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Our latest blog post:
Our ZURBevents explore the intersection of product design and business. →
Come to ZURBsoapbox:
ZURBexpo is an exhibition of product design ideas to help you design great products faster. →
Our latest blog post:
If you hadn’t heard, bigger monitors are in, small ones are out … at least for desktops. The 1366x768 has ousted 1024x768 as the supreme screen size. Now we hope you’re not thinking that means we should stop designing for small screens, even if it is for desktops, despite what Jakob Nielsen might be saying. Because when it comes to designing for the web — size shouldn’t matter.
Nielsen makes it a point to carefully say that “small screens are finally so rare for desktop computers that we don’t have to design for them.” Then he goes on to cover his bases, saying we still have to consider small screens anyway. Nielsen seems stuck in a desktop world, a single-device myopia. When it comes to mobile devices, Nielsen seems to begrudgingly consider them and lays out these option:
But we can’t ignore that more and more people are using mobile devices to access the web, be it for tablet or smartphones.
Nielsen does make some good points about larger screens (like optimizing for widescreen monitors around 1,440px wide), something we considered when it came to images for the new ZURB.com homepage. But like 960 grids, we can’t get stuck in one screen size or device.
Don’t get us wrong, we agree with Nielsen that the desktop is far from dead. Tablets and phones are very much consumption devices (for now). It’s very easy to say that mobile will kill the desktop or the laptop as we use our mobile devices more and more everyday. When it comes to writing long pieces or editing/writing code or text, desktops are still where it's at.
For the time being, we’re still going to use a variety of devices for different tasks. It’s not devices, however, that we’re designing for — it’s four-corners, no matter the size.
So it’s a waste of time to develop sites specific to each device. What’s needed is a modern grid system, which is why we developed Foundation and why we’re on the road to Foundation 3.0. Once completed, it will be one of the most, if not the most, modern responsive grid system in the world.
We’ve already released a taste of Foundation 3.0 and another taste is planned for later this week. But what does it take to build a modern grid system that meets the challenge of building a robust site and still look good on hundreds of different devices and browsers?
In other words, what is it that we need in a modern grid system:
Here’s what such a grid would look under the hood (take a close look, it’s a sneak peek under the Foundation 3.0 hood):
OK, this looks great for desktops, but for smaller devices, we’ve added additional styles wrapped in this media query:
But there’s some overriding we have to do, to basically tell the browser on a small display to: don’t float the columns, don’t give them a min-width, don’t give them margins:
There’s more to building a modern grid system than just these two bits of coding. In fact, Jonathan goes completely under the hood to show us step by step on how to build such a grid system in a recently published .net Magazine article.
When it comes to being a responsive designer, remember what Yoda said, “Size matters not.” What say you?
Last week, we were excited here at ZURB to distribute new iPads to every member of the ZURB team: design, operations, marketing and engineering — even our interns. There's plenty of companies in Silicon Valley that kit their employees out with nice gear, but this wasn't just about everyone having shiny toys (though it doesn't hurt).
You've probably noticed that it's not just laptops and desktops people are using these days. Other classes of device, like smartphones or tablets or eReaders (etc, etc) are beginning to dominate how people access the Web, or talk to each other, or capture and share things in their life.
We believe that, given this inevitable shift toward more disparate devices, it's important to put more of our eggs in that basket. That's why we developed Foundation, our responsive framework for developing sites and apps for any device. That's why when we relaunched ZURB.com we did so in a way that worked across devices, and it's why we develop sites and apps for our clients responsively.
There's plenty of reasons to have iPads in an office. We use them for QA, we can use them to present work to clients (or each other) ... but the biggest reason we kitted out each and every ZURBian with an iPad was to foster an environment of multi-device design literacy.
It's not just our designers who need to understand how Design works in a multi-device world. Our marketing team needs to be immersed in these devices so they can talk about it. Our engineering team needs to know about them so they can build new apps and services to cater to it. Our operations team needs to understand the multi-device world so they can plan for it, and work with it, and find new talent to drive it. We all have iPads because each and every member of our team needs to intuitively understand the multi-device world (we all have smartphones, too) and understand what it means for our business and our industry.
Here's an example of how this is already helping our team. The new iPads, with their retina displays, make for a great reading and browsing experience. We also recently relaunched ZURB.com with a visually rich design. However: we did almost nothing to cater to retina displays (it didn't even exist when we started the redesign). No high-resolution imagery, no consideration for the improved readability when it came to font sizes and the like.
We could simply serve up giant images and scale them down for everyone else, but something else the iPad teaches you is that while the resolution might be enormous, often the bandwidth is not. Even on 4G LTE Retina-sized background images are a seriously large file load. We're still working on this problem, but without team-wide exposure to this we might not have even bothered and we have to bother. These devices aren't going away, and they're not going to get less capable.
That's a technical example, but the effect is spreading already. When we evaluate new services to drive operations, we consider whether they work on different devices. We're already planning for TVs with connected AppleTVs in our breakout rooms, because our iPads can present directly on them without messing with cables. And so on.
Consider how immersed you are in a multi-device world. Smartphones, tablets, notebooks, eReaders, glasses (hehe), TVs, cars ... to work on what we all work on we need to understand these things.
Curious to learn more about the ZURB culture? If you’ve been following our posts from last week, we gave you a nice look into how a new designer adjusts into a new environment as well as our approach to failure. It’s different, and we embrace it!
Culture aside, we had two other posts covering entrepreneurship and customer service topics. Grab that cup of coffee and enjoy our Week-In-Review.
One of the most exciting times in a ZURB designer’s career is joining the company, but it doesn’t come without a few bumps in the road. Alina, one of our new designers, shares her experience joining the company and the issues she encountered early on in her time here. We’re excited to share some insight into how ZURB “breaks in” a new designer — and how our approach for doing this differs from most other design companies out there.
Read: "Breaking In A New Designer"
Customer service is an important part to many businesses, but is it crucial? Forrest examines customer service from ZURB’s angle and says it’s not just important, it’s of core importance for product gut reactions and long-term company strategy. Don’t underestimate the importance of day-to-day customer interactions in helping your business excel in an increasingly-competitive world.
Read "In Product Design, Customer Service Is Much More Than A Simple Q&A"
We’re not perfect. At ZURB, we embrace failure as a core component to our creative process. We foster success through failure, but just how do we go about this? Ryan shares our point of view on a topic many people like to put off to the side, and references personal and business examples to give context to the point.
Read "Rewarding Failure? Actually, We're Fostering Success"
Not all of us were biology majors in college, but many of us actually can apply a useful tool: The Scientific Method. Ryan breaks down the method and discusses each step in great detail from a startup perspective. Testing out your ideas are crucial for success, whether or not you use the Scientific Method to get there.
Customer service is a core part of ZURB’s day-to-day operations. We spend a lot of hours ensuring that each of our customers can take full advantage of the apps that they invest in.
In the most traditional sense, customer service is actually quite basic. A customer has a question, gets in contact with the company and gets their question answered. Perhaps it’s not always this easy, but at its core, it’s a transactional exchange of information for a time.
When it comes to ZURB (and product design), however, customer service is a completely different animal. No longer is it just a transaction — it has to be a fruitful conversation. A customer service advocate must not just answer the questions of the customer, but understand the bigger picture about how the issue translates to the broader business goals.
Customer inquiries differ greatly, but we gather valuable information from every interaction that helps shape our business. On the most basic level, bug reports turn into bug fixes. Two other key insights include curated feedback that lead to gut reactions on product, as well as feedback that helps shape our long-term business strategy.
Let’s look at two examples about how our customer feedback helped contribute to change in one of our products, Notable.
Louis, our customer service advocate, noticed early on in Notable’s lifecycle that several customers were confusing Workspaces with standard Notable posts. The recurring issue was confusion between how posts and Workspaces differed given they were all integrated into a single dashboard.
Understanding this feedback, we separated Workspaces into a new right-hand nav, keeping only Notable posts in the upper navigation bar. While customers continued to have some questions about Workspaces functionality, the design change clarified how users should view posts and Workspaces as separate entities. Take a look on the image below (click for a larger picture):
We integrated CSV export functionality into Notable results because of customer feedback as well. Several customers requested an export option so they could store their Notable data, so we developed a small browser hack to meet their needs. By simply adding .csv to the end of the HTML link of the Notable results, a user could now download results for offline use.
Through identifying CSV exporting requests as a trend in customer interactions, we developed a solution that would fill that common user ask. Collectively, user feedback led to a gut feeling, which resulted in making this change for the users. It’s just another example of how listening can have a positive impact on your product.
It’s important to not just address customer needs, but gather feedback through fruitful conversations with our customers. Through this, we build better products that help people design faster and better than before. Don’t underestimate the value of customer interactions in helping your business meet and exceed business objectives.
How does your organization think about customer service?
Alina highlighted something the other day that caught the attention of a few people — that part of our culture is to encourage our teammates to get crazy and throw out some pretty wild ideas, even if it means failure. She rightfully called it opportunity and outlined three good reasons why we do it:
But there’s also another reason we do it — to learn and to do so quickly so that we can move on. We call it “fail fast.” When you enable people to take risk, try things and fail, they learn faster and their productivity skyrockets. Think of it as autonomy to fail by not putting up a barrier that inhibits employees. In a way, it pushes them to master their craft.
Truth be told, everyone of us has failed at some point. Recently, I took a chance and pushed the envelope on some copy for our website, taking a more hard news slant. After having a spirited debate over the content with a fellow ZURBIan, I realized that I hadn’t just pushed the envelope — I'd blown it apart. But I learned how to better balance my journalistic instincts with the needs of the business. I learned to find the happy medium. That’s not to say I won’t take another risk again. But I learned from this one.
Don't get us wrong, it’s not that we’re seeking failure. It’s what Eric Ries calls productive failure, where you learn something really important from it. Take Josh Levy and Ross Cohen, BeenVerified’s co-founders. They burned through $550,000 in 11 months because they failed to figure out who would actually use their product.
Sure that’s a hard lesson to learn and they could’ve prevented it by doing some user testing and getting feedback as early as possible. But hindsight is 20/20. The important thing is that Levy and Ross learned to not waste time developing a product without a customer. Now that’s a productive failure and the duo were able to eventually turn BeenVerified into a success (it made $11 million last year).
To go back for a second to Eric. He was recently asked at the Wired Business Conference if startups were being rewarded too much for failure. His answer:
We’re rewarding failure not enough.
Eric’s got a point, but we’d add that it’s not that we’re only rewarding failure. We’re actually fostering success. Failure is the means by which we get there and get there at breakneck speeds.
There’s a lot of talk about applying the scientific method to entrepreneurism. It’s at the heart of Eric Ries’ Lean Startup, which he talks about recently at the Wired Business Conference. But exactly how do you exactly apply it to a product?
First, let's take a look at what Eric is really talking about. He's really advocating learning. To learn as much about your products as possible, to learn whether or not there is, in fact, a customer at the other end willing to pay for it. After all, he learned the hard way the damage not figuring out who your users are can cause. His early startup crashed and burned because he didn't figure out who would use and pay for his product. He says building a robust product and having a splashy launch could sink your startup if there isn't a customer to pay for it. Which is why he urges startups to apply the scientific method and view learning as a measure of progress.
Like a scientist, he suggests, you’ve got to test your ideas and continue to test them through hypothesis and experimentation, gathering feedback along the way.
While it’s not something we use all the time here at ZURB, we have applied the scientific method in our approach to product design. Let’s delve a bit deeper, looking at how we applied it when it came to eliminating a feature from Notable:
As you can see, the scientific method was helpful in solving a particular problem. While it is really useful for testing out theories and hypothesis, the one thing we hope that you remember the most is that you have to test out your ideas. The scientific method isn’t the only way, but it’s one of the tools at your disposal to learn if your ideas will work out in the wild.
I’m one of the newbie designers here at ZURB. It’s an exciting place to be and I’m so grateful to have joined this powerhouse team. But even with all the joy of coming to work everyday, there are still some growing pains every new designer experiences here. That’s because ZURB is a very special place and we do things quite different here. More than anything else, the pains come from getting up to speed on ZURB’s unique approach to design and breaking some of the (bad?) habits we’ve picked up along the way in our careers up til now.
As a new addition to the team, there’s a lot of pressure to make yourself of value and validate being added to ZURB’s awesome team. (Honestly, the pressure is just in our heads, not brought on by the team.) We desperately want to be “worth it,” which means that mistakes are really hard to get over. Even a small mistake can feel like a huge letdown — a failure.
But failure is a really big deal here at ZURB. In fact, we have a special word for it — opportunity. That’s because every half-baked idea and every inept solution is our chance to find out something new about the product we’re working on. We always throw out a ton of ideas to our customers, knowing fully-well that some of them are too out-there and a few are just plain wrong. But there are three good reasons we still do it:
When new designers, such as myself, join ZURB, we use our experience, judgement and best practices to present solutions that we can recommend with confidence. We just want the customer to look at our work and instinctively fall in love with it, without further explanation, of course — after all, it’s all in the layout, right? The trouble comes when the customer starts asking questions and challenging our recommendations.
The truth is that work doesn’t sell itself. A great concept can be easily scrapped by the customer who isn’t going to read your mind about its merits, while a mediocre idea can be a wild success when positioned correctly.
We often work on very complex products, which require sophisticated solutions. And that means our customers expect us to have the answers on all of their hows and whys (and rightly so!). Which is where I found myself recently — stumbling to explain an elaborate interface and defend even the simplest element, all because I didn’t think through the justification ahead of time. Having a clear point of view is valued greatly at ZURB, but learning how to articulate that point of view is as important, if not more.
When most agencies get projects, they hole up in their offices for a few weeks to do research, put together strategies and comp up layouts. Next, they assemble an impressive presentation and have “the big reveal” meeting with a customer. There the customer-agency relationship is simple: customer provides a project, agency provides a solution. And it’s really the only process designers know before joining ZURB.
Things are really different here. We don’t do big reveals. Our process is not mysterious. We’re very transparent about how ideas turn into concepts, which turn into solutions. We present one small idea at a time, which our customers can easily grasp and believe in. We then combine several small ideas, and they magically become solutions that customers feel invested in and fully appreciate. It’s one small “aha moment” after another, that in the end amount to a big “wow factor.”
Trying to present a solution right from the start can actually backfire! Recently, I worked on a project where I tried to bite off too much too fast. I presented too many new ideas in one little neat layout, which just left the customer confused — we could actually hear their eyes glaze over on the phone. But had I showed all those pieces individually, the customer would have been open to them and felt like they were part of the creative process.
What’s more interesting is that, after working with ZURB, customers often adopt these methods of creative exploration and iteration within their organizations. We love hearing that marketing directors are picking up Sharpies and shopping around sketches to their team. That’s actually one of our schemes for world domination.
It’s been an exciting and challenging couple months. I can only imagine how much I have yet to learn!
Forrest highlighted an interesting finding today, which found that when we layered in complexity, our customer lifetime value increased 40% over the last year. It's a great example of how simple isn't necessarily what users are looking for in an application. In Notable, we layer in the functionality based on the complexity of the problem customers are solving. 40% is a fairly large jump, but for some of you, the question might be, "what is lifetime value (LTV) anyway?
Lifetime value is the net present value of the cash flows attributed to the relationship with a customer. That's a lot of important sounding words. What are we really talking about? In a SaSS (software as service) business model, like Notable, we're making money by providing a service each month. Customers pay a fixed amount each month to use the service.
Over time it isn't reasonable to think you can keep a customer paying for your service indefinitely. People will drop off from your service, which we calculate as a churn rate. The churn rate helps us determine our retention rate, the key component of calculating the lifetime value of a customer. I'm not really an analyst, so I was originally very confused by the concept. A few years ago, I came across Andrew Chen's post on the subject and he did an amazing job of outlining how to calculate the LTV. We use his formula, and it looks something like this:
LTV of an account = (1/(1-rentetion) * revenue)/ accounts
To be honest, I had to view an excel document with the value of all our customers eventually heading to 0 to fully grasp the concept. But I'm glad we adopted this metric as it helps us understand what our investment can reasonably be to earn a new customer.
So from a business and marketing perspective, it's important to have a number to help you forecast your spending to earn new customers. By increasing our LTV by 40%, it gives our business the flexibility to be more aggressive with our marketing efforts. Circling back to the original article, simple doesn't always translate to a better business.
Aaron Levie, Box CEO and co-founder, shared some great insights at his March Soapbox talk. He shared his belief that people would shift away from Microsoft and seek out the best possible solution by mixing and matching products and services.
Simple is in. And Aaron is making the case for it once again. He references an important trend sweeping not just across Silicon Valley, but across the nation — the radical simplification of everything.
Aaron believes if a company makes a customer do any unnecessary work to achieve a desired outcome, the company is “primed for disruption.” And, to an extent, he’s right — often times, people opt for a simple option over a complex solution that adds unnecessary stress (and subsequent problems) to our lives.
While simplicity is a trend that seems to be a hot topic for discussion, simplicity isn’t an end-all-be-all when it comes to customer understanding and user behavior. Instead, we view effective layered complexity as a standard for all businesses to pursue.
To observe how layered complexity differs from simplicity, we have to approach it from a user standpoint. Customers have varying levels of understanding about various subjects, and because of this, they have different needs. For example, a product designer’s design literacy differs significantly from a startup CEO trying to determine how product design fits into their business.
Effectively communicating a product or service to a customer is an important component of building a successful business. Lacking the ability to do this often has significant consequences.
When it comes to simplicity, however, Levie says solutions shouldn't accomplish less:
Now, this isn’t an excuse for solutions to accomplish less. The irony of simplicity is that it invariably lets you do more. Simplicity isn’t about giving up any value — it’s a movement around designing technology or products thoughtfully to make them substantially more useful and attainable.
However, there are times when more complex features or service components are needed to scale a business. If simplicity is the ultimate end-goal for all, inevitably, some users or customers will be disgruntled over missed offerings. Companies should structure their products and services understanding that while simplicity is important, selective layered complexity is even moreso for including the right solutions and, in the long term, building effective, profitable businesses.
On Wednesday, we discussed pricing for features not per user. Our pricing tiers for Notable are a perfect example of layering complexity. Last March, we launched a new feature-based pricing model for Notable. Capturing images is the same no matter how much a customer pays. Instead of striving for simplicity, we layer in complexity with tiered features.
Just one month after we launched the new Notable pricing model, we experienced a 22% increase in our customer lifetime value. Even more convincing: Notable customer lifetime value was up 41% one year following the change.
While minor tweaks were made to pricing, layered complexity had a tremendous impact on increasing our customer lifetime value. Which goes to show that even though customers and businesses may want to simplify, there are times when it's necessary and, even profitable, to instead layer complexity as their businesses grow.
How do you believe layered complexity fits into your company’s business plan?
Over the years, we have seen many businesses adopt a per-project or per-user pricing structure, which pushes customers to re-evaluate the value of the products they are using. Not only does this run the risk of losing customers, but it goes as far as punishing them for their loyalty. Why would any company chose to lose customers? More than that, why would they punish them for using their products?
Take for example, GitHub. We love their service. We use their private project repository. But then we hit our limit and it had us think twice about the service because we would've had to pay for more space. Instead, we just deleted older projects to make room.
The problem with volume-pricing is that it's stressful. It leaves the customer wondering what they'll have to pay in the future, and often punishes usage. Many companies use a volume-discount approach. As companies scale, they are forced to pay more for the apps they already use even though they end up paying less per user. This puts customers in a bind, forcing them to choose who receives access to the tools or what projects to use the tools for. Only giving 10% of your company access to a tool rather than 50% to 100% will negatively affect the value of using the tool.
Take Netflix. How many of us have a "watch instantly" account, which withdraws about $8 bucks a month from our bank accounts? And that's if we use the service or not. We don't even have to think about it. We aren’t allotted a set amount of hours we are allowed to watch programing without paying more.
But what if we were? If after watching 10 hours of television you were required to pay more, you might have to think twice about subscribing to the service entirely.
Recently, we re-launched Verify with not only new features, but a new pricing structure. Though we never charged on a per-user basis, we added value for all of our users with mobile testing. We also created a new tier of service with a new premium feature.
We understood, that depending on the size of our customers’ companies, this feature may not be the perfect fit so the new tier and premium pricing is an option, not a requirement. However, we also realize that regardless of a company’s specific product needs their operational needs will vary as they gain and lose staff and clients. Why inconvenience your customers because of uncontrollable variables instead of a change in product need?
With Notable, we determine value based on the features a company needed to effectively collect and organize the feedback they need for their designs. We often find that larger companies with several users and multiple simultaneous projects may find use for the freedom to organize within sets and workspaces available on our upper tiered plans. While freelancers or small businesses might not have a need for these organizational features, but still may have a variable amount of hands in the bucket.
Think of it this way. What is the use of product design applications if you are limited by the amount of feedback you can receive? Why would we charge people to involve more influencers from their own business or client list? It just doesn’t make any sense and causes unnecessary stress for growing companies unable to predict the expense of using these products.
Per-user pricing simply does not put the customer first. That's because they'll constantly need to reevaluate the your product's benefits each time the price goes up. This will drastically affect the adoption of your product. Let your users have flexibility and decide what features are best for them instead of who is best to use these features. Don’t let your customers outgrow your product, instead allow your product to grow and become an integral part of their daily workflow.
What are your thoughts on per-user pricing? Does it work for you or would you prefer a simply subscription that is flexible to your needs? Let us know in the comments below.
The ZURBlog is where we discuss product design, business and strategy. We use design thinking to challenge businesses and designers to improve the products and services they create.
ZURB is a close-knit team of product designers who help companies design better web sites, services, and online products. We've worked with more than 150 start-ups since 1998.
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