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

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?

LTV Defined

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.

Simplicity Isn't An End-All-Be-All

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.

A 40% Jump, Thanks to Layered Complexity

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?

Photo credit: Sarah Ackerman

I’m gonna tell you a little secret. I still get sweaty palms whenever I submit a piece of work for feedback. Doesn’t matter if it’s a blog post. A new ZURBword. A paper napkin sketch. Or pitching a still raw, uncooked idea. The anxiety a creative-type can feel when it comes to getting feedback is the worse feeling in the world. But feedback is an unavoidable and necessary part of the job.

Let’s face it, putting work in front of people for criticism is pretty hard. After all, who wants to expose something they’ve poured their blood, sweet and tears to criticism? Who likes hearing where they've gone wrong? But we need constructive feedback to improve our designs, our products. We need good feedback or we risk failure.

And you’ll get several types of feedback from different types of people on your team. So it’s easy to have a knee-jerk reaction, but that won’t help you or your work in the long-run.

How To Take Feedback Well

Next time you’re getting sweaty palms while getting feedback, try to keep the following in mind:

• Don’t take it personally. You’ve spent a lot of time on your design, put a lot of effort into it. You’ve fully invested yourself in your work. So it’s understandable that your first instinctually reaction is to take it personally. After all, it’s your baby. But feedback is about the work, not you.
• Be willing to admit you’re wrong. It’s hard to separate yourself from your work. You’re too close, biased. By admitting you’re wrong, you’ll end up asking specific questions, which will more easily ferret out potential solutions to problems.
• Be willing to fight for your ideas. Admitting you’re wrong doesn’t mean you have to put away the boxing gloves. If it’s something you firmly believe in, something you’re passionate about, be prepared to back up your choices with concrete numbers or competitive examples that have either worked or failed. However, you won’t win your fight if you constantly highlight that the other person is wrong and argue for the sake of arguing.
• Follow through. It’s not enough to receive feedback. We have to prioritize the feedback we receive. Think of it as design triage. Then we have to take action, implementing that feedback and iterating on our designs.

Feedback doesn’t have to give you sweaty palms. Remember that it’s not about you, but the work. Getting good feedback can help take your work to the next level of awesomeness. However, your work won’t get there if you're a knee-jerk reactionary every time you receive feedback.

Love that clip of Harlan Ellison because it doesn’t just apply to writers. It applies to designers as well. With more and more companies turning to designers to take their products to the next level, there’s a danger of not getting paid what they’re worth. And with more and more competition, it’s easy to put out the tin cup, taking any amount of cash a client is willing to plunk in to get that next job.

Lowballing what your work is worth, however, can potentially damage your relationship with a client. Or as Andy Budd puts it in this article:

The problem is, when a professional relationship begins with a compromise, it’s very difficult to gain your power back.

Andy makes a great point when he says that the power is in the hands of the designer, not the client. Designers hold the cards, he says, because they are, after all, the experts. Andy urges designers to stop holding themselves back because "we're so desperate to win work that we'll drop our prices and compromise on quality." Great, but how do designers do that? How do they make sure they get paid what they are worth?

By proving your worth, that you are the expert.

Proving Your Worth

Let’s go back to Harlan Ellison for a sec. He knows his worth. But he’s proved that worth over decades of hard, deliberate work. He’s written thousands of short stories and articles. He’s written television and movie scripts. He’s got the professional cred to get paid what he’s worth.

Does that mean that designers have to have decades upon decades of work behind them? Sure, it helps to have a backlog of work to show, but it doesn't necessarily have to be decades worth of work. And even if you don't have decades of work, you can still stand out from those folks that push pretty pixels around without any clear idea what they are doing or why they are doing it. How do designers do that? What makes a great designer who gets paid what they are worth? Deliberate practice and hard work.

Here are three practices that can help designers stand out from those that are just pixel pushers:

1. ID-ing your target audience. Nailing down who your users exactly are can make or break a product design. Eric Ries’ first startup crashed and burned because he didn’t figure out who’ll use and pay for his product.
2. Talking to users. It’s not enough to ID your users. You have to talk with them, get their feedback. How will you know what to improve if you don’t get feedback?
3. Defining the problem. Designers have to ask why, as pointed out by Simon Sinek in his book, “The Power of Why.” Most designers neglect asking why first. Without answering why, we can’t define the problem we are solving.

Getting paid what you're worth and keeping yourself from getting taken starts with putting in the hard work and practice to perfect your craft. By doing so, you'll solidify your professional cred, be seen as the expert and be able to haggle for a better price on your work.

It's easy to let things get to you, especially if you're handling a number of projects or clients at once. Maybe a deliverable isn't ready at a level you're happy with, or you're short on inspiration, or you're having trouble connecting with a client. Whatever it is, it can start to pile up, and that starts to sap your ability to follow through with great design. Pro tip: the trick to alleviating that stress is to take a little more time to think through your problem and be prepared.

How to Be Prepared

Try this out next time you're sweating a design problem, business problem or just a people problem:

• Do your homework. Check out research or analytics to provide insights or justification you may not feel confident in. For example, maybe you need to better justify layout decisions, then read up on reading patterns from Jakob Nielsen.
• Memorize the problem. Check out, read over, or better analyze the crux of your stress until you know it inside and out. Familiarity with the subject, the details and broad strokes, will make you feel more comfortable. You might need to spend some serious time reading up on discovery materials, past user research or looking back through your own iteration to get a handle on this.
• Visualize and solve for the stress. Imagine what people will ask, or how they'll react, and anticipate not only that but your own reaction. When we're talking to clients, we like to have a good picture of what they'll ask and where they'll have concerns so we're ready to answer.

Being prepared for something that's stressing you will not only help you feel better, it'll help you solve the problem and turn it into an opportunity. You'll be more confident, your colleague or client will feel better, and you'll do better work. Simple, but true.

If you need to really dial down client stress, check out our post on getting sidetracked projects back on track.

When author Harlan Ellison would get asked where he got his ideas, the award-winning writer would joke that he’d send a check to a little shop in Schenectady, NY. In return, the shop would send him a fresh pack of six ideas. Joking aside, truth is that writers, like designers, get their ideas by paying close attention to the world around them and seeing what others are doing.

But as more and more companies turn to design to grow into different markets, different avenues, it can be exhaustive to churn out idea after idea. No longer does it become just about generating a billion ideas. It becomes more and more about narrowing in on the right idea. Finding exactly what matters most to people, what solves their problem.

So how do designers hit on that idea? How do they ferret out the gem among a stack of coals? How do they get the confidence to get it right and keep from being paralyzed by fear of getting it wrong? The real challenge to those questions is trying to solve the human problem, according to this video by the folks at Continuum, a design strategy firm that works on everything from industrial products to household products like coffee makers. Check out the video below and watch how the designers narrow down on the right idea:

Notice how the designers in the video use many design methods in their hunt for the right solution, such as brainstorming, sketching, and interviewing. They even collaborate along the way, exploring dozens of ideas together to get to the right one. That being said, let's take a closer look at three points from the video.

1. Understanding users’ needs and values. User aspirations tell us more than past product choices, the video points out. It’s not enough to know just who our potential users are. What separates a great designer from one that just moves pixels is the person who delves deep into the drives, beliefs, feelings and needs of their users. If not, the consequences could be dire. Remember Josh Levy and Ross Cohen, co-founders of BeenVerifed, who burned through $550,000 in funding without getting a single customer? That’s because they spent months developing a product that didn’t have a market, that nobody wanted to use.
2. Getting ideas quickly into the wild. Tinkering with a prototype gets the idea out into the wild quickly, so we can user test and refine the prototype. More than that, putting work out in front of would-be users as soon as possible can prevent a lot of heartache in the end. Take Google Wave for instance. Sure, it was a pretty technically impressive application, but it was a big flop. That’s because Google didn’t learn how users would respond to Wave before they released it.
3. Good design strategy is actionable. As one designer says in the video, sometimes things that are called design strategy actually end in user insights rather than ideas. The key is turning those user insights into meaningful action. Take for instance our work with Borealis, a software company for managing environmentally responsible oil and gas projects. Insights from frustrated users led us to the actionable idea of centering the application around the users' profiles. More than that, we struck upon the idea of mini-apps that were easier to build, maintain, and would excite users.

Getting to the right solution to a human problem requires deliberate practice, digging deep into the problem, asking tons of questions and sifting through dozens of ideas. It requires understanding users inside and out. By doing so, designers can strike upon the right idea without fearing they'll end up with a flop.

Remember how yesterday we told you about refining your designs in-browser quickly? Well, that was only part of the story ... really, the tail end of the story of how we used Foundation to code up a prototype in the browser for our new ZURBword front page. Take a look at our old page:

As you can see, there wasn't much to look at. It was nothing more than a directory, a list of words with not much going on. We wanted something a bit more eye-catching that would encourage people to click around and check out our thoughts on some hearty design concepts. So around November last year, we started sketching out some ideas to take the site to the next level.

But did we want to take those ideas and put them into Photoshop? Or did we want to go straight to code, designing in the browser? A lot of designers debate whether they should design in browser or not.

However, the one big advantage to prototyping in the browser is that it's faster, trimming off several steps in the design process, especially if you already have an established visual style. Since we wanted to get the new ZURBword up as fast as possible, we decided to prototype it in the browser.

Getting It in the Browser

We started playing with a few ideas, trying to figure out what would actually work. Take a look at some of our early ideas below. Click on the images to see a larger image.

Here we lost a bit of focus on the content. There was too much line work going on and everything felt too structured and boxy. Overall, it felt too much like a beefed-up directory. So out these ideas went and it was back to the drawing board.

Playing around with the lines and images, however, we came up these next set of images. Take a look (click on the images to see a larger image):

The design on the left, however, felt too forced, an island of stuff in a sea of text. The one on the right broke things up, which was kinda awesome. But there was that darn line problem again. Everything felt trapped, contained too much. However, we played even more with the blocks of content seeing where it would take us.

Our exploration led us to the designs below. Click on the images to see a larger picture:

In the end, we did something like 10 iterations to get to our final design. But we weren't quite done yet.

Refining Our Design with the Inspector

As we said yesterday, we refined our designs by opening up the Chrome inspector. In less than five-minutes, a group of us, including myself, were able to quickly critique the design and suggest changes, which the inspector let us see instantaneously. We were able to change the background from white to gray and even add a drop shadow to the boxes.

We also reversed engineered Foundation to add a couple more columns on the side for wider screens. One other nifty touch was having the images rotate each time you land on the front page.

With those final changes in place, we were able to launch shortly after that. All in all, it took us a few weeks to get the new ZURBword up and running. And all thanks to in-browser prototyping.

Our days can be pretty busy at ZURB. Sometimes we don’t have time to stop everything and do a full-blown design critique. Sometimes we just want quick and dirty feedback. That’s where in-browser prototyping comes in handy, especially when we’ve got a design that’s nearly there but not quite there yet.

In-browser prototyping came in handy while we were putting the finishing touches on the rebooted ZURBword. The original site wasn’t up to snuff. So we put Arthur to work on a swank redesign. As he got closer to the final design, four of us huddled around Arthur and his computer, giving him a speedy design critique in about five minutes. To do it, we simply opened up the Chrome inspector to see some instantaneous changes. How we did it is something we wanted to share with you.

Getting Dirty with Chrome Inspector

The original white background of our nearly-complete page wasn’t quite working. So Bryan suggested using gray. That’s when we opened up the Chrome inspector, searching the left-hand DOM for the body element. Take a look (click on the image for a larger view):

We then went into the right-hand style box and started fiddling with the CSS, changing the color of the background. Click on the image below to see a larger picture of what we did:

Next we decided to add a drop shadow. So we moved in the DOM to the class we used for each of the containing boxes, to find the box-shadow in the style-box, double clicked on it, changing it to “0px 2px 5px rgba(0,0,0,0.15)” to add the shadow. Check out the larger image of what we did by clicking the image below:

Not An Excuse for Backseat Design

The changes only stick around as long as you don’t reload the page. Once you reload the page, the changes will vanish. So you’ll have to go into the actually CSS to make the changes permanent. Take for instance the box shadow, we used CSS3 to make it permanent on the actually code. (So that particular change might not show up on older browsers.)

In any case, in-browser design critiques aren’t an excuse for backseat designing. It’s meant to be really quick, really dirty so you can be scrappy and prototype your ideas instantaneously.

Critics have been slamming brainstorming almost as long as it's been around. They say it doesn't work. That working in solitude generates more ideas than a brainstorm. The problem, however, isn't whether brainstorming works or not. The real problem is that about 90% of the people we come across who say they are brainstorming aren't really brainstorming at all.

When it comes to solid proof that brainstorming doesn't work, critics point to a 1958 study that found that college students came up with twice as many ideas working alone than when they brainstormed together in groups. One problem with this study, however, is that it didn't actually test the techniques of brainstorming.

When the techniques are properly used, brainstorming can be an effective design method. However, most of the people we see that brainstorm don't do it right, using brainstorming to get consensus rather than generate ideas.

Understand the Brainstorming Rules

We've found that brainstorming works better in small groups, no more than five people. A facilitator is necessary to keep people in line and make sure everyone follows the rules. The techniques for a good brainstorm are:

• Quantity rules — Explore a large quantity of ideas first. The more, the better. Decision and analytical thinking come after the brainstorm.
• Reserve Criticism — Don't criticize any idea in a brainstorm at first, encourage participation instead. A recent New Yorker article suggest that criticism can help brainstorms. But that's a separate design method that comes later, after the brainstorm.
• Encourage wild ideas and build off them — Don't discourage ideas, no matter how crazy. Never say "but." Use "and" instead. Keep it going, riffing off idea after idea.
• Stay on topic — Try not to stray from the topic at hand and keep one conversation going at a time. Timeboxing helps keep a brainstorming session focused.

Constraints, such as the ones above, reduce uncertainty and stress, allowing teams to be more creative and generate more ideas. But, like with everything else, practice makes perfect when it comes to brainstorming. For example, brainstorming works exceptionally well for designers at IDEO because it’s a skill that they learn and hone through deliberate practice, according to a 1996 study from Administrative Science Quarterly. Or as the study puts it:

Designers believe that brainstorming skills take time to learn, that facilitation and participation are distinct skills, and that such skills vary even among experienced engineers.

Brainstorm Sparingly Through The Design Process

It's tempting to use brainstorming to seek consensus and bring the design process to an end. But we've found that brainstorming is best as an idea generator that's used sparingly throughout the design process rather than at every single stage.

Select Participants Carefully

Some brainstorming sessions will require that you have someone on the team that's an expert. Say you're doing a device for heart surgery. You'll want someone in the brainstorming session that's a heart surgeon. It'll do little good to have the janitor participate in the brainstorm.

Don't Forget to Follow Up

Another problem we've seen is that people don't follow up with participants after a brainstorming session. This can kill a great brainstorming session. Participants will want to see the outcome and see how the results will be used next. They won't want to join the next brainstorming session if they know the last one didn't accomplish anything.

Create Space, Encourage Collaboration

Space is crucial to the brainstorming process, as suggested by this recent Co-Design article. Around the offices at ZURB, we have several comfortable rooms where we can stand around huge whiteboards and hash out our ideas.

We even knocked down the walls that separated the design side from the support side. We don't have pesky cubicles to separate us either. We've found that open space encourages collaboration. Without physical blocks, creativity can be unlocked.

Brainstorm Effectively, Breed Creativity

If used properly as a design method, brainstorming can breed creativity. Others will see things that you might not have considered. Having a sounding board, even another person to talk things through, helps spark ideas and let’s you see things that you can’t because you’re too close to your work.

Amazon is really pushing the Kindle and when you go to their homepage, the Kindles are front and center with the Kindle Fire being the most prominently showcased. But have you actually looked at a Kindle Fire? It's not exactly easy to use. So when it comes to usability, the Kindle Fire just plain sucks.

Jakob Nielsen recently trashed the Kindle Fire’s usability, calling it disappointing from a user standpoint. Here are a few of its faults:

1. The browser is awkward and not at all easy to navigate.
2. Buttons are too small for fingers to easily click on, leading to a lot of tap errors.
3. Reading magazines are tough to read and flip back between pages.
4. Lack of a home button and up/down volume button when using apps or browsing the web.

Yet the Kindle Fire is on fire, selling like hotcakes. Millions were sold last year. What is about the Fire that makes people snatch them up? If it’s not usability, then what is it? We all know usability is important, but it seems Amazon has gone beyond that. They’ve managed to tap into the drives, emotions, and beliefs of their users. As Eric Schaffer, of HFI International, explains in the video below, the Kindle Fire is solid proof that usability is not enough.

This is something that's been brought up by Simon Sinek in his book "The Power of Why." When it comes to our products, most of us tell others what it does and expect others to buy it. This doesn't work. Sinek says that every inspiring leader from Martin Luther King Jr. to companies like Amazon is that they think and talk the same way. They start with asking “why.” The Kindle Fire is proof of this.

By asking and answer why first, Amazon has managed to convert people into thinking that they need a tablet that isn’t just a book reader or movie viewer, but that’s a portal into the world.