ZURBlog is where we discuss product design, business and strategy.

As product designers, we've been conditioned to figure out who our users are, and rightly so. After all, it's a waste of time and money to design a product without figuring out who will use it. But are we spending too much time on users that we're forgetting someone else?

Consider this. You build an awesome product, you launch it, and then wait to see what happens. You know your target demographic will adopt your product, but what about those other people who'll see it — like the early adopters who try a product and aren't likely to become long-term users? We're talking about the journalists, bloggers, marketers, and product junkies who will spread the news, who could easily make or break your product. That's because they are the most vocal with their opinions. So how would you want them to talk about your product?

As pointed out in this video from the folks at Penny Arcade, these "unintended users" can help transform an industry. Check out the video below, noticing the issues that game designers face when it comes to designing with these folks in mind:

Let's take the idea of a spectator from the video a step further. A spectator can also be seen as a potential customer. Someone who comes into contact with a product briefly, observing how it works, and may even take it for a spin. With that in mind, let's take a closer look at a couple points in the video:

1. Accessibility. As the video points out, spectators want to understand how to use something, even if they aren't necessarily at the helm. They want to know the rules, even if they don't intend to play themselves. Another way to think about it is communicating your core value clearly.
2. The human touch. As seen in the video, spectators are in it for the human touch. In the case of spectator sports, this translates into the drama of the game. But in product design, this translates into the "why." Simon Sinek tackled this issue in his book "The Power of Why." Most designers tell others the ins and outs of their products then expect them to pay for it. That doesn't work. Users and spectators both need to know why they should care or why they should use your product.

It's imperative that we know who our customers are and what problem our products solve for them. However, it's also worthwhile to consider those casual spectators. Win them over and you'll be well on your way to transforming them into actual users.

Hat tip to Dre from Wages of Wins for sharing this video with us.

We've said it once and we'll say it again, get feedback or fail. Spending tons of money to launch a product only to later learn that it's a flop (we're looking at you, Google Wave) is not only a waste of time and money, but it can damage your reputation. You need feedback while building your product.

That's where user testing comes in. However, many product designers fear putting their work out in front of would-be customers before it's finished. After all, who wants to expose something they've created to criticism? Who likes to hear where they've gone wrong? Then there's all the work — gathering testers and conducting the actual test. Why go through all that effort when you can just put stuff up and launch it? With that mentality, it can be easy to dismiss user testing.

As the folks at Penny Arcade point out in this excellent video on video game testing, your product is competing with dozens of other products, so it has to be prepared for that. The way to do that is user testing. Check out the video below and notice how the folks at Penny Arcade approach user testing and why you can't be afraid of it:

Let's break down three of the major points in this video and see how we can apply them to our approach to user testing:

1. Be willing to admit you're wrong. As the video points out, you're too close to your projects. You'll have a natural bias. Admitting that you don't know all the answers encourages a lot of "why" questions, which leads to solutions to a problem. In other words, it's OK to be wrong because it'll eventually get you to a win in the end.
2. Fully invest in your work without letting your pride get in the way. As creative types, we naturally fear exposing our work to criticism. After all, we pour our blood, sweat, and tears into our projects. They become our babies. So it's easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to criticism. One way to keep from being reactionary is to solicit specific feedback, such as avoiding open-ended questions and seeking feedback that is directly related to moving your project forward.
3. It's never too early to start user testing. OK, you have an idea for a product, might even have a few pixels finished already, but why start early? Remember Josh Levy and Ross Coen, BeenVerified's co-founders? They blew $550,000 in funding without getting a single customer because they developed a product in silence first and tried to find a market later. As entrepreneur Joel Gascoigne advises, throwing up a landing page that talks about your product is one way to test drive the concept. Testing early is far cheaper than building a product in silence for months.

It might be tough to hear the constructive feedback from your potential users, but it's absolutely crucial to see if your ideas and concepts work. However, getting feedback isn't enough, you also have to be open-minded and willing to accept that you might not have all the answers.

Steven Levitt, influential economist and author of "Freakonomics," said it best when it came to the typical business manager's obsessive need to be right in a recent podcast:

“What I’ve found in business is that almost no one will ever admit to not knowing the answer to a question. So even if they absolutely have no idea what the answer is, if it’s within their realm of expertise, faking is just an important part.

I really have come to believe teaching MBAs that one of the most important things you learn as an MBA is how to pretend you know the answer to any question even though you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.

And I’ve found it’s really one of the most destructive factors in business is that everyone masquerades like they know the answer and no one will ever admit they don’t know the answer, and it makes it almost impossible to learn.”

Most people in business are wired to get it “right.” Put on the spot, pressed for time, squeezed by competition — you feel obligated to provide lots of answers on the spot and project confidence, above all. That makes you look good, pleases your boss, and gets you ahead.

When you’re wired to get it right, the risk of getting it wrong seems huge. Failure feels crushing and steers you away from uncertainty or taking risks, pulling you more toward the warm embrace of schedules, requirements, and niggling details.

As seductive and easy as it is to do, managing for the “right” answers has two critical flaws that will hurt you and your team in the long run:

1. It demotivates employees by squelching their autonomy and sense of purpose for the mission the team should be sharing together.
2. It kills questions that would open up big opportunities for innovation by listening to varied sources, entertaining unsafe ideas, and asking 'why.'

Design leadership can cure this reductive management style. Those who lead should feel comfortable saying, "I don't know, but I know how to find out." They should inspire a team to take small risks, collaborate effectively, and run toward uncertainty.

Design methodologies are leaders' safety net so they don't feel the need to act like they have all the right answers. Two critical ingredients of effective design leadership are:

1. Embrace “enlightened” trial-and-error, encourage lots of 'why' questions, and brainstorm lots of potential solutions first. Most solutions will end up on the cutting room floor, which is scary and can seem wasteful at first, but ends up being a vital leap of faith to help lead your team to the win.
2. Expose the team to real world customer feedback early and often. After all, the ultimate arbiter of success will be your customers, not your boss. Engage customers to help the team understand which concepts are the real winners. This will give them a sense of accomplishment and inspire them to reach for something bigger than themselves!

A truly effective leader embraces uncertainty and admits to not having all the right answers to start. By doing so, managers can learn to check their hubris at the door and open up their team's ability to ask dumb questions, listen hard for answers, and really learn. After all, as Levitt hinted at in his comment, it's this ability to collectively learn that makes a business healthy, constructive, and innovative in its marketplace.

We're very passionate about feedback here at ZURB. We put a lot of effort into how to soliciting great feedback as well as giving great feedback.

We receive a lot of feedback from clients and teammates, some of which we solicit and some which we do not. What we don't want is detailed, nitpicky feedback when we're presenting a new idea to a client. Likewise, we usually want very detailed feedback when we present hi-fi wireframes to clients. So we thought: wouldn't it be nice if we had an app to help us control what type of feedback our clients would give us?

Different Ways to Solicit Feedback

We started to touch upon a few of these already, but there are numerous ways you can get feedback from clients and teammates:

1. You might want to simply guide people through a few mockups over the phone without soliciting any detailed feedback. You just want a poor man’s Webex without much setup: throw up a few screens up there, share a private link with your client, and control what they see on their screen as you talk on the phone.
   
   Check out an example here >>
2. You might not want to get on the phone with your clients or teammates and ask for their opinions on a few visual explorations. Do they like it? No? A quick "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" does the trick. If you want more detailed feedback, you can let them leave a comment on each mockup after they give their "thumbs up" or "thumbs down."
   
   Check out an example here >>
3. Finally, you might want very detailed feedback about final wireframes. In this case, you’ll need to give people specific directions and an ability to leave annotations on each mockup in your design presentation.
   
   Check out an example here >>

Summary of Feedback All in One Place

The trick, of course, isn't just controlling how you get feedback. You also have to make sense of it. It's really painful to ask for feedback then sort through 40-odd notes and comments to figure out what people think about your mockups. So ideally you want a quick summary that summarizes all your feedback.

You want one place where you can see all the thumbs up, comments, and annotations. This makes it easier to scan through your feedback. By doing so, you'll be able to drive the design process forward more quickly and iterate on your mockups faster.

Introducing Influence

By this point in the blog post, you might be wondering — what is this app that ZURBians are using to control the feedback they get from clients? Remember the little app we launched back in August to help you present your design ideas and reel in the feedback?

Today, we're excited to announce the private release of Reel's mother app Influence - a quick way to present new design ideas for feedback. We recognized that presenting design ideas, controlling and making sense of feedback you get was a problem for any freelancer, contractor, or company that is designing products. We created Influence to solve this problem.

We'll start letting early adopters in today to check out Influence and give us feedback (about an app to control how you get feedback — no pun intended!). For now you can sign up and we’ll let you in soon!

Sign Up For Influence

We're pumped to hearing your thoughts about Influence!

Not too long ago, product designers had a lot more control. As designers, we knew exactly which device and software our target users would use to consume information and interact with our product. We knew the specific interactions that users would use and how they would experience our product. So it was easy to rely on traditional task analysis and customer profiling to figure out how an interface should work. Not anymore!

Nowadays, there are thousands of different devices and tons of different ways people can consume information and interact with our products. Think about it. We have absolutely no idea whether the user will use a TV, a laptop, a phone, a tablet, or some other hybrid device to use our product. Then there's email, Twitter, Facebook, RSS, or whatever else to consume information — we don't always know which of these a user will turn to.

We've lost control of how customers will interact with our products.

What does this all mean?

It means that we can no longer focus on building “a thing” to solve a very specific situation. We need to build a more holistic solution to a bigger problem. We need to understand the drives, blocks, emotions and beliefs of our users at key conversion points as they use our products across all the devices and use cases.

Eric Schaffer, of HFI International, discusses this very problem and how Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust (PET) analysis helps product designers build holistic solutions.

Think Bigger

Times have changed. The old ways of task analysis and customer profiling don't work anymore. We've got to think bigger when it comes to the people using our products and how they're interacting with them.

At ZURB, our workday gets packed quickly with client projects and our own projects. A tiny distraction can upset our workflow and destroy our productivity. So when we read this Inc. Magazine article on the seven things highly productive people do, it got us thinking about what distracts us throughout the day.

Think about your workday. What distracts you? Email? Multitasking? Or feeling overwhelmed by a large project? Staying on task and meeting goals takes deliberate practice. Below are three pieces of advice that keeps us from getting too distracted, which we wanted to share with you.

Manage Your Email, Don't Let It Manage You

How Flickr Co-Founder Caterina Fake manages her email.

When it comes to email, it's easy to allow a swelling inbox consume your entire workday. That's why Inc. Magazine suggests picking two or three times out of the day to check your inbox. Believe it or not, the article's suggestion is something we've heard before from a few influencers.

Take Ben Blumenfeld, communication design manager at Facebook, for instance. He doesn't think of email as a "must do" task, saying he thinks of responding to an email as optional. We know that's hard. Email is an addictive distraction. We have to respond quickly or it might seem that we're ignoring the person on the other end. However, when email dictates your day, you lose hours you could be using to accomplish a task or goal.

Working Backwards

Scribbling down a lofty goal on the top of your task list that says build an awesome app that translates any language into Klingon is a "sure way to make sure it never gets done," says Inc. By working backwards, says the article, you can slice the work up into smaller, more manageable bits. That's something we already do as part of our design process. We call it timeboxing, which forces us to limit what we're doing by how much time we actually have.

Another way we put a fire under our butts is by planning a 5-day outlook. Breaking down a huge project into smaller time chunks keeps us from getting overwhelmed and off task.

Multitasking Can't Always Be Avoided

The biggest distraction of them all is multitasking, which researchers say saps the brain. In the rush to complete a project, it's nearly impossible to not juggle several different tasks. So Inc. Magazine's suggestion to completely stop multitasking doesn't really work. This Harvard Business Review article suggests that multitasking can't be avoided and may actually be beneficial to entrepreneurs.

The trick, however, is to optimize your multitasking and know the cost of switching gears on your productivity. When there's too much structure in your day, it's hard to have the flexibility to switch gears on multiple tasks. Say, for instance, your day is scheduled around meetings, then multitasking would just get in the way. In other words, what's true for one person isn't always true for everyone. Multitasking has to be taken on a case-by-case basis.

Stay Focused On Your Terms

While these are the ways we stay productive, which we hope you find useful, we know that they don't always work for everyone. Your workflow may be different from ours. Somedays you may have to multitask, other days it's not possible. In end, however, stay focused and it's in your hands to figure out how best to do that.

Browsing Quora recently, a question on product design caught my eye: "What are the key differences between ‘Normals’ (normal mainstream users) and tech early adopters?”

It's a common concern of people working on new products — most of you have probably seen variations on this graphic:

By definition, early adopters make up only a small percentage of the typical-user base of a successful product. New products and services tend to live or die based on their ability to cross over into a mainstream audience (see Geoffrey Moore's classic "Crossing the Chasm").

Most Quora answers focused on early adopters’ tech savviness and comfort using social apps and other technologies, but that’s only part of the story. There are actually two types of early adopters: I like to call them "Tire Kickers" and "People With Their Hair on Fire." Spotting the difference between these groups is key to identifying the right kind of feedback and putting together the best roadmap for you product.

Let's take a look:

Tire Kickers: Technology Junkies

Tire Kickers have a general interest in the field and like to play with new technologies, but most of the time won't convert to long-term users because they don't have a need for it. These are your tech bloggers who try a product then post about it. They like to be first, and tend to be very vocal with their opinions — but they may not always be the best source of feedback, because they have so little in common with mainstream users or people trying to solve a specific problem.

However, don't dismiss Tire Kickers out of hand. They can be valuable allies when it comes to a blog post or word-of-mouth. However, they're not likely to become long-term users of the products they try because their attention span casts a wide net.

In other words, they'll kick the tires, check out the interior, maybe take a car out for a test drive and tell their friends how cool it is, but, in the end, they don't buy the car.

People With Their Hair on Fire: Your Superfans

When it comes to early adopters, People With Their Hair on Fire (PWTHOF) are the ones to focus on. These are the people who use your technology because you're solving a pressing problem for them, regardless of whether they typically fall into the role of early adopter or not. These are the ones who will tell you how your product fits into their daily lives, how they use it to solve problems, what they love, and what they hate.

Create a dialogue with them and be responsive. Because your product solves a problem for them, these users tend to be forgiving of bugs or usability oddities. They’ll often be willing to help test out new features and give honest feedback.

Why are these people important? Well, PWTHOFs and mainstream users are just two sides of the same coin — users who are typically mainstream that might become early adopters when a product fulfills a real need for them. This means two things: 1) they'll be more typical when it comes to comfort with technology and ability to learn new features, and 2) they're likely to know other people with similar characteristics. Both of these factors are invaluable when it comes to designing for your users.

But who's who?

So if the PWTHOFs are key to your product's future, and Tire Kickers will fall by the wayside, how do you identify which is which?

Well, there's no substitute for talking to people. Respond to users on Twitter, reach out via email, have conversations on the phone. Once you're talking one-on-one, it'll be easy to see who's been diving deeply into features and who's just giving surface feedback.

Win over those PWTHOFs, and not only will you have a fan for life, but you'll be well on your way to winning the hearts and minds of mainstream users.

We've said it once, and we’ll say it again, user experience design doesn’t exist. This term simply does not make much sense to us. So it’s no surprise that this comment from a fellow designer on the blog post from Tuesday caught our eye:

Whitney’s article titled You're Not A User Experience Designer If ... drills into the heart of our argument of what actually goes into the field of User Experience Design: graphic design, psychology, communication design, user research, sociology, usability and much much more. To say that you are an “expert in user experience design” is to say that you are an expert in most of these fields. So you can see why ZURBians tend to give someone the eye when they hear “I’m a UX Designer” from people. It’s tough to figure which part of the practice they actually belong to.

Whitney’s article centers on the graphic design field within the user experience umbrella, specifically what makes up a great graphic designer. She outlines 10 great questions that help weed out designers who simply craft and push pixels around without having a clear idea why they are doing so. Three of the points hit close to home, so we decided to show some real life examples of them in this post:

1. You Don't Talk to Users

   If you design entirely based on intuition without ever gathering intel from a single human being who might at some point in their life come into contact with your business, I’m sorry, but you just aren’t a user experience designer.

   Example: Over the years, we've seen many startups turn a deaf ear to their users. Remember software startup Devver? Don't worry if you haven't. Devver crashed and burned in 2010 after two years in operation. Co-founder Ben Brinckerhoff blames the failure partly on their hesitation to get feedback from their customers. The focus was on the product, not their customers.

2. You can't ID your target audience

   If asked who your site is intended for and you say anyone and everyone, you are wrong. If a product is designed for everyone, it works for no one.

   Example: This actually happened to Josh Levy and Ross Cohen, BeenVerified's co-founders. They burned through $550,000 in funding without getting a single customer. That's because they spent years developing a product that didn't have a market. Then there's Eric Reis. He spent six months building a product that nobody wanted to use.

3. You don't define the problem

If your boss tells you what to build and you don’t start the project by first determining why — the specific pain point that people are currently experiencing that your product aims to eliminate — you’re a lackey, not a user advocate.

Example: Simon Sinek tackled this issue in his book "The Power of Why." Most designers tell others the ins and outs of their products then expect them to pay for it. That doesn't work. Simon says every inspiring leader — from Martin Luther King Jr. to companies like Apple — all talk and think the same. They ask "Why" first.

Hopefully these questions and examples have motivated you to ask "Why." Everyday I meet a designer who is simply doing what she or he is told by the client without challenging the assumptions. Asking "Why" and having customer validation not only makes you a stronger designer but gives you a reason to do what you do (besides money). It helps you understand how the product you're designing will be used by customers.

Whitney has seven other amazing questions in her article, make sure to check them out. Everyone who is designing anything should be asking these questions. We'd love to hear if you have any questions of your own to add to the list. Give us a shout in the comments.

Yesterday’s tweet from Chris Dixon, a well known investor and founder of Hunch, caught our eye:

"Desingineer" -> mythical person startups are looking for who can do UI, UX and also excellent front- and back-end coding. ^TS

— chris dixon (@cdixon) December 19, 2011

In the past few years people have started paying an insane amount of attention to “great design and usability of products." Why is that? Well, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and business folks are starting to realize that “Design” is their competitive advantage. Most of the technology capabilities have already been commoditized. Design has not. So it is no surprise that "great designers" are in high demand.

However, most people still have no idea what makes up a great designer or how great designs are made. To most a great design simply means: pretty, hand crafted pixels on your website that take your breath away. “Just give me a pretty graphic, with some simple wording, and a nicely designed button and I’ll slap it on my site” — this is how most people think about a nice design for a site, and it’s wrong.

Eric Schaffer, founder of Human Factors International, does a phenomenal job outlining the central element of great design in this video — the user:

The word "user" is unfortunately missing from most of the work typical "designers" deal with on regular basis. Take a look at this job listing which came up first on Indeed for "Designer in Bay Area". How many times does the word "user" appear in it? Zero times. Yet it should be the basis for their entire role.

The difference between people who just craft pretty pixels and images and the people who think about the drives, beliefs, feelings and needs of their users is what makes up amazing designers and products. Once you can understand this difference, you’ll understand what a great designer does and why there is so few of them.

ZURBians working under a time constraint during ZURBwired

As product designers, it seems counterintuitive to say that imposing hard rules spark wild creativity, but it really does do the trick. It can lead to some great designs, products, and even great music.

In an recent interview with the folks at Sound Opinions, musician and famous music producer Brian Eno said that his process of creating new music starts by locking down some rules or constraints.

I notice that I work better when I try to specify as much as I can. Is there a deadline? When is it? How much am I prepared to spend doing this? I mean time and money. What do I intend to do with it when I finish? Is it going to come out as this or that and so on and so on?

Let’s break this idea down:

1. Constraints force a different way of approaching a problem. Eno points out that confining yourself and your problem forces you to be more novel in your solution. By doing so, Eno says you’ll be forced to shake your preconceived notions and view your problem from several different angles.
2. Constraints force you into timeboxing, where you continually limit what you're doing based on the availability of your time. By doing so, you’ll actually focus on the result and get products made more quickly. Deadlines don’t have to be debilitating and can actually work to your advantage.
3. Constraints force you to say "no." Eno says constraints cut out a lot of possibilities. This isn’t easy. Saying no is really hard. Contraints, however, help you self-edit. In other words, eliminate the crappy stuff before you waste your time on it. You'll find yourself being more innovative because you aren't worrying about accomplishing a billion things. As Steve Jobs says, innovation means saying "no" to a 1,000 things.

Creative ideas will wildly bloom the more you confine yourself because you’ll be forced to think your way out. Enjoy the constraints, don't hate them. As Eno says:

None of the rules are forever. The rules are really there to help you enjoy the game more. No game is fun if it doesn't have any rules. The reason we like games is that there are rules within which we can develop skills and sensibilities and ways of communicating with each other.