It was, after all, an innovation. It represented a different way of dicing onions and chopping liver: it required consumers to rethink the way they went about their business in the kitchen. Like most great innovations, it was disruptive. And how to dyou pursuade people to disrupt their lives? Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention to costumers – not once or twice but three or four times with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and finally sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.
The Pitchman by Malcom Gladwell, in What the Dog Saw
I was reading last night about a simple disruptive innovation in the cooking world that made hundreds of millions of dollars. The Veg-O-Matic. Reading that, I was thinking of another product that did virtually the same selling, the same pitching, an elegant form of an infomercial for a fruit company.
Very impressive. Like a disabled button this doorknob more clearly says locked. I would take it one step further and have an icon or some change in color that suggested that the door is presently locked, but not always locked. Then I’m not given the wrong idea that I can never enter, instead I can easily see I’m just not allowed to enter just now.
By designer Arnaud Lapierrevia
Via gregmelander:
Working the Product: Align Your Design
One of the most difficult parts of transitioning from service oriented design as a web designer to product oriented design as a Creative Director has been the need to align the design for many moving parts.
At Zaarly we have several teams all with access and need for interface, visual assets, and visual direction. We have a rapid release marketing team with some crazy ideas and amazing talent and they’ll push the limits of our brand, and occasionally try to break them. Then we have an eager and agressive product team always ready to publish, and often in need of fresh design work for new features.
With high demand for output on a visual brand and product interface that are still maturing (Zaarly is less than six months old you’ll remember), it can be incredibly challenging to keep the quality high and simultaneously meet the demand for output. The sheer volume of a product like Zaarly’s is ten times what I’ve had in any other project.
Align the design, or the personality of the product will suffer
The best way for me to address the competing need for quality and output is to start by aligning the design. When you’re the only person designing that might be slightly easier, but when you’re two designers and a slew of contractors, along with a large group of people in your company who own Photoshop (which should be punishable by death or severe restriction of alcohol), then it takes a more concerted effort.
Get designers you can trust. It’s crucial to find the right designers for your team so that you don’t feel like you’re having to redesign everything that comes through your door, or just feeling frustrated because you’re outputting a poor product. A good designer will know how to listen to criticism and instruction, but they think for themselves. A good designer understands constraints and knows when to pull back on something because going big would not serve business needs even though it might produce a Dribbble-gasm.
Work from a style guide. A few weeks ago we created both a brand guideline and a document that we are calling the Masters of the Universe PSD. Both documents are evolving but create a center for us to resonate with and compare new ideas against. We are always asking ourselves if this new thought resonates with the bigger picture of what’s already been done. The Masters PSD is huge 2000px by 7000px. It is filled with the different iterations of styles that have been produced for Zaarly web. The goal is actually to reduce its size as we begin to apply better and stronger constraints to the design. We’ll follow this up with a similar PSD for the iPhone app, Android App, and anything else that follows.
- View the work as a continuum. At the speed we’re moving and given the overall philosophy of the Zaarly team, I won’t be able to control every aspect of the creative that gets marked with Zaarly. However, I can set a goal for what things could look like in 3 months, 6 months, 1 year… and work to train my team and all the teams at Zaarly to understand the importance of consistent quality as a powerful tool to engage and retain the people who will grow to love our product.
The other area where the work is a continuum is where it is maturing. The first push for Zaarly was fun and vibrant with illustrations bounding off the page. The next movement for our product and visual communication will be to retain the best parts of the emotional impact while maturing the interface and application to feel secure and safe — we are after all dealing with people’s hard earned money. I have to be able to take the alignment of the design gradually forward in some areas, and then in other areas realize that a change will have to wait till a major release ala 2.0.
This is Part 3 of Working the Product
Working the Product: Demand Process
Good design is born out of process. A process is as simple as a recipe. Some recipe’s like Kraft Macaroni & Cheese call for boxed noodles and packaged dried cheese. It has three simple steps, and consistently produces tired foods, but it is nearly fool proof. Without a recipe your sitting on a pile of ingredients that will always come out different. Not a big deal with macaroni & cheese, a little more haphazard with Chicken Tikka Masala.
As the lead of Squared Eye I wasn’t going to give my clients a Macaroni & Cheese experience, I wanted to serve them steak, frites, and a tall glass of Tripel Karmeliet. In other words, I wanted to give them the design and the business experience that would change the way they work, change their expectations of the web industry, and leave them dancing in the streets. In order to do this Icreated a process kept my clients happy and engaged, my output and contractor interactions efficient, and money in my pockets.
It took time to develop that process for Squared Eye, and it will take time to develop one for a new born product like Zaarly. It will happen along the way, and at startup speed.
Every part of a product process is Design
Business Goals I’m learning that a decent product process starts with a solid business goal. It should be a goal that provides for a consumer need, or helps draw out a need that is obscured by a stale system that needs disrupting (like our economy for instance). Without this root, the following parts of the process will be empty of impact and probably riddled with confusion and frustration. This is design at its best, solving real problems with edifying solutions.
Product Roadmap and User Experience I’m still not sure how the road map and UX interrelate, but I see them as a kind of liaison between business, interface or visual design, and people who use your product. The roadmap is necessary to know where you’re going and how to unfold that experience for the audience in a meaningful and consistent way. User Experience is a part of our industry that’s thrown around like a hot potato. For my purposes here I’m speaking to the kind of UX that deals with the high level concepts and flows that make using a product so easy and enjoyable that people forget they’re using it.
Information Architecture, Copy Writing, Content Strategy, and Prototyping Transition into working with content. Copy, buttons, actions, titles, descriptions, images, navigation, and more make up the content in a product and all of this has to be organized into proper hierarchy and flow according to UX and business goals. This is not a dry stage, but acutely important to design and development phases of the process. Without these steps, designers are moving by intuition alone and can often create great looking products with a poor flow or care for the edge cases. The prototyping phase of this is particularly important if the product has complicated interactions that need to be simplified. (Side note, check out Invision App, awesome prototyping tool). At their core, these steps are design. They are the structure and scaffolding of the product.
UX Design, Interaction Design, Visual and Graphic Design If done well, the IA, copy, and prototyping becomes the raw clear ingredients for the interaction and design team. By now the focus of the feature being developed should be pretty well along and making sense to the whole team. Everyone has already contributed major input and so now its time to make the interactions and visual treatment elegant, in-brand, and compelling.
This is a time for the visual look & feel to take precedent, but as a Creative Director, its my job to be proportionately involved in every step of the process. I’m only half a CD if I can’t dive into the creative business decisions that are driving Zaarly.
Development In a good process, developers have been involved along the whole way, from business through design. Without their involvement and leadership the product expectations will fail because they were either unrealistic or weak because the prior teams didn’t understand the capabilities of their developers or the available technologies.
Development is design. Anybody can be taught to code, and some coders are better than others, but the best developers are those who think in design and execute with innovation or simplicity when appropriate.
Quality Assurance This is a big one. Everyone up to this point is so involved in the product that the assumed flows and uses of the product have become static. A QA team should be involved throughout the feature push, and particularly during any prototyping, but this is the critical moment where all the testing and assumptions are put under fire. QA is feeding issues to designers and developers, and if need be, even further back. This is the filter for everything that goes out, so that your audience is experiencing your best.
Ship I’ll get to this more in the last portion of this Working the Product thing I’m writing, but in short, this part of the process is why all the others exist. Without shipping, you have no product.
Bringing it together
I’m seeing a kind of rotational relay race in product creation, or perhaps something more akin to the way cyclists will take lead while their teammates draft behind them. None of these steps are hand offs and totally independent, but each step in the process may have the emphasis as features are pushed through.
Regardless, the process isn’t fixed. It changes based on the experiences, maturity, and growth of a company. The process should be self-critical, and often reinvented. The process should change as we keep learning.
This is Part 2 of Working the Product
Working the Product
Six and a half years ago I was working at a thrift store, wondering what the hell I was going to do with my life to provide for a new, and newly pregnant wife. Five years ago I began a journey into a service industry, designing and building websites for small businesses and churches. Three years ago I rebranded as Squared Eye and aimed my sights at taking on more challenging projects with deeper pockets and a bigger vision. Six weeks ago I joined a brand new startup called Zaarly as the Creative Director of a product that will either flop or dynamically change the way we buy and sell. This last shift has me feeling like I’m back in the trenches. I’m relearning and rethinking the process of how to execute on a design and how to ship a product.
Below are my the thoughts I have on this thing, six weeks in. Instead of waiting till I have the whole thing written out, I’ll just show you where I’m going along the way.
Demand Process
Align Your Design
Know Your Team
Maintain the Dream
Stay Human
Ship
