Velora Studios Blog

4 Faces of Value Driven Design

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:14:00 GMT

Creating value through design is an out-of-the-box skill that some people may call entrepreneurship, while others may describe it as vision. Whichever side you are on, the ability to create value through design leads to the same outstanding result: CHANGE. Advances in design and technology have led to significant changes in world's economy, arguably more than any other social or political event so far.

Therefore, as a value-driven designer, you will constantly be looking to solve problems and remove dead-ends, in an attempt to help people embrace change before it's too late. This article reveals the four faces of value-driven design, and shows how your work as a designer can generate more value, rather than revenue alone, for the next generation.

"You Don't Need Planning Permission to Build Castles in the Sky" by Banksy

Instrumental Design

Design is instrumental in generating value if it facilitates discovery or innovation. There are more and more solutions today coming from a designer's perspective, that are meant to solve social problems. For example - how children learn and interact in the school environment. In this case, design becomes instrumental as it facilitates learning. If you can't afford solving social issues at the moment, there are other alternatives.

For example, design is instrumental in understanding the concept behind an infographic, an area of abstract exploration born at the intersection of journalism, data analysis and storytelling. Design is only part of the process. Being a designer capable of making aesthetically pleasing designs is not enough to create an infographic that clearly conveys data, but design skills are what helps an infographic achieve it's goal.

For infographics, instrumental design creates value by facilitating understanding. It enables people to visualize information that may be difficult to process at once. It creates a new level of understanding, a top-down perspective on multiple facts and concepts tied together by complex visualizations. Instrumental design adds value by simplifying analysis and facilitating insight. You can read more about the relationship between design and infographic design in our previous interview with Alberto Cairo, infographics director, teacher and communicator.

Infographic by Alberto Cairo. (source)

Applied Design

Design is applied creativity. Start-ups should know better: applied creativity in the tech industry is one secret to good cashflow. Applied design can generate more value when the business is focused on niche markets, rather than on producing average solutions for an enormous market. Although niche markets can pay more for well designed products that fit their needs, it's not the type of value we are talking about. Applied design does not create value by making it easier for businesses to increase price markup. It creates value by pushing microtrends to the surface and making very specialized hobbies and crafts more appealing to curious new audiences.

For example, Instagram revived the retro & vintage style by making it extremely easy for everybody to apply color filters to photos. Instagram became successful and nowadays there is more talking going on about how much Instagram is worth, rather than why it is worth that much or the impact it really had on people.

Instagram, an award winning app

Iterative Design

As a designer, it's important to have the right mindset about the things you create: instead of making one-off designs, you can improve ideas and extend your product's life cycle. There is more value in sustainable innovation, than in serial entrepreneurship. Similarly, optimizing an existing solution can be more beneficial - both for yourself, and for the end-user.

This kind of mindset is both sustainable and productive. The designer can avoid creative blocks, while spending more time to improve and innovate before moving to the next idea. Pairing usability testing with creativity is the best way to go. Perfection can be achieved in iterations, you don't need to be an idea generation machine to hit the mark.

Prezi, a web based app reinventing presentations

Empowering Design

There are only a few examples o f design empowering people, compared to the overwhelming number of designs serving other goals Most commonly, design empowers people when its manifested in creating products that improve the way we work, communicate and interact with each other. Everything that technology gives us can be more valuable if designed to empower people. A smartphone app designed to test the quality of water, another that helps deaf people realize when other people are talking to them, a free project inspiring people and teaching them new skills - these are just a couple of examples of empowering design.

MIT Student Uses Phone Camera To Read Vital Signs and Display Them Through a Mirror

Endnote: In an attempt to justify the expense budget, design advocates describe value-driven design in loose terms, commonly overlapping the concept of value with brand reputation and image. However, value-driven design aims to help the consumer and the society in general, not only the business, although as a result, the business may grow to become a global center for innovation and change.

What Will Grow Your Reputation in 2012 as a Designer

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 16:35:00 GMT

Good reputation is good business: it helps you find great clients and helps them find you. This article is a brief round-up of what will grow your reputation in 2012, starting with real examples. However, one should always keep an eye on what's gaining more weight in different environments. Learning to adapt is a designer's best strategy, so let's start with what's proved to be effective so far.

Write with Purpose

Bring your blog back to life and start by establishing a clear goal to achieve by the end of 2012 through writing. Jeffrey Zeldman suggests that a blog post can facilitate more work opportunities than a portfolio. With passion and "a thinking voice" one can turn blogging into a powerful tool to get the desired exposure, grab people's attention and position themselves better as designers.

Speaking of goals, popular designers like Jacob Cass and Brian Hoff are particularly aware of the importance of establishing specific objectives through their blogs. Here is Jacob talking about establishing clear goals and why that is important in building a personal brand through blogging and social media:

Jacob Cass at TEDxCMU: Building a Personal Brand

On the other hand, while clear goals can keep a blog focused, a passionate voice keeps the audience engaged. It's almost like having a mission statement: What are you trying to achieve through blogging? What are you most passionate about? Use the answers to these questions to connect writing with your skills and vision as a designer. A blog is the reflexive and social component of past experiences, documented ideas, solutions to projects, inspirations and topics you are passionate about. Be sure to turn blogging in your favor in 2012.

The Design Cubicle focuses on "client education and design awareness"

Add an App to Your Portfolio

In 2012, apps should be part of a designer's portfolio. With technology pushing digital experiences further, an app can be a designer's best piece and a worthwhile investment. Once complete, it can be released as open source or with a commercial license and turned into a great source of passive income. It's an excellent way to showcase your design skills and vision. Besides, once the 1 million users milestone is reached, it will be very helpful to associate your name with a popular app.

Instagram was App of The Year in 2011

Looking back to 2011's milestones in app design, one can think of Instagram and Path as the two most prominent app designs from last year. With millions of users active every day, the exposure received from designing and building an app is by far a designer's wildest dream. Make it come true this year by investing a few hours of work a day and learning how to code. Start by writing down stories in a project management app like Pivotal Tracker and discuss with a team of developers what's the best way to implement your idea. Getting involved in every stage of the process and being able to make more decisions along the way is highly rewarding.

You can start the year by learning how to code with Code Academy

Make A Design Podcast

A podcast is a remarkably effective inbound marketing tool, bringing you results before it gets in the top 10 list of the best designer podcasts... A podcast is a great opportunity to expose personality to your audience, but it can involve a significant amount of effort to come to this result. Especially video podcasts can take up a lot of time recording, editing and publishing episodes. For a quick start, check out The Podcasting Bible, but make sure you're not missing one of the most important things in podcasting, and that is - making it unique.

Think of a podcast as a product and find a strong unique selling proposition (USP) for it. In podcasting, USPs are a good reason for audiences to continue watching the show; and a key element to getting as much exposure as needed to make your own brand and studio grow. An original concept can take your audience from local to global in a matter of weeks.

BrightLounge is a video podcast where we travel around the world and talk with creative people and entrepreneurs

In podcasting, content and self-presentation are two important aspects that viewers experience first-hand. Everything else, such as content creation, video editing, designing an identity for the show and promoting it happen "behind the scenes". Although hidden from viewers, producing a podcast takes up a lot of time, so make sure you can commit to additional work before starting to webcast.

Support A Good Cause

Designers should be inspired by a cause and motivated to support good changes in the modern society. A cause, unlike a product, survives only on people's ability to adopt and take action on greater values than those they usually benefit from on a daily basis. A cause is often a blind spot in our busy lives, and an opportunity for you to make an impact in 2012.

Popular designers who supported a cause through design last year are Natalie Matsuki and Duane Kinsey of Logobird - organizers of the Japan Earthquake Tributes project and the Bruce Mau Design team, who participated in multiple projects for the greater good, such as The Bureau of Doing Something About It.

The Japan Earthquake Tributes

Build Great Connections, Not Just A Network

A designer doesn't need to talk to a million of people at once; he needs to speak with only a few, from the heart, and those people will talk to millions others for him. In 2012, what's better than growing an enormous follower base is making smarter connections, based on common interests. Google+ and other networking services like Quora and Geekli.st are powerful tools one can use to find more specific targets for more engaging conversions through social media.

A digital network is similar to an open space bent around the connections, topics and communities you're interested in online. Digital networks work on rules that may difficult to apply in actual life scenarios, but the connections made through such networks can be very powerful. Each good connection helps build more credit and grow your centricity score, an indicator services like Klout use to measure one's reputation online. Empowered by social media, a good reputation works as a form of social currency helping designers do more business and become more profitable.

If good reputation would be a badge, it would be very difficult to get. In this article we discussed what popular designers did to brand themselves effectively in 2011. Hopefully, now you can feel inspired and ready to rock in 2012. If you have a personal piece of advice on how designers can build a great reputation, you are welcome to share your thoughts with us!

Time Perception in UX Design

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 18:06:00 GMT

You are close to finishing up your project; your workflow has improved significantly since you started using that project management tool for developers: time is flying. Later that day your flight is delayed and you start reading the news and switch to playing a game: time goes slow; distraction keeps your eyes off the clock until departure.

Time perception is an interesting dimension of user experience that designers need to understand to improve the UI. When users engage with the interface, a slight change in their perception of time can affect their entire experience. In this article we discuss different types of time perception, user scenarios and optimization techniques recommended in each case.

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

Wait Time: A Placeholder for Undefined Activities

When users are waiting or taking a break, time can be perceived as a placeholder for a variety of experiences. Users will try to fill this time with something entertaining. Users can decide to play a game, read news or books, check social updates or search/discover new things.

There are two basic design requirements for entertaining apps meant to fill that wait time: user input should be minimum and the experience should feel rewarding. Interface designers need to minimize the number of interactions users have to perform to reach their goal: this apparent simplicity makes it easier for users to navigate smoothly, remember the experience and repeatedly use that app in similar situations.

Photo by: Oran Viriyincy on Flickr.

Sensitive Time: A Limited Resource to Achieve Goals

When in a hurry, users tend to perceive time as a pressing factor and limited resource for getting things done. The emotional charge involved will transfer to their experience of apps used at that time. In order to avoid frustration and prevent bad user experience, designers will have to determine what is the best design solution to fit important information, both on the mobile and desktop version of the product. High traffic content should be placed in highly accessible areas, and all actions required from users to complete goal relevant tasks should be accessible and clear.

Photo by: Tomas Gianelli on Flickr.

One sure way to optimize interfaces for time sensitive users (in a hurry, on the move) or time sensitive user needs (booking a last minute flight or ticket, fast online purchases) is to identify all possible user paths necessary to complete the task successfully and guide users towards the most efficient one:

Optimize forms necessary to complete a required task - more specific tips can be found in this recent article
Use CSS3 to style your form, add transitions and animation effects for a smoother interaction
Reduce the number of page reloads necessary to complete a task
Use media queries to re-style and optimize the interface based on various media resolutions

Apps used for spotting local deals, booking tickets and making time sensitive decisions are built on very specific user scenarios. In this cases, frequency, instead of duration of usage can accurately indicate a defined preference for the app. Frequency of usage can be a better indicator of user satisfaction and should be considered first in usability testing. Other measures include traffic data and performance indicators that help identify key points in the interface where user paths break before the task has been completed.

Working Time: Consumed to Achieve a State of Flow

The reason why users choose an application for everyday use is because they can achieve a state of flow while reaching their goals. In a state of flow, the time spent using an app may be neutral to users, as long as their expectations are still being met. Nonetheless, for resource intensive apps, that require longer processing times, designers should be more concerned with optimizing the UI elements to help users tolerate the passing of time in a more enjoyable way. This can include: designing better loading bars and providing an estimate of the time involved in certain tasks, allowing users customize the interface to fit their own workflow and setting up hot keys to speed up some steps. These techniques help increase user tolerance and give people a sense of control.

Photo by: Ken Blackwell on Flickr.

For applications where time sensitivity is not a primary concern, usability testing should focus on user workflows and learning curves. Before any user can develop a preference for a certain app, she must be able to learn using it really fast. If the learning curve encourages early adoption, users are more likely to become interested in using the app frequently and for longer periods of time.

A good measure of user involvement that can be tracked during the trial/learning period is the amount of time spent changing default settings to fit one's preferences, customizing the interface, setting up shortcuts, updating one's profile info and so on. This type of behavior is similar to moving to a new house or office and adding a personal touch to the places we expect to spend a lot of time in. Customization options are an important part of user workflows, because they make users experience positive emotions (feel skilled, competent, empowered, personally involved), necessary to achieving the state of "flow".

To sum it up, increase the chances of your users achieving a state of flow by designing applications that are accessible, enjoyable and can be customized to one's taste and preferences.

Endnote: Time perception is relevant in UX design because it shapes the interaction between users and interfaces. This article briefly presented three possibilities of time perception affecting user experience, although we barely touched the surface of a much broader topic. What are your thoughts: should time perception affect design decisions or not?

Resources: Seow, Steve, "Designing and Engineering Time: The Psychology of Time Perception in Software", Pearson Education, 2008

Johnson, Jeff, Ph. D., "Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules", Elsevier Inc., 2010

What We've Been Working on at Velora Studios - BrightLounge and the Velora Network

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:53:00 GMT

Here at Velora Studios, when we are not busy working with our awesome clients, we are busy building our own projects. We are excited to announce the launch of two projects we have been working on for some time now. Read on to hear the story behind BrightLounge, Velora.co and our new network button.

BrightLounge and Velora.co

Introducing BrightLounge, our New Video Podcast

Last month we released BrightLounge, a video podcast about design, startups and technology. BrightLounge is much more than another podcast about design and technology. We have a bold and unique vision: Every episode we travel to a different country to interview inspiring creative people around the world. After our Velora meetup in 2010 we got hooked on traveling. We began filming in March of 2011 and already have a collection of episodes waiting to be released.

In our first episode we interview Ilija Studen, the founder of the popular project management tool, activeCollab (what we use for our own project management). We are telling inspiring stories from people passionate about the work they do and products they create, in different countries around the world.

Talking with Ilija Studen

New episodes will be released every few weeks. You can watch and subscribe to BrightLounge on http://BrightLounge.tv, iTunes, Miro, Youtube and more. If you have any suggestions of people you'd like us to interview or places you'd like us to go, let us know!

The Velora Network and Network Button

We love working and building awesome sites with our wonderful clients. We have such a passion for creation, that we cannot finish a client project and stop there. We've built Velora.co to showcase projects of our own, and to show what we will be working on next. While we will always be a design studio bringing our clients ideas to life, we have a lot of own ideas to show the world as well.

The Velora Network button

There is now a small network button present at the bottom of all our sites. With multiple sites we realized that we need to give users an easy way to navigate between them and see what else we have built.

What Comes Next?

So now we have VeloraStudios.com, BrightLounge.tv and Velora.co, what's next? To reveal a bit more of our roadmap, the Velora Studios site is currently in the process of undergoing a major redesign for a much cleaner and responsive design. We will also be giving the Velora CMS its own website in the near future. Lastly, we are busy building a couple web applications that we cannot wait to show you.

5 Creative Uses of Character Design

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:17:00 GMT

Character design is like the honeycomb of brand strategy, used for decades to raise brand awareness and entice customers of all ages. Character illustrations are making their appearance in web design more often recently, but one needs to understand when and how characters should be used in association with a brand name, product, website or even with themselves. This article highlights the best and most creative uses of character design, with the sole purpose to help you, designer or business owner, understand its magical powers.

What Makes Character Design Great?

We have chatted with people, designers and illustrators and everybody comes with their own recommendation of how character design should be used. Yet, from all these colored viewpoints, one idea stands out as a common denominator: characters are often used to add a playful and fun side to brands and products.

Nicola Smanio, art director and animator, points out to an interesting aspect of character design: humor:

"Character design, in my personal experience, is a good way to bring some humor to a boring matter. TV advertisers noticed quite early that humor is probably the best way to build up brand awareness. Everything that's cute and funny seems to get the public's attention regardless of what the message may be. Let's face it, if I'm not interested in what you are selling, at least make me laugh."

Self-portrait | Nicola Smanio creates, designs and animates characters

Below we present 5 types of characters and discuss about the way you can use them to raise awareness and build a memorable image for a brand or website.

The Helpful Mascot

Some products are designed to help people handle daily tasks faster and easier. Others are so complicated, that additional customer support department is needed to help users become proficient in using it. The need for help can be addressed in multiple ways by brands, such as introducing a character as a helpful mascot that people recognize and remember. A few interesting examples of characters as helpful mascots have been living around for a while, like the SEOmoz Robot, others are rather new. Regardless, their roles are to help people or prompt the user that they can find helpful tips when interacting with them.

Roger the Mozbot is a well known character helping users understand how to use the SEOmoz dashboard

The Animated Hero

The Animated Hero is a character usually playing in multiple short stories or episodes for the sole purpose of illustrating how one particular product can become useful to customers. A world wide recognition of the animated hero may be easier to achieve when the character is part of funny or unusual situations, like the Red Bull characters. These characters, despite being very sketchy, are now recognized by huge audiences. They are used in short stories to illustrate the main effect of the energy drink, that "it gives you wiiings!".

Character Design for Red Bull, by Nicola Smanio. Example of animated heroes illustrating the effects of Red Bull.

Real Life Characters

Most commonly used in web design and social media, real life characters are created to represent real people. These illustrations have become more popular, and now you can even order a character based on a photo of yourself. The character can then be used on a blog, twitter background or another social media account. In web design, the trend has evolved towards using more abstract illustrations, but the core concept is the same: create a drawing of a real person to add a touch of playfulness, personality and openness to your website.

Illustrator Ricardo Gimenes has created multiple cartoons for Smashing Magazine, including the team characters

The Abstract Illustration

Unlike the Animated Hero, an abstract illustration is a visual statement reinforcing the brand's mission statement. The character can be animated, used independently or as a part of the visual identity of a brand. An interesting example can be found in the visual identity of Anim'est, as a simple illustration of a sheep in different poses. The sheep is usually a metaphor for conformity and mediocrity, but the Anim'est illustration is turning that metaphor around. The ordinary sheep becomes a unique character representing the creativity and quirkiness of the different animations in the Romanian Film Festival.

The Romanian Animation Film Festival uses a simple and funny sheep character as a metaphor of creativity in animation

The Brand Personification

Brands are personified when there is a character that does everything the company or team is supposed to do. The character is basically the image of a brand in action. It can also be used in the role of the helpful mascot or the animated hero. It lives and evolves with the brand and becomes the carrier of the brand's story and message in offline and online media. From the memorable MailChimp character, supposedly delivering emails to users, to our own creation of Mr. Fox, in charge of tracking down the rumors in Philadelphia and uncovering the truth, the examples of a brand's personification through character design can be found in a variety of situations. These are just two examples of how character design can help people related to brands easier.

The MailChimp character acts as if it's involved in delivering the e-mails to people

Endnote: Funny or quite, abstract or realistic, characters animate brands in a unique way. They have various roles and purposes and have evolved from simple mascots/puppets to lively figures used in advertising, digital media and as metaphors for brands and products. The use of characters in web design is a technique borrowed from comics and theater. Check out our previous post about Theatrical Elements in Web Design to learn more about this practice. if you liked this article, don't forget to share it with your friends!

Theatrical Elements in Web Design

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:52:00 GMT

Modern theater can be a surprising inspiration source for web designers. An interesting concept that UX design recently borrowed from theater is the fourth wall metaphor, referring to the invisible wall between the stage and the audience. When the performance put on stage is immersive, the fourth wall is broken and the spectators synchronize their experience with the entire play.

This article discusses the importance of theatrics in web design and a couple of examples of theatrical elements that can be used in websites to create more immersive experiences.

Personifying Websites through Character Design

Character design originates from theater and animation and can be adapted to web design in the form of a personified element representing the brand. If a brand could be animated, its personality would be molded into a character. In web design characters can be used in a variety of situations, from logos to backgrounds and illustrations depicting the members of a team.

Illustration from Inspiredology depicting fictional characters in a lab finding inspiration through research and experiments.

Sometimes, all it takes is a talented illustrator to reproduce in drawing actual people, but in other cases, it can be a more refined and complex process using the brand's identity to design a character that will represent it entirely. What designers can take from theatrics and transfer to character design is gesture and pose analysis, character development (which should be in juxtaposition with the brand's identity) and character objectives (is the character supposed to be friendly and helpful, to persuade or just to depict real people?).

The characters from Pixel Cookers hide their identity, like action heros in a mysterious cartoon

Character design is about mastering and combining artistic expression with branding, storytelling and theatrics. The characters created cannot speak or act, yet they have expressive figures and poses, suggesting action and emotion. An important thing to keep in mind though is that one cannot create a character and abandon it a few months later; once created and presented to an audience, it needs to be used consistently in online and offline campaigns. Characters are designed to live and evolve with a brand, for generations, and this is one of the reasons why characters can be such a powerful element of brand strategy.

Veerle artfully creates a character for her own blog

Some effective uses of characters in web design have been presented above. What other websites have you found that use characters in a theatrical way to emphasize a message or create a certain image for the brand?

Re-discovering Scenic Design

Moods of Norway is a fashion brand combining the traditional Norwegian style with modern trends

One of the reasons why theater can be so immersive is to be found in the brain, in our mirror neurons. Also called the "empathy neurons", mirror neurons make us capable of borrowing moods and emotions from the people and scenes we are witnessing. Because of their existence everything from paintings to scenic design can influence our mood, pump up our excitement level or transport us into a different world.

An example of scenic design in 360 Long Street - a web documentation of the main street in Zurich

Scenic design, rediscovered through photography and advertising can be used in web design to induce a certain state of mind and suggest a variety of emotions to the user. You can experiment with scenic design by using photos of a real place, a custom illustration depicting imaginary worlds or image manipulations. Action shots, surreal elements and artsy decorations can together be very persuasive tools in the hands of UX designers. Nonetheless, the scene you create for a website should be more than a beautiful background, it needs to be conceptually connected to the brand and the type of products or services that the brand is selling.

From Artist Statements to Effective Copywriting

Common sense says that theater needs to captivate, inspire and entertain us through visual performances. While that is true, one of the most penetrating theatrical element designers can integrate in websites is not visual, it's actually a phrase, the artist statement. An artist statement is a brief verbal representation composed to explain or contextualize the artist's work. Similarly, web design can use typography to accentuate ideas, statements or descriptions related to the identity of a brand, its values and role in the market.

Example of an effective statement used to describe the brand's values. From Piccirilli Dorsey

Branding, copywriting and design often go hand in hand to create something similar to an artist statement for brands. The most common form is the slogan, but some of the most creative uses of an artist's statement in design are scattered throughout the pages of a website. From Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth to simple yet effective phrases reflecting on the brand's role and values, designers can create even more challenging artist statements for the websites they build.

A visual and verbal statement from Corning Gorilla Glass

Endnote: Theater is not dead, yet we see theatrical elements re-born in modern forms of expression, such as design. Some design techniques have direct origins in theatrics, while others, such as character design, can grow to become a separate discipline. What other theatrical elements did you incorporate in your designs? Let us know in the comments below and if you liked this article, don't forget to share it with your friends!

Web Design for Real People

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 21:22:00 GMT

Web design used to be a developer's playground before UX designers came and added more levels to the process. As the center of gravity shifted from designing systems to creating experiences, it became more clear that everything we designed needed to add value to our life and choices. As we move to an experience economy, allot of designers spend time looking for inspiration in online resources, only to discover that the best solutions come from offline sources and everyday life. UX designers will become more skilled at identifying real world resources that can be applied in web design, because they are increasingly relevant to their job.

Photo by: Dull Hunk on Flickr

Design thinking needs to go outside aesthetic or functional challenges and bring in solutions inspired by people. This article talks about being "people aware" and using human factors to improve user experience.

Communicating with Systems

One thing we know from Marc Rettig is — if you want to be a good interaction designer, go watch how people interact with objects. People appreciate things about web interfaces that can be surprisingly different from what an entire team of enginners would expect. One of these things is the way systems are designed to provide feedback, start and sustain an imaginary conversation with people. Interaction is partially communication.

People have dialogs with and about the things they use every day... If you pay attention to how people interact with interfaces, what you will notice is — people talk with the apps they use, they comment about the form they're filling, express frustration or relief when performing certain tasks, and add human attributes and descriptors to things they're been using for a while.

Systems can be designed to provide feedback in a way that encourages dialog. Why not design web interfaces that "behave" like someone you could actually get along with? The more communication opportunities you create, the more memorable and likable the product you design will be.

A simple example of what JackThreads.com "says" when users decide to unsusbscribe

Cognitive Laws or Flaws in UX Design?

We like putting laws and principles behind our design choices. We do that because we hope that previous experiments and testing can come up with a recipe for successful design strategies. Often, that is reasonable, but what really matters is how we apply these laws in our work. Does our own experience, as users, validate these principles against the actual reality of everyday interactions?

A very simple example is Hick's Law talking about choice paralysis when users are presented with too many options especially when it comes to items from a long lists. Apparently, it's easier for user to choose from one row of 10 items, rather than two rows of 5 items. This principle is restricted by Miller's observation that short term memory cannot handle more than 7 items at a time (with a -/+ 2 items margin). How can you solve this contradiction, as a designer?

Choosing made easy: CSS Tricks finds a balance between Miller's magical number 7 and Hick's law

Although CSS Tricks does a good job at it, for more than a decade, most websites designed would use lists of attributes, a logic, ordered and cold approach to presenting a variety of options to people. Browsers use a row of tabs, your OS would make you navigate through lists and apps will have huge menus and submenus that will expand over half of your screen.

Only recently, interaction designers started to adapt perception laws to everyday life, and come up with a couple of interesting alternatives to rows and lists. Here are a few examples:

Lists, rows or stacks? Enter Photo Stacks on the iPadwhere you organize items on stacks, just like we would in our own house

People Awareness

Although interaction design should not be limited by its own means of practice, older web technologies inflicted a lot of pain in most of the user interaction patterns we got familiar with. Thanks to the rise of touch interfaces and the evolution of markup languages and web design tools, interaction designers are now able to reconstruct the web in a way that responds better to basic human needs and preferences. Designers have started to build a brand new social, playful and colorful web, reflecting personalities, ideas, visions, moods and emotions.

Photo by: PipeApple on Flickr

People awareness in web design spreads across multiple levels as well as throughout the process of creating, building, optimizing and converting a web product.

Your website is targeting a specific market and that idea is defined through personas. Your process from wireframe to design is user-centered: what are the true goals users want to reach on your website. You can be people-aware up until this point, have a strong product and a solid base. User experience is a milestone in the creation of every website. If you have user profiles and focus on the user as a designer, but stop there, you're not giving life to the final product. You're building it, but then taking its life away.

It may be difficult to explain to business owners busy talking numbers why your job shouldn't be limited by or finished once you polished up the surface, but if your client understands ROI, they should understand user experience in similar terms.

How much effort would you put in bringing in new users? Is your market deep enough to support the business based on this strategy only? Good user experience extends the life of the product by ensuring a higher return rate of first time users. Here it is: a web product that keeps people coming back, a website that is useful and fun and a great user experience.

Web analytics focus on real people. Check out our interview with Neil Patel about KissMetrics and web analytics.

Lastly, you need to be people-aware when it comes to analytics. You have this beautiful website and returning customers, but your business vision is back to numbers and risk seeing just traffic stats, rather than actual people coming back to do business with you and displaying certain behaviors when interacting with your website. Avoid this trap by choosing the right web analytics tool for you, that would display accurate and relevant information about real people, in real time and over time. Web analytics is ultimately about people, so there you have it - the last possible level where people-awareness is paying off in your web strategy.

Endnote: Earlier this year we talked about concepts from Psychology that UX designers could use to craft better experiences and integrate in their design strategy. We are adding a few more concepts, especially relevant in the context of user interaction. We talked about communication, perception and people-awareness. There's much more to add to the list, and we would like to hear your thoughts on this topic as well. Do you think this article was useful? Please share it with your friends!

Three Levels of Experience in App Design

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 05:13:00 GMT

User experience in app design is like state-of-the art service in running a fancy restaurant. It's all about the quality of interaction, and perfectly tuning it to the identity of your brand. Some of the best designed apps mediate gratifying experiences, such as feeling empowered and in control, entertained and curious and feeling like the app is money well spent.

There are three basic levels of experience connected to app design that we are going to explore in this article. The reasons and emotions behind them, along with examples of some of the best apps you may be using on a daily basis, will reveal a more deeper and complex relation between app design and user psychology.

Flipboard App by Johan Larsson on Flickr

Making the Connection Between Experience and Mind

There are three main approaches to interaction design, depending on the type of application you want to develop. First, there is user-centered design where you find exactly what the user needs and try to deliver work that not only exceeds those needs, but adds a touch of originality, keeping the user happy and completely immersed in the experience. User centered design is not exclusively picked over any other design method, it is part of the design process. Designing experiences for the mind to enjoy goes far beyond adopting a certain practice over the other. If you don't know how the mind works, don't design apps. Just like "if you don't understand people, you don't understand business" (Simon Sinek).

Using EconBiz App, photo by Die ZBW on Flickr

Second, there is activity-centered design, which we already talked about in our article about understanding users. The idea is, you - the designer - need to understand the tasks, purposes and goals associated with the activity users want to perform while using the app. This approach should be paramount in art direction for apps used in complex activities. We will talk about this later.

Third, there is system-centered design, which means you are concerned with building an app that users will have to learn using first, and acquire specific skills in order to use the system.

Although there are dozens of other methods pertaining to app design, the three approaches above are really all you need to know in order to understand how and why User Experience is really about the gratifying feelings you get while using apps on a daily basis. Going back to the restaurant metaphor, people don't pay for high protein or low fat food cooked in certain ways, they pay for the experience and the service they receive along with delicious dishes from a specific cuisine. Similarly, user experience can be gratifying in many ways. Here's how.

Experiencing Proficiency With Feature Rich Apps

Most often, feature rich apps are appealing to people who love what they're doing and go beyond and above to master tools and programs that make them feel skilled, efficient and productive. Designing a really complex app is a challenge for interaction designers. The extra hundreds of features need to be positioned and designed in a way that makes sense to users: from the most used tools those you can get familiar with later on. Another important element is feedback: how does the app provide feedback for all the little changes users experiment with? What are the options for users to control how the app responds? How fast can users accomodate to the interface and use it without having to consult the intro tutorial? Cognitive ergonomics needs to be the focus of art direction in feature rich apps.

Adobe Nav an app that transforms the iPad into a separate tool dock for Photoshop

What's most gratifying about using feature-rich apps is the feeling that you're an expert, that you have the ability to complete the things you love to work on. Sometimes too complex apps can be a real head-ache for new learners, but that doesn't mean you should compromise and choose simplicity over the promise of proficiency. Instead, you could decide to build a light version of the app that gradually introduces users to a fully flavored experience.

The best candidates are feature rich apps that either support tasks (project management) or constitute the main platform for those tasks (image processing). A good example is Aperture, a photographer's best friend, proudly adding over 200 new features to its interface. Aperture's feature rich interface is, on top of all, designed for the best experience. It allows for as much customization as you may need, although the default settings are pretty much fit to your needs. What's interesting with Aperture, is that the system is designed to have a memory - the tags, labels, faces, folders, projects and saved presets are very handy features. It's as if you had a clever tool that knows how you work and you need things to be.

Feeling like an expert with Aperture is part of the experience because the interface was designed to make photographers feel like a pro when they edit, organize and share photos

Experiencing proficiency withAperture - a feature rich app designed for passionate photographers

Experiencing Information with Content Rich Apps

The majority of apps are designed for passive and reflexive activities such as reading news, articles, books, as well as taking some time to go through your social feeds and friends updates. Information consumption is experience related to app design. You can go for a user-centered approach all the way through the process of designing a new reader app and you will succeed.

You need to observe the details of user experience in everyday activities related to consuming information. Where do we look to get more information and what do we enjoy seeing when information is presented to us? Realize how much we enjoy feeling more knowledgeable after pondering over a beautifully designed infographic. Observe the best menus in town at fancy restaurants. Then take a look at newspapers, billboards and even at the huge ads creatively crafted to steal that emotional response from consumers.

Be a great observer of how people prefer to digest information, and you will design a reading experience that is visually pleasing and challenging. One of the best apps that lets you experience information differently is the Popular Science+ app. The creators, Berg, fully embraced the idea of re-inventing the way we interact with a digital magazine on the iPad. While other apps attempted to re-create the feeling of reading a book, Popular Science+ defies the familiar and introduces a very different interface where you scroll over images to read more, play puzzles and interact with infographics by turning on and off the colors for the data you want to see.

How Power Happens interactive infographic designed by Fathom for Popular Science+

Experiencing Playfulness With Imaginative Apps

Apps can take users to a deep level of engagement when the user is left to discover and explore different interaction scenarios. Although the purpose of using the app can be achieved with several other tools, users will choose the one that is designed to entertain, to captivate. Experiencing playfulness with apps is not just about playing games, it's about re-inventing the things people do, introducing novelty in a much familiar habit. For example, think about what you experience when you listen to music on Planetary. How does it feel to take a break from computer work while using the tibetan singing bowl with Awareness, or using Elementar to pinch and pull fonts into different weights and sizes?

Elementar a parametric font system designed by Typotheque

Recently Typotheque, a font design studio in Netherlands came up with a neat app for typography lovers, called Elementar. It was pretty clear even from a while ago, when Typotheque created the Dancing Writer, that the studio had a different approach to UI design and user interaction.

The challenge behind designing interfaces is that you need to create visual affordances to take interaction to a different level. Typotheque breaks the rule and erases most of these cues showing how you need to use the app.

Elementar is the type of app with minimal controls and simple interface. What's interesting about it is that it doesn't need buttons and bars to mediate interaction. When you first try the iPad app, you will be surprised by its mere simplicity - all you need to do is use intuitive gestures to explore different variations of parametric bitmap fonts. There is no strain on your experience, the core concept is simplicity, which again seems to work best with design, as we have already noted in one of our previous posts. Elementar is strikingly simple, yet imaginative: a genuinely engaging platform that feels fun and irresistibly natural to a font lover. The user experience of elementar makes you choose it before any other app with similar functionality.

Endnote: App design can succeed if you're using your skills to optimize the way users perceive and enjoy using the app. User experience can be designed because you can make the user feel differently about using your app instead of any other one. Feeling empowered, feeling like a pro, feeling entertained and informed, they are all part of the experience you create as a lead designer or art director.

If you enjoyed reading this article, please share it with your friends and let us know what your think about user experience in app design.

Better Marketing with UX Design

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 08:57:00 GMT

Design has evolved to be an important part of how brands are built and perceived in modern markets. In this article we are going to address an interesting question: can design serve brands better than marketing? The answers may not be easy to digest, and getting to these answers is just the tip of the iceberg. Our purpose is not to denigrate the role of any business or marketing practice, but to point out to how design can be equally important to a brand. Here's why...

Engaging through design. Photo by Rafaeldesigner on Flickr.

Positioning Starts with Designing Interactions

Two years ago a start-up in NY changed how brands managed their online presence. It's called Foursquare and its goal to connect businesses with consumers using geo-location was instantly appealing to businesses in all major consumer industries.

UX design amplifies interaction and supports it. Brands can use design to adapt and extend their presence in a digital environment and amplify their reach. Over time, this can help businesses position themselves better in the mind of global users researching the web for solutions and products that speak to them.

UXD creates opportunities for start-ups to better position themselves as described above, in comparison to what traditional marketing currently does. Web experiences spread fast, reach multiple devices and create a consistent brand image across the world. UX and interaction design add a new dimension to how people perceive brands, especially in terms of availability, reliability and accessibility.

Some of the finest examples range from media giants like The Economist and CNN to retail innovators like Zappos and vacation and travel stars like AirBnB. These companies' response to the market can be described as adequate, innovative and future-proof: rather than focusing on sales and promotion, they spread their branches across multiple platforms and replicate the brand experience on all major social channels. A brand that displays a strong web presence is a brand that positions itself best in the mind of the modern consumer.

Gary Vaynerchuck talks about how technology changed the way we do business in his book The Thank You Economy

Creating Digital Incentives

UX and Interaction design have evolved a lot to accommodate important software engineering innovations, new web platforms and a wide variety of mobile devices.

Start-ups selling products online are most sensitive to how technology shapes consumer behavior, market trends and media channels. Because of that, brands will often need to go beyond user's expectations and be one step ahead of the competition. Designers can cleverly use digital incentives to help the brand gain in popularity and market share. Digital incentives range from cross-platform syncing, free of charge hosting, on-demand reports for user data and exclusive benefits for subscribers or paying users to extensive social media integration, custom web apps and fluid experiences across devices.

Designers are best at spotting the benefits of digital incentives for online businesses. Even using simple game mechanics can turn badges and icons into symbolic digital incentives, sometimes more powerful than the 1 in a million chance to win a fancy car in traditional contests.

The Designer Fund Project challenges designers to build better businesses

Communication as an Experience

Communication is a central point of reference for how we engage with brands. Although there may be different types of communication made possible by the diversification of media, UX design refined it to the point where users expect more than unilateral engagement, when it comes to how messages are delivered. Where there is a lot of content, they expect an interactive environment able to filter and customize data. Where there is a strong emotion or deeper interest for the brand's content, they demand immersive experiences.

An example of how UX design can change and improve communication with brands is the use of custom news apps designed to promote a band, product or public figure and deliver news related to them in real time. If until recently marketers would make and give away branded t-shirts and promotional items to get their message across, now they keep fans and customers closer with apps designed to entertain and communicate better.

Using mobile apps to communicate with fans: Donna Karan iPhone app

Endnote: If we design better apps to communicate with users, use digital incentives and game mechanics to enchant our fans and create more engaging websites to interact with customers, does this mean that traditional marketing practices are just a waste of money? For most start-ups, that may actually be true. Nonetheless, business owners and designers together should not disregard the strategic use of marketing, as a tool to connect the brand and the vision behind your brand with the decisions you make online and offline. If you find this article useful, please share it with your friends!

Understanding Users - 3 Non-Design Principles Applied in UX Design

Mon, 09 May 2011 20:26:00 GMT

Our understanding of people is relative to the context we find ourselves in and often limited to it. It's a basic cognitive bias. In web design, the context is usually the interface and our understanding of the people interacting with it is described by usability metrics. Nonetheless, a UX designer's understanding of people needs to go beyond the context of user analytics and usability metrics.

In this article we are going to talk about 3 essential non-design principles that designers need to be aware of when creating interfaces that are meant to be compelling and accessible at the same time.

My Identity by: Kathryn

Less Is More

A Non-Design Principle that Users Relate To

One way in which you can understand users better is by understanding how the mind works. Great designers like Bill Atkinson, neuro-psychologist by training, showed that innovation can happen by combining your design and programming skills with a deeper understanding of users. His work as one of the first developers in the Apple development team lead to the creation of the first user-friendly interfaces for graphic applications - MacPaint and QuickDraw. He used simple symbols to designate the tools and their functionality, so people can easily identify what those tools were and how one was supposed to use them. He worked closely with Larry Tesler who previously described how he came with the idea that designing simple elements (metaphors of real life environments) would be more effective and easy to implement in human-computer interfaces and they would make more sense to people.

Talking about simplicity with @sickdesigner on Twitter

Simplicity is a non-design principle we need to be aware of when designing user interfaces. We had a few interesting responses through Twitter to our question about whether simplicity is the key to elegant user interface design or not, and we selected one of those responses in the image above that points to this conclusion: simplicity makes sense to people. It's easier for our mind to absorb information and perform complex tasks later on, if we work with instructions that are easy to understand. In a lot of cases, the argument in favor of simplicity will be supported by usability metrics as well. For a UI designer, simplicity is a core principle behind user friendly interfaces, and some of the most important people in the history of interface design have been using it from before the term "user-friendly design" was first employed.

Exploration Is Good

How Guided Discovery Makes Sense to Users

We talked about discovery previously in our post about game mechanics in UX design. Earlier this year we noticed a couple of UX designers debating around the problem of guided or non-guided patterns of interaction. To some extent, users need to clearly identify and understand the way different UI elements behave and how they need to use them to experience the system as it was designed to function.

Parallax scrolling on Nike Better World

Users, already familiar with common navigation techniques, are unlikely to experience the excitement of discovery by going through a typical navigation menu. There are a couple of designer and non-designer websites that still make the best of menu navigation, and still, the feeling of familiarity is always there.

In order to bring back the excitement and focus associated with discovery, one can utilize uncommon navigation techniques, depending on the type of website or marketing campaign. Two noticeable examples showcasing excellent uses uncommon navigation techniques are Nike Better World (parallax scrolling with HTML5) and Magnum Chocolates Pleasure Hunt (showcasing an excellent practice for integrating a RIA experience with web design). Go and see for yourself how fun these unfamiliar navigation techniques can be by visiting the two websites!

RIA integration: Magnum Chocolates Pleasure Hunt

Why User Scenarios are Not Enough

An Interpersonal Difference That Matters to UX Designers

The problem with having user scenarios as a cornerstone in UX design is that it gets in the way of inclusive design practices. Interpersonal differences should not be immediately translated in different user scenarios, unless you're actually targeting a very specific type of person. Even so, if your user profile is only relevant for a particular niche of you client's customers, you can still consider interpersonal differences that are tightly connected to user experience.

Customizable dashboard built with HTML5 at GeckoBoard

Task orientation refers to a user's work style. Some users are more concerned with achieving goals than with managing resources and organizing the steps required to reach that goal. Every person has a different action plan when it comes to accomplishing a task, although in a user scenario approach, all users fit into the same user profile. Task orientation is extremely important in UI design, and it shows that user scenarios do not always help you to completely understand a user's style in working with the interface you want to create. Giving users multiple ways to accomplish a task or providing a customizable interface can make your website or webapp more user-friendly.

Endnote: Understanding users beyond the context of web-based interaction should be a priority for UX designers. Usability metrics, user scenarios and analytics are contextual tools that help you build websites that work well, but a deeper understanding of users will enable you to use these tools efficiently. If you liked this article, please share it with your friends and let us know your opinion on this subject!

The Designer Who Changed the World

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:21:00 GMT

Design can change the world. As a matter of fact, we absorb and adapt to changes every day, using products and services that didn't exist months ago, exploring new possibilities of interaction and re-designing the world we live in, our life style and our tools.

In this article we will talk about change driven by design. In each section and give an example of a solution or product that significantly changed our perception, behavior or interpretation of the world, to support the idea that change through design is not only possible, but a fundamental aspect of a discipline that drives innovation in every industry we have known so far.

Photo by Martin Borjesson

The Designer Who Envisioned Change

The most impressive way designers can change the world is by re-designing the tools we use to create, share and monetize products and services. People may not change, but their behaviors do. Change the tools they use to interact and make sense of the world around them and you will see new forms of interaction coming to surface. When you speak of emerging technologies you essentially speak of emerging behaviors, and this can be seen in current web app trends, web businesses and consumption habits.

Let's consider WalkIn for example, the mobile app that won the StartupBus competition at SXSW Interactive 2011, and also managed to change behaviors on both ends (the restaurant staff and the consumers). The main purpose of WalkIn is to help people better utilize their waiting time until their table is available at a restaurant. So what changes in behavior did WalkIn produce? The customer has the freedom to enjoy what they want to do even when they are "waiting in line" and the restaurant staff can manage waiting lists better. The best part about this app is that restaurants don't need to use a physical beeping card to let customers know their table is available, they use a service, which can be cost-efficient and eco-friendly.

So how do designers imagine change? The premises for change do not lie in what people do, but in the tools (products and services) we use to do things better. So re-designing tools produces innovation. That's where change starts and that's why change happens.

Screenshot of Walkin

The Designer Who Refined Identities

People can use web identities to reflect their unique characteristics. The power of customization is similar to the power of attraction in offline world interactions. What attracts you most about people? Is it their everyday appearance and routine? No, it's more than that. It's a special feature or personality trait that sticks with you as a vivid memory. That trait or feature can become something like an iconic offline version of your Gravatar. The extent to which designers can refine and transform identities exceeds the power of any other industry (fashion, cosmetics, home products). Designing your digital identity happens not only through interface customization, but also through the multimedia content you create over time, the conversations and the communities you are part of .

An online environment, such as Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Quora or Dribble, provides different meanings of expression that challenge the user to reveal the most desirable aspect of their identity or even discover new opportunities to prove their influence and desirability. The more complex the patterns of interaction, the more refined identity expression becomes.

Building refined identities through Quora

Quora is different from all the above mentioned community oriented websites because the way it refines your identity is it puts your knowledge, judgement and personality to a test, even with the most trivial questions. At a very subtle level, the rules of Quora make it a very complex social game where authenticity and influence is displayed not only through followers and votes, but also through the way you answer other people's questions. The way you would express yourself on Quora is different from Facebook, because the concept of identity on Quora plays with your ability as a person to generate solutions from the ideas people introduce to the "game".

A more recent example of app that refines identities through design and different forms of expression is WonderShake, a location-based iPhone app that won Teclosion Spring 2011 in Tokyo. This app creates a social profile of yourself and shares it with other people nearby, who are connected to the app. This way, you can use your online description of yourself (your "inner taste") to make more friends and meet new people. It's the opposite of what some critics of the tech bubble predicted would happen: instead of increasing our isolation, it helps people connect with one another easily when they might not have otherwise.

WonderShake Logo

The Designer Who Imagined Possibilities

Imagination is closely tied to our senses, and we can use any type of sensory impression to create something that makes sense and speaks to us at a deeper, emotional or conceptual level. Still, we seem to come up with more unique ideas when playing with information visually.

Designers see the world from different perspectives. Sometimes, to reach a solution, you really need to visualize your options or the data you have available. Our brain uses and processes information mostly in the form we receive it first hand, so we need to mentally adjust that by re-imagining the information we have; then we can be more creative in our interpretation of it.

Hans Rosling explains statistical findings through dynamic graphs

Information visualization is a fundamental way of triggering change through design. Vision, taking shape of immediate representations, conceptual organizations, inner imagery or symbols, are our most refined and evolved mode of interaction with the world. Together, art and design have the power to merge meaning with emotion and inspire change in the world through the simplest or the most complex ways imaginable. Recently we've seen great identity and graphic designers like Jacob Cass supporting Japan through minimalist posters, but beyond that, change and insight happen every day in the world as a result of design meeting science through visual explorations.

Endnote: Can design change the world? Yes. It cannot change everything, but some aspects of the world can be fundamentally changed through design. We find new solutions when we see the world differently, when we envision change, when we refine forms of interaction and see new possibilities beyond the status-quo. If you enjoyed this article, please share it with your friends or let us know what you think about it.

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Psychology in UX Design

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 14:39:00 GMT

What distinguishes good design from great design is experience. UX designers are always on a quest to create interfaces that users can relate to, through graphics, content and patterns of interaction. What's interesting though is that exceptional ideas in design may come from different backgrounds, such as psychology and social science. This article focuses on recent UX design trends inspired by or based on various findings in the field of psychology.

Photo by: Lapolab

Interaction Design and Cognitive Psychology

Perhaps the most important advance in UX Design that is heavily based on previous psychology studies is the rise of augmented reality, touch-based interfaces and 3D environments simulated by mobile, home entertainment and game devices. The rules of interaction in 3D environments and touch-responsive interfaces dig deep into cognitive psychology, information processing in humans given visual inputs, perception and hand-eye coordination.

Photo by: Plantronics Germany

The psychology of UX design involves a deep understanding of our mind's ability to perceive and interact with smart surfaces. The technologies used today to create more responsive and intuitive interfaces use a good amount of data about people's limits in processing simple visual information and ability to modulate their own reaction and behavior accordingly. The Gestalt laws of perception are actively used to define the maximum level of abstraction that an interaction designer can reach in creating icons and graphic elements to communicate basic instructions or options to users. Also, the same rules are applied in interface design, where you would make use of white space to create visual boundaries between sections or group them together. More recently, with the use of simple design elements in web apps, designers show a more elaborate understanding of perception as a top-down process, where meaning is already ascribed to the sign or icon before the user attempts to break it down to lines and simple geometric shapes.

Interestingly, the Weber-Fechner law is used in ineraction and UX design mainly to describe user-interface patterns of interaction for game devices and tablets where you need to tilt, pinch, press and move a motion controller/tablet to interact with the interface. Engineers and designers need to find the right balance between the controller's interpretation of movement and the human operator's gesture intensity and amplitude. The goal is to build interfaces that simulate the effect of our action in a way that we would expect them to.

Persona Scenarios in User-Centered Design

The use of persona scenarios in UX design is growing. At a certain level of micro-targeting, UX designers can help brands better interact with a particular character. Most of the scenarios are built on case studies, field observation and statistical data, but psychological findings about personality traits, needs and personal goals pushed UX design towards a more refined process that involves more research and user testing, right from the prototyping stage.

Photo by: Crystal Campbell

In user-oriented design, the possibilities of interaction are framed by persona scenarios and user goals. Additionally, designers will use this data to define the range of actions and customization options possible, depending on the user's expectations and computer skills. Interaction patterns need to be adjusted to people's actual needs and expectations. This is where user psychology helps to create a design brief that UI/UX designers can understand better than a general description of the website's functionality.

User Experience and Flow

The concept of "flow" in psychology was first used by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a brilliant psychology professor and co-founder of Quality of Life Research Center (QLRC), who famously described what makes "optimal experiences" genuinely immersive. The term was adopted and evangelized in different fields, and especially in the psychology of work and innovation.

Photo by: Eva-Lotta Lamm

The same concept can be freely used in UX design, to describe the way users effortlessly interact with web apps and websites and become increasingly attached to cleverly designed interfaces that help them discover, experience and share information in a new way. According to M. Csikszentmihalyi, the state of flow is an altered state of mind where time is distorted and one looses themselves in the things they do. With UX design, the idea is no different: you need to clearly identify and understand your users' goals and design interfaces that help them complete tasks in a short amount of time and keep them engaged.

The psychology of flow can help designers rely less on visual attractiveness and create optimal experiences by organizing the content and structuring the interaction map around the best possible scenario that can be tested before and after a site launch, with real people and in real time.

Endnote: A common misconception in design is that the only topics from psychology that are useful to a designer are persuasion techniques and color theories. The applications of psychology in design go way beyond that. Psychology is not only about understanding people to influence their behavior. This is something that UX designers need to know, so they can discover answers to their questions and create appropriate solutions. If you found interesting answers to your questions as a UX designer, then please share this article with your friends!

Using Game Mechanics in UX Design

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 23:21:00 GMT

Have you noticed that more and more websites are using game mechanics to create more enjoyable experiences? Principles of game design can serve UX designers today more than ever, because - 1 - brands realize the importance of interacting with users and keep them engaged and - 2- current web technologies allow developers build interfaces that support rich interaction scenarios in real time. Game mechanics will rock the web. In this article we share the best examples of how currently popular websites use game mechanics to attract new users and add them to their fan base.

Photo by: Brian J. Matis

The Place of Game Mechanics in UX Design

In economy, utility is used to describe and measure consumer satisfaction. In web design, utility is transferred to usability testing, reflecting a similar approach, where user satisfaction is broken down to directly measurable indicators. For this reason, web analytics is perceived as a reliable tool to improve user experience. Web and social analytics is the backbone of UX research and supports the majority of design and development decisions related to website optimization.

Although many people can identify usability issues and rank websites accordingly, it can be more difficult to measure what exactly makes a website appealing, fun and captivating. The same description "I love using it" can be interpreted in terms of navigation options, attractiveness, quality of content or interaction scenarios. The puzzle can be solved though by following a rather intuitive path and learning about what people actually do and use to entertain themselves, for example video games. Let's go through a couple of examples showing how UX designers use game mechanics to create websites that we enjoy using.

Principles of Discovery

Games and web interfaces have one thing in common: they are virtual environments where real-world elements, mental maps and scenarios are used help the users find their ways around - everything else is creatively re-imagined and displayed. Games like Dune, inspired by the Dune chronicles, challenge users to deal with the laws and elements of a totally different world. Discovery is a fundamental element of game experiences that only a few websites would make use of effectively.

Most content-heavy websites encourage users to provide feedback, submit comments or share information with friends, thus increasing the chances of converting first-time visitors into participants. In some cases though, the content is made available through play and discovery, on websites that "respond" to the user's choices and preferences. TED uses descriptive terms (jaw-dropping, inspiring, courageous), duration-related data (15 mins, 20 mins), as well as categories (technology, science, art) to help the user discover a lecture she will most likely enjoy, based on her choices.

Discovering lectures on TED

A recently popular music-discovery website - Hitlantis - uses a visually compelling interface and a simple menu to create the perfect environment for music discovery. There are a couple of other websites and apps that use principles of discovery to keep users happy and immersed in a carefully crafted music experience. Stereomood uses moods to bring up new songs, Discovr uses a complex algorithm to categorize and suggest bands based on a variety of factors, and Songza uses other people's suggestions and channels to help them discover songs similar to the one they search for.

Music discovery with Hitlantis

Principles of Motivation

In 2005, Steven Levitt made an interesting point about motivation and incentives in Freakonomics and that is - people respond to incentives, but also learn how to use gratification mechanisms to get what they want. Games are purposely designed so that users can increase or decrease the level of difficulty for a certain game and experience the joy of winning differently. Also, there are multiple rewards and incentives throughout the game, to keep them focused, motivated and excited about the final outcome. In UX design incentives take the form of badges (Foursquare), scores (Klout), numbers reflecting popularity (Facebook, Twitter) and usage (Digg), memberships and experience related symbols or tags (pro, new user).

Cool badges for power users on Foursquare

To some extent users want to become more involved with using a website because all these incentives make sense to them and make them feel good. As a designer, you can create a more compelling experience by using simple incentives or game-like scenarios.

Self actualization needs are also intricately connected to game mechanics and user experience. There is a broad spectrum of feelings one can experience by collecting all these badges, reaching a certain position or rank, seeing their profile stats go up and sharing their scores with everybody.

The standard of social influence on Klout

At a very basic level, the feeling of progress and achievement is extremely relevant in the way user scenarios contribute to improving the overall user experience. In most strategy games, players need to manage their resources by avoiding loss, fighting for territory and replenishing their resources. Resource management involves multiple game mechanics, but creates a powerful game-mind connection and an immersing experience. At the intersection of strategy games and UX design there are web apps designed for project management or, more recently - online banking. Bank Simple did a really good job at stimulating people's desire to achieve their goals by designing a simple and rewarding mobile/web app which will be launched this year.

Motivation through design: BankSimple

Game Modes in a Social Web

Many games have both single player and multiplayer modes integrated and interaction scenarios altered accordingly. While it is obvious how browsing many websites could be compared to a single player experience, there are many cases where you can transfer the multiplayer experience into the web environment as well. Platforms that allow multiple accounts and user management are increasingly popular. Whether you're designing and developing a project management app, a sketching tool or a fun platform to manage multiple social media accounts online, you're using game modes and facilitate more complex interaction scenarios across the web.

Multi-user management is tightly connected to team work and collaborative activities, but there can always be a playful and fun side to it. For example, CoTweet allows you to have multiple people use the same account to schedule and respond to tweets. It's a multiplayer game mode adapted to social broadcasting when a teams, rather than single individuals, can effectively accomplish more with team work.

Multi-user platform on CoTweet

Multi-user game modes radically changed the online TV experience we were used to when Justin.tv and Ustream came on the scene and introduced live broadcasting with live chatrooms. Now, you can broadcast through webcam or play on your computer and share your screen live with friends who enjoy the same game as you do. You can be the team leader of your group in a multiplayer game or just show everybody how awesome your skills are.

Live streaming and multi-player games on Ustream

Endnote: Game mechanics in UX design are effective because they're fueling interaction. The experiences you create using game mechanics and game elements on your website can be rewarding, fun, challenging, creative and remarkable. This article highlighted only a few examples of how websites use them to improve user experience. If you find more examples, share them with us, we would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this topic.

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The Problem with Social Interaction on Websites - Bringing Back Authenticity

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 11:35:00 GMT

Building engaging interfaces is not easy. The list of priorities starts with usability issues and finishes with the difficulties of creating an experience through form and functionality.

Over the past few years a new challenge sprung from the maturation of tools and apps that enable sharing, user feedback and other forms of mediated interaction - generally called "social media". Integrating social media in websites was similar to introducing casual Fridays in the corporate world: steering up controversy first, but ending up doing business in jeans. Today, social interaction is amplified (viral and mass communication) as well as simplified (reduced to simple auto-fill share buttons), but this type of solution is not always the best in using technology to encourage authentic interaction and engagement.

This post presents multiple solutions to effectively use social expression in ways that are mutually beneficial, engaging and genuine.

Photo by: Rosaura Ochoa

The Problem with Today's "Social Media" Scene

Social interaction is fascinating: always changing, adapting and gradually shaping our perception of each other. Authentic interaction enables people to speak about their feelings and experiences. Therefore, by bringing in a social layer to the interfaces we build online, we basically plug in technology to the social and emotional side of our personality. However, the online social media scene we have today displays forms of interaction that are not completely authentic.

For example, the number of replies and friends one gets over time becomes a "social proof" of value and influence. Is this actually relevant? Apart from that, it seems that social sharing is such a big thing in "social media", that sharing buttons alone are considered enough to foster interaction. That would be fine if promotion and traffic weren't the main sought-after benefits of social sharing. For the rest of this post, we will re-think the way websites interact with users.

Bringing Back Authentic Interaction

Fixing Calls to Action: Create Enchanting Invitations Instead

Glossy, big, enticing and sometimes commanding buttons populate essential sections of a website's structure. Designed only to be clicked (thus influencing the user's behavior to a certain extent), they are part of a suffocating "Call to Action" frenzy. If we would carry them around as often as we would use them, we wouldn't have many friends. Instead, replacing Calls To Action with decently appealing invitations is closer to emulating real life social interactions. Welovetypography.com graciously invites the user to search through the website, while cleverly promising a quick response through the word "quickly" instead of the "submit" or "search" button.

Photo by: We Love Typography

Fixing Share Buttons: Making "Sharing" More Exciting And More Genuine

Marketers can achieve "top of the mind awareness" faster and cheaper through social media, than through advertising. In addition to this, the more genuine you appear to other people, the more significant your actual "reach" becomes. Businesses have played an important card with integrating social media in their online strategy; that card is authenticity. Thus sharing has become more of a broadcasting tool that indirectly monetizes interaction, rather than an interpersonal experience.

One can bring back the feeling of authenticity in sharing if the widgets or buttons used would allow the user to (literally or not) highlight what exactly they thought was worth sharing or what inspired them most from the content they shared with other people. Would that be closer to what people normally do in real life situations? For the most part - yes. Usually, if you want to share an article (from a paper magazine) with your friend - you wouldn't give him the page pointing to the title. What you would probably do is - you would show the paragraphs that captured your interest - or you would want to introduce the reason why you bring that article to your friend's attention. Would sharing be a more personal and genuine action in this case? Hopefully - yes. In any case, it would be more fun than the automatic description filled in for you.

Fixing Comments: In-context Replies, Not Stackable Comments

There are always interesting conversations in comments people post on the web. Unfortunately in most cases, these conversations are reduced to a simple archive of stacked comments. This practice strips away the charm of conversation right from the section of the website dedicated to user feedback and interaction. This is so different from real life situations. Imagine you went to see this awesome speaker and attended the cocktail party afterwards. You would notice how people meet and talk to each other in small circles, build on each other's feedback and have a great time finding things to talk about related to that shared experience. It would be so unnatural if they would line up in a row and try to shout to people further down the line, which would be the case if they were posting comments on a site.

A different approach to re-designing the "comments section" could bring back the experience of participating in a real life conversation. By simply connecting each comment with the exact concept or idea it's referring to on the page and showing it significantly closer to that idea, rather than at the bottom of the page, would break the comments section into discussion groups that are more fun and easy to follow.

Photo by: Paul G

Fixing Social Bookmarking: Making it More Natural

Social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Delicious make up what are referred to as "silent online communities". The problem with them is that they work based on categories, tags and folders (which is a form of information archiving specific to institutions, not to a person). Although it would make sense why bookmarking uses categories to archive saved items, you could make it all a more enjoyable experience by bringing all the saved pages together into a personal story, using photo album, bookscrapping or collage inspired techniques. We could go beyond that and maybe in the future even create our own "Qwiki's" (or a similar multimedia presentation) from the content we have bookmarked for a specific topic.

Endnote: We need to ask ourselves, are we using these technologies in the best way possible? Are we motivated purely by the desire for more traffic and higher conversion rates? It is important that we question current practices and always look for ways to actually improve interaction and user experience.

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Go Beyond Scalable Websites, Learn How to Create Scalable Technology Businesses

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:45:00 GMT

Define success. Imagine the steps you have to take to get there. Multiply that by the number of clients you want to work with by the end of the year and see if your plan is still viable. Success is tightly connected to scalability, a term equally familiar to systems engineers and to entrepreneurs. Scales are not just about measurable units, but also about brands, products, processes and teams managed for growth before the need to scale up becomes overwhelming. This week's post is about scalability for businesses, not just websites.

Photo by: Z33 Art Center

Scalable Teams

Behind everything you will do there will always be people. There is as much design involved with building a great team, as it is with building strong brands. The people you have around and count on will shape your vision from the inside, while working with the very first clients. It is important, in the long run, to think about how flexible and scalable your team is, even when you are starting off with one or two people on your side.

There will always be a strong connection between the team dynamics and the company's evolution in the market. People perform operations, make decisions and use technology and knowledge to create a constant flow of ideas, behaviors and achievements that ultimately shape a business from the inside.

Photo by: Thomas Hawk

Going back to scalability let's see what a "scalable" team looks like. Scalability in terms of people resources is pinned down to three elements: responsibilities, collaboration and skills set.

1. Attitudes that Scale

Why pick just attitudes from the great variety of factors influencing team performance and dynamics? The answer is - attitudes mediate the team's reaction to change. Attitudes that scale are attitudes that prepare people for the next level of complexity: trust, dedication, openness, flexibility, determination and focus - just to name a few, but you can read more about that part in our blog about overcoming limitations as a creative or entrepreneur.

2. Skills and Ability to Adapt

Scale issues are dealt well by people who show the ability to take in new tasks and grow their knowledge and skills by participating in various activities. These will often be T-shaped people who will play a key role in making decisions and helping new members join the company with as little as friction as possible. Their input and work will determine how the company responds to market factors, change and increased demand.

3. Collaboration

Sometimes you will have to work with people outside the team to meet your company's growing needs. Outside help is needed either because of the magnitude of the project or because it's a slightly different area of expertise you need help with. You will want to keep in touch with the teams and freelancers that you may work with for a limited period of time.

Photo by: Trey Ratcliff

Scalable Processes

A business' life is written in processes: creative processes, value creation, implementation, workflow and client relations. It would be difficult to scale these processes if you shy away from experimentation and play. Any business model can be reinvented or replicated because the processes involved in running it can vary greatly, but some business models fail because the processes they run on cannot be scaled. Usually small doses of variation or adoption of new methods and tools will make it easier for you to scale up over time.

More eloquent examples of scalability through process comes forth when you look at how roles and responsibilities changed in the past few years and how companies learned to be more open with managing and handling operations. More and more processes will become automated and more efficient as businesses realize they need to be more productive, that is spending more time generating value rather than spending time administrating and fixing internal issues. Businesses become more collaborative with outside systems, either by encouraging outside teams to build on their platforms through APIs and using open source systems or by seeking to embed their products in the ecosystem and make them compatible with multiple devices and platforms. This type of experimentation and openness to collaboration test early in time a company's ability to operate through scalable processes.

Photo by: Brett Renfer

Three Practical Ways to Ensure Process Scalability

Like with mental processes, scalable business processes are iterations where your team is used to perform a task. Here are three ways to make sure these processes are efficient across different tasks and at different scales:

1. Use Smaller Goals to Break a Project Into Measurable and Achievable Tasks

Break your project down into milestones of simple tasks that will allow you to more easily make and measure progress until completion. Creating small goals makes it easy for your teammates to take action and keeps everyone motivated when they can see that progress is being made.

2. Don't Leave Questions Hanging

A lot of questions come from the client; even if you have tons of experience with similar projects, it is best to find answers to these questions is before you start working on the project, especially if it's about how a solution can be implemented. It should be clear right from the beginning what the limitations are for executing a specific task and that changes can only occur within these limitations and set scope. If you clearly describe a solution and define the scope, you control the workload and the magnitude to which changes might occur as you go.

3. Adopt a Development Methodology Like Scrum

The Scrum Methodology was created to best serve teams of 5-9 people involved in software development. One of the Scrum principles is that "working more hours" does not necessarily result in greater or better outputs, but highly organized teams that communicate effectively - do. It's interesting that in a Scrum session the team talks about the impediments and difficulties they might run into. This type of communication is less likely to occur with clients because to them talking about impediments is like talking about real risks, costs and broken deadlines. The truth is, they need to know that. A "we can do it all" attitude is heart warming, but definitely not scalable or efficient.

Scalable Products/Services

The life of a product will be shaped by various cycles the product needs to go through to adapt to the environment it was made for. Sometimes businesses can make the environment adapt to their own products and that happens when the adoption rate is higher than average and increases until the product becomes a part of people's lives.

The scalability of products is more obvious with web services because their structure needs to produce the same results over multiple different platforms. When the need for change arises (either to ensure accessibility from new devices and platforms or to include new features), the architecture of the product needs to be scalable.

Dropbox is a product that can be scaled because it's using back-end technologies that can me meshed up to expand its features and functionality. In terms of reception, it can be adopted and used by multiple types of customers for various purposes. These guys experimented with an old idea (file sharing), paired it with some cool features (like being notified when files are changed, automatic file synch and keeping versions of the files stored) and came up with a simple and scalable model that has proved to be successful and sustainable since 2008. It's interesting to see how this product will evolve and work with other open systems to provide even more features for its users. It's the perfect example of scalability in terms of structure, future development and adoption. The same example warns us that if your products are appealing to people who push the markets forward, then you need to keep up with their expectations and that is where product scalability becomes a selection criteria in a product's life cycle.

Photo by: Johan Larsson

Endnote: The scalability of your product/service, your team and your business overall is something that should always be on your mind if you want to grow. Handling scalability issues early and having solutions ready before a problem occurs will save you from many headaches in the long run.

Did you know that we have a monthly design and business newsletter with interviews of interesting creatives and designers each issue? Subscribe now on the right sidebar.

Persuasive Web Design: How to Persuade the User with Usability, Copy and More

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:14:00 GMT

Is usability a persuasive element in UX Design? To what degree does usability account for an online business' success? What guidelines exist in design for creating usable and captivating interfaces? This post provides a few useful answers to the questions above, answers that will be useful as general guidelines for one to keep in mind whether working on larger web projects or smaller ones.

Photo by: Witflow, an UX & Usability Studio from Poland

1. Persuade Through Usability

Good usability is more than fluid navigation and a good implementation of information architecture principles. Every aspect of web design and development adds up to ensure high usability of the final web product. Whether you're concerned with choosing the best web technologies or the right font face for that shiny button, you are ultimately concerned with the usability of the website.

If the goal is to improve the usability of a website, the means and methods for doing so span across the entire process, from analysis to design, from testing to evaluation. All usability methods can be considered and implemented while working on the web product; none of them should be considered as separate steps that can be performed optionally and in isolation from the team's work to design, develop and launch the product. A good resource that explains how usability methods can be applied in all aspects and stages of web design is this book - Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work (Interactive Technologies)(aff.), where the author uses the term "pervasive usability" to explain this idea.

Above all, testing the site's usability after it's launched demonstrates ill-placed trust in the magic of testing that is isolated from the context of iterative development. Before we continue, let's be clear about something: usability is NOT something that you can add to a website as an afterthought, usability is your product's ability to perform well because of several things you did while working on it.

Last year we saw a rising interest for web apps that collect information about the user's behavior and reaction to websites or web apps that provide different user testing models. Some web apps require a simple line of code be inserted in every page that needs to be tested, others - just entering your company's url. The pricing plans could be appealing to everyone - from freelancers and UX professionals to design agencies and start-ups, but the bottom line is - testing should be part of the method you use for building websites. Test usability as you go along through design and development.

Screenshot: Optimizely | A-B Testing Application that allows you to edit land pages and get real-time results

2. Persuade by Reaching Actual Goals

Usability correlates in a significant degree to loyalty, as shown in this article. This is because usability methods are always goal oriented. You have the business goals on one side, the user's goals on the other, and you balance them out. If the business goal to sell products is not balanced with the user's goal to find information related to the product, then we have a problem: the site's usability is poor. The first guideline for persuasive websites is to provide information (solutions, content, answers) in a usable format considering the main business goals of the website.

Highly creative designers and developers will always challenge accepted and popular standards as well as conventions in design by using creative unexpected techniques to get the same desired results. They will use unconventional navigation options, integrate refreshing animated elements (as opposed to unnecessary, distracting effects) and draw in users through interfaces that cleverly use white space. Usability is a guideline for creating persuasive websites, but the methods for achieving usability may be unconventional.

Unconventional navigation: Cooper

3. Persuade Through Consistency

It is surprising what usable interfaces can do, even when there is a minimal amount of copy for users to read and be persuaded by. Most users are able to identify and describe usability problems after using a web product for the first time. It only takes them a few seconds to "feel" it and a few minutes to become familiar with the site's structure and functionality. Whether it's a one page design or a content-rich website, users will have formed an impression before reading much of the text. Still, copy is another guideline for persuasive websites.

But wait, when did good copy become the cleverly worded part of the content? It is definitely more than that. Persuasive copy is produced through consistent style, clarity and dialog throughout all media channels. The style on your website needs to be consistent with the style used in writing e-mails, getting back to people, social media channels and blogs. Sometimes being concise and enticing works - because you only focus on a specific goal - other times you would rather create more lengthy high quality content and encourage a different level of engagement. Style is effective through consistency. People can latch on, absorb and relate to something that is consistent. That's why you should use copywriting guidelines to ensure that the content you create is persuasive.

4. Build for the Future of Your Business

There are items that are more often overlooked because (a) they are not specifically included in the project scope, (b) nobody takes responsibility for them or (c) everybody thinks they can handle these things later on. Long term business goals are part of what may get overlooked because of the previous reasons. A website's goals span over years and converge with the business goals when all of the goals are well represented and fully achieved through the products and services provided by the business. When building a website, communication is driven by recent/current tasks and priorities; strongly connected to the first version of the web product being developed. Still, the web design studio and the client should spend more time discussing the future goals for the client's website, products, services. Meeting the user's needs and expectations is a challenging task to get the design team thinking, but fitting that in with the client project requirements and budget limitations might become a problem overshadowing the business goals on the long run.

There is a way out of this situation by choosing a web design studio that can handle the work and eventually help the business expand in the future. A web design studio needs to think beyond design and development and also think about the consistency of the brand and its business goals. Even if the budget is tight, reviewing and testing should not be overlooked. The price of testing and going through more design iterations is significantly lower than the price of diminishing the website's ability to fully realize its potential.

Photo by: Krishnad

Endnote: The relationship between the user and the interface can be as powerful as a one-to-one relationship, where people use arguments, examples and none-verbal language to persuade and influence. It's a matter of consistency in communication, efficient methods to reach real goals and usability. This is how web sites and web products become persuasive in the eyes of the users.

Did you know that we have a monthly design and business newsletter with interviews of interesting creatives and designers each issue? Subscribe now on the right sidebar.

UX Design - Made by People, for People Infographic

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:35:00 GMT

Experience. We love it, we talk about it, we criticize it, we crave it and we sell it. Is experience more of a modern currency or something beyond that, more profoundly attached to how people live and act in a global online marketplace?

User experience in web design starts with real people and grows from there - not only the people who are customers, but also the people who are involved in the process of building a website. There is an interesting blend of knowledge, goals and ideas that go into the process of designing for the best user experience. Throughout this post we will talk about three major components that go into designing great experiences.

Since user experience is the end result of and encompasses all parts of the creative process, we have designed this awesome infographic to illustrate and explain what is involved when creating the best user experience. The infographic can be useful to both businesses and creatives for a detailed look at the components that make up UX design.

Infographic: UX Design - Made by People for People (click to download and view larger)

Is Usability a Good Metric for User Experience?

One of the biggest frustrations for businesses and web design studios is to find out that people do not use their website the way they intended. Usually these problems are discovered through usability studies. When defining usability, we think of a product's ability to help users reach goals efficiently and easily. Related to that, a website's usability can be studied by measuring the user satisfaction when a user is using the interface to find something or accomplish a task. Poor usability will cause a business to lose potential customers. If a site has poor usability then the business will have a number of visitors who want to make a purchase, but give up and leave the website because of a poor experience.

Usability is a powerful metric to start with, but user experience cannot be limited to that. In fact, it makes sense to put on your business spectacles first and think about user experience as a strategy for interaction through design, rather than being content with simply building a website that is usable. When we design for great user experiences, we take into consideration three major components: Information Architecture, Interaction & Dialog and Design & Development.

Start with Information Architecture

The scope of information architecture is to structure information, databases and content in a logical way. At a very basic level information architecture is connected to usability through navigation, accessibility and website structure. From a business standpoint, information architecture is connected to the goals, products and services of the company, presented in such a way that people can use and relate to.

Navigation

One of the simplest and safest method to improve user experience is to make sure that the interface you build makes user's navigation towards the goal as frictionless as possible. If your site's purpose is to provide specific data from different streams of information, make it as simple and as fast as possible for the user to get it. Easy access to relevant information makes the user feel satisfied with the site's ability to respond according to their expectations.

In some cases, users will have to give something in return for finding/doing what they want on the website. Sometimes they will provide contact information, other times they will have to register for a paid monthly subscription. The point is that frictionless experiences are something that users will feel comfortable and even enjoy paying for.

Great business players with a rich and engaging strategy make sure that easy and fast navigation, as well as instant access to various services are provided to their users. This approach is already raising the benchmark for the rest of companies who turn high usability into a pulley for additional profit.

Photo by: Nathanael Boehm

Technology

Information Architects will also have the responsibility of analyzing the project requirements and providing advice on what technology the team should use for best performance and scalability. At the same time, they should be able to make an assessment of the client's current hardware and resources and make suggestions on migrating to a different platform, if required.

Workflow

The best way to start with your UX strategy is knowing what works best for your own business and how long it will take to do that. This implies that you are aware of the costs and resources needed for building and maintaining a website, especially if your website is a web app where additional resources will be necessary. Commonly people involved in the workflow setup are also leading the development team. What they need to be aware of is the budget, deadline, project requirements and available resources - like databases, hardware, technical sheets and so on. From an operational point of view it is most efficient to start working on the information architecture of the website and then organize and plan the project along those lines.

View and download the full-size infographic.

Interaction and Dialog - Guidelines for a Better User Experience

Focusing on user experience should first be aligned to the company's communication strategy. There are six aspects of communication pertaining to interactive marketing methods that you need to consider: content, interaction, dialog, support, presence and engagement. Depending on the industry, a high level of engagement can be achieved in different ways. Sometimes betting on more interaction pushes user experience outside the boundaries where communication is actually effective. For example, inviting the user to find a plane ticket by first viewing a virtual tour of the agency may not be the best choice. Though the virtual tour may be flawless, this experience is not in tune with the user's primary motivation to be there, that is, purchasing a plane ticket.

We have already talked about Why Content Will Always be King when it comes to positioning and influence. Great content facilitates dialog and helps the business gain a stronger web presence, especially if the content provided can be shared by people. Of course, there are a couple of SEO-related benefits derived from generating great content online, but the company's goal should be greater than that. Strong brands encourage communication on multiple levels, in meaningful ways. Storytelling has a lot to do with crafting captivating experiences through interaction and dialog; read our previous post about Storytelling in Web Design or learn more about Telling a Story through Your Brand.

Photo by: Reilly Lievers

Design and Development

Design

Designing for better user experience is designing for human beings. Get to know the people you design for: understand the company, the team, the products and why customers would want to find them. There is a lot of research involved with that. Some of the first topics that deserve investigation are: brand image, customer profile and competition. It's also useful to learn about previous marketing campaigns and understand the style and the personality of the company. What words best describe it? What do people already know about it?

There are two main types of workflow when it comes to web design: first, it's iterative design, where the interface is continuously improved and adjusted. Second, it's a more practical approach where you provide the client with the design and allow for a couple of reviews on it; this is called "Big Design Up Front". Both of these workflows start with the initial working prototype and with a few initial specifications - such as color palettes, structure and style.

Develop

Design and development can be tracked and run separately, but there are a lot of inconveniences that either the client or one of the teams will have to handle in time, if that is what happens. The most efficient scenario is where development starts immediately after the Big Design Up Front phase and runs parallel to other minor design iterations related to that. Some of the challenges involved with development are usually related to building custom applications, integrating modules previously developed by the company and optimizing the system for high performance, for different browsers and for various devices. There are a wide variety of web technologies the company can decide to use to accomplish this. Taking a look at what your competition does and what they do to engage with customers online is a smart practice. This is usually called benchmarking and it's not a practice related only to marketing anymore.

Test

When it comes to business intelligence and website testing, large companies will often want to outsource most of it to the big shark agencies in the industry. That is not very affordable for start-ups, but once the budget can be stretched to include testing, you're on your way to strengthening your position and strategy through business intelligence. In UX design, there are a few common methods that gained popularity through the last five years.

Based on the depth of investigation and the method of gathering data, a company can run usability tests using eye-tracking, A-B testing and task completion tests. Also, design and experience is measured through self-reported metrics, guided interviews and brand awareness studies.

There are a few really amazing apps designed to measure and monitor engagement, web analytics and performance, as well as traditional ways to learn about your customers feedback and experience with the website - through e-mail, social media channels and online support.

Choosing from either of these is strictly related to costs, time and experience. Paid services provide relevant data over time, but using this data to make decisions is really the scope of testing. You can't get around that, no matter how hard your try.

Photo by: Steve Lacey

So What Is User Experience?

This question is fascinating, isn't it? How about trying to answer another question instead: what makes a great memory? Is it about the people you meet, the setting you were in, the music that was playing or the emotions you felt? Great memories come with smooth experiences. It's when everything comes out right. you can actually isolate a great memory and just reflect on it for a couple of minutes. It is unique and powerful.

A good metaphor of UX is "The Fourth Wall" metaphor. When people watch a great performance, they sit in front of the theater scene. There are three walls with decorations and light surrounding the scene that remind the audience that everything is staged, directed and practiced. The fourth wall is the invisible boundary between reality and fiction. The audience watches the performance through this wall and its transparency draws the audience in for the two hours that they sit there, totally immersed in the performance. This is user experience.

Endnote: UX design is a challenge for both the company and the creative agency working on it. If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends and remember to download the infographic too.

Did you know that we have a monthly design and business newsletter with interviews of interesting creatives and designers in each issue? Subscribe now on the right sidebar.

The Creative Flow in a Web Design Studio

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 21:18:00 GMT

What does it take for a group of people to be an awesome team? What does the team need to be so immersed in the project, so that everything flows perfectly when working on projects? More exactly, what makes a great web design studio vibrant with energy and personality?

In creative web design agencies there is an interesting sequence of ideas, solutions and decisions, that we call the creative flow. It is fueled by the interaction between clients and the creative team, as well as by each member's participation in the project. The creative flow becomes richer and more resourceful, when everybody around you is excited.

Photo by: Julia

Starting the Chase

The client has entered the game, the problem is presented, team members react. Brainstorming is immediately triggered, at an individual level, by a sufficient amount of information that can be connected to a final result. The process either starts with a rough description or a rich creative brief. But the statement through which a final result is depicted needs to be specific enough to allow a proper identification of the means, tools and actions that make it reacheable.

Generating ideas starts at an individual level, as an immediate reaction to the ongoing conversation with the client. Every member of the team will immediately start thinking of how they can add their own knowledge and expertise to the initial sketch of the project and mold their skills to meet actual requirements. This helps the team members visualize themselves as active participants, envision the desired results and see themselves add value to the overall work performed by the team. Finding one's place in the puzzle works like a depressant and preparing the mind to focus and prioritize smaller tasks efficiently. Generating ideas and figuring out the "how" and "when" is also part of the creative flow; so talking about who should be responsible of what is always a great start before brainstorming on the actual solution for the project.

Photo by: Dustin Diaz

Interact and Engage

The flow of ideas starts with a sparkle of inspiration, shared withing the group. And then, just like a snowball, amplifying its own volume and content, through brainstorming and conversation, the idea will become more robust and powerful. If every team member is perfectly in tune with one another, this is a sign of a prefect alignment of each person to the rest of team.

Flow, fun and engagement - three important things to keep if you are conducting an informal discussion. We've always been taught to believe that strong characters will stand out and lead the group in one direction. It's not the case anymore. In creative teams or in a studio, everybody has a skill set that is unique and extremely important for the team to perform very well and be highly productive. Even when it comes to personality traits, it's the feeling and motivation one gets from interacting with the team - that will make the best of one's personality come out or not. In a web design studio, interaction is even more flavored and gets people fired up about doing a great job. That is a great thing, especially when you consider that most of the time, in traditional work environments decisions are taken by a few people running everything in the company, while the distribution of information following this decision happens over time and through indirect means of communication.

Photo by: Hamed Saber

Making it Imaginable

The discrepancies between mental representations and an actual solution that can be evaluated by both sides, the client and the creative team, usually represent a looping problem in the creative flow and the communication between the two sides involved. Often the client will send out signals, asking for more accurate descriptions or for a visual representation of the intermediate results. It is best to always start working on a different part of the project only after you have received enough feedback from the client. Evaluation is required throughout the entire process; every task should be based on the confirmation that the desired result is perfectly understood and in line with the initial proposal the client agreed upon.

Finding or anticipating discrepancies is something that the team needs to be aware of all the time. A client might not be able to express in time the need for further clarifications, but if the way you perform requires clarification, then the work relationship you are trying to build along the way will not be a smooth one. Avoid disrupting the creative flow by communicating clearly with your team and with your clients. You will be saving more than time by doing so...

Photo by: H.Kopp-Delaney

Fun and Feedback

A problem arises when we consider that our creative thinking, decision making and disposition for action are limited in how much information we can handle at a time. The creative flow is also about managing this type of limitation in a way that does not interrupt or interfere with the work plan, overall. A great way to manage this limitation, when working together, is to alternate work with accurate feedback and intense focus with fun.

It's not the most easy solution though. People experience down time and up time differently. It's unproductive to interrupt the work flow for a 30 minute meeting where you evaluate the job done up to that point. If possible, this can be postponed or even eliminated. Find a creative way to communicate to one another about the progress for each task. Avoid time lags. If a project is on hold, brainstorm together on what can be done in the meantime and help the client respond positively to working on a side project, related to the initial proposal, as well, if that happens.

Photo by: Beatriz AG

It's Time to Do It

Before your team gets immersed into the specific tasks pertaining to the project - technology, content, information architecture, visual design, and user interaction - slice the timetable into several general steps, that everybody can relate to, no matter how much time it takes for a one separate task to be completed. A good way to think of time is as a resource managed by the team through interaction, according to a task-oriented schedule. Learning to be smart with your time is more productive than throwing in extra hours at the task.

In creative work, productivity is more profoundly related to creating something that bears more value than the time you take working on it. Essentially in creative work, when it comes to time, clients don't pay for how many hours you spend working, but for your ability to best utilize the project's resources to make

Endnote: The creative flow in a web design studio is a powerful group dynamic that will influence the team's productivity, vitality and work style. Thinking about it is not different from thinking about designing an experience. There are small things to improve and start with - like working on a schedule, assign tasks, ask for and provide feedback and make room for free time as well. There are also heavy subjects to work on - how everybody adapts and interacts while working towards reaching a goal in a limited time frame.
If your role in the group is to facilitate and keep things organized, most likely you are the one who should read this article. Go on and share it with your team!

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Experiences from the Velora Team Meetup 2010

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 21:07:00 GMT

A couple weeks ago we had our first Velora team meetup and spent the weekend exploring Bucharest, the capital city of Romania. It was a blast. Though we are a multimedia design studio based in Philadelphia, our team is spread across the world. We collaborate remotely everyday with each other using tools like our project management system, Dropbox, and Skype. Read on for pictures and more about what happened.

In this photo: Bojan, Alex, and Bryan eating at Club Dracula Restaurant

We had fun exploring different parts of the city, going to some beautiful parks, seeing the House of the People (the largest building in Europe, also known as the House of Parliament) and eating some great food together. We even found some bumper cars to ride on. It was a perfect weekend for the meetup, nice and sunny and warm. We met Count Dracula at Club Dracula Restaurant when we least expected it, although it was obvious we were having dinner on his territory.

In this photo: Catalina and Bryan enjoying some awesome food at Caru cu Bere, in the Old City Center

Every restaurant we went to was different; had a very unique style and a different story to tell. Some were built around very old meeting places or restaurants from the 16th & 17th centuries, while others in contrast, brought vibrant colors and styles, fancy modern influences, as well as specific cultural influences from all over the world. The stone paved streets lead to historical monuments and buildings and to a busy city center, with large open intersections surrounded by sparkling lights and tall buildings.

Picture: Bumper Cars!

There were lots of fun places to go to and interesting sites to visit. One weekend was definitely not enough. After we spent all day outside exploring we came back to a comfortable couch where we talked and played some fun multiplayer games on the iPad.

In this photo: Bryan on his iPhone and Catalina eating her favorite thing, salad.

We plan to have more meetups like this in the future, traveling to different places to meet each other and new people, all of this being part of the awesome experience we love to create at Velora Studios.

In this photo: Alex and Bojan at Afi Palace, one of the largest malls in Romania.

If you want to check out more photos than what you see here, visit our Flickr album or our Facebook page. Also, you can learn more about Bryan, Catalina, Alex and our newest team member Justin from our about page.

Endnote: Having a team meetup is a great way to bring a team closer together and have a awesome time (especially when you are used to working remotely). Our first meetup was a great experience for all of us, and we can't wait for the next one.

Telling a Story with Your Brand

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 15:28:00 GMT

How do you differentiate yourself when there are so many similar applications and products in the market? The story, image and personality behind your brand is what can make your brand stand out. It is important to realize that people aren't just purchasing your product, they are purchasing an experience and the story behind the product. Everyone wants to hear a story and to be part of an experience. The most important thing a brand can do to promote their product or service is to make it tell a story. A great story adds value and personality to a brand and its products or services. It makes the product more approachable and friendly.

If your brand can present a unique story or make the customer feel like they are a part of something, you'll win big time.

Photo by: Stuck in Customs

Sell Customers an Experience, Don’t Sell Features

We are all storytellers, but we listen to stories even more. We are surrounded by stories. We love hearing them, whether they come from a book, a friend, a movie, a game, a song or a brand. Stories have the power to elicit strong feelings and emotions. When you present the story behind your product to the customer and then invite them to become a part of that experience, they will want to purchase it to have that experience themselves. In this situation they are not buying your product for its features or price, but for the experience it gives them and the story that it tells. It doesn’t matter if brand "XYZ" has one more feature than you or is $10 cheaper, it’s the experience that matters.

How to Start Telling Your Brand's Story More Effectively

Storytelling shows the human side of your brand that customers can connect with. The copy written about a brand isn't the only thing that tells its story. The web design of the site selling the product, the look and feel of the product; how the product functions, whether it is a neat AJAX effect in a web app or the way a small hinge on a physical product moves. These things are all part of conveying the character of the story. A great story will immerse your audience, and keep them on the edge of their seats waiting to hear what will happen next.

1. Brand Identity Design

A brand’s logo design and color scheme are important in conveying the image that your brand represents. Create a design and story that your target audience can relate to. A large part of a brand’s personality is conveyed through the company’s identity design. The look of a brand can tell the consumer if it is something bold, modern, sleek, and powerful or something friendly, natural, cute and playful. Check out another one of our posts to see how important lessons from storytellers can be applied in design to aid in tellings a brand's story.

Picture: The Velora Studios Logo

2. User Experience

How your product or service is designed to function is another big piece of your brand’s story. Whether your brand is selling a physical product or software, design for user experience is equally important. Companies like Apple go the extra mile to create a great user experience with their products. They want users to feel great and immersed in the experience of using an Apple product. Even opening the box is an exciting experience because of Apple’s carefully thought out, elegantly designed product packaging.

A brand's story should connect with customers on an emotional level and create a deeper involvement. It is important to think beyond if a product is accomplishing its task and if a product looks nice. Even if both of those things are true, the most important quality to think about and implement is making the product enjoyable to use.

Photo: Apple iPod package design from thedieline.com

3. Customer Service and Positioning

The last major piece that makes up a brand’s story is how the brand interacts with and responds to their customers, and how a brand positions itself to the public. Listen to what your customers are saying to you and respond showing them that you care. Encourage customers and potential customers to interact with your brand. With the shift of consumer expectations that came with the real-time social web this is even more important. Luckily, now it is also easier to see what your customers are saying about your brand.

Zappos’ customer service is a great example. Zappos makes the purchasing experience as smooth and friendly as possible encouraging customers to call them about almost everything. Call center employees don’t use scripts or have call time limits. The culture that Zappos has created within its workplace is reflected on its customer service and its story is told.

Photo: Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO from Whiteboard Journal

Summing it Up

The best brands are not using bland sales copy and data to promote their products. They are not adding unecessary features or making sure they have the lowest price. The best brands are telling stories and inviting their audience to become a part of them. The story that your brand tells can make all the difference.

Endnote: Start telling your story today and think about how it will appear to others. Show personality in your brand does and give your audience something to latch onto. Have you heard an amazing story recently? Have you become enthralled by a product because of the story and experience it provided you? Leave a comment and let us know.

Lessons in Design from Storytellers

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 14:30:00 GMT

The most successful and loved brands have a story to tell. Some of the best memories we have are carefully crafted into the best stories of our lives. There is, undoubtedly, a very strong attachment to stories we recognize in ourselves. And there will always be a charismatic person, a storyteller who uses his skills and social intelligence to energize, inspire and influence thousands of people, for the better.

In this article we will talk about how you, the designer, can create stories that people love, remember and share.

Photo by: AmandaLouise

Alternative Uses of Storytelling

The use of storytelling can be found in team-building, training and marketing. A short story may be used as an introduction, so that everybody starts to adjust their mindset to absorb and reflect the emotions and feelings embedded in the story and what comes next. You may find stories in business presentations, carefully written by content strategists, in advertising and, of course, in copywriting. It is easy to see how words and speech in different contexts can tell stories. We are used to reading and hearing stories, but how can you help tell a story with design?

As a designer, you might think that telling stories is a domain reserved by copywriters, bloggers and writers, but that isn't the case. The use of images and elements of design can help to tell a story too. Think about it: what people see is instantly translated in words and thoughts, so that they make sense of it. Words and meanings generate emotions, reactions and become part of the things that people remember over time. Stories are easy remember, stories can move people. Stories make people listen. What’s your story?

Design Lessons from Storytellers

1. Typeface

Storytellers use tone, rhythm, intonation and body language to emphasize parts of the story, to add more drama or induce a certain feeling and mood in the listeners.

Applying it in design: The typography chosen can reflect the mood of a design and create a contrast to grab the users attention. Use big, bold letters in bright colors to punctuate, emphasize, intrigue and make specific items or concepts stand out. This works better with single words, concepts, short call to action phrases, than with headlines. You can use geometric, clear, sans-serif typefaces for a clean, minimalist and modern looking interface; or serif, humanic typefaces or italics - to denote a sense of natural elegance and emphasize your unique style and personality.

Either way, a smart choice of typeface can be a very powerful tool in getting your story across the way you intend to. Master typography and think about how type weights, font families and contrast can help you use type as powerful tool to convey the emotion behind your message.

Example Charity: Water

2. Elements of Interaction

Another important aspect in storytelling is the numerous ways that storytellers engage with listeners. They might ask something like "Do you want to know what comes next?" or make direct reference to their listener's own experiences by suggesting parts of the story familiar to them.

Applying it in design: Use elements of interaction create the feeling that the information provided is the immediate answer to a previous question or derived from previous data. For example, you can use a popular method of designing the menu in such a way that it makes the users ask themselves questions like “Why?”, “How?”, “When?” and “Who?”. On clicking the link, button or widget – they receive the appropriate answer. This helps them turn the interactive experience with your website into a narration they will find easier to remember, relate to and share with others. Using a call to action to show the user you have the answer to their question or problem will entice them and put them in a mindset that is ready to be immersed in your story.

If you want to learn more, check out our post about how you can use elements of Style in Interaction and UX Design.

Example: SYPartners

3. Mirror your Audience

Storytellers are excellent influencers. They make people listen to them because they are in tune with their audience, drawing them in so that they're waiting for more. They make a connection by mirroring the people they talk to and lock into a context that is beneficial to building a friendly, open and close relationship. Some of the best storytellers will make you laugh, cry, feel exalted and inspired. And you will remember their strong presence for a very long time.

Applying it in design: You can easily understand mirroring by observing people around you having a conversation. Depending on how close two people are, as friends, they may “mirror” each other's gestures, facial expressions, sometimes verbal expressions and even go as far as to adopt similar attitudes or reactions.

If you wish to address a specific type of person, with specific personality traits, preferences and attitudes, you can easily start a conversation with them and make yourself more familiar to them, by adjusting the style and tone of your content.

As a designer you can use relevant images and color palettes that are likely to be in tune with your audience’s preferences. For example a site directed to business owners should have a professional clean look, while a site for kid's toy should have a playful, fun and vibrant aesthetic. Your audience needs to relate to you and that’s what they want to see first. If they don't feel that they can relate, they will go somewhere else.

Example: Globetroopers

4. Inspire your Audience

You do not have to make your story self-evident by having large amounts of text covering your website. In fact, you don’t need to write that much at all to create a story behind your website. What you can do is to provide your audience with relevant examples, case-studies and samples. Provide relevant details, tell the story behind the project, be original and make yourself understood.

If you do that, your audience will better understand what you do (the story) and who you are (the main character).

Tips for designers: Use testimonials on the site you are designing (whether it is a client's or your own) to show the customer real people that are satisfied and have found their answer through this product or service. Make sure that the testimonials are worded in a way that addresses the concerns of a potential customer. When their doubts are addressed and they see how people just like them have their needs met through this product/service they will feel inclined to purchase it as well.

Example: Basecamp

Endnote: You can use your communication skills to give directions, make things clear, expressive and inviting. You can use your intuition and your talent to make your design elicit emotions and move people. These tips can help you create stories through your work, and become a part of the narrative that people will remember. Be part of our story by commenting below and letting us know what you think.

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5 Ways to Become More Productive as a Designer or Business Owner

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 12:31:00 GMT

Becoming more productive can help you get where you want to be with your business, but the answer to what you can do to become more productive usually isn't staring you in the face. We often get used to our workflow and make a habit of it. It takes effort to identify where bottlenecks are and to take action on improving your process to become more productive as a designer or business owner.

There are many different little things you can do to become more productive, ranging from meditation to exercising to learning how to speed read. We have outlined what we think are the five most important techniques that will have the greatest impact on your productivity as a designer or business owner. Following, reviewing and conditioning yourself to these five strategies will help you to optimize your workflow so that you can get more accomplished each day.

Photo by: sparktography

1. Automate:

Don't spend time working on things that an application do on it's own. With computers and technology advancing so quickly there are more things that can be automated everyday. A few examples are simple repetitive tasks like file renaming, batch image cropping or resizing, hard drive backups, website backups, sending out reminders to clients and more.

Screenshot: Automator for Mac

You can get started with this by using tools like Automator for Mac, the actions palette in Adobe Photoshop, and Actions for Windows. Next time you are doing a simple task like this, think to yourself, do I really need to be doing this or can my computer do it for me?

2. Optimize Your Equipment:

Having the proper equipment is important for being productive as a designer and can make a huge difference in how much work you get finished each day. For example, if you do a lot of masking and drawing it probably makes sense to invest in a tablet which would allow you to complete tasks like these many times faster than with a mouse. Updating an outdated computer or adding a second or third display to your workflow can help tremendously too.

Photo by: DamnedNice

Upgrading your outdated equipment may seem expensive and not ideal, but if you can be two or three times more productive by doing so, then it is well worth it. You almost can't afford to not upgrade if you want to be able to grow your business beyond it's current state. When you are optimizing your equipment to remove large bottlenecks you are making a wise purchase that will have a large return on investment. The final benefit that an optimized work area and equipment provide is they can help you to have more fun. If you are having more fun you can be more relaxed and will want to spend more time working since you enjoy it more.

3. Get Things Done:

This may seem like a really obvious one, but many people don't spend enough time actually getting things done. Many times designers and business owners struggle to just complete the items that come up during the day and end up not really progressing on the tasks they need to work on to move forward.

Look at what you have been getting done and do not just what comes up during the day, but make sure you do something that advances you or makes your business grow each day.

Getting Things Done by David Allen is a great method and book for any freelance designer, developer or business owner. The principle is that a person should get tasks out of the mind by recording them somewhere. Once you have done that, the mind can stop thinking about everything that needs to be done and actually focus on doing it.

Screenshot: Things

Organize what you need to do for the day in a to-do application or on paper. Make sure that you have separate list of only the tasks that you need to complete for the day so that you focus on only what you need to do at the moment. To-do lists help to get everything out of our heads instead of trying to remember what can sometimes grow to be hundreds of different tasks. Finding what you enjoy and what fits your style best, whether it's an app or a moleskin notebook, is important and will help you stick to the process and make it part of your routine. I like using an app called "Things" by cultured code. It fits the GTD workflow well, I enjoy the interface and it has mobile apps so I can always write something down that I will need to do, no matter where I am when I think of it.

4. Know Where Your Time is Going:

One of the most common productivity issues is when designers don't realize how much of their time they are spending on things that they shouldn't be. There are a couple easy things that you can do to find out where your time is really being spent.

Rescuetime is a great web app that will track everything you do on your computer while you work. It then shows reports and graphs so you can see how much of your time is spent being productive and how much you are distracted. It does a good job of recognizing what applications or websites may be distracting based on what you input as your occupation and it can be further customized manually.

Screenshot: Rescuetime

There is another similar application called Slife automatically tracks where your time is spent on different programs and webpages. Like Rescuetime you can set goals for yourself within the app. It exists now as a web app, but there is also an open source desktop client available.

One final app, a desktop app called Concentrate will help you stay on task by preventing you from visiting certain distracting websites and applications. It will even set your instant messenger status to away to avoid incoming distractions.

Using apps like these can be very useful in letting you see where you are spending your time each day and then take action to really focus on what you need to. Oftentimes you may be surprised in how much time you spend on things you did not expect, like email, youtube or twitter.

5. Review What you Can Cut Out or Outsource:

Look at the things that aren't important and can be cut out of your daily workflow. Find where you can cut out, automate and outsource so that you can spend more time on what is important in your business, design. After you focus on seeing what you are actually doing with your hours each day it will become more apparent what can be cutout and isn't really getting you anywhere.

Photo by: Velora Studios

Outsourcing is another complex topic on it's own, but today it is more common than ever for freelancers, designers and small businesses to outsource some of their work part time so that they have more time to focus on the things they want to get done. Invoicing, email, support and research are just a few examples of things that a designer could outsource to become more productive and spend more time on their skills and what they enjoy, design.

Endnote: Almost everyone will have at least a few things they can adjust to become more productive. Think about what these things are for you and get started today. Each day continue to focus on making those changes and you will gradually adapt to your new more productive workflow.
Do you have a productivity tip to share? If you do leave a comment and let us know!

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Awesome Website Prototyping - 3 Practices for Better Wireframe Design

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 08:12:00 GMT

Website prototyping has been and still is regarded as a simple incipient stage in design and in some unfortunate cases – it is simply overlooked. But there is more to sketching a mock-up than some people may think. Wireframing has more to do with the message and the core concepts of a business, than it has to do with graphic design - because a website mock-up is actually about mapping businesses and figuring out what goes where and why. It's important that both designers and clients understand this. Website prototyping needs your attention and thought (more than you might be giving it now).

Website design prototyping is a process that refers to three main practices. This blog post will help you understand how to use them efficiently, as a designer, and help your client see it as a map of their business, instead of as just a sketch, before the "real" design comes up.

Photo by: Paul Mayne

#1 Design Practice - Usability Focused Prototyping

Sometimes designers are just flooded with inquiries and tight deadlines; other times – the client just wants to have a certain type of website and doesn’t make a difference between having a website and building it with a specific set of goals in mind.

Either way, the initial mock-up may end up looking like the same simple sketch you made for the last five websites you built, when it actually needs more work and more thought put into it, all the way through. The finished website that follows will probably not be as effective as it could have been if more effort was put into the initial wireframe design.

If you want to avoid this happening, keep in mind three simple rules of design that you should start with, from before you even design the first mock-up.

1. Design with the customer in mind

Who is your customer? What does he do on your site? What do you want him to enjoy doing?

"What" type of questions are a good way to start; as a matter of fact - these questions are exactly the type of questions that customers love to ask most often.

You have the ability to lead them through a range of alternatives with your design that eventually answer "what" questions in the most effective and gratifying way.

The customer is a complex human being with a whole spectrum of reactions, emotions and thoughts that he wants you to make him experience. The content that you provide is the appetizer. The main dish you want him to enjoy on your table is actually the experience that you create for him through your website. You want him to go “WOW!” immediately after he gets familiar with your product, whether it’s a beta product or a trial period. But most of all you want him to enjoy going through all the process: have a good overview of your website, understand what you are talking about, find what he needs and become interested. And to do so you have to guide him all the way through and you can do so with a carefully designed and structured interface.

2. Design for interaction

Design with the hope for a connection with customers. Make it so that you are still the best host of your own show where they can be in the center of attention.

Conversation is built through blogs, forums, discussion areas, e-mails and comments, but sometimes it takes more than that to make it clear to everybody who comes to your page that you do want to read what they have to say and that you can make it easier for them to share the content they like, if they want to. The level of engagement that you wish to achieve is profoundly embedded in the visual organization of content online.

So you can build a larger community, you can feature guest comments and allow people to interact freely with each other, use something like a Meebo widget and allow cross platform connection or you can provide the user with more typical and traditional tools of interaction, such as a contact form and contact information.

But most importantly – you need to design your website so that it is easier for the user to actually contribute. Just like people used to do over 2300 years ago in the Akademias – build an inspiring place of ideas and knowledge, where people can come to sit and listen, walk around and absorb or contribute and share.

Design for Interaction and a lot of people will eventually want to be part of something that is unique, that makes them feel passionate, interested and engaged.

Photo by: Todd Moy

3. Design for content

Not every bit of information IS actually good content. We have talked about content in a previous blog post – Why Content Will Always Be King – where we shared a few ideas with you about how great content can be created online.

Designing for content means that you want the user to be able to find, access, remember, save, share and add more content. You can think about integrating dynamic graphs that receive data from the web and update constantly; you may want to include infographics and make data visually enticing; you may wish to use wireframing tools to figure out how use the space wisely so that you say a lot in a few words but invite the user build on them and promise to listen and reply.

Please note that designing for content is different than designing for more content. You do not need to figure out how to stuff more content in a 1024x768px range. What you need to focus on is how you arrange and structure information (in any form presented) so that you trigger a positive reaction in people, so that you reach out to them, so they can absorb it, so that they know they can be part of it and that they are welcome to add up and help it grow.

#2 Business Practice - Strategic Alignment

Aligning your business strategy and reputation with how you present yourself online - is not an easy thing to do. You need to make sure that your clients and customers will find exactly what they expect to find and then surprise them and make sure they have an awesome experience interacting with your business, online.

Strategic alignment starts from the very first stage and you need to make sure that you, as a designer, understand the personality, style and goals that define your client's business. Most of the time, clients believe and say that they want to make a good impression, to stand out and be remembered - through their website. Therefore there is a certain preference of clients and designers where more weight is given to pixel-perfect design, over efficient, strategic and genuine communication with the user. Both are equally important; it isn't good design if it doesn't communicate the message efficiently.

Design, like development, is about building solutions. And those solutions need to be aligned with the functionality, purpose and design of your blog. You decide what needs to be aligned from the very beginning of the project.

You can sketch it yourself, but you need to figure out what goes where and why - arrange information visually and make it easier for everybody to "see what you mean".

#3 Social Practice - Staying Real

Warren Bennis said there are 4 skills that great leaders share: good management of attention, of meaning, of trust and self-management. Some of these are more obvious, others are not. Nevertheless, you must have experienced what it feels like to manage all of them at some point and perhaps even tried to use apps to augment your efforts.

Staying real is about being completely aware of the meaning and value you add through your works and through the relationships you build. How does this relate to wireframe design? It does: stay real and keep the essential on top of everything. Make facts a starting point, make your skills obvious, make your services useful and meaningful. Use the space wisely. It needs to be a beautiful and unique map of your ideas.

Stay real and people will relate to you. Keep the mock-up clean, clear and focused and customers will be able to better tell that your client's product/service is what they want.

If you want to get started with it, all you need is what you already know and wish to say to the world. Wireframe design should start with your message, your history, your content, your ideas – not with a simple template. We like to think about it as wireframe design for businesses (their strategy and goals), and think beyond just the website.

Endnote: Next time you are designing a website wireframe, remember to put some extra thought into it if you find that many of your wireframe designs end up looking similar. The prototyping stage in design is very important and can make the difference between a successful, unique website and an unsuccessful, generic one.

If you wish to hear more on this subject from us, leave your suggestions and comments below, subscribe to our newsletter on the right and share this post with your friends.

Style in Interaction and UX Design

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 19:53:00 GMT

We live in the age of individuality, in the sense that, whether it's business, personal stuff or anything else in between, we seek and prefer systems that allow us make our own choices; we prefer those over standardized solutions. From customization to user oriented services and products, the center of gravity shifted from the general mass of people to you.

We even witnessed this transition. It was a brief but fundamental turn. It's not about what everybody does anymore, it's all about what you want.

We have seen this with clients, consumers, as well as with everybody in our team: it's a very particular type of positioning. You are important and everybody else is important too. This type of positioning is embedded in the style of interaction, a topic we think needs more attention, because it is connected to UX Design principles.

Photo by: NathanaelB

A Brief Definition of Style

If there is any principle in design that we are surely aware of and care about - that principle must be related to style. We define style as:

A personal statement one makes through what they do

A simple and unmistakable bouquet of something one creates

The look and feel of people, places and things

UX Design and Rules of Interaction

It is clear then that style plays a major role in business, communication, interaction and in various areas of visual expression, from design to architecture and art. We use message, facts and style cues to determine whether we made a choice that fits our preferences and expectations. Speaking of expectations, everybody expects some type of aesthetic touch added to the service or product provided. That aesthetic touch can come from the provider (designer items or gifts) or from the user (customized services, user-oriented interfaces).

Purpose and Clarity

Every startup, product or application needs a launching place and an interaction arena. Some think of websites as launching places in the virtual market. But we like to think it is actually an interaction area or arena. And we like to think that clients feel the same way about it.

When you design and build a website, what type of information do you consider to be vital, to start with? It can be in any order, but it all comes down to message, appearance, purpose and functionality. Is that enough? Maybe. Should finding and expressing a certain style be constrained by budget? We think not. The only thing that deprives work of style is lack of passion or lack of understanding.

Style in a user centered design practice is a personal or formal expression of how you think about your users, clients, fans and friends. Community oriented websites are extremely relevant for that matter. For example, when users have their own profiles, whether it's a simple description and a picture or a stuffed profile with lots of things going on - it's all about that special spot - the users spot, that they get to customize. That is a basic and extremely engaging level of interaction. Style, in this case, is not determined by how people get to customize their own profiles, but by intrinsic rules of interaction, permission levels and privacy settings. These things will encourage a certain type of communication and eventually, the desired style of interaction (user-to-user and user-to-website) will be achieved.

UX Design is all about style, too. UX Design emerged partly because of how our lifestyle changed. The way we present, absorb and communicate things is soaked with graphics. Design is everywhere. Consequently, aesthetics and design will channel information in a way that is persuasive and attractive to say the least.

UX Designers know aesthetic pleasure calls to action. But they will add a sense of direction, purpose and clarity to that website. And so, this is the part where you feel and understand the message, the story, the personality behind it all.

UX Design uses style to make a website memorable and have personality.

Photo by: Marcwathieu

Effective Use of Interaction Elements

People will use specific elements to interact with your website. Menus, navigation and action buttons, forms and communication-related elements. These are well known, frequently used elements that can make an interface more or less enjoyable.

When using these elements, your experience, communication skills and approach to web design and development will become part of the style of interaction defining your website interface.

The Behaviorist Approach

You think that people come to your website to do or find something and then decide on the next step. You think they will enjoy using different selection and search tools, rating and tagging and eventually - you think they want to buy or subscribe to everything they think is good for them. Therefore, this final step will be one or two clicks away and the style of your website will be something similar to Jerry Maguire. You prefer e-commerce websites or something similar – as far as functionality and design are concerned. You will encourage the user to do something every time they visit your website and you probably don’t want them to customize things too much, because that makes you feel you can’t predict how they will react and what they will do on your website.

The All-things-social Approach

You think the web is a better, more versatile and more enticing extension of real-life interaction. You use interaction elements to encourage people engage in conversations, build relationships, find friends, share things about themselves. Your choice of design is made based on the idea that your website has a story and a personality. You will try to make users stay longer on your website, enjoying a fun environment, as well as a very casual and relaxed style embedded in the way you talk to them.

Information Oriented Approach

You think information is the purpose, therefore you focus on usability and look. You prefer revealing your style through typography and sleek CSS effects. You think that people who come to your website want to stay informed and connected, but you leave either of those two choices in their own hands. Interaction elements are seamlessly integrated in the interface layout and perfectly adjusted to fit the general style, color palette and theme.

Endnote: Style is something that you feel, live and express through what you do. If you believe in your message and if you can picture yourself actually interacting with the type of people you want to be your fans, then you are on the right track. You are ready to make it big, with style.

How to Deal with a Client's Indecision

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:47:00 GMT

A Strange Inability to Decide

Straight and simple: a client's indecision can be a pain, especially when it keeps you from actually implementing a solution that would fit their needs, preferences and - yes - budget.

It is not necessarily the best thing to assume that decision making is purely an intellectual process. Decisions are important milestones for you and your client, but even when you have all the data you need, you will often find it is harder for your client to make up their mind, than you thought. When a client cannot decide on a design, there will frequently be a fine line between them suggesting that something can be slightly improved and suddenly realizing that everything needs to be changed (re-designed).

So how do you deal with that?

Photo by: Soundman

First - reaching a decision is a tricky thing to do. Decisions arise from a pretty intricate mix of personal preferences, feelings, expectations and outside influences, which are validated against actual resources, goals or measurable parameters. If you think your client suffers from a severe inability to decide, you may be wrong. In fact, he is going through a more elaborate process of figuring out what's the best balance between what he feels is right for him and what he obviously understands it could be a safe way to go.

Sometimes it can be distracting, figuring out things for a bit too long - on your client's side. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. The creation process involves lots of intermediate stages that seem to take forever. Help your client focus on the bigger picture and that will make your life easier too.

Know Your Client

Everybody is different. Everybody has something special about their personality that shines through what they do. This is more obvious with clients, that is - people with initiative, really passionate about their businesses, who usually have a story to tell, besides the main brief they give you. It is actually fascinating and inspiring to find out what's the story behind their business.

For the most part, it is up to you, how you communicate with your client and how you present things, if you make this precious discovery about your client's story and mindset with regard to their work in general, or not. From that you can easily narrow it down to what's truly essential and relevant for you, even before you start working on the project.

We found a pretty interesting article about various types of entrepreneurs. You may want to read it and think about how you can relate to each type of entrepreneur and if your style is complementary to their story, character and style of handling things. (see link - What Type of Entrepreneur Are You?)

Creative Organization

Write it down and act on it, that's a good thing to do. When we find ourselves stuck and wondering what to do next and we call it indecision. It's not that we don't know what to do or can't decide, it's just that - since we just sit on it, nothing will ever come out of that type of inertia.

Organization is clearly essential in any business related activity, even in our relationship with clients. But what one may find surprising and related to that is - although decision trees and action methods are pretty interesting - things don't really work that way. Concepts such as mind-maps, chart flows, structured action steps and so on can help you and make your life uncluttered and almost panic-free, when indecision strikes in. But in the end it all comes down to how you communicate with your client. Organization makes sense in words and as part of a continuous interaction with your client, who is going to validate that - yes! - you're on the same page.

Photo by: Slimninja

If your client is undecided, you presentation style could really make him feel comfortable and help him see what you mean. Communication is not about sending out messages, it's about helping another person absorb new information in a way that is really useful. Therefore, the relationship you build around your project, with your client, must be determined by the way you communicate and click with one another. Make sure you are in sync with your client, so that you don't loose momentum. See why this is important in this article from 99Percent - The Art of Momentum

The Chemistry Behind Your Work

Rationality is still a decent model that approximates how people work with one another. We choose clients and our clients choose us based on a very simple price/value estimation from both sides. Then we make important discoveries like - although we may act very much like homo economicus, we actually work together better as partners or friends.

The bottom line is: how deep you and your client are willing to get involved in this project? You really need to figure out the answer to this question first, or else you may find that adjusting your lenses can be a bit too frustrating when your client thinks you should.

Ideally clients should find you and prefer you over other people or companies based on how attractive working with you really is. That is why presenting yourself and your work the right way will attract the right type of clients: the clients you do want to work with, the clients who can keep up with you and the clients that let you go as far as you think is necessary to come up with something really different for their business.

Endnote: Better understanding, communication, organization and chemistry: the building blocks of authentic work relationships, where indecision is not a burden, but an intermediate step between one milestone and another. Working with your clients indecision is a great skill that both your clients and yourself will get to appreciate in time! Share this article with your friends and let us know how you handle indecision in the comments below.

Why Content Will Always Be King and How you Can Get Started Building your Own

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 22:39:00 GMT

Over and over it's burned into our heads that we need to create unique and remarkable content. How important is it really, and will it always be as essential as it is now? Businesses with big budgets can spend tons of money on SEO, SEM and PPC marketing campaigns, but that is not a substitute for great content. In the long run, the business that spends huge amounts on visitors, but has no quality content will lose to the business with great content. The business with great content can get interested and more importantly motivated visitors without spending money. When visitors see quality content they will tell their friends and networks about it through social media. Paying for eyes is temporary. Content is permanent.

Photo by: Velora Studios

It's Hard to Build Quality Content

Creating great content is not something that everyone can just do. If you are a business owner, a freelance designer or developer, then start by sharing your experiences, tricks and opinions. Provide value to your potential customers with your content. By doing this your visitors will see that you are real, and they will be motivated to choose you over the faceless corporation.

Business owners used to think they wouldn't stand a chance against their high-spending competition, but now the playing field has been leveled. If you can create great content then it is actually the other way around. Big ad budgets and high spending can't compete with great content in the long run. With the amount of people consuming content and the amount of devices to view it on increasing all the time, it is more important than ever for businesses to create content.

Content is supplemented by SEO and PPC, not the other way around. Not only does great content provide credibility for your brand and help with SEO, it builds an audience of followers who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. Traffic from ads goes away when you stop buying them. Content you create lasts forever, and people will continue to find it long after the time it was posted.

Don't try to pull one over on viewers. It's great content that is king, not any content. Avoid trying to get traffic by just talking about the hype and using buzzwords. Sure it may give you a short term boost, but in the end you'll be losing more fans than you gain. Great content comes from skill, experience and being real. It's not something that you can fake.

Photo by: Robert Scoble

How Do You Get Started?

1. Talk About your Passion:

Tell the world about what you know best. Show them your passion. If you know your passion really well, chances are you will have tons to talk about. Customers love working with people that are passionate about what they do.

2. Show Personality:

Be yourself, be genuine. You are probably more interesting than you expect. When you show your personality people will feel like they can relate to you and will begin to follow you.

3. Teach and Share:

Establish yourself as a leader and build credibility. Teach people about what you know. When potential customers or fans see you know your stuff, you'll build credibility with them. Don't be afraid to share some of your best tips or secrets. Your competition isn't going to beat you just because they know a few of your tricks. Ideas are easy, it's implementation that is the hard part.

4. Tell a Story:

Everyone wants to hear a story and feel like they are a part of something. If you can make your content and brand tell a story to your visitors, or viewers you will be able to grow a very passionate fan base.

At this point hopefully you've been inspired to create some remarkable content of your own. Most of the time though, it's not as simple as build it and they will come. You will have to hustle a little and get your content out there. Engage potential fans, or answer people who are asking questions (even if they aren't necessarily asking you directly). Give your content a good kick out the door and it can start spreading like wildfire. If you can consistently put out quality content then eventually you will get enough dedicated fans that your content will spread more and more on it's own.

Endnote: Remember that great content is something that will always be appreciated and it's effects and benefits can last indefinitely. When you create something great, people will want to see it, they will want to share it and you will win. Want some more great content from us? Subscribe to our monthly email newsletter on the sidebar for more tips and talks about design and business.

The Pursuit of Perfection in Design and 5 TED Videos to Help you on your Quest

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:00:00 GMT

Achieving beauty (aesthetic, artistic and conceptual) is a classic dream for us, creative designers and entrepreneurs. It's a dream about finding the balance between form and function, style and purpose, artistic expression and communication efficiency.

In design it is sometimes hard to find that balance. Design is essentially a social tool used to introduce a new idea, product or organization to audiences worldwide. Creative people express themselves through design because they want to be part of the process behind creating new products and services. Therefore, the general purpose of design is to integrate an idea or concept in a socially accepted and appealing form of expression (to attach a visual image to the idea).

If you do that correctly, your work is perfect.

Design is like the markup language of a brand image. It sets the mood and tone of your message, it gives your brand a personal and unique style before the magic of growing big happens and it clearly defines the way in which your audience will perceive you - everywhere, anywhere. This is the power of design, and this is why perfection in design can only be achieved when you truly understand who and what you are designing for.

Photo by: Simon Pow

There are numerous articles and resources on how to design state of the art websites, logos and more. We find really good ones on some the most popular design related websites (that you may know), like Abduzeedo, Six Revisions, Smashing Magazine and The Behance Network. But inspirational resources are neither the means nor the guides one should consider first in his pursuit of perfection.

In Design, Perfection Goes Beyond Perception

Perfection can be visualized, expressed and imagined. It is something that can be achieved gradually. When you are working on something that you are passionate about, every step you take is a step towards achieving perfection. When you finally finished your design and you feel it is exactly what it should be; it conveys precisely the message it should convey, then you have successfully achieved one level of perfection with it.

Maybe, instead of keeping too many unreleased works on your digital library shelves, you could really take a second look at them and try to figure out what's the message or the concept behind each of them. Be authentic, finish what you've started and, in the end, something will turn out to be perfect.

5 Inspiring TED Talk Videos About Authenticity, Play and Perfection in Design

For your pleasure and inspiration, we made a list with 5 of the "most favorited of all time" videos on TED, that are both insightful and useful. We thought these videos really help this point come across clearly: beyond everything designed, something is perfect when it makes sense to you, to us and everybody else.

1. Stefan Sagmeister's talk on Happy Design

This talk teaches us one simple thing: through our work, we need to stay in touch with what makes us feel happy and, if possible, help other people do the same. Our experiences impact our life, and our life experiences are reflected in our style. So why not take the best of it and integrate it in our work, so that every time we create something, it makes sense to us why we did it in a particular way or why we chose a specific typeface or color. It's like adding bits of our personality to the canvas on which we start building visual representations of the message we try to deliver.

2. Stuart Brown says Play Is More than Fun, It's Vital

Play is essential. It's the fun side of practice and it helps people refine theirs skils and abilities. But as they grow up, most people stop doing that, although they may substitute actual playful activities with something that still stimulates their brain in a joyful manner. Yes, that part is called entertainment.

The lesson we can learn from this is two-sided: not only do we have to practice playing with ideas, but we also need to understand that meaningful design is playful design, it's engaging and it makes people curious and happy. So play can actually be an easy way to achieve perfection in your work, as a designer.

Don Norman on 3 ways good design makes you happy

Don Norman speaks about how good it feels to have things that are both beautiful and useful. Make it fun for the user to visit that website, seduce him with things that he may not notice at first, but will always pull him back to your work, like a child to a box of candy. If the user goes "Oh, that's neat!" - isn't that what you want to hear? Isn't this better than "Oh, that is an interesting mix of bright colors and broken lines"? Yes it is. Why? Because design needs to be experienced. Learn more about it in the video below.

4. Marian Bantjes: Intricate beauty by design

Marian Bantjes speaks great words of wisdom that should resonate with all graphic designers all around the world. One needs to really to connect what they do with why they do it, that is, throwing a personal meaning in one's work. Individuality, written in bold letters all over your design, is more important than the desire to become popular or recognized in the mainstream media. You should figure out what words define you and what concepts excite and inspire you AND use them. Do that and you may just become "bizzarly popular".

5. Richard St. John: Success is a continuous journey

This is actually not related to design, but it is so relevant, we couldn't ignore it just because it does not have the word "design" in it. One valuable lesson we learn from it goes like this: do not ever stop doing the good job you did before you became succesful. We have said, in the first part of the blog post that you can reach variable and multiple levels of perfection as you design for various projects. Well, the fun part is that, while reaching those, you will have to continue to do that: success is only temporary, perfecting yourself lasts for a lifetime.

Endnote: The pursuit of perfection in design is not a distant dream. It is achievable, it is recognizable as a process and is repeatable. If this makes sense to you, then it's going to make sense to a lot of other people like you. So share these awesome videos with your friends and stay tuned for more brilliant blog posts from us!

Don't Limit Yourself - 3 Awesome Tips for Creatives & Entrepreneurs

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:00:00 GMT

At Velora Studios we like to break down walls, erase boundaries and forget about limitations. We believe you can do anything if you put your mind to it. All too often you might find yourself stopping at a random point in a project and using some simple, stubborn and frustrated words such as: "It won't work"; "That's all I could do"; "It's over my head". Before you use these words again, remember: brilliant ideas, as well as limitations, most often come from within. One of the most important questions you should ask yourself next time you are having doubts is, "Why wouldn't this work?". By challenging yourself you can truly push yourself over the edge and discover that flying is way better than always walking on flat ground.

Photo by: divemasterking2000

3 AWESOME TIPS TO OVERCOME YOUR LIMITS

1. You Can Be Your Own Critic

First, look at the situation from multiple points of view by being your own critic and your own fan. This helps you get a better idea about where you stand and how you should position yourself. If you are your own critic, you'll see your own flaws and set yourself to overcome them. If you are your own fan, you can figure out more easily what your personal brand image says about you, what's special about you and your style and you can use that to motivate yourself when things go wrong or slightly off track.

Then, you can be competition to yourself. What's the name for that in business? Benchmarking. It's all about monitoring your own progress, tracking your actions, purposely setting out action plans to achieve a certain thing. On a subconscious level, this type of introspection will help you learn how to set the locus of control more accurately. Sometimes, it's you who is in charge of everything and sometimes you just need to let it be and make the most of whatever you have at hand.

2. You Can Break the Rules

What is the worst thing that could happen if you break the rules? There are a few things that could go wrong but first let's see what rules are exactly. Rules are alleged statements about how things should be done if you want to achieve something. Most often, rules come from experience and are consistently enforced by people or groups with prestige/authority/influence. In a simple form, rules are prescriptions of actions.

But wherever they come from, most rules are intended to keep the status quo for the satisfaction and benefit of those who make them. Some of them work fine for everybody, others work better if challenged. To illustrate this, we chose the rule of structure which is a basic rule in design, but when challenged - incredibly creative things can be achieved.

It is true that all content needs to be built on a structure. Whether it's a very clean and neat layout or a specific set of recommendations on how the content should be presented, we take the rules of structure for granted and thus define the first limits of our work. In design, it is up to you to break the rules and find a new way to keep your content organized and clearly presented.

For your pleasure and inspiration, we have picked 4 examples of website design styles that challenge the rule of structure as we know it.

Flavors.me has templates to choose from and very simple rules to keep content organized, but the app as such is challenging the idea of structure since it allows everybody adapt a given template to their own personality - no HTML knowledge necessary. With Flavors anybody can build a unique personal webpage and send a message about themselves in the way that best reflects their own style with a new approach to personal site layouts.

At daytum.com you start with a blank page, which you will fill with statements, categories and quantifiable concepts of your choosing. Not only does the user have the freedom to tweak the rules of structure, but also the rules of logic and common sense description of things. One may track or present visually, by choice, any aspect of their day-to-day life that they feel is worth sharing via this gorgeous personal app.

Kaleidoscope is a great example of a one page presentation. Instead of using multiple pages, the website is divided into sections that show examples of how the app can be used. The site is designed with one idea in mind: make every piece of information accessible just by scrolling up and down. Not only is the idea of structure totally interpreted, but it happens in the most visually enticing, friendly and accessible way.

What's really cool about IdeaPaint is the intro. They disregard rules of typical structure, and literally make their website into an experience of what IdeaPaint is. To illustrate, some products and services can only be experienced. It's hard to describe what twitter is like, for example, you need to experience it. Well that's what IdeaPaint does - you are experiencing their products by watching people using them. Most of us think flash intros are a bad idea, but if there were ever a good place to use one this is it.

3. You Can Be Disruptive

It may sound awkward - the environment we usually live in is as disruptive as it gets: social media, marketing messages, dynamic displays and so on. But there are a few ways to be disruptive that does not have to do with any of the above. Two words: Disruptive innovation.

Here are some tips on how to go beyond your own limitations by being disruptive.

For Start-ups:
Short circuit the flow of consumption as it is in one sector and power it again at another level.
For SaaS (software as a service) providers:
Develop for the future, spot the next big trends and invest in R&D using alternative solutions, rather that doing it in-house (create your network of contributing business partners and freelance consultants).
For Designers and Developers:
Use the best and most versatile tools, apps, coding languages you can get to practice and develop skills that will always help you stay one step ahead of everybody.

Endnote: Remember to take a step back once in a while to see if you are falsely limiting yourself in any way. The path to your goal is like a giant mountain, and the fastest way to get there is to avoid plateaus. If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our email newsletter on the sidebar, and we'll let you know the next big thing we are currently working on.

Velora Studios Business Card Sweepstakes!

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:52:00 GMT

Three lucky people will win free design and printing of 1000 business cards from Velora Studios. These are some of the highest quality business cards available. The cards feature extra thick card stock, UV gloss coating and full color printing on both sides! A $270 value. We will even pay for the shipping. Read on for entry details and official rules.

To enter for a chance to win simply follow Velora Studios on twitter and retweet this message. Limit one twitter entry per twitter account, per day. The contest will run until March 3, 2010. The three randomly selected winners will be notified via twitter. See below for the official rules of the sweepstakes. Good luck everyone!

VIEW OFFICIAL RULES

Only legal residents of the United States are eligible to enter this sweepstakes. While we would like to make the sweepstakes open to everyone in the world, different rules and regulations associated with games of chance in countries other than the US make it difficult to administer a sweepstakes internationally.

Logo Design Today

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 03:00:00 GMT

Over the years the do's and don'ts of logo design have changed slightly, but the fundamental concepts remain. A logo still needs to be simple, memorable, timeless and translate across all types of media. Gradients and transparencies in logos used to be signs of a sub par designer who did not understand scalability or multimedia presentation. Today gradients and transparencies are often acceptable and growing more and more common in professional logo design. Advancements in technology now allow transparencies and gradients to be scaled and reproduced on almost every form of media. Even building signs can now include transparencies.

Using Gradients & Transparencies

Gradients are not new technology, but recently using subtle gradients on logos to create the effect of a light source has become popular. It is fine to use a gradient in a logo, but remember to make sure it will reproduce well without the gradients. Some types of printing and manufacturing cannot reproduce gradations or wide rages of colors (t-shirts are a common example). For this reason it is also necessary to make sure the logo will reproduce well as a silhouette in black and white.

Transparencies are growing more popular in logo design too. Sometimes logos create the illusion of being transparent by using lighter and darker colors overlapped to simulate a uniform transparency. Transparencies that fade off are true transparencies. Now these types of transparencies are easier to reproduce on the web, in print, and with sign materials.

The Design Process and Color Spaces

It is important for businesses to understand the design process and what to look out for when searching for a new logo/identity design. The logo design process begins with research of the company, the industry and the competition. Next there are many initial sketches made which evolve into three final concepts. The client chooses their favorite concept and revisions are made if necessary. Final files are then given to the client in various formats and color spaces. Most times a logo is printed it will need CMYK or Pantone colors and RGB for on the web. The designer or studio will go over this with the client when sending the final digital package.

Bitmap vs. Vector Logos

All logo designs should be in a vector format not bitmap to allow scalability. Bitmaps cannot be enlarged without becoming distorted and pixelated (sometimes referred to as stair-stepping). Vectors are computer coordinates that allow the design to scale infinitely without becoming blurry. Another benefit of vector logos is that they can be easily edited to fit into different marketing campaigns and types of media.

Making an Impact with a Timeless Logo

The best most memorable logos do not use a common font found on every computer. They use typography created custom for the logo. Unique professional logos take time to create in order to be simple, memorable, timeless and translate across all types of media. Businesses should avoid any company that offers twenty dollar logos finished in 24 hours. These logos are guaranteed to not meet any of the above requirements. We hope the information in this post helps any business looking for a custom logo design as well as any designer just getting started in identity design.

Does Your Website Help You Reach Your Goals?

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:02:00 GMT

As technology and browsers advance, websites are growing closer and closer to regular desktop applications. The days of a website acting as a simple electronic brochure are over. Every business should have goals for their website. For a website to help a business become more successful it needs to function in a way that helps a business achieve their goals online. More specifically a primary and backup goal.

Most often the primary goal is to get more customers purchasing from an online shop or capturing leads from contact forms. A businesses backup goal supplements the primary goal by drawing in more traffic and building credibility. Examples of backup goals could be a blog or an email newsletter. With it's powerful tools, the Velora CMS helps businesses accomplish these goals online.

Welcome to the New Site of Velora Studios!

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:19:00 GMT

This blog will contain articles with success tips for your business, effective design strategy and other topics of interest to us. Besides the introduction of our new site, today marks the release of some brand new services.

Today we are releasing our new brand building packages. These packages are created based on each businesses individual needs. The goal of the package is to teach business owners how to run a more efficient and successful business. For more information ask us about our brand building services. Lastly, free 30 day trials for the Velora CMS are now available. Test drive the power your business could have online today!