Do you feel a little bit down? Is nothing fun anymore? Do you find it hard to motivate yourself to get through the daily grind? Is the twinkle in your eye gone, and is the spring in your step non-existent?

Do you read this in a 90’s infomercial voice, and do you picture me saying this to you looking like a Seinfeld/normcore guy in a soccer dad haircut?

Well, I’m no expert or PhD in the field of creativity — and I’m sadly not a 90s infomercial guy — but I would like to tell you a story of how I kickstarted my creativity and found a new path for me that developed into a side hustle: a steady stream of side income, but also a new hobby and hopefully a lifelong passion.

So there I was at work, by my desk, a couple of years ago. I wasn’t thinking about how time flies — but I was thinking the usual “how did I get here, why isn’t work fun anymore, and where is my energy and inspiration” thoughts. We all had them, right? And we all have ways and tricks of getting out of that rut; I’ve had them and I’ve shaken that rut before.

But this dip in my inspiration was a doozey. The usual rounds of Pinterest and Instagram couldn’t even give me a glimmer of motivation or inspiration — and forget about Dribbble (the 2/3 perspective shot of an iPhone and some useless animation never really gets my juices flowing). A walk in the sunshine? Nope. Sweden is pitch black 6 months of the year and a slight overcast the other 6 months. I exaggerate, of course, but this is how you see things when you’re in a doozy of a creativity dip.

So, how do I get out of that rut? The sound of ping pong balls from the table at work and a two friends leaving for a smoke break put an idea in my mind. I don’t smoke and I’m complete rubbish at ping pong — the office ping pong leaderboard spells that out for me every day. But I should take advantage of the government labor law requirement to take a break during my work hours. Right?

I decided to use 15 minutes every day to something creative and completely different from my day-to-day job. That should be easy enough. But remember the doozy of creative slump that my usual inspirational rounds of social media and sunshine walks couldn’t shake? Yeah, I had to set some other rules and guidelines too, to really get things going.

The guidelines I set: these 15 minutes every day had to involve pen and paper. Because pen and paper is a scary thing for me. I rarely use them, and if I do I draw some squiggly lines when trying to do wireframes for the app I’m working with, or some web design. Whenever I feel the slightest sensation of ”this could be goooood” when I’m drawing, I get terrified of continuing. Because the next line I draw with the pencil could ruin everything. Right? I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that way.

But I wanted to push my limits, and doing something slightly scary can be very rewarding. So: 15 minutes and pen and paper. I knew I needed even more guidelines to start this. I can’t really remember how I got into it; I must have seen something on Instagram and it probably was a tattoo from the incredible Duke Riley that did it. But I decided that I would draw a whale every day and I would spend 15 minutes on it and it should be on pen and paper. There, I’m all set to go.

I did the first whale of the day. Horrible. Just horrible.

“Is this really something for me? My god, I feel even worse after these 15 minutes,” was my initial thought. But then again, I needed the scary challenge to propel me from this rut and I couldn’t quit after the first one. Enter the final guideline — or rule if you’d say so: I’d post it on Instagram while I’m finished as proof. A kick in the butt, a “hey, I did it!” or “look at this piece of crap whale — yes, it’s a whale and it’s supposed to look like this”.

And it did work. I posted a picture of the first whale. I declared to friends and followers what I did and I got instant encouragement. And the days passed and I drew a whale every day. First it was based from other illustrations or photos, but after a little while I could draw whales right from memory (and I still can I think). I could feel the fog of non-creativity lift and a light in the tunnel for every whale I drew.

It took me about 20 days — and 20 whales — to get to a point where I wanted to do something else other than drawing whales. And I discovered that had a ton of ideas! Not to mention that during this time I severely increased my productivity at work and had a spring in my step again. Still at the bottom of the ping pong leaderboard, though.

With renewed energy and inspiration I decided to venture into something that has always intrigued me: typography. Why not use these 15 minutes every day to start on the first font of mine? However, I had no idea of how long it would take, how to do it and where to start.

I downloaded a trial of the Glyphs app and opened up an empty project. ”I’ll start with the first letter of the alphabet,” I thought. Said and done. I spent my 15 minutes every day trying to learn the app and also the basics of typography. I read articles and ebooks on my iPad to and from work. Somedays I could draw a whole glyph in 15 minutes, other days I managed a joint or an ear.

Those 15 minutes every day as a break from work expanded to 1 hour every evening whenever I had the energy. After six months of doing that, it was time for me to go on paternal leave with my youngest son. That meant that I could spend a least an hour every day working on my typeface while my son took a nap. Three months into the leave, I had a working font to type with! Now, here you’re thinking ”by golly, that’s a dedicated young (ha!) man — working away while the son is asleep — what commitment!”. No, I didn’t work on it every day. I also got caught up with Game of Thrones on the iPad while I had a sleeping child next to me. You can’t always force work — sometimes you need to step away from it and come back later.

But there I was: I had created my first typeface. And I had ideas for at least ten more. Ideas and a curiosity to try out designing a script typeface or a monospace one. I learned a hundred things doing the first one, and probably made thousands of mistakes. And that was the same with the next one, and the next one etcetera.

As well as not being a PhD in creativity, I’m not a professional typographer either. I’m well aware of that. I learn a million new things with every new typeface I create. I’m happy to go back to my old ones and fix the most obvious mistakes — because I take pride in creating a quality product and not just getting things out there with shortcuts taken.

So what about the side hustle thing? That’s the cool part of this. You can work on learning new things and selling that art in the process, whether it’s typefaces or art prints or patterns. There are lots of marketplaces for you to sell that creative thing you’ve made. I’ve designed 10–12 typefaces so far — some more ambitious than others — and I’ve released 8 of them for sale on different marketplaces like Envato Elements, Creative Market and YouWorkForThem. There are many more marketplaces out there, and that’s another part of my creativity experiment. I was curious about this process of creating a digital good and then selling it online.

Most marketplaces have a traditional a la carte model where the customer buy a family of fonts or a single style or weight and as a creator you receive a 50–70% cut; Envato Elements have taken the bold step of trying a subscription model a la Netflix and Spotify. A move that may still be to early to tell how it will pan out — I think creators out there are split about it. But when comparing it to streaming movies and music — which too could be argued are digital goods — I know I personally prefer a subscription model rather then a la carte. But it all depends on the content, of course.

And while it took me a year to create some fonts, upload them and market them, these fonts have started to generate a small steady stream of an side income for me. I won’t quit my day job just yet.

But someday. Someday…

All images courtesy of author except where noted.

Originally published at envato.com on February 15, 2017.

Kickstart your creativity for that side hustle income was originally published in Envato on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What If I used a day at work to create and sell something that could raise money to help — in any way — the refugee crisis?

This year hundreds of thousands have crossed the Mediterranean. Refugees on a dangerous travel from countries like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan. Countries torn apart by war, destruction and persecution. Thousands of families run for their lives and takes huge risks crossing treacherous sea on flimsy over crowded rubberboats and barb wired fences spanning some nations borders. Many have no other choice but to climb aboard these boats to give their children a chance for survival, safety and a future.

I can only imagine the horror of these perilous journeys and especially if you are doing it with your children.

Besides from donating our own money and clothes not being used — our family has searched for other means of helping out. I’ve had the idea of selling something to raise money.

Thanks to the lab days we have at Hemnet — I’ve written about this earlier — I now got an opportunity to use work hours to help the refugees in any way we can.

So I took my idea of creating something, sell it and donate all the profit to UNCHR. I’ve created this pin that you can buy and wear and a sticker to put on your laptop.

The pin design took an hour or two. What took the rest of the day was researching where I could produce the pins and stickers cheap enough that as much money as possible could go to UNHCR. I also needed to setup a shop somehow and keep track of orders.

Goals

• Sell 100 pins for 125 sek each
• Raise 11 000 SEK*
• Buy 4 family tents
• Buy 10 aid packages

I will use the money to buy tents and aid packages that will help refugees living in UNs refugee camps. You will get a little package with a pin, sticker and thank you-note.

Now. Reaching these goals would be awesome. In my mind it seems impossible, but you never know and you have to try. It’s the least I could do.

If you would be interested in buying a pin you can do it here.

I’ve worked on web projects since 1999 with everything from web hosting to light backend programming to interaction design and visual design. That’s 15 years of experience — quite a lot in Internet years. During these years I’ve worked in everything from huge corporations to the smallest of teams, and one sure thing is that the product development process has almost never looked the same.

Some of these projects were successful. Some weren’t. Some projects were never-ending, with a backlog managed by Mr Creosote and thus exploding to a gooey mess when the last piece of thin mint gets added to the backlog.

I would certainly categorize the Hemnet Map Project as a success. Successful launch and satisfied stakeholders — but here is something that’s even more important to me: a happy, inspired and creative team from start to finish. A team that leaves the project hungry for the next one.

Setting up the team

To wildy paraphrase, we were told:

“Bring home the full screen map search*, create a beloved fullscreen map search experience with new possibilities for added functionality for the user and future ad revenues. And do it as fast as you possibly can.”

We got the trust to set up a small and self organizing cross functional team — running fairly autonomous with regular demos and and go aheads with management. The team consisted of:

• Two designers — With a range consisting of user experience, interaction design and visual design
• One researcher — A freelancer helping out with interviews, personas
• One business developer — Concepts, ads
• Two developers — Ruby, map tiles, front end

One of the developers were also team-lead — keeping the whole thing together and on track. Note that this were our titles and main focus areas. But all team members were involved from the get-go in everything in the project.

Everyone had a say during decision making discussions and because we had the trust from management and had all the necessary knowledge in the cross functional team — we could take decisions right then and there ourselves.

Eliminating the time it would have taken to report, present and get go ahead from management.

We felt a true ownership of the project.

Decisions were made with a shared understanding for the value we would bring Hemnet and with regard for the overall goal for Hemnet. The trust of setting up this team and managing this project came with a couple of conditions.

We had to:

• Have regular demos that the whole company could attend where we presented what findings we’d done (early in the process) or what we were done building in the project.
• Break down deliverables to smallest possible chunks and deliver them to the live site to reduce future surprises
• Have regular retrospectives where we talked about the projects progress, if we were happy, what would make us happier, et cetera.

The discovery phase or “to boldly go where no man has gone before”

With all this we moved into a discovery phase. Again, all team members were involved in every aspect of this. During a eight week period we defined goals and metrics for the projects. The success criterias were defined by the team, not the management.

We researched, found and verified insights thru surveys targeting our existing map search users to track their needs and behaviour, sifting thru behavioural data from site usage and phone interviews with users.

We co-wrote user scenarios and project specific personas. We visualized concepts together, gathered feedback and built simple prototypes.

In the end we had lots of findings, prototypes and good stuff to work with.

Implementation phase

At the end of the discovery phase we had a pretty good idea about what we needed to build and how to build it. The implementation phase started with a lot of planning. Splitting scenarios into buildable chunks that we could deliver to the live site whenever they were done. That reduced the number of late surprises compared to pushing a huge chunk of code to the live site.

Again we did a lot of things together. Sketching concepts and drawing responsive patterns on whiteboards and paper — quickly presenting our ideas, throwing them away, presenting new ones and honing the good ones. Everyone sat together in a room covered with whiteboards, and everyone drew. This is by far the quickest way to iterate design solutions instead of a single poor designer detailing a wireframe and risk spending too much time on a solution between design critiques.

I’ve seen, been a part of and also been the culprit in projects where the time between design critiques grew longer and longer. And if a single designer spends too much alone time on a solution you can almost hear the Deliverance-banjo playing in the background. That’s never a good thing.

We met the challenges of continuous feedback in several ways. We had bi-weekly demos that the whole company could attend, where we demonstrate what we were building.

Once every week, always the same day and time, we also invited whoever wanted to come to a “designfika”. If you are a Swede, or ever been involved with a Swede, you are aware of what a “fika” is. It’s generally an excuse to have a cup of coffee and eat buns. At the “designfika” we gathered in a room with coffee and pastries and the design team presented whatever they were working on at the moment. The purpose was to gather feedback.

In a way we are all designers. Designers solve problems and that’s something everyone can be a part of. The people with the title “designers” have the task of presenting what the problem is, how the design solves that problem and gather feedback on the design. But, I guess my view of the role of a designer and the importance of design critique is another blog post to be written…

The last part of the continuous feedback is one the most crucial. User testing. We employed several ways of user testing and as always: the more user testing you can do the better. We invited users to our office and did 10+ interviews and let them try out the project. Quite straight forward. Now we don’t always have the time and resources to do something like this, and you probably don’t either.

Quick tip: The easiest way to quickly get input is to test on people from other departments within the company — which we did. My colleague Magnus also put together a homework assignment for everyone at the company with a single page crash course in user testing with ready made questions so that everyone could test the product on a friend or a family member.

All this gave us valuable insight regarding how the product worked, and this is something you could easily do whenever you are designing something. Not only will you get valuable feedback on the product, but you will also spread the knowledge of user testing to other parts of the company. And I can assure you that the majority of your colleagues will have fun doing it and they will also (hopefully) feel involved and invested in the project.

The importance of A/B testing

After nine two weeks iterations with continuous design iterations and lots of backend development we finally had a product to start A/B-testing. This was important for us because we wanted to make sure that the tech behind the new map search would hold up for traffic and how the flow of traffic would change and/or disrupt existing ad revenues.

With a product ready for A/B-testing we started to deliver the new map search experience to 5% of our traffic. We had launched the project. Now we started the process of analyzing the stats and gather feedback from the 5% of users using the new map search. We got our hands on a handful of browser bugs and some map tiles performance issues and spent the last couple of weeks polishing the product.

Throttle up or “Scotty, we are going to need everything she’s got!”

Now, there are something quite fulfilling with having a big bang release. Push that button and release this new product to a surprised group of users. Shiny, new and scary (if you ask the user).

But starting out with the A/B-test meant that release day practically meant throttling up from 5% to 100%. Maybe not as exciting as a big bang release, but way better for your nerves and it makes it possible for the team to enjoy a beer at the launch party.

Post release phase or “The final frontier”

Just because we launched the new maps didn’t mean we were done. There were still stuff left on our wish list that needed to be done. The live site were running our most viable product with some additions. But still a lot of stuff to do — UX goodies, performance enhancements and such. The backend team needed to spread the knowledge of map tiles and all the work they had done to the rest of the developers and the design team had style guides to update and communicate.

Our keys to success or “how to keep the redshirts casualties to a minimum”

To quickly summarize our keys to success and how we avoided “redshirt casualties”. We had easy access to everyone we needed to talk to, we got insights from users from our user panels and behavioral data from Google Analytics. We had all the necessary competencies in the team to solve the task, and we were the decision makers.

We were “hands off” from management and were able to focus on our task. We had time to plan, learn, fail and then learn some more. Designers programmed and developers were involved in research and design.

And we communicated. A lot. Everything in this post is about communication. Daily stand up meetings, spontaneous and planned design critiques and regularly retrospectives that gave us concrete actions to improve the project and keep us as happy as possible.

Built by five people in six months. We are extremely proud of the result. You can try out the new map search here or see a little bit more of what I did here.

My colleague Magnus Burell held a presentation called “UX at Hemnet” at the UX All Stars (Yes, he really is an all star) meetup — check out his slides on Slideshare.

Our resident guru Thomas Lindqvist recently wrote about the final “super-retrospect” we had with the map search project reveling the questions and answers the team came up with. I wrote that communication were the key for our success — Thomas is the reason we communicated well and continued to do so during the project. If you are remotely intrerested in product development process you reallty should check out his series of blog posts on that subject.

And I am sorry for the poor Star Trek references.

—

* previous fullscreen map search was hosted and developed by an external partner

Building a new map search experience for Hemnet.se was originally published in Daniel’s picks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I work at Hemnet.se as a UX designer. Hemnet is Sweden’s largest online residential real estate site. The product development team at Hemnet consists of UX designers, frontend developers and backend developers.

One of several things that made me want to work at Hemnet were their commitment to use a certain amount of work time for “lab days”. One day every third week we got to work at whatever we wanted as long as we had fun and learned something new.

Everyone, be it in smaller teams or one on one, always worked on something related to Hemnet, even though there were no such restrictions. Such was the Product Development Team’s commitment to Hemnet.

More time for product development

We noticed the value of the work done in a single day every third week. Not to mention the value of having inspired and happy co-workers. Yet, there were never any time to get something deployed on the live site. To move something out into production, you had to use several lab days and some free time. That meant that a rather long time passed from lab day to the deployment of something on the live site.

So, instead of having a single day every third week the decision was made to use 25% of our time to really focus on product development. Instead of a day every third week we now have two weeks of lab days every sixth week. Ten working days to research, build and ship whatever ideas we all agreed on.

Pitching your idea

A couple of days before the lab weeks started we used half a day to research the ideas that we wanted to develop and wrote down what value it would bring and what we needed from the rest of the company to realize the idea. Then we used the other half of the day to pitch the ideas to the group and collected feedback. If you didn’t have an idea of your own or if you found one of your colleague’s ideas to be better, you could always find something to do and contribute to.

Getting more inspiration from “Inspiration”

At Hemnet we have a section called “Inspiration”. The section features selected photos from homes for sale all over Sweden. The photos are meant to inspire you with ideas for your own home or perhaps your future home. Almost half the traffic on that part of the site comes from mobile and tablets but page views per visitor is -15% from the rest of the site and the time spent is almost -10%.

We had an idea of using all the pretty pictures we have in that section of the site and making the browsing more fun and more inspirational.

That meant big pictures. A retina iPad have 3 145 728 pixels (2048*1536) to play with and that meant that we needed to save our original photos in better sizes. We also needed to build an API to access the photos as well as giving the user of the app an option to create and delete their own collections with their favourite photos.

From zero to app in two weeks

We started out with writing a mission statement. What our idea was about, what value it would bring, risks and then we roughly whiteboarded the app. While I started designing the app the backend team talked through the future API endpoints and set up the iOS-project.

It was ten rather stressful days. I had the easy part with the design, keeping everything and everyone together and some minor project management. With tremendous hard work from our backend and iOS developers we actually built and launched an API and had a working iPad app in two weeks.

This iPad-app will probably only be what it is at the moment. A concept. But we did do quite a lot of work with APIs for delivering hi-res photos and we will integrate components from this concept into future apps from Hemnet.

We delivered a lot of value these two weeks. But above all: We had tons of fun and came out of our lab weeks with renewed energy and lots of pride in what we’ve done for future work at Hemnet.

If you are curious of the end result you can check out the work section where I’ve done a small write up of the project.

If you are interested of knowing more of product development on Hemnet you should check out the blog of Thomas Lindqvist and read his every thought. He is our agile coach, architect of awesomness, and a damn fine human being.

Note: This post was also published on my own site together with a small write up of the app with a few more images and some interaction examples.