Most designers are extremely passionate about their craft. Unfortunately, that means they also find themselves wedged between their love of work and responsibility to their family. How can you find a good balance between the two? Frankly, you really can't.
Fortunately, designers tend to go through cycles of high creativity followed by a calmer period of rejuvenation. Just let things unfold naturally and see where the flow takes you. Mix up the project work whenever you can so that natural cycles don't disrupt projects that require a higher degree of creative vision.
Of course, most business situations don't come in "waves of creativity" so designers must learn to work within the constraints of time. Use those constraints to your advantage— learn to use chunks of time effectively and give you focus, whether you're at work or spending time with your family.
There's a notion that professional designers need to show only one version of a concept to clients or stakeholders. At ZURB, we don't think that's the best rule of thumb. Although sometimes having only one version can be good for moving a project along, overall this methodology is flawed for a few reasons.
Multiple ideas create better ideas
A new spark can emerge in the process, so keep those concepts flowing. Collaboration is a great way to open up new ideas, and it helps create lots and lots of new ideas. Soliciting input from others allows you to get great ideas from numerous team members.
Focus, don't give them a buffet of options
Worry less about how many you are accumulating, and more about how you're focusing the design problem. They can be pared down later. If you're not careful developing multiple design concepts can get you into trouble. You run the risk of offering too many choices without a clear sense of direction. Showing three focused solutions is far better than showing 10 "choices." Design doesn't work like a vending machine, so if you're presenting your ideas like a snack bar, you're going to get a client selecting whatever looks tastiest at the time.
Designers need to build relationships to help clients work through decisions they may not understand. Revealing your design process with the three-concept rule builds trust and helps those who aren't design specialists understand how things will unfold.
The idea of showing three focused concepts to a client may take some getting used to, but it's the best way to help your client meet their end goals. Remember, a client or stakeholder may not understand your choice of puce green, but if it helps her solve a problem, then you're doing your job.
This may sound nutty but here at ZURB, you'll often find us standing at whiteboards to think out design problems. In fact, we have 19 of them scattered about the office. Although sitting down to talk things through might be more comfortable, designing while standing is an awesome way to create great results.
The stand-up design method really gets the blood flowing because it actually forces your blood to circulate through your body and brain, and gets the neurons firing creative thoughts. People interact with your websites in noisy homes, at coffee shops, and over smart phones in public. They're active and fickle. Standing while designing helps you match their actions and keep your energy up while designing. More often than not that energy shows in a more inspired, dynamic, free-flowing end result.
Getting away from your desk lowers your guard
It's subtle, but desks are homebase. They're territory. People feel ownership over them and social rules apply for who and how people can approach you in that space. When you stand and work away from your desk you enter into shared space. You're more approachable and open to feedback. Below is a great example of how getting in a neutral space encourages others to give feedback on a design.
Standing is social
When you get away from your desk, it's easier for others to gather around you. ZURB has a big work table with enough room for 3-4 people to spread out and work. This gets ideas flowing between people.
Standing up while designing gives you a whole new perspective on your project. It's funny, but the scale of an idea influences how you think about it, and whiteboards give you a large space to work in instead of a small rectangular computer monitor. Below is a great time lapse video example from our 24hour ZURBwired that shows people working in clusters.
Whiteboards promote standing
It invites standing, animated/energetic work, and is fundamentally social. Most great work and great conversation happens in the hallway or around the water cooler, not in meetings. Having work on whiteboards makes it easy for others to approach what you're doing. Two, three, and four or more people can gather around and participate. New things can start to click. Getting other people invested in a design is much easier at a board.
It also keeps you from typing ideas on a keyboard, which constrains thinking. Instead, using large hand movements while standing in front of a whiteboard produces unexpected results. Skip the details, just focus on broad concepts.
Just stand up
The next time you need to jumpstart a design project, put up a whiteboard on the wall. It's a surprisingly effective way to collect and organize ideas.
We had some amazing sushi and a captivating remote UX research discussion with Nate Bolt. Feel free to slip those headphones on and listen to the podcast as you page through the slides below.
Nate started off with a nifty comparison: “About 5% of all research is remote. Research in general is a niche industry. User research within is pretty small. UX research within that is even smaller. Remote UX research is even smaller.”
Why do people love remote?
Remote is a cheap access to someone’s physical environment
You want to intercept somebody who is “in the moment.” Ex: They are in the middle of entering their credit card to buy something.
Easier to recruit
Easier to observe and record their actions
Can get participants from all around the world
When not to use remote
So when is remote research a bad idea? If you need specific skill sets. Example: If you want feedback on a video game from 13-year-old kids who are French and Chilean but speak English and have web cams. This is really bad idea for remote testing. Why?
Bandwith is a huge issue
Translation is a huge issue
Its hard to get consent to talk to kids
Hard to make behavioral inferences form web cams is tough
Security is a problem
People mis-assess their language skills. Nate mentioned that they ran into this issue a lot. A quick tip to overcome this is to ask a question such as “What happens to a balloon when you let it go? Up? Down? “ as preliminary screening to make sure they actually speak the language. Always better than asking “Do you speak English?”
Designing the actual study
Nate outlined an example study he did for Intuit trying to figure out why folks were bailing out of checkout. The remote UX study was setup had:
10 participants live with screen sharing tool
10 participants from usertesting.com (self moderated which meant the participants were talking to a mic on their own, nobody was on the phone with them)
Used Ethnio to intercept users as were about to checkout and ask them what is going on in their mind
Two tips to remember
Screen whether people will be good participants. A good question to ask before you recruit a participants is: What did you come to this site to do today? Folks that answer “I have the last model and am looking for the next one” are killer participants! Folks that say “Just because” are the ones you’ve got to X out.
Try to avoid professional survey takers. Folks that say: “Oh yeah – I would totally use that!” are the ones you want to get rid of. Try to ask people to perform a task instead of asking them about their opinion. Nate did a study testing Survey Monkey’s new UI. Nate asked the users to create a survey for something they needed to test. He could see the people that truly carted about the tool. Those are the ones that he recruited for more testing.
The talk had a lot more details and information which you can get by listening to the full podcast above as you page through the slides. We'd like to thank Nate Bolt once again for showing us the ins and outs of Remote UX Research!
During a recent post-project analysis on Notable, the ZURB team realized there are two pain points when it comes to improving existing product: The beginning and the end. Getting started on a new product release is tricky and wrapping up a release can be brutal.
The Beginning
At the beginning of the product development process, it can be hard to convince team members that something just built could be better - it feels counterintuitive and even flirts with demotivation. Sometimes teams might be tempted to gather analytics and research before making changes, but if we waited for data and confirmation of "right answers" all the time we'd never get anything done!
The End
The final stage of product improvement is also a minefield. You need to give critical, detailed, and specific feedback, despite the fact that's it's time consuming and emotionally taxing. It takes a lot of willpower to keep going forward, but it's important to get people out of their comfort zone so they'll reach their full potential. Sure, it's hard to demand continual changes until it's right. Team members will get frustrated, but their redemption comes in seeing that they have a successful outcome in the end.
Whether you're pushing your team to get started on a product improvement or trying to keep the momentum going to the finish line, you can't give in. You have to complete the vision.
When working with a designer, its often easy to fall into set patterns or expectations of how a relationship will unfold during a project. Knowing what motivates the designer on your team goes a long way toward getting the results you want. Here are a few things that the motivate the designers we know.
We're Visual Translators
First of all, it's not about the money. Sure, designers care about making money just like everyone else— but we aren't going to sell our soul to get it. Many designers thrive on the thrill of creating a visual language out of abstract concepts. In fact, when it comes down to it, we're visual translators.
We're Right Brain/Left Brain
We want to exercise both our right and left brain. Sometimes designers are not too orderly in their approach to solving problems (we prefer to think of it as organized chaos). The truth is, the brain doesn't work in a linear fashion when its piecing together creative solutions. It doesn't mean we're not deadline-driven, it's just that when a design project is timeboxed, the results will reflect that.
Work with designers to channel energy that can stimulate follow through for other critical tasks. To give both the right and left brain a good workout, help designers bucket time into "project structure" time and "creative thinking" time. At ZURB, we occasionally require designers to write a business email that lays out the intent of their work before we actually start designing.
We Skip the Politics
Okay, let's be honest. Sometimes designers are a bit lazy— the path of least resistance is just fine with us. Just because you highlight the way you want something done, that doesn't mean we're automatically going to approach the problem your way. On the other hand, it doesn't mean the objectives have changed either. Political bureaucracy isn't going to encourage designers to create magic— in fact it saps their energy and keeps them from driving ideas forward. If that's lazy, so be it for a designer.
We're Vain
Finally, we just love our pixels. Vanity is a designer's weakness, but it's also a trait you can use to your benefit if you give a designer ownership of his work. Visuals have sex appeal whether there is meaning or not and designers love this control. Just realize that power can be channeled with proper goals and vision so be sure to provide this structure for designers.
Each designer has his own set of motivators. Understanding the particulars and how to address them will go a long way toward keeping your designer happy and prolific.
It came about like this: we were walking down to get coffee and discussing the finer points of Nate Bolt's SHOTS video. Nate was coming to the office to do a Soapbox and we decided two dimensions weren't enough to fully capture him, so we set about to build our own 3D camera. It was a huge success and much easier then you would think. Here is our process in three easy steps, so that you can follow along at home.
Step 1: Acquire two identical video cameras
Everyone at ZURB got an iPod Nano at the holiday party last year and two happened to be in the office on Friday, score! Attach the cameras to a fixed surface about 6-7 inches apart. I found a piece of metal and a couple rubber bands that did the trick.
You need to have the cameras pretty level with each other (think how your eyes work) but don't sweat getting them perfectly aligned, your going to fix that in step two.
Step 2: Record video from both cameras
In case this is not obvious; you're going to record from both cameras at the same time. However you don't need to start both camera at exactly the same time since we can easily sync them when we do the editing. Which brings us to the tricky part...
The end format we need is a single video file that has both sources side by side. A little Googling found a Windows app called StereoMovie Maker that will help you combine, sync and align the two videos. It's not the most intuitive software so here is the workflow we developed:
Transcode your video files to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 (StereoMovie Maker only supports these formats).
Focus on something distinct in the background (like the power outlet in this example) and using the horizontal and vertical sliders align the red and blue images so they completely overlap
Select the Microsoft Video 1 compressor. YouTube has no problem reading this format and it is significantly smaller then using no compression.
If you did this all correctly then your saved video should look like this, both videos sources side by side in a single file:
Step 3: Upload to YouTube
Upload the video to YouTube and add the tag yt3d:enable=true. This tells YouTube to combine your two side by side videos into a single 3D video.
That's it; once YouTube has finished processing the video you can go to its YouTube page and test it out with your Red / Cyan glasses. If have Amber / Blue or Green / Magenta Glasses you can use those instead by toggling the 3D options next to the pop out button in the lower right hand corner of the player.
Note that embedded YouTube videos do not support 3D, you must go to the YouTube video page for this feature.
Here are the two videos we made on Friday with this setup:
A lot of our work happens in a digital environment, but unfortunately it's not always the best medium for getting feedback. There's a lot to be said for face-to-face meetings and here at ZURB, we take a hybrid approach to sending and receiving feedback on design work. Here's an inside look at our process.
Digital feedback keeps work focused
Digital feedback has a lot going for it. First of all, it can be a lot easier to articulate an idea because writing things down forces the person giving feedback to think through the idea. Written feedback also serves as a great historical reference so you can recall what your team said in years past.
Digital feedback is also terrific for keeping things brief and succinct— no need for endless conversations that go on and on. It's also asynchronous and doesn't rely on matching schedules or hard-to-plan meetings. Feedback apps like our Notable are particularly useful for getting feedback because it's very specific, contextual, and takes the guesswork out of exactly which concepts are under discussion.
Some things can only be done in person
No matter how useful digital feedback is, in-person meetings can provide much better insight. For instance, body language and tone of voice are very revealing. You'll get a sense of how comfortable the feedback giver is with what they're saying and their tone of voice can help you better understand the scope of the discussion.
Feeling the intent of the feedback can also give you enough insight to get the point of the directive. Don't over look the power an in-person meeting can have toward building and creating momentum based on positive reinforcement. After all, digital feedback can seem rather critical all the way around, but both positive and negative feedback can be easier to appreciate in person.
We use a hybrid approach
At ZURB, our team use a hybrid approach because we feel that practice in digital form makes in-person delivery more efficient and powerful. Indeed, sometimes we switch back and forth several times in the course of a day. The key is to be flexible when working in the web world— being able to switch gears smoothly is important to getting useful feedback.
ZURB’s been pretty busy lately, releasing Bounce and ramping up the private release of our next app, Verify. Not to mention all the awesome soapboxes we’ve hosted over the last few months. But what you don’t know is that the team has also been busy ramping up our two newest ZURBians and our most recent design intern.
Elizabeth Bouinatchova
As former video game tester, she's got all her nerd credentials in line.
Coming in as ZURB’s first-ever Customer Service Advocate, Elizabeth has her work cut out for her. It’s a good thing she has over a decade of experience helping people solve problems.
Elizabeth is originally from Maine and recently moved back to the Bay Area with her husband. And while she occasionally feels like her brain is leaking out of her ears, it’s been a good couple weeks for her so far.
"When I walk into ZURB every morning I know that I'm expected to be skilled, motivated, and capable of accomplishing extraordinary things—and they have no doubt that I can do it. It's a good feeling."
Dave Gamache
You all may remember Dave from January when he started his first internship with us.
After 6 months of interning and a lot of great work, Dave’s finally starting his first week as a full-fledged ZURBian.We're stoked to have his unstoppable energy on the team full-time.
"ZURB is awesome in so many ways, but for me it all boils down to the people. You know you're working at the right place when you come into the office tired from a long a weekend, and leave with sore abs and a smile because you laughed so hard, but still crushed all your projects."
Intern Anthony
Anthony Tadina has joined the ranks until August as ZURB’s latest intern. He's a self-starter from Fremont who thrives on good design (and good food).
He'll be working alongside our team on a variety of projects—and is even working on some changes to the Notable site. We've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating that ZURB internships ain't no job shadow. They're the real thing.
He was drawn in when he found out about our annual ZURBwired marathon and is here now to learn from ZURB’s 13 years of interaction design experience.
"The most challenging part of ZURB is getting right down to business. Every single ZURBian told me I'd get thrown in the deep end (which I was!), but after a couple of weeks, I'm still keeping afloat and loving every minute of it!"
Join Our Team
Interested in joining the ZURB team? Think you've got what it takes to be ZURB's next intern? We're always looking for talented, T-shaped people who can help us build great things.
To get a hold of us, just shoot us an email and tell us what your top three skills are and why you want to work at ZURB.
Yes, I’m talking to you. Have you ever had an idea for a product or a website? Most of us have. Did you ever ask anybody about their opinion of it? How did you do that? Face to face interviews? Focus groups?
Once you had a prototype of the idea did you ever observe someone using your product? How did you do that? Record them with a camera? Use software to record their mouse movements?
Ok, be honest. Was it a little expensive? Time and resource guzzling? How much time and money could you have saved if you accomplished the same task remotely? Remote user research is *"a type of user experience research that is conducted over the phone and Internet, instead of in person. It seeks to understand how people interact with technology."*[1]
We’re excited to have Nate Bolt the man behind 230+ user research studies at Bolt|Peters get on his soapbox to teach us how to design and conduct remote research studies from top to bottom using a phone and a laptop.
Hmm. Interesting. Is there a down side? How do I do this?
People say that remote research is inexpensive, it's great for cross-country teams, and you get a lot of data without leaving your office. But wait, what are the downsides? How is something like this setup?
In a 25 minute interactive discussion Nate will share:
When we should & shouldn't go remote
How to create tasks for participants
How to find participants
How to handle problem participants
Best ways to gather data remotely
Best remote tools to use
You miss this and you might be spending tons of $$$, time and resources on user research you could have done remotely. No big deal.
Rosenfeld Media was kind enough to offer ZURB blog readers a 20% discount with code RRZURB off all of their books including Nate Bolt's book: Remote Research.
About Nate: Nate Bolt is the El Presidente at Bolt|Peters where he has overseen more than 200 remote user research studies for Sony, Oracle, HP, Greenpeace, Electronic Arts, and many others. Beginning in 2003 he led the creation of the first moderated remote user research software, Ethnio, which is being used around the world now to recruit hundreds of thousands of live participants for research.
RSVP for Nate Bolt's ZURBsoapbox on July 9th, 2010
Where?
ZURB HQ
55 N. 3rd Street, Suite 100a
Campbell, CA 95008
"How does your business intend to make money?" It's an unexpected— but important— question to ask your team at the beginning of a design process. Understanding your customer's service strategy affects the design process in several ways.
First, it never hurts to have people continue to challenge how you intend to make money with your website. All team members should be focused on making money for the company.
Second, every interaction in your website needs to balance the business goals with the user needs. If the business goals are left for after the site is built, then it's going to be very difficult to make changes to the core functionality to accommodate a revenue stream. Companies like Twitter may pull this off, but it's a bad strategy for most web start-up businesses.
Third, design experts are going to help you find ways to optimize your ideas, especially professionals that see how small changes in the implementation of an idea can contribute to higher returns. For instance, we've seen small visual design elements, such as adding a thin gray line, contribute to a 40% increase in ad revenue.
The next time you sit down for a design meeting, don't be afraid to outline your service strategy. It's just another way for a good designer to help you reach your customers and revenue goals.
Self-taught designers that work on their own as a freelancer or within a company aren't trained in the service side of a design business, so many budding designers look to process as the magical selling point of design. The reality is, companies aren't interested in being sold process. They simply want results.
Indeed, process is effective and companies want to know you have one, but they're really all about seeing a finished, polished product. The concept of a design process is often unclear to customers and clients. It may seem like a waste of time, with steps that only slow things down or add to the designer's time. Some companies are also concerned process is a threat to their control over the project.
The good news is, "design" is both a process and a result. People pay for results, but the benefit of design is that it's an effective way to solve business problems. We've found that the best approach is to sell on results and educate with process. It takes more time to build a business relationship this way, but it keeps the cash flow moving while you build long term clients. As an added bonus, these long-term clients will come to appreciate the importance of the design process, making future projects run more smoothly.
We've written a bit before about what we think here at ZURB about critical thinking and design, but in most design companies critical thinking doesn't get the attention it deserves.
Critical thinking plays a big role in design. It helps define the pace of a project and keeps a team on a tight schedule. It also sets solid expectations and helps your team build confidence in its goals. Critical thinking often means repeating a task or revisiting a checklist, which brings efficiency to all parts of a project— and everyone loves efficiency, right?
We often hail design thinking as a savior for opening up problems. In a service organization, however, closing problems down is equally important for sustainability and profitability. A smart approach to critical thinking can expose and shut down a problem before it has a chance to become a big issue.
Designers often mistake creative freedom for controlled discovery, yet even in design thinking, constraints provide structure. Those constraints can provide a strong framework for goal-setting and having very focused goals helps balance the uncertainty of opening up lots of projects.
Don't assume reaching those goals means you have to do everything yourself, though. In fact, critical thinking is very much a collaborative process— as is design thinking. Designers need to understand that sometimes they're just a piece of a larger puzzle, or are there to apply their unique talents to a portion of the overall project.
At first glance, critical thinking may not seem important to the overall success of a design project. Yet it's a vital component that shouldn't be overlooked.
We all know that kid in school who waited until the last minute to write their report for school and still pulled out an A anyway. Why do some people excel when they procrastinate while others get burned?
We all really want to believe it's pure talent, but when you look closer at why procrastination works for some people, you start to understand that there are a number of principles that can be replicated. If you break down the technique, there are few key behaviors that might look like laziness, but instead contribute to the overall success of a project.
To procrastinate the right way, you need:
Very specific goals - When you know what you're trying to accomplish, you take much of the guess work out of the equation. Instead of thinking, "I need to put some time into the Harrison project," say to yourself, "I need to create five wireframes, 40 sketches, and write a two-page report." By being specific you set a clear, obtainable goal.
Very specific time frames - if you work backwards from an established endpoint, you know exactly how much time you'll need to put into a project. The more you know your craft, the easier it becomes to "wait til the last minute."
Visualization of a result - When you know "how many, and in what time frame," all of your thinking time can now be applied to a positive end result. Visualizing success is a key ingredient to a great outcome— it's a rehearsal that keeps shaping the solution.
A good enough result - Focus on a good result to get rid of risky ideas that may not produce any results. Remember that time limits how much needless, unfocused experimentation you can get away with.
When you put these principles together you end up with a replicable technique that creates results. At ZURB we call this timeboxing.
It’s dreadful to think about, but most of your work as a designer is about getting it wrong. Think about the last design project you worked on. How many iterations did you have to go through before you got it right? Probably quite a few.
Although few other professions spend so much time getting it wrong, it's important to realize that it's perfectly okay when designers do. Does the rest of your team understand this, or do they continually focus on wrong answers? If so, there may be a disconnect in your process, or maybe they don't understand your process at all. Be sure to let your team know that it's okay to fail as long as the end result is a win. In fact, it's more than okay— failure is the only way you'll get to a win.
About the ZURBlog
The ZURBlog is where we discuss design interaction and strategy. We use design thinking to challenge businesses and designers to improve the products and services they create.
ZURBvision: A 3D camera built from two iPod Nanos
As former video game tester, she's got all her nerd credentials in line.
Nate Bolt el Presidente of 
Nate's office dog Sela the reason for Nate's #1 ranking on Google for 
