 2-4 will be a little heavier on data/techniques, if you’d like to hear when those posts go up, follow me on Twitter Got questions you’d like addressed in upcoming posts? Please let me know in the comments.)

When I stepped down as CEO of RescueTime (now profitable, still growing like gangbusters, yay!) I entered a weird time in my life. I didn’t know what I wanted to do next or who I wanted to do it with (I obviously couldn’t recruit co-founders out of RescueTime), so I started having lots of “coffee dates”. It was exhausting stacking up half a dozen meetings a day with a broad assortment of folks.

It was a big transition from being a “maker” (on a maker schedule) to a guy who would meet with anybody. One thing that I came to realize (like a lot of people) that calendars suck– mobile calendars especially.

Mobile calendars fail to take advantage of the fact that they are on an amazing communication and mapping device.

Say I’m in the car driving to a meeting and realize that I don’t recall the exact address of the place I’m going. No problem! I’ll just pull up the event. It turns out that even if you’ve taken the trouble to add location to the event, your calendar doesn’t give you any way to get a map for that. Here’s what you see:

Even if I did go to the trouble of inviting Paul to the event when I created it (which I rarely do), I’m still 4 taps away from being able to compose an SMS.

And typing a coherent message on a touchscreen (often in a hurry or at a red light) ranges from painful to downright dangerous (texting and driving is a killer). Which is silly, when you think about it– communication around your calendar is generally limited to some very common messages, like:

• I’m here, where are you?
• I’m running X minutes late.
• Hey, I just wanted to confirm our X o’clock meeting at Y
• I need to postpone our meeting a little bit because I’m behind schedule.

When I looked at my SMS logs, I realize just how many of my messages were (usually typo-ridden) variations on those messages.

After almost a year of coffee meetings (and a few fun projects like CubeDuel), I found a co-founder close to home. Montana Low (who I’d worked with a bit at Jobster and RescueTime) had been freelancing for a few months and was looking to jump in as a founder. We both had some commitments to wrap up but wanted to get our feet wet with a tractable mobile idea.

We wanted to build it, but the big question lingering in our mind was “would it be worth it?”. If we did build it and “won” the category we were shooting for, would it be worth spending a few months of our free time? We’ll explain how we answered that question in post #2 of this series!

Continue Reading]]> “We are not UI experts but do know when we see a good design.”

I saw this on a mailing list I occasionally read, in a post where a company was looking to hire their first design employee/contractor. I think it’s a big part of why hiring designers is a process that often ends in failure: because most people who aren’t UI experts (heck, most UI experts fall into this camp as well), don’t know when they see a good design.

The challenge, of course, partially lies in the definition of “good design”. Let’s run through a few, in increasing order of importance.

Good Design = Beautiful/Cool Design

In this arena, we might actually know when we see a good design. We often have pretty good instincts on beauty and have a lifetime of training in understanding what other people find beautiful. Beautiful design can be important– but on the web it doesn’t seem to be a necessary element to success. Take the top 50 sites on the web. For a designer who primary considered themselves an artist, how many of those sites would be a source of pride if they were in their portfolio? Designers who primarily seek beauty/coolness often get lost in their own sense of beauty and engage in what I like to call “design guitar solos“– the visual equivalent of the talent-intensive squeeling that guitar pros engage in which only another guitar pro appreciates (or even understands). In the web design world this can range from a nuanced photoshop manifesto with dozens of layers to an incomprehensible JavaScript-powered UI. With great power comes great responsibility– and oftentimes a simple melody is the most effective song.

(note: grabbed from a 1994(!) article post by Peter Morville)

Good Design = Elicits the Desired “Feeling/Motivation”

This brings us closer to a good definition of effective visual design. While it’s not a web site, take a look at Apple’s FaceTime commercial. It’s simple. It doesn’t have the cyborg eyes and spinning globe of apps that Android’s recent commercials do. The design lead on that commercial didn’t get to do the metaphorical equivalent of playing a 12-minute solo behind his head in front of a sold out crowd. No epic visual effects. Just an emphasis on generating emotion– and pretty damn effective as Apple keeps trying to battle their way to the other side of the chasm. (Side note: I think Android’s robot craziness isn’t all that bad– they are currently aiming at early adopter geek-types. Remains to be seen if that’s brand they can pivot away from when the time comes to court “normals”. It wouldn’t be the path I’d choose, though!).

Good Design = Measurably Gets the Job Done

(note: Dave McClure is putting on the WarmGun Conference on October 8th that’s centered around conversion-centric design – Check it out)

THIS is the kind of design that very few people shop for– and indeed, don’t know how to shop for because they can’t “know it when they see it”. As I’d asked in a post WAY back in 2007 (“Do Designers Deserve a Seat at the Strategy Table“), when was the last time you saw a web portfolio that talked about metrics and goals? That talked about how the new design kicked the old design’s ass as far as the numbers were concerned? That talk about an X% SEO lift over Y months? On multiple occasions, I’ve seen uglier designs tromp prettier ones, and we can look at the aforementioned top sites on the web and see that it’s chock full of ugly.

One thing that’s important to note– the experts are wrong just about as often as they are right. As a self-proclaimed expert (!), this is hard for me to stomach, but it’s true. Check out this (somewhat murky) video of the head of Microsoft’s experimentation efforts. There’s plenty of gold here. First, he runs through a couple of design variations and asks the audience (chock full of startup geeks) to guess which performed better. By and large, the audience was wrong as often as they were right. Taking this further, Ronny tells is that the internal experts at Microsoft had similar luck. Said another way, the smartest people about UX and conversion made educated guesses, tested those guesses, and found that their efforts improved their target metric only SLIGHTLY more often than they made it worse.

Good Design = An unseemly mashup of Usability, Marketing, Credibility, and Usefulness

The problem gets worse, because “getting the job done” isn’t just about pure conversion mechanics and A/B testing.

• There’s design STRATEGY (most of the above is about tactical design). Is your designer the type of person who wants to have stategy handed down to him? Or is he the kind of person who is going to agitate for a 2-sided referral program? Or something clever like UrbanSpoon’s Spoonback effort?
• Are they thinking about marketing? Do they think like a user? Do they understand your market? Do they want to? Marketing isn’t just about outreach– there’s a whole discipline around understanding a market, getting their feedback (from user studies to poring through support/feedback email), etc.
• How do you deal with the conflicts between what your business wants the user to do and what THEY want to do? In my opinion, the best businesses have those goals perfectly aligned– but any ad supported site knows that their job is to find exactly how aggressive they can be with ads and pumping page views.
• What about SEO? Content sites need to optimize for SEO. Yes, the first rule of good SEO is quality and linkworthiness. But there are design/markup considerations, anchor text concessions to consider, and more.
• Load time. There are breathtaking studies about the effects of page load time and conversion. How many designers obsess about speed? Not enough, given that adding 2 seconds to page load showed a 4.3% reduction in revenue/user.
• Considerations vary wildly based on the type of offering. Sites that you use every day clearly need to be faster/leaner. Are there sites out there that can afford to be slower? Apple, for example, serves up enormous (and gorgeous) photography on their home page.
• Does the designer love writing headlines? Writing is one of the biggest parts of design– if they’d rather you do all the writing and prefer to work with Lorem Ipsum text, they have a big hole in their skillset.
• How much do they like saying no? At any company larger than a few people, designers meet the “too many cooks” problem fairly quickly. Good design is not only a bizarre blend of graphical, technical, marketing, strategic, and writing expertise– it also requires a healthy dose of political acumen and salesmanship. What are they going to say when Alice swings by their desk and says, “You know what? I think it’d be awesome if we had a block showing our twitter feed on the home page. Maybe with one of those cute blue birds at the top?”

The problem with hiring designers (and the reason that they so often don’t work out as contractors or employees) lies squarely on the shoulders of the people doing the hiring. They’re still looking at screenshots in portfolios and saying, “Beautiful! Wow! This must be our guy/gal,” when they should be looking deeper.

Continue Reading]]> 15 years ago, you couldn’t even BEGIN to look for a house without a real estate agent (who takes 6-7% of the purchase price from the buyer). Today, the internet has changed that. 10 years ago, someone starting a small business had to eat a cost of thousands of dollars to get a solid looking logo– often more if they didn’t want to roll the dice on just using a solo designer (of if their first designer didn’t create something that they loved). Today, a small business can get dozens of designers working in a public forum for $500. I think that’s AWESOME. But like real estate, there are casualties. And, like real estate, there is anger. But to me, “transactional design” (the kind of design that can take a few hours to net a good product and doesn’t require a lot of consultation) is an inevitable casualty of the global economy and the evolution of the internet (see 99Designs).

It’s a Global Village Now

I was in India for 3 weeks last year and was STUNNED at the cost of labor. We rode in taxis for the entire trip and spent less on them than the 1 way trip home from the airport in Seattle. Talented tailors would throw in manpower of tailoring a shirt if you just bought the cloth. If it’s unfair to pay $500 for a logo, was it unfair for me to pay Indian market rates for a taxi ride (usually less than a buck or two)?

The $300 bounty for a winning logo design is a kings ransom for a young designer in most of India (and the rest of the world). Guess what, Western world? You’ve got to compete– and Walmart has taught us over and over again that consumers aren’t going to pay 10% more (much less the 1000% more that an onshore hourly designer would cost) just so they can feel good. Some of them will- but most of them won’t. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle here. You’re better off trying to find creative ways to compete than bemoaning the unfairness of it all– it’s like a cottage seamstress complaining about the existence of the new textile factory down the road– technology changes markets.

For a rural Indian designer, entering 10 contests per week and winning one for $500 might be a huge win (and he doesn’t have to write a single proposal!). And that designer might be damned talented. How different is this than a services business investing $500k in sales effort on 10 different $10m RFPs and ultimately winning one? In fact, isn’t this just a different sales investment/risk than costly networking, proposal writing, advertising, etc., etc? Heck, the designer doesn’t even have to issue a Net-30 invoice– 99Designs drops the money to the winner pretty instantly.

So I’m assuming that the gripe with design contests isn’t that people are getting paid LESS than they used to, but rather that they could get paid NOTHING even after expending the time and effort of producing a logo. Which brings me to my next point:

Whether you are a Business or Freelancer – getting paid requires that you risk time and money.

If you want paying work without spending time/money or taking risks, you should go find a job with a paycheck.

My first business (a technology consultancy) was CONSTANTLY investing staggering amounts of money and time to get customers…. We had sales guys, who made healthy base salaries and some commissions. We went to networking events to establish relationships with people who could be customers someday. We took existing clients to lunch to chat about projects on the horizon. We sent out custom holiday cards to every client every year to keep us visible. We built and maintained a web site with a rich and updated portfolio. We had snazzy business cards that had to be kept up to date. We had really nice business clothes for the clients that cared about such things. We cooked up gorgeous custom proposal documents for customers– and these proposals required considerable analysis work and consultation with the customer (spec work!). We even responded to RFPs sometimes (rarely). All of these efforts can come up empty, of course. Many of them did, but in aggregate, my business grew like gangbusters. Software is no different. I heard that Salesforce.com spends 60-70% of their topline on sales/marketing. Much of that is probably wasted, but I’m sure they are in a constant state of making their marketing spend more efficient (just like 99Design entrants are probably in a constant state of gauging the kinds of contests that will net them the most bang for their effort).

In short, getting paying work cost TONS of time, money, and risks (how many freelancers do you know who average 100% billability in a 40 hour work week over a year?).

If you are a fresh-off-the-boat designer (or a rural one), you should expect your costs and risk here to be higher than if you’re not. You’ll have to invest more and get less as you build up relationships, your skills, and a portfolio. If there are too many designers eager for work (as I believe there are right now– the design world is NOT growing as fast as were churning out design grads), the market is going to make this harder for you. Don’t like markets? Get a paycheck-job or go learn Ruby on Rails (then you can fall out of bed and land on 2-3 lucrative freelance offers).

The nature of design

The best work general comes from seasoned professionals who engage in a deep discovery process, run through a lot of iterations, and work closely with the client. That being said, you can see flashes of brilliance without all of this, especially in the world of “transactional design”. Some of the stuff on 99Designs is GOOD. For a logo, book cover, or smallish web site design (especially for a smallish business) the difference in value received between a $30,000 engagement and a $500 contest is not worth $29,500. In fact, the contest might (on some occasions) yield better results faster. Even if it doesn’t, it’s CERTAINLY faster and can help with brainstorming. From a purely economic point of view, rolling the dice with a contest is a quick experiment to run that might yield exceptional results. I could design a good from-the-hip book cover in a few hours and it MIGHT be great… Design can be random and certain design tasks are 90% inspiration and 10% perspiration rather than the inverse. The bigger the design project, the less this is true, obviously. Again, I think logos (for small businesses) is the sweet spot.

Supply & Demand

As a business, we try to be as fair as possible with vendors, but we’re in business to be profitable. If I look at the winning designs on 99Designs and I generally like them more as much as any designer’s portfolio, is eschewing the cheaper option really the way to go? Paying bottom dollar prices CAN mean that someone somewhere is being exploited. I’ve seen no evidence that the 99Designs designers are exploited however, though it’s obvious that there are designers with higher costs of living in the US who simply can’t compete on transactional design services.

If you answered “yes, as a matter of principal” to the last question, how do you feel about internships (unpaid or crappy pay)? How do you feel about buying sneakers that were made in a Chinese factory with awful working conditions (check your feet, please)? How do you feel about the fact that the average Google employee generates over $1m per year in revenue but gets paid less than 10% of that #? Shopping for the best dollar-to-value ratio generally means that someone gets a disproportionate cut of the wealth in the transaction (even just a little bit)… Though are Google employees really getting screwed? Is an Indian designer getting screwed if she’s pulling down $20k year on 99Designs? And where is the outrage about things like iStockPhoto? Or 99Designs’ Logo Store? Is responding to a clear need in a design contests for a speculative chance at pay really that different from a photographer tossing up a speculative photo on iStockPhoto and hoping that someone might eventually buy it? The ones that have great photos make a ton of money. The ones that suck probably need to take photography classes. Heck, is it really that much different from my startup, where I spent a big (expensive) chunk of my live to launch something hoping that someone would want to buy it? Isn’t a startup in the “spec-work” category?

Design contests are a meritocracy in the extreme– good designers can probably make good money and (with a track record of winning and a great portfolio), eventually graduating to less-speculative lead generation if they so desire (though I bet GREAT designers could net thousands a day on 99Designs). Bad ones don’t and have to seek other marketing avenues or other lines of work. Again, welcome to business. Given the huge number of designers that enter contests OVER AND OVER again, clearly many have decided that they’d rather roll those dice than roll the dice associated with RFPs, Adwords, hiring salesfolks and other lead-generation efforts.

These are just some thoughts. As a designer, I’ve never done spec work (unless proposals count– they probably should). As a business, I’ve never asked for it… But from either side of the table, I’m not sure I have an ethical problem with it. So from one (admittedly kinda mediocre) designer to the rest of you– how are design contests “damaging” designers beyond the way that Google News is “damaging” newspapers?

Continue Reading]]> When I decided to take a weekend and focus on my blog I realized one big thing:

Most blogs are crappy products. And most of my favorite bloggers (the ones that espouse taking design, marketing, testing, and iteration have largely blown off the designs of their blogs To be clear, I think the quality of the blog is almost entirely measured by the quality of the content and not the theme. But blog success is a function of content quality and the ability to turn readers into people who retweet, comment, subscribe, or follow.

Success (whether it’s a blog or a product) is looks a lot like this:

Quality of Product * Success of Marketing * Conversion of visitors = Success

Certainly, outstanding bloggers (or outstanding products) can win on just quality of product. Some of my favorite bloggers (let’s single out Paul Graham (though I think he’d call himself an essayist), Dave McClure, Andrew Chen, and Eric Reis) have blog formulas that look like this:

(great writing = 10) * (great word of mouth marketing = 7) * (no clear call to action, no testing = 1) = 70 (pretty darn successful at expanding their influence)

(Note: McClure might get a -1 for too many font colors! )

My hats off to all of ‘em. They are better (and more prolific) writers than I. But we all know that a little A/B testing can go a long way. We’ve seen that a quick/dirty redesign of an already effective looking page can pump conversion by more than 20%. Hell, we’ve seen that a few iterations of Twitter language (leading to “you should follow me on Twitter”) can boost clickthru by 173%. Could a weekend’s (largely outsource-able) work double a visitor’s chance to become a follower/subscriber, comment, or even read a second post? If you’re starting point is a stock blog theme, I think so.

Here’s what I think you should do on a blog to maximize the 3rd part of the forumula above (and, to a lesser degree, the second part):

• Toss in some social proof. Assume people don’t know who you are and make it clear who you are and why you are important. You’re establishing credibility– why should anyone read what you have to say? Take a look at VentureHacks if you don’t know what I mean. Well played, sirs.
• Figure out what you want your visitors to do. Clearly, you want them to read your posts, but scribble out a stack-ranked list of the actions you want your readers to do and make sure your design supports that. If there’s crap on your blog that doesn’t support that (badges, widgets, etc) pull ‘em. Here’s my list:
  1. Retweet! No way a blog is ever going to have a viral loop, but if a reader likes what they’re reading and wants to spread the word, that’s huge– so encourage it! 1 subscriber is 1 subscriber. A retweet means hundreds or thousands of potential new visitors/subscribers. If my conversion rate on other activities is meaningful, this is my post important user behavior.
  2. Follow me on Twitter. This was a hard call to prioritize over RSS subsription, but I think a lot of people are turning to Twitter to replace their RSS readers. Feels like the right trend. Also, clickthrus on my posts on Twitter results in pageviews– it’s trackable. RSS isn’t.
  3. Subscribe via RSS. Makes it an almost certainly that they’ll at least see my headlines henceforth
  4. Subscribe via email. I dropped this to fourth because I don’t think most of my readership rolls that way, but it’s still a fine way to get content.
  5. Comment. Other than the “game of blogging” (i.e. maximizing reach, influence, audience), the discussion is the big part of why I blog. Bonus points, discussion makes a post feel lived-in and heaps on some more social proof. I’ve ceded the UX of commenting to Disqus, who thankfully does a badass job of encouraging conversation. Further, a comment gives me a chance to talk to the commenter (I almost always try to reply– take a look at Neil Patel if you want an example of a fabulous blog post. He always replies).
  6. Read a second post. In this world, I think getting someone to read a whole FIRST post is a great achievement. If people want to read more, I want to help them do that. But, heck– if they like my stuff, subscription/following on Twitter seems much preferred for both parties as a primary call to action.

Now maybe you could argue that a blog shouldn’t be treated this way. Maybe we’re all blogging to express our feelings, hone our writing skills, and be part of the conversation. That’s fine if that’s true. But look at the degree to which blogging has been instrumental in the careers of folks like the ones I’ve mentioned (as well as Fred Wilson, who says much of his deal flow is because of his blog) and it’s pretty hard to argue against trying to make your blog an effective funnel. Hell, at least spend a few hours and pluck the low-hanging fruit.

At the end of the day, every web site is a funnel and most blogs are pretty damn leaky. Take a weekend and plug some holes.

Continue Reading]]> (note: this is modified from a talk I gave at Seattle Tech Startups on Wednesday)

The more I think about it, the more I’m impressed with software businesses that are great businesses (not just great software). There’s a class of entrepreneur that is product focused (like the folks at Twitter), there is a class of entrepreneur that is business focused (the white-toothed stereotypical biz guy), and there is a class of entrepreneur who is PR focused (I won’t name names, but we all know of startups that seem to thrive simply because of the attention they draw). I think good things happen when you create an outstanding product that has a clear path to monetization– add on someone who is also an attention magnet (like Steve Jobs, who is all three flavors rolled into one) and amazing stuff happens.

A couple of examples

• One you might have heard of– Google. Their outstanding product certainly earned them clear leadership in the world of search engines. But it was Adwords and Adsense that got them to the point where they could feed every employee gourmet meals and do their laundry for them.
• One you haven’t heard of– Autotegrity. This tiny company is finding leads for car dealerships via Google Adwords (among other things). They find people who are looking for very specific things (“blue honda accord”) and offer to get them three competing quotes. They take these leads and sell them to car dealerships (3 times, predictably). It’s a win for both sides and they are staggeringly successful.

One thing I increasingly believe is that the idea of just building something great is a game with much higher risks and rewards. Clearly if you build something that captures attention like Twitter and Facebook, you have the luxury of nearly infinite time to figure out how to monetize what you’ve built. But all of the people trying to build the NEXT Twitter end up in much more dire circumstances. A smallish audience of a few million early adopters a month– an audience which is neither big enough nor unique enough to monetize very effectively. This is no joke– I know lots of services out there that are getting tens of millions of page views and millions of uniques per month that can’t manage to get enough ad revenue to pay a single salary.

So step out of the gates with a strong idea of who’s going to be paying your paycheck and how many of those people you’re going to need to pull it off. If “targeted advertising” is your answer, find an audience that PAYS– that means creating a content site for an audience than some subset of marketeers would chew off their own arm to get in front of. That may mean creating software for weird-but-profitable niches like home remodeling (which commands $20 CPMs last I heard). And it certainly means serving audiences who actually SEE and CLICK on ads (which means that your blog about startups is not going to make you any money, natch).

The key here is that owning a business isn’t about building a product any more than owning a car repair shop is about fixing cars. You’ve got to broaden your vision and bring your passion to bear on stuff like marketing, business models, customer service, guerrilla PR, SEO, and more. It’s hard to name any companies that are admirable who don’t excel at things well beyond product development.

So if you’re supposed to work on everything, what do you work on FIRST?

You should look at your business as a funnel (which, incidentally, is how every salesguy on the planet looks at their sales pipeline). Here’s one that’s in my head all the time:

What’s at the top of this funnel varies on what type of business you have. Maybe it’s page views from organic SEO and SEM. Maybe it’s warm leads from a bank of cold-calling lead-gen folks. And maybe your conversion event is a software purchase (like ours is). Maybe it’s an ad-click. Maybe it’s an account signup. But trust me, you have a funnel.

So when trying to figure out what the hell to work on as an entrepreneur, go worship at the alter of the funnel. That means:

• Measure the hell out of everything. If you don’t know many many new visitors are coming to your site, what percentage of them do something, what percentage of THOSE people, click signup, what subset of THOSE people actually successfully signup, and what percentage of THOSE people are paying you a month later, the first thing you should do is work on metrics. Don’t go overboard, but know your funnel.
• Work your way UP the funnel, not down (if you have the financial luxury to do so). Most entrepreneurs ask “how do I get people to come to my site so it can grow?” The answer most often is down the funnel: the product isn’t providing enough value, communicating clearly enough, engendering enough passion, or causing people to want to tell their friends.
• Seek the low hanging fruit in the funnel. That means that you should seek out where people are escaping your funnel. If you get tons of visitors but no one clicks on anything (high bounce rate, low time on site), chances are your value prop is confusing or isn’t very compelling. You might need to improve the product, but chances are you just have to improve how you talk about it.
• Seek leverage. The lower you attack the funnel, the more it helps. If you do something to improve your retention that will help you forever. If you do something that gives you a boost in acquisition (like a SuperBowl ad), the value will be short-lived (unless you have a true viral loop). Two great retention stats (via Andrew Chen):

  “If each month you lose 8% of your existing users (92% retention) from the previous month, the average use will stay for 12 months. If you can hold just 4% more of your users (96% retention), then they will stick around for 2 years. If you can hold only 1.3% more than that (97.3% retention), they will be in for 3 years.”

  And, if you take a cohort of 1000 users from a month an 80% retention rate means that you’ll have 68 of them after 12 months. If you can get that to 90%, you’ll have 282 left. A 300% revenue boost for that single cohort (and every subsequent monthly cohort!).

• Don’t give up on making your product great. It’s easy to get sucked into data, A/B testing, form fields, etc. But at the end of the day, people don’t just abandon signup forms because they are hard and confusing, the abandon them because they don’t care enough about signing up.

Resources Referenced in the Presentation

Bokardo’s “Designing for Social Traction” Presentation
Josh Kopelman’s Cohort Analysis Spreadsheet

Hat Tip to:
Gladwell’s Blink (has the story about likable doctors getting sued less regardless of how good they are at healing)
The Heath Brother’s Made to Stick (best marketing book on the planet, they talk about the “Curse of Knowledge” and the “Tappers and Listeners” study)

Here’s the full presentation:

Continue Reading]]> Long ago, when I set up this blog I read a few primers on blogging. One of them suggested that you have a picture of yourself on your blog. There were lots of good arguments for doing it, so I dutifully hunted among my photos for a picture of myself. Turns out that I didn’t have too many (I tend to be behind the camera rather than in front of it).

I did find one that I liked. It was on a nasty old fishing boat on the Prince William Sound (in Alaska). A friend of mine had bought the boat and invited a few friends for an multi-day cruise. There was no running water. The bathroom was a 5 gallon green bucket (I’ll leave it to your imagination how we “flushed” it). At the end of the trip, I was scruffy as hell, but I’d had an absolute blast tromping around the rugged islands of Alaska. That’s where the pipe picture was taken.

As my blog actually accumulated readers, there came a trickle of negative feedback about the pipe, which has increased to a steady stream. Some people feel like I was trying to look serious. Or academic. Or rich. Or that I was just clowning around. To me, the photo had a ton of meaning. To anyone else, not so much.

For some reason, this made me think of one of my favorite posts on product/UX design. Here’s a quote:

“When I started working on Wufoo, I was definitely a bad designer. I thought I was hot shit and knew all the answers. I saw the user as a wild beast that needed to be tamed. He got in MY way. Use the tool the way I designed it, fool—not the way you think it should work [emphasis added]. Thinking back, I remember being angry all of the time.”

One of the big lessons (which I continue to learn a little bit more every single day) is that it doesn’t matter a damn bit what you’re saying (whether you’re “saying” it to a user with design or saying it with words or pictures on a blog), it matters what’s being heard.

So I’ve pulled the pipe picture in favor of a more recent one. Some people suggested that I keep it as a “schtick”, but I’d rather be known as “that guy who kicks ass with RescueTime” than “that guy with the pipe” (who actually never smokes a pipe).

Continue Reading]]> I think that common sense goes a long ways in UI design… But not all the way. It’s a learned skill like any other. I was reading up on calendar controls today (which I’m obsessed with, by the way) and caught a great post by the curmudgeonly Jakob Nielsen. Here’s the snippet I like best (he’s describing the top application design mistakes):

“Affordance” means what you can do to an object. For example, a checkbox affords turning on and off, and a slider affords moving up or down. “Perceived affordances” are actions you understand just by looking at the object, before you start using it (or feeling it, if it’s a physical device rather than an on-screen UI element). All of this is discussed in Don Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things.

Perceived affordances are especially important in UI design, because all screen pixels afford clicking — even though nothing usually happens if you click. There are so many visible things on a computer screen that users don’t have time for a mine sweeping game, clicking around hoping to find something actionable. (Exception: small children sometimes like to explore screens by clicking around.)

Drag-and-drop designs are often the worst offenders when it’s not apparent that something can be dragged or where something can be dropped. (Or what will happen if you do drag or drop.) In contrast, simple checkboxes and command buttons usually make it painfully obvious what you can click.

Common symptoms of the lack of perceived affordances are:

• * Users say, “What do I do here?”
• * Users don’t go near a feature that would help them.
• * A profusion of screen text tries to overcome these two problems. (Even worse are verbose, multi-stage instructions that disappear after you perform the first of several actions.)

When I tested some of the first Macintosh applications in the mid-1980s, users were often stumped by the empty screen that appeared when they launched, say, MacWrite. What do I do here, indeed. The first step was supposed to be to create a new document, but that command was not shown anywhere in the otherwise highly visible Macintosh UI unless you happened to pull down the File menu. Later application releases opened up with a blank document on the screen, complete with an inviting, blinking insertion point that provided the perceived affordance for “start typing.”

Continue Reading]]> This Tuesday, I’m going to get a chance to meet Kevin Hale, who is the designer behind Wufoo and proprietor of ParticleTree. Kevin wrote a blog post last month that I think is one of the better summations of what it means to be a web designer. While I don’t want to dwell on the negative, Kevin has a pretty good description of why I hate to refer to myself as a designer (whether it’s “web designer”, “ui designer”, “interaction designer”, or whatever).

“For most designers, the relationships they care about most is the one they have with the design. They seem to only love the design and more often than not, they tend to love the design too much. These designers focus on their legacy at the expense of the audience. The user can suck it. You can hear it in the way they talk about the design and how they talk about their users. They’re arrogant and defensive.”

“…When I started working on Wufoo, I was definitely a bad designer. I thought I was hot shit and knew all the answers. I saw the user as a wild beast that needed to be tamed. He got in MY way. Use the tool the way I designed it, fool—not the way you think it should work. Thinking back, I remember being angry all of the time.“

Another great bit:

“On a web application, the design breathes and exhales through customer support. I’m so glad we have Chris on our team. He’s our customer evangelist. Through him, I’ve come to believe that there’s nothing more important than to monitor and man those incoming emails and respond as quickly as possible to every single inquiry, request and comment. It’s the pulse of not only the application, but the business as well. It’s in support requests that Wufoo lets us know when something isn’t working. It’s there that she lets me know when I’ve done something right.”

Give it a read.

Continue Reading]]> A reader took the time to shoot me an email with a few questions about design and startups… His questions were interesting enough that I thought they might be worth blogging about. So here goes:

Question #1 – What is the priority balance between programming and design/UI?

In my opinion, it totally depends on your startup, and where the core of your innovation lies. Take a hard look at the problem that you’re attempting to solve and why the current solutions to that problem are inadequate. As Paul Graham says, there’s no shortage of things that suck… presumably, you’re setting about to make something suck less.

How? Are you going to make it faster? More fun? More reliable? Cheaper? Sexier? More powerful? More viral? More social? When you’ve got a match between how you propose to innovate and the skills that your founding team has, you’ve got an exciting opportunity.

I should point out that brilliance can (and often does) manifest outside of a person’s core skillset… I think a person with a background in marketing would never conceive of the viral marketing machine that is Feedjit (the person who did is a PERL coder with a background in systems engineering). I don’t think a person with a journalism background would think that Digg or Reddit were such hot ideas. Innovation can (and often does) come from people who aren’t familiar with the “common wisdom” that maybe shouldn’t be so damn common.

But assuming a big part of your innovation revolves around “creating a better user experience for X”, you need someone who can create great UI. And while people who don’t dream in pixels and CSS can have flashes of UI brilliance, there’s no substitute for a great UI guy on your team.

I’m not going to go into detail, but obviously there are about a billion scenarios where coding is AT LEAST as critical as design. I’ll leave that blog post to someone else.

2. Should we have a layout/ UI figured out before programming has begun? (this is actually in retrospect, because we’ve already begun programming)

I’m a big fan of agile/scrum style development and the iterative design that goes along with it. That being said, I think the idea of having a cohesive vision in the form of a visual prototype is a great guide to build off of (just don’t be married to it). Making design shoot-from-the-hip-agile from start to finish can oftentimes result in a bit less focus and a product that looks duct-taped together.

3. If we are planning to have Facebook app/ MySpace widget a la Slide or YouTube, would it be best to focus on destination site, or on the widget side first?

Joe Kraus recently spoke at a YCombinator dinner and espoused the virtues of chasing the trends. I’ve always referred to it as the idea of “finding a parade and then marching in front of it”. I’d want to know more about what you were building, but on the surface I think that jumping on the Facebook bandwagon is worth doing if you think Facebook users will sign up. A lot of things won’t play well on Facebook (you won’t see us building a RescueTime Facebook app any time real soon). That being said, I’m not real bullish on Facebook’s long term future (from a platform perspective). A lot of the top Facebook apps are down as much as 70% from their peak usage.

Continue Reading]]> One of my brethren at YCombinator sent out a request to the 2008 Winter Founders list a request for information about design services for his startup. He and his co-founder, like many YC founders, are hackers.

In my career I’ve been a web designer (although I’m only moderately good at it), I’ve hired web designers (for a consulting firm I used to run), and I’ve hired contract resources for design services. Recently, of course, I’ve been doing all of the design work for RescueTime (Time Management Software for Lifehackers, if you’re new here!). In most cases, I was generally dealing with extremely tight budgets (by Seattle or Silicon Valley standards), so I figure I’m uniquely qualified to answer his question. Rather than keep the answer confined to a relatively small mailing list, I figured I might open it up as a larger blog post. So here goes.

First of all, I should stress that I think a UI designer should be baked into your organization as early as possible. Most startups are building software for “normal people”– and programmers are notoriously bad about empathizing with how normal people interact with software. Hell, most of the designers I know are bad about empathizing with how normal people interact with software. If you’re one of the rare startups that’s building products for geeks-only, then you might be able to get away with limited designer involvement. But for most, the idea of “slapping a coat of paint” on an ugly application is a recipe for confused users and poor conversion rates (whatever your conversion event happens to be).

Second of all, I should stress that usability testing should be baked into your organization from day one. Watching people in your target demographic interact with your software is a priceless experience (and doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg). Most entrepreneurs get sensitive around their creation and find all sorts of excuses to avoid getting negative feedback about it– don’t fall into this trap.

Finally, let me emphasize that when I talk about designers, I am ALWAYS talking about UI designers, NOT graphic designers. Sure, pretty websites are nice… But artists are a dangerous breed, and are often tempted by the design equivalent to “guitar solos”: Swanky web forms that have so much CSS goodness that they no longer look like web forms, links that don’t look like links, buttons that don’t look like buttons, etc. Any chance to be unique is an opportunity to confuse users. At the end of the day, a lot of audiences don’t think web UI is actionable unless it’s a form element, a beveled button, or a blue hyperlink. You don’t want Jakob Neilsen designing your site, but you want a designer who will sacrifice aesthetics for usability if the need arises.

So, onto the resources.

Logo Design

As a startup, the first thing that you’ll need is a logo. I am a bit of a logo nut (and designed the RescueTime logo myself). I do believe that a good logo can be powerful, but when money is tight and time is scare, here are a few ways to get an interim logo:

LogoMaid – LogoMaid is a collection of 4400 watermarked logo templates. You can get non-exclusive logos for $25, and exclusive logos for $199 and up.

LogoMarker – If you’ve got to have a unique logo, this is your cheapest option. It’s basically an online logo construction kit– you can try it for free. $99 gets you the logo in a high-quality vector format.

LogoLoft and LogoWorks – Not custom enough for you? Well, LogoLoft and LogoWorks are trying to commoditize custom logo design. Presumably they have an army of underpaid designers ready to design to your specifications. Packages start from $99 and go up from there. The more you spend, the more designs you get to chose from, the more different designers get involved, and the more revisions you get… Basically, by spending more money you can reduce risk that you hate what they give you.

Custom development by a designer of your choice – Of course, you can always hunt up a designer of your choice… I’ve seen identity packages range from $1500 to $500,000, and your value mileage will most certainly vary (read up on the history of the Nike swoosh– quite a bargain there!).

Web Design Templates

Web design can be a bit spendier than logo design, depending on what you want to build. A lot of startups will need custom application design, but many might be able to get away with (or at least start with) a web template. Purchased templates usually consist of a layered Photoshop document, an HTML file, a CSS file, and maybe (god help you) a couple of SWF (Flash) files. Some will come with all of the necessary template files to play nicely with Blog/CMS systems like WordPress or Joomla.

TemplateMonster – TemplateMonster is the big boy on the template block, offering almost 13,000 templates that are searchable and sortable. Like LogoMaid, they offer a cheap version if you don’t want exclusive rights to the design ($50-70) and they also offer exclusive rights (which can cost you thousands).

Open Source Templates, Open Design Community and OSWD – These guys have quite a few fewer templates, but heck– they’re free… Yay for Open Source!

Custom Web Design

Custom web design work can range from cheap to ridiculously expensive. As programmers who are hopefully fairly familiar with web technology, you can probably get the most bang for your buck with an individual consultant rather than a firm. Of course, the more you need (graphic design, HTML/CSS, usability analysis, SEO, copywriting, etc), the less likely you are to find a single person who can TCB. If SEO is a big part of your marketing plan, make sure your designer knows enough about SEO to not paint you into a corner (send ‘em to SEOMoz for a primer).

Individual web designers with some experience under their belt can cost you $35/hr to $95/hr on a contract basis. If you are organized and can find a resource with vouched-for work ethic and responsiveness, you can do very well finding resources in secondary markets (midwest or southern USA) or offshore (eastern Europe or India). However, if you can afford it, a designer who is local and can/will meet with you is valuable. As a rule, the cheaper they are, the busier they are. You’ve got to sling a LOT of pixels at $35/hr to make a good living in most major markets.

Make sure you find someone who has experience doing what you need. If you need a complete application flow/design, finding a freelancer who has only built “brochureware” web sites is not your best bet.

SitePoint MarketPlace – The SitePoint marketplace is an excellent resource to find hungry freelancers. For $10, you can post an ad describing what you need and you’ll be buried in responses. The last time I did this for a designer (XHTML/CSS), I got 5 good responses for ridiculously low rates, and about 30 responses from people who either had higher rates than I wanted to pay or had crappy portfolios. Of course, I had two different designers flake out on me (one for a legitimate reason, one just fell off the map). That’s another risk of cheap individual consultants… They are oftentimes not very businesslike.

XHTMLized – If you find a good designer who has lackluster XHTML/CSS skills, these guys are a godsend. For $249 (assuming you can wait 7 days), they’ll take a Photoshop doc and turn it into GREAT front-end code. You can have them do more than one page, but it’s oftentimes good enough to just take a design that has most of the styles/elements you’ll be needing and turn them loose on it. There’s lots of competition in this arena, and Smashing Magazine has an excellent writeup about the alternatives.

Elance and Guru.com – These sites allow you to post a need and get a bunch of quotes from hungry designers and design shops (oftentimes offshore). There’s no obligation. It’s VERY important to clearly define what you want and what deliverables you expect to receive to make sure quotes are accurate.

Design Employees

This is the area where I have the least experience (at least in terms of markets like Seattle and Silicon Valley). From what I can tell, a FT web designer (Photoshop, xhtml, css) can run anywhere from $45k to $95k per year. Obviously, this can flex if you’re generous with stock options, which might be worthwhile for some startups.

I hope that helps some fellow bootstrappers out there. I’m a firm believer of taking the shortest path to testing your startup idea in a real market– these resources should get you there faster if you don’t happen to be a pixel-slinger. But at the end of the day, there’s no substitute for having someone on your core team be passionate about great user experiences.