Something’s been on my mind for a while …
Many people email and ask me on Twitter about whether or not they’ll ever like they “know their stuff” when it comes to their role as a designer.
Stop Trying So Hard & Trust The Process
Small Changes, Big Rewards: How Etsy Embraces Continuous Experimentation
If I were working at a start up right now, I would take a little time out and have my entire team watch this talk that Dan McKinley (@mcfunley) the Principal Engineer at Etsy gave about continuous experimentation. It reinforces a key lesson that is so simple, but so easily forgotten.
Editing Your Product: Knowing Your Customer
Hillman Curtis used to say that you have to “Eat your audience”. In saying that, I think he was trying to get people to really try hard to intimately know their user. I don’t know if he was trying to figuratively say that we should Continue reading
UX Magazine: The Flâneur Approach to User Experience Design
I wanted to share an article I recently wrote for UX Magazine, it’s called The Flâneur Approach to User Experience Design. The idea came to me while I was on a flight from London to NYC. I’d spent almost 3 weeks wandering around London and Paris without any agenda, simply exploring, observing,
UX Magazine: Owning Your Story
I wanted to share a recent article I wrote that’s been published on UX Magazine’s website, it’s called Owning Your Story. Storytelling has been on my mind a lot recently. But not in the way that everyone’s talking about. It’s not about the basics of how to tell a story. Continue reading
Why You Should Start With A Minimum Viable Team
This week I was thinking a lot about what makes a great startup team. So many of the “lists” that come out try to identify what “not” to do in a startup and the 10 reasons why startups fail. A lot of times, these lists focus on the product – explaining that the startup failed because the product was too complicated, or too simple, or just didn’t make sense. However, I think another key reason that we need to address is the element and influence of the initial team, the first key hires that you make as a startup.
Rather than give my thoughts, I’d like to point to you to a really awesome post that Charlie O’Donnell wrote on the subject. His blog post Minimum Viable Team is a complete breakdown of every conceivable role you think you would need, and then he slowly eliminates each role that you don’t really need to get to a Minimum Viable Product. This method of slowly showing you what you can Continue reading
The Democratization Of Design & The Lost Art Of Justification
A sad thing happened to my recently. I was shown a website that was recently redesigned and it was horrible. Not just a few pixels off, but entirely incoherent. There was no consistency or re-use of elements, the fonts were all over the place, navigation jumped around, breadcrumbs came and went, and it was simply something that looked like an elementary student could have made. But that wasn’t the most painful part. The most painful part was a scary realization that the democratization of design is breeding a whole group of people who can make stuff, but can’t tell you the why behind what they are doing. Is the pre-fab model of design is forfeiting the important art of justification and meaning?
When I started out, we did not have websites that sold Photoshop templates. We did not have websites that held contests for people to design a logo for $39. We did not have massive libraries of site templates and stencils to work from. More importantly we didn’t just focus on making, we also focused on meaning. Continue reading
High School, Start Ups, And The Power Of Perspective
In high school, I was on the volleyball team. We were pretty good, but we had one big problem. In volleyball, you play until you get to 21 points. Every time we’d get to 10 or more points, we’d just simply freeze up. We missed plays, we messed up serves, we just couldn’t play anymore. One day in the middle of a game, when we reached 10 points, our coach called a time out, gathered us on the court and said “You’re down. The score is now 0, 10 … for them”. We went on to win the game.
Every game for the rest of our team’s career, when we’d reach 10 points, we would all yell “0,10”!!! I’m sure the other teams thought we were completely crazy. But this reverse psychology worked for us.
Sometimes when you think you’re winning the game, it’s easy to fall into the trap of guaranteed success, entitlement, or feeling more secure than you should. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter where you are right now. Because in an instant, the other team could catch up. And for my little volleyball team, we needed to think different. We needed to focus not on where we were, but where we were headed.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and it’s especially relevant in start ups. A small victory can give you a boost of confidence and make you feel like you’re on top of the world, that there’s no way your idea could actually fail. But it’s at those very times that we tend to ease up a bit, get a little too comfortable, and leave just enough room for the other people to catch up.
Small victories are great, but the key is to not lose sight of the rest of the game that’s in front of you. Because chances are, in order to win you’ll have to overcome about a million times more setbacks than you faced to get to that one small victory.
Only you know what it took to get to where you are. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter where you are right now. What matters is what you are doing to get to the next level. And to get to the next level, sometimes you need to turn your focus away from any victories you’ve had, and keep your vision on what’s yet to be achieved.