I decided to write this after seeing many articles criticizing Dribbble being published in the past months. I think that it is needed to remind ourselves about the different ways Dribbble is important to the ecosystem, especially at a time when designers are taking on more responsibilities in product teams.

I’m a Product Designer and I love Dribbble.

I switched from Behance to Dribbble because of the community and the quality of the work. The Dribbble community is really friendly, smart and full of talent.

Be a Dribbbler

To be a designer on Dribbble means you get many good feedbacks and receive reviews from a great community.

Above all, it allows designers to create an influence within the ecosystem, to show they are expert on new trends.

Inspiring bootstrapped startups

Dribbble has become a proper source of inspiration for any person working with digital products. It is used by many talented designers. A lot of bootstrapped startups are getting UI and UX inspiration and are then able to improve dramatically the visual aspect of their product. This happens thanks to amazing designers publishing their works on Dribbble.

The Best of the Best for recruiter

Dribbble is used a lot by recruiters looking for the next talent to hire. It is not uncommon to receive a message about great opportunities after publishing your work on Dribbble.

Hiring new talents brings new style in big companies.
This is an amazing media to communicate about new features, this is why companies hire talents and people with notoriety from this community.

Kicks ass your product

Teams with designer have to use Dribbble to communicate about their product. The first reason is quite simple: this is about acquisition.

If it’s well done, each shot will bring you a lot of new users. More importantly, each new users are designer expert. They will bring you a lot a quality feedbacks, about your visual design and your experience. You will have many user-designer to correlate with your own designer.

Dribbble is evolving

Dribbble is a fantastic way to discover new UI design. Many times, this is static shot of “weather apps”, but people who believe so overlook the good parts of Dribbble.

There are thousand of amazing interactions and animations showcased on Dribbble. The problem does not necessarily come from the Designers or Dribbble, but maybe Dribbble should find new ways to showcase UX design.

Being able to embed Pixate, Invision or Framer would allow to show how much good product designers we are.

Contact me on twitter @madgraphism

and check out my Dribbble

Why is Dribbble Useful for the Ecosystem was originally published in Web Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Whenever we hear or talk about responsive web design, the first thing that comes to our minds as designers, developers or others involved in the site creation process is providing an optimal viewing experience in the myriad of devices that can be used to consume our website's content. We struggle with how best to tackle the issue of responsive images, finnagle with fluid grids, and wrangle with media queries to make everything look spiffy. But is there more to "responsive" design than this?

Enter Responsive Design for All. This was the title of the talk given by Aaron Gwin, Carl Armbruster, Kate Chadha and Justin Hickman, and their overarching message was that we need to think beyond screen sizes when we are talking about responsive design and focus on making our designs universal and accessible to all users. The reason for this? Not all users are created equal. Some people read faster than others, some see better than others, and some have physical limitations that affect their ability to interact with things around them.

Universal design ... the concept of designing all products and the built environment to be aesthetic and usable to the greatest extent possible by everyone, regardless of their age, ability, or status in life.

This is not to say efforts aren't being made in this regard. For example, the W3C has put together recommendations such as WAI-ARIA and WCAG that are excellent guides on how best to build your sites. We also have the Congress-mandated Section 508 that requires federal agencies make their electronic information technology accessible to people with disabilities. These guidelines and laws have translated into features and workflow changes that we see in web design/development today: alt tags and captions for images, em units for font sizing, captioning and audio transcripts for videos, semantic markup for screen readers and audio browsers. But after listening to Aaron & Co., I see that there is still a lot we can do to make our sites truly responsive to all our users. Here are my takeaways.

Understand the user

“You must really understand the needs of your customers to design great products for them.” - Jason Mayes

If there is a core tenet that User Experience professionals adhere to, it is understanding the needs of the users. This is not something that should apply to just UX professionals. It applies to all of us site creators: designers, developers, project managers etc. To really understand how people interact with the products we build, we have to put ourselves in their shoes. Yes, we can use Google Analytics and other analytics platforms to find out things about our users, like what browsers they use and what devices they are viewing our sites on, but we don't get any data about what limitations they have, or whether they are using assistive devices/tools with our products. So immerse yourself in your users' lives, see how they live and what they have to go through to build empathy (think along the lines of 30 Days, not Wife Swap). Ford's Empathy Belly provides an excellent example of working to understand the needs of your users as your work on designing your products.

Test in real environments

“Test early on real devices to see the true ramifications of every interface element you introduce into your designs.” - Brad Frost

The quote above is from Brad Frost's article on embedding performance and performance thinking into our designs, and while it was meant to address the issue of website performance, it is something that we can also use as a lesson in other aspects of design. For instance, testing of our designs really should be done on devices/environments that we might not normally think about. When was the last time you ran your designs through a color blindness test to see how users with this limitation would perceive your site? Have you ever tested your site with a screen reader during your QA process? And there is more we need to be aware of besides poor vision and color blindness, as outlined in this Michigan State University document.

In the United States, about 7 percent of the male population—or about 10.5 million men—and 0.4 percent of the female population either cannot distinguish red from green, or see red and green differently from how others do (Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 2006).

If we truly care about the user's experience then these are things we definitely need to add to our workflows to achieve better designs. Chris Campbell wrote a great article back in 2008 that is a superb starting point for designing with color blindness in mind, and tools like Apple's VoiceOver utility and NVDA are great for understanding how screen readers view our sites.

Let your site respond to users

While responsive web design focuses on making our designs respond to the environments (read devices) they are in, we should also be allowing our sites to respond and provide feedback to users. Back in 2004, and I know I'm really digging through the trenches here, Andy Clarke and James Edwards penned an article on A List Apart titled Invasion of the Body Switchers. I remember reading through the article and being amazed at how these chaps were using stylesheet switching to "give users even more choices or accessibility options." While the article is mostly technical in nature, the example they put together is something we can learn from. In it, visitors to the page can change the contrast of the site by selecting the desired contrast level from a dropdown. What this does is toggle the stylesheet used by the site to switch out color schemes and even layouts as chosen. Some variations of this are already in use today. When browsing the web, have you come across sites that display three A's in progressively larger size right next to each other and clicking on one of them changes the size of the text on the page? That is essentially the same concept. Other possibilities abound with this, including using tactile feedback like sounds or vibrations to give feedback to the user. An unvetted example would be using sounds to signify successful or errant form submissions.

A call to arms

There’s no denying how far we have come with responsive web design, and how important that has become for delivering exceptional experiences for our users. But we need to stop limiting ourselves with our “traditional” view of responsive web design. We need to go beyond just trying to maintain the integrity of our designs on different devices, and maybe start thinking of our users as the devices, and design to fit them all. If we can make a concerted effort and rally to push for things like web standards then surely we can make a concerted effort to reach users like Chris Campbell that we are otherwise leaving out in the cold. Let’s think a little deeper about what we do and make the web truly responsive for all.

There is more to responsive design than we think was originally published in Web Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Starting with a grid structure hypothesis

Grids are limiting. I almost never use a grid in my design work until I have experimented laying out the elements and content in a multitude of ways. I then use the grid to clean things up. The funny thing is that I unknowingly build grid structures while I am designing. Things naturally fall into some type of grid while I arrange things to achieve hierarchy, balance, proportion, etc. If you’re like me you probably don’t hold grids in high esteem, however starting with a grid structure hypothesis can aid your intuitive process. If your process ends up going in a different direction just redefine the grid to fit your design. If this logic offend some of my hardcore grid designers I am sorry. To me design is more art than science, or rather design is science after the fact.

I have created a number of grids that you can download here. I encourage you to turn each grid on and off as you are working on your next project. Now let’s review the logic under which these grids were built.

The average desktop screen resolution is 1366x768 pixels and 99% of screens are over 1024x768 pixels according to W3Schools as of January 2014 (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp). Almost half of all screen resolutions are over 1366x768 pixels and this ratio is widening every passing year. Most frameworks and grids optimize for the average of 1366x768 pixels or below so I decided to create a grid based on a 1920 pixel width.

Grids are often created from numbers that are divisible by 3. I think this is a great approach because of the rule of thirds. I have created a 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, and 24 column grid based on a 1920 pixel width with 10px margins. In the psd file you will find each one of these column layouts, which you can turn on and off as you are designing.

I would love to hear how turning each grid on and off while designing impacted your intuitive process.

In the famous book Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug advocates that designers should make buttons look like physical buttons people would find in their non-digital lives. This advocacy became a standard and then recently declined after the rise of Flat Design. Now buttons are less obviously clickable.

I am sure you have clicked a button by accident or by not knowing that the button was indeed a button. This is usually a harmless and reversible action, but sometimes it isn’t. People who prematurely send an email before they are done writing it or individuals that accidentally buy something online are obviously frustrated when these unintended actions occur.

Apps often ask users if they are sure they want to do something after a user presses a button to alleviate issue of accidental clicks. This is usually annoying and adds another step to the process. What if every time you wanted to purchase something at the grocery store someone asked “are you sure.” If you’re like me and love to indulge in ice cream, beer, and chocolate (often at the same time) the prospect of someone asking “are you sure you want to buy that quart of Häagen-Dazs ice cream” may make you rethink the idea.

To relieve this issue I created a button that requires a bit more work to press, but relinquishes the need to ask “are you sure.” This button requires a user to click and slide the arrow element across the button to initiate the interaction. Feel free to download the PSD.

What do you think of this solution? Is it intuitive? How can it be improved?

If you found this article of value please click the ♡ below so others can find this post.

Find me on Twitter, and Dribbble.

l’art pour l’art’

The current theory of UI advocates that the best design is the least amount of design needed to accomplish a user’s tasks and goals. This belief drives a sameness to the aesthetic of interfaces. Spend a few minutes looking at the beautiful UI work on Behance and Dribbble and you will realize that everything looks terribly similar. I don’t think this is because people feverishly copy each other, rather they employ UI patterns that have been validated by others. Designers are increasingly defaulting to quick prototyping tools and “designing in the browser” to save time. The problem is that we don’t move past these practices. Also, we often over test and over optimize common design patterns in the name of “lean UX.”

These methods have made design more and more standardized leaving some asking “What happens once we have discovered all possible solutions?” Could we reach a point where designers are no longer needed because every design challenge has been solved and standardized?

What would happen if designers stopped trying to resolve the same UI problems and began creating new ways of doing things driven by their intrinsic taste?

“Art for art’s sake” was an art movement in the early 19th century that held that art doesn’t need to be the product of any moral or utilitarian function, and that art can merely be an expression of self. The movement was a rejection of the industrialization of society and culture during the time. The movement produced many beautiful works that later influenced the same system it sought to repudiate.

Should UI designers drop their analytical lens and start building for themselves like the artists of the 19th century that sought to undermine the industry’s influence on art? Is it time to add “art” back to the design process?

Of course any self-respecting designer will base their design choices on some objective standard but maybe we should add a bit of fun to our UI and see what happens. Perhaps we may find a new way of doing things. Perhaps our intrinsic whims and tastes are shared with the “users” we serve.

l’art pour l’art’

We all know about the Paypal, Hotmail, and Airbnb growth hacks. Here are 28 new growth hack examples to help you market your web and mobile apps.

Originally posted on Autosend.io : Growth Hack Examples

“Growth Hack” is a buzzword that describes the clever methods web and mobile app marketers use to grow quickly. The problem is, if you look for growth hacking examples, the same ‘ole Paypal, Hotmail, and Airbnb examples always come up.

I figured it’s time for some new examples. So I looked around and put together a list of 28 web and mobile app growth hack examples you’ve probably never seen.

Let’s get to it!

Growth Hack Examples for Web Apps

1. Zapier Landing Page Hack — Zapier has a landing page for every integration pairing they have AND don’t have. This is not only good for user onboarding, but great for SEO and getting new users to imagine the power of Zapier without even using it. It also helps Zapier get sign ups and know which integrations to focus on next. It’s just so darn clever.

2. Taplytics Can Do Hack — Taplytics offers to setup their mobile app A/B testing tool for you if you need help. This may not seem like a hack but let me explain. Getting people to use your app is one thing, but getting people to actually install something that requires a developer is another. That’s why Taplytics’ can-do attitude is such a phenomenal hack. They realize non-technical mobile app marketers will probably stumble on their page first. If app marketers can get set up help without begging their swamped dev team to do it, they’re more likely to choose Taplytics. If this is scalable for you, find a way to do it.

3. Qualaroo and Moz Community Hack — If you could create a site for your potential customers to visit everyday to discuss topics around your product, would you build it? Moz and Qualaroo did. Moz created a Q&A and advice forum for online marketers that requires a login that also can be used to sign into your pro Moz account. Qualaroo created Growthhackers.com for growth hackers to do the same. Now anytime you visit the Moz community you have no choice but to remember to use their app. When participating on Growthhackers.com you happen to see banners marketing webinars for Qualaroo. It’s a win for everyone.

4. Funnelfeed Craigslist Promo Hack — Funnelfeed used Craigslist to promote their service. But to get the signups they needed, they baited startups with a huge promo code they found for free office space. It’s perfect because it cost them nothing and it’s something their potential users actually want. Besides, the goodwill they’ll get from saving startups money is huge for their retention.

5. New Relic and Invision T-shirt Hack — People will do almost anything for free t-shirt and New Relic and Invision know this. New Relic gives a free t-shirt to anyone that signs up for their service. Invision gives a t-shirt to anyone that signs up for their mailing list on their exit intent pop-up. Both techniques get visitors to convert before they leave their site.

We write posts like this all the time. Why not check out the Autosend blog?

6. General Assembly and Udemy Content Hack — We all know how hard it is to seed a community with great content, especially when you need experts. Instead of spending a lot of money and time creating their own content, General Assembly and Udemy convinced experts with an audience to do some of the heavy lifting for them, instruction-wise. Though General Assembly develops its own curriculum and content, they’ve also enlisted experts to lead classes and workshops, reducing the number of instructors they have to hire and allowing individual instructors to do some of the marketing for them. Udemy (especially at the beginning) even cold emails authors, professors, and other experts to add content to their site.

7. Growth Hacker TV Free Ad Network Hack — Leave it to the person who make videos about growth hacking to come up with a great growth hack like this. Growth Hacker TV partnered up with growth niche sites and agreed to drive traffic to each other’s site using Hello Bar. The best part is, Growth Hacker TV got partners to agree that for every two clicks given away they’ll send one click back. Basically, give two clicks, get one click. So they always get more traffic than they give away. Score!

8. Yammer Biz Email Hack — Yammer only lets you sign up with a verified business email address. This helps users invite coworkers effortlessly. I’d also bet this helps their sales department lead score more efficiently. Either way it’s a good way to get a whole business using your app and filter out the looky-loos.

9. Uber IRL Hack — In this whole growth hacking game we often forget real life exists. This is why I was so impressed with two of the IRL (in real life) growth hacks Uber pulled off recently. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Uber drove around entrepreneurs and investors for pitch events. Was it a waste off gas? Sure. Was it an easy way to get press, get sign ups, and encourage current and future influencers to talk about your brand? Absolutely. Uber also worked with Nor Cal Dry Bar to pay for their patrons’ next Uber ride if they booked a blowout. This helps Uber reach a different niche, gives them press, and helps every user imagine another way to use Uber.

10. AnyPerk Gatekeeper Hack — A lot of B2B and Entreprise companies have to worry about reaching the right person in the company. This can take hours of research, weeks to set up a meeting, and months to actually get people using your app and paying for it. Well, AnyPerk wants to skip all this. AnyPerk is incentivizing users to get their message right to the source. Without making a call or sales pitch, AnyPerk pays members in the target company $50 to convince HR directors to use the app. Remember, customer acquisition costs for B2B SaaS is about 12-18 months of sale revenue. That’s far more than the $50 they’re offering. AnyPerk cut the time it takes to close a deal and saved money. What did you do today

11. Hittail Blogger Love Hack — We all want bloggers writing about our app, but are you making it easy for them to do? Hittail is. Most of us hide the fact that our tool is free for bloggers to review. Hittail just puts it all out there on their pricing page. The one thing that could make this bigger is if they automatically letting bloggers enter their URL on a special blogger signup page. In the background they could run a check on Alexa rank, Google PR, social shares, and any other metrics they find important. This could pre-quality bloggers, send them straight to a “press page” to get all they need to start writing a post (screenshots, feature list, logos, etc) and let them submit the review link when they’re done. This helps them cut the time they need to quality bloggers and helps bloggers get their work done faster.

12. Sidebar Dual Reward Hack — In attempt to grow their already large email list, the folks at Sidebar created a neat referral program. Sidebar created an incentive that encourages new subscribers to refer a friend to subscribe to their email list. What makes it great is that it is a dual-sided reward. This means, both the new subscriber and the person they refer get the incentive. What’s best is, Sidebar only spent five minutes on the hack and got four times their average email sign ups.

13. Unroll.me — Unroll is a tool that helps you clean your inbox. To set it up using a web service like Gmail, you have to allow Unroll limited access to your Gmail account. Since Unroll gets permission to access your inbox, they suggest a few friends (your top contacts) you can invite to use Unroll too.

14. Rankscanner Earn More Hack — Rackscanner’s app helps you track your websites keyword ranking. During their beta, you can only track 5 keywords, unless you refer more people to use the app. I know, a few web apps do this, but I think Rank Scanner implements this well because they give away the one thing they KNOW their users value.

15. Gleam Widget Hack — Gleam gives customers a widget to embed on their website to help them run contests to grow traffic and social followers. When contest participants use Gleam, they can click on a link that invites them to get a Gleam widget to host their own online contests. This hack is responsible for about 20% of their new sign ups. You may want to copy this.

16. Visual.ly and Quora and Medium “Sharecropping” Hack — I don’t like using “sharecropping” to describe what they do because of it’s negative connontation, but these sites use their users work (with their permission) to bring traffic to their site. Visually lets you upload infographics and allows others to embed them on their site with a backlink to Visually. Quora lets you answer questions which brings traffic to their site. Medium features the best blog content to get high quality traffic to their site. Visually, Quora, and Medium let you reach their community in exchange for access to your content. This in turn makes their site valuable. It’s a win-win for both parties.

17. Appcues and Bounce Exchange “Powered By” — The powered by is so infamous that it’s difficult to include in a list of ”never seen before” hacks. But some of the “powered by” brandings are better than others. Appcues and Bounce Exchange are a couple of my faves. First thing, both of their powered by messages are well placed and targeted. Appcues targets web/SaaS companies and their customers seem to have the same audience. Bounce Exchange is used by marketers and only marketers would actively look into the powered by link at the bottom of the screen. Second, Appcues and Bounce Exchange’s “provided by” are shown even on paid plans. This bumps customers that don’t like the branding into a higher plan and you get paying customers to advertise your service for you. Can’t get better than that.

18. Iubenda Provided By Hack- Every web app has a privacy policy. And when it’s time for most startups to create one, they look to their competition to copy and paste what they need. Iubenda seems to be well aware of this. This is why their embedded privacy policy with the Iubenda branding is so genius. Not only is it a big SEO win for them, it’s unbelievably right in the faces of all those cash-strapped startups that want to avoid paying an attorney thousands to do the same thing. Genius!

P.S. Need more growth hack ideas? Check out these unique user onboarding hacks using text message, push notifications, and automated emails.

Growth Hack Examples for Mobile Apps

1. Timehop Future Hack — During user onboarding, Timehop helps you schedule a tweet or Facebook message with a promotional message to your future self a year from now. I know what you’re thinking. A year is a long time from now and you’re right. But when those tweets and Facebook shares go live a year from now, it brings users back to their app and invites new users. It’s like a growth hacking savings plan. You invest now and in time, you’ll get something in return.

2. Facebook Messenger Sync Hack — Facebook doesn’t really need more growth, but that doesn’t stop them trying. In Messenger, they’ve ASKED (key word here) users for permission to continuously sync their address book so they can find other Messenger users. This means their users will always be able to invite Facebook friends that aren’t using Messenger to use the app. This is awesome because this isn’t a one-time growth hack. As their users add more friends, they’ll always be prompted to invite different people to the app.

3. Blab — Blab also does a neat hack using address book syncing. Blab uses the address book to allow users to video chat with anyone, even if they don’t the app. This is an incredible way to get new users since invites will include a link to download the app. The thing I like best is that Blab is makes sure users know what they’re getting into. This is good for reviews and building trust. Too many growth hacks rely on dishonest practiceswhich make their results short lived and ineffective.

4. Foursquare Platform Hack — This Foursquare hack is the typical “leverage a platform” growth hack. Foursquare allows you to post your check-ins on your Facebook timeline for others to see. The one missed opportunity here is that they don’t default Facebook sharing “on”. With some A/B testing, they may find making Facebook sharing a default for user could increase downloads.

5. Path WOM Hack- Path does their take on IRL growth hacking by letting users invite someone else in person. Doesn’t seem like much of a growth hack. But 77% of people learn about new mobile apps through family and friends (word of mouth). The best way to encourage word of mouth sharing is to make sharing your app easy in person. Path is known for their growth hacks but this one is an easy win (and I’m sure a highly converting one).

6. Fancy Credit Hack — Paid referral programs are typical for web apps to get more sign ups. But Fancy stole this technique for their mobile app. Fancy is like Pinterest with buy links. When a user invites a friend they can earn real credits to use on their site. A lot of people don’t like to consider referral programs growth hacks, but since they aren’t used much on mobile…it is.

7. Circa Share by Text Hack — Circa does something that surprisingly most other mobile apps don’t do. Circa allows users to share in-app content by text. Remember, 98% of text messages are opened. And most text messages are read in 3 minutes (PDF LINK). By allowing their users to text interesting bits from Circa, their friends will get the news and a link to download the app.

8. Instapaper Integrations Hack — The goal of any mobile app team is get people to download the app and keep them using it. Instapaper has found a way to do this by integrating with similar apps. In Instapaper, users can install other apps like Pocket onto any device or browser they want. They’ve even made it easy for users to do it by making their own app directory and adding easy options that help users add apps by email.

You’ve made it this far. Why not subscribe?

9. Draw Something Connections Hack — I know Draw Something seems like ancient history now, but there was one major growth hack they used to reach the top we can all learn from. Draw Something used Facebook connections to make it easy to invite friends to play. This encouraged more users to invite friends and the cycle continued to 100 million daily active users.

10. Sing! Karaoke Experience Hack — Some apps just lend themselves to major growth and Sing! Karoke is one of those apps. Sing! Karaoke lets users sing along with their favorite songs and share their performance with a community of artists and get likes and feedback from friends. Users can even invite friends and sing along with them. The entire app is one sharable moment. There’s no way a user would want to use the app by themselves and that makes people invite others to use the app. Basically, if there’s any kind of fun way to use your mobile app, find a way to get people sharing it. It’s growth hack virality most of us can only dream of…sigh!

Also don’t forget to try some user onboarding hacks.

Enjoyed this article? Share this on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and LinkedIn. If you have any examples you feel I should add to the list, please email them to ashli@autosend.io and let me know! I’ll make sure to add them to the list.

You may like these articles as well…

• How to Onboard Users with Email, SMS, & Push
• 15 Ways to Keep Mobile App Users Hooked

Originally posted on Autosend.io : Growth Hack Examples

A lot has been written about designers learning to code, and most recently Stephen Caver opined that developers should learn design “to gain empathy for the designers with whom they work.” And I couldn’t agree with him more. The overall message of this article and others like it is the idea that working together is the best way to ensure successful delivery of the projects we work on everyday.

This is all fine and dandy, but let’s face it, the sad truth is that it takes a lot of time to actually learn let alone comprehend the material we are diving into, especially if it is something with which we have no experience. On top of that, we have actual work and life outside of work and depending on individual situations those could occupy significant amounts of time. So finding time to sit down and learn something may not be something that we can take on as easily as others think. But I am not going to sugarcoat it, if you really want to learn, you will have to put in the hours to achieve whatever goal you are aiming for.

So what am I trying to get at? Well, I do not profess to know a quick way to mastering design principles or javascript, but I do think that collaboration can be the bridge that allows us to complete projects successfully while we work on filling knowledge gaps.

Collaboration
“the action of working with someone to produce or create something.”

The idea of collaborating is not a new one, but while it is easy to say “we collaborate on projects,” I think it is harder to define collaboration beyond giving an opinion in a meeting or creative session. Well, maybe not necessarily harder, but more… unusual. This is my perspective on what collaboration really means, especially as it applies to my role as a developer working with art/creative directors, user experience designers and project managers.

Collaboration is…

… a desire to learn

The most important part of achieving a goal is desire. It’s often been said that if you truly want something then you will do everything in your power to attain it. Whether that is money, a car, or a house. The same can be said of learning design or code. You have to want to learn it for you to actually be able to do so. Call it drive, determination or persistence. This is the first quality that you have to show when working with others — interest in what they are doing. Learning on your own is hard, and is often slow, confusing, and frustrating. So why not take advantage of learning from someone who has already mastered the principles? Someone you probably get to see on a daily basis. Take advantage of the resources you have available all around you, it will make the learning process a whole lot easier.

In a comment on Stephen Caver’s article, Rachel Gertz beautifully summed up the importance of learning:

I think for any team to be truly cohesive … having an appreciation for the process and the methodology behind why we each do the things we do means we can communicate using the same language.

… a desire to teach

In the same vein, it is important for you to teach what you know, regardless of whether you think you’re good enough to teach or people know what you want to teach. Brand new topics can be extremely informative, but I have also found that picking up a nugget or two from a talk or class you already know about can have tremendous effects on your workflows and how you approach your work on a daily basis.

If think teaching means presiding over an extensive class or something similar, that is not the case. Take a look at Make Photoshop Faster for example. This is a resource that solved a lot of Photoshop woes, and all it included was two optimization tips. Like I said, a nugget or two has the potential to change paradigms. Other excellent examples of people teaching what they know are Joel Marsh with the Daily UX Crash Course, Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton with Bootstrap, and Dan Rose with the Photoshop Etiquette.

Resources like these create a common understanding of base terms and techniques that make it extremely easy to pick up on the deeper nuances of whatever it is you’re trying to learn or teach. But most importantly, educating others covertly makes you a student by giving you a deeper understanding of what you’re teaching.

… building relationships

I had the pleasure of attending the Artifact Conference earlier this year in Austin, TX, where I got to hear a number of excellent talks. The one that really hit home for me was RWD IRL (Responsive Web Design in Real Life) by Trent Walton. In it, Trent explained that in order to built cohesive units, we need to build relationships (not referring to the romantic kind here) with people that we work with. This allows us to gain insights on how we each work as individuals, our personal processes, and where our strengths lie. I don’t think you have to wait to actually work on a project with someone for this to happen, because it could be as simple as asking questions on topics you’re interested in but are not familiar with, or sending out quick emails with tips, ideas or cool things you’ve come across.

A fair point that Trent also brought up was the almost adversarial nature of the relationship between designers and developers, particularly in environments where silos exist. In this scenario, there is a lot of fear with regards to losing control of your part of the work in progress. This then results in (a) people working in a secretive manner in the corner somewhere and having individual “great reveals” once the “masterpiece” is complete, and (b) creation of problems in one stage of the project flow that have to be solved by those in the next stage. Solving this silo problem requires a structural change within an organization to ensure that all disciplines are represented and contribute in every stage of a project. This is the part of the conversation where we admonish waterfall-oriented processes and advocate for iterative and agile approaches, but a lot has been written about that as well so I’m not going to delve into that.

… charting new pathways

The final piece of the puzzle is trying out new things to see what works best for you as a team. There are countless ideas on what the ideal workflow is, how to arrange workspaces for collaboration etcetera etcetera. But I believe that it is up to you to find what works best for you and go with that. The Basecamp team serves as an excellent example of this. On the issue of using Photoshop or HTML/CSS for designing interfaces, here’s what Jason Fried wrote in an article titled Why We Skip Photoshop:

None of this is to say we think Photoshop is bad or a waste of money or time, but for us we’ve found that going straight into HTML/CSS affords us the best iterative and creative experience.

This is what has worked and continues to work for them. Of course this has certain implications, but they have created a system that works for them. I don’t think anyone can dictate what is best for your team especially as an outsider, so it is up to you to determine what works best. And the way to do this is to experiment with ideas to see what fits best, be it element collages, designing in the browser, prototyping in code and so on. Once you’ve found what works, you can always fine tune it to make it better.

What about you? Do you have any ideas on what you think collaboration is? Leave a comment or let me know on Twitter.

Defining collaboration was originally published in Web Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In fact, it needs them more than ever.

As an interactive designer, I am of a dying breed. I am one of the many interactive designers who is slowly being nudged (pushed, shoved, tossed) out of the digital design process. And I have the Post-PSD Era to blame.

The Post-PSD Era is a product of the successful web. Due to the rise of mobile and constant innovation in our development standards and processes, it is becoming increasingly outdated to provide PSD Mock Ups for each screen of a website or app, or even to provide more than a handful. In some cases, PSDs can be avoided altogether. This is to the benefit of clients, developers, businesses, pretty much everyone — even, in fact, the designer. Learn how all designers can adapt in the Post PSD Era.

Why do I hate Photoshop?

I don’t. I have done most of my work using Photoshop. Photoshop does have its downfalls though. Web designer Brad Frost summarizes Photoshop’s strengths and weaknesses in his own blog post, The Post PSD Era:

To sum up what Frost is saying, Photoshop does the things it was built to do very well. Photoshop serves its purpose so well that designers found new ways to use it for what it’s not very good at — web design.

Now, If you look up the definition of designer on Google, you’ll see this:

Notice it does not say: designer: a person who builds designs in photoshop.

The definition of a designer’s role hasn’t really changed, but rather, their workflow has.

Your Current Workflow (or something like it)

Previously, web design workflows have been something like this:

1. Discovery. This covers everything from getting to know the business to what the look and feel should be. Standard stuff.
2. Concepts. After the discovery meeting, you have a few ideas of what the new design could look like. Anywhere from two to five concepts are usually presented, each with its own design style, colors, font treatments, photo treatments. Surely, with all these different looks, they’ll like one of them.
3. Mix & Match. This is where the client tells you what they like about each of the concepts and tells you to match Concept 1’s dark color scheme with Concept 4's fun text treatment and Concept 3's grunge look, but make sure to keep it simple and clean. This is the creative equivalent of mixing all the flavors at the soda fountain into one “Suicide” soda.
4. Repeat Until You Get It Right. Repeat steps 2 & 3 until the client is happy. Make sure you’re wearing your comfortable jeans, because you could be here awhile.

The Post-PSD Workflow

The Post-PSD Era, on the other hand, is all about pre-defining the rules of whatever it is you are about to design. Instead of wasting time designing multiple unique concepts for look and feel, more research is done up front to find the right look, feel, tone, and style to achieve the business goals of your client and the project. A Post-PSD Workflow might look like this:

1. Discovery. Same as above.
2. Definition. In the Post-PSD Workflow, this is where your money is made. Where a designer would usually present multiple concepts, they now present multiple “styles”. The decision of how the project should look and feel will be determined by what style best helps meet the business objectives. When this step is done, the style, tone, and overall visual theme should be identified. (There are several techniques you can use to arrive at these conclusions, which we will go over in minute.)
3. Application. Since the styles have already been defined, you aren’t wasting time trying to Frankenstein multiple design concepts together with multiple layouts. Instead, you are just building on top of wireframes with the styles you’ve already established. If comps are still necessary now you only have to do one concept and work off of that.

Gone are the days of old where a designer would present multiple website design “concepts” to the client or when a PSD was needed for each version of a web-page. Instead, you establish a style for the whole project, perhaps the whole brand, and then you let that determine the design.

Post-PSD Methods

There are numerous different processes that go beyond the multi-PSD design methodology.

Visual Inventory

Dan Mall’s idea of a Visual Inventory is my personal favorite. He builds the Visual Inventory document for the client to help them identify design solutions for the business goals. It’s a more abstract way of getting to a design solution. Specifically, he says:

“Full-page comps are designed to solve the question, “What should this site look like?” To solve the more abstract question, “What should this site feel like?” I’m pleased to see that we’re turning to abstract deliverables like style tiles, style prototypes, or—my personal favorite—element collages.”

When you create a Visual Inventory for a client, you are helping them find the solutions that will work for their product instead of the aesthetics that they prefer. This provides the optimal experience for their target customer.

StyleTiles

According to the Stiletil.es website:

“Style Tiles are a design deliverable consisting of fonts, colors and interface elements that communicate the essence of a visual brand for the web.”

Like the Visual Inventory above, it’s a way of capturing styles without building out a full comp. Unlike the Visual Inventory, a style tile actually goes an extra step of identifying the exact styles that should be used: which fonts, color combinations, imagery, illustrations. The goal is to pick one definite style to continue with for development. The end result looks something like this:

With this as my roadmap, I can easily pick which of these styles I want to use for specific elements on the site. I’ve already defined the look and feel, now it’s just down to application.

In-Browser Design

There are those who support the idea of designing in the browser. Chris Thelwell, Digital innovator and Lead UX Consultant at ThoughtWorks, lays out some critical beneftis to In-Browser Design in his article Design-in-browser, are you ready?:

“Design-in-browser forces you to make the content lead the design.

There is no better way to test your design than by actually testing your design.

Design-in-browser is responsive by default, enabling design for multiple devices without multiple versions.

We can present rich, useable HTML to demonstrate the design (both visually and in the way it feels to use), rather than static comps.

CSS allows quick iterations, making real-time collaboration possible across multiple locations.

Move forward with something more real at every stage, to start building the final product in the design stage.

The design itself is the wireframe, visual design, sliced up assets and the documentation in one.”

This is the evolution of creating a Style Guide for the developer without handing off actual visual comps. In-Browser design requires collaboration between designer and developer to make sure the site not only looks right, but functions correctly as well.

Agile Methodology

Agile is actually a development methodology that focuses on iterative design. However, I’m actually no expert, so I’ll quote a credible source. According to AgileMethodology.com:

“Agile development methodology provides opportunities to assess the direction of a project throughout the development lifecycle. This is achieved through regular cadences of work, known as sprints or iterations, at the end of which teams must present a potentially shippable product increment. By focusing on the repetition of abbreviated work cycles as well as the functional product they yield, agile methodology is described as “iterative” and “incremental.” In waterfall, development teams only have one chance to get each aspect of a project right. In an agile paradigm, every aspect of development — requirements, design, etc. — is continually revisited throughout the lifecycle. When a team stops and re-evaluates the direction of a project every two weeks, there’s always time to steer it in another direction.”

In other words, it is expected that styles, functionalities, even the content, will change. This is truly the most “agile” workflow methodology. However, the Agile Methodology assumes a certain scale, and may not be ideal for smaller projects.

Providing Value

In today’s digital ecosystem, our digital experiences are rapidly evolving, and there isn’t enough time to constantly redesign in Photoshop. But that doesn’t mean designers aren’t important. Rather, the opposite. Designers are more important in today’s digital world than ever. You are still responsible for creating flexible design systems and finding the styles that will connect with the user. Now you just have to do it faster. By ditching the PSD and streamlining the design process, you aren’t just providing the client the value of saved time, you are making yourself more valuable. And ultimately, the real goal of the Post PSD Era is about creating more value — for your customers, for your team, and for you.

Part 2 in a series of reimagining the Quora Android experience.

Contents: Problems → Solutions → Process

Problems

Previously in a usability test on Quora, I identified two main issues, neither of which had easy quick-fixes:

1. Browse falls short in helping users discover interesting content

2. Search Results quality is questionable and navigation is difficult

Solutions (High-Fidelity Mockups)

Below are annotated before & after comparisons of the current Quora interfaces vs. the high-fidelity mockups of the redesigned version.

Process

Borrowing Adaptive Path’s double-diamond process, I use Personas, User Stories, Sketches, Wireframing and Prototyping to understand the users’ needs and explore solutions for them. The goal is to maximize understanding of the problem space while deferring detail as long as possible to ensure a lean product development process.

Persona: Meet Alex

Alex is an aspiring entrepreneur with big dreams but a busy schedule.

“I sometimes get lost reading and browsing stuff from people I respect. But quality is important — finding credible content shouldn’t get in the way of my learning.

Personas are a great tool for developing empathy for the user and in ensuring that a product is designed to solve actual user needs. Although Quora has many kinds of personas (i.e. sage contributors, inquisitive scholars, etc), I focus on Alex, the time-starved entrepreneur, because my usability test participants all shared similar demographics, behaviors, and needs. Furthermore, Alex’s persona has a higher probability of resonating with the majority of users, according to the oft-quoted 1-9-90 rule (1% will answer, 9% will edit, and 90% lurk) in content-based networks.

Alex’s three core needs are:

1. Content Reliability: He wants to learn from the best, so Alex wants to easily see the best content on Quora.

2. Quick Access to Content: Alex is already heads-down working on his startup so when he needs to find something on Quora, he needs it pronto.

3. Content Discovery: With such a hectic schedule, the serendipitous advice and occasionally fun insight on Quora is an escape for Alex.

User Stories: Alex’s Needs

After understanding Alex’s 3 core needs, User Stories help me break them down from abstract high-level Epics into smaller designable pieces, which essentially make up the Use Cases. The Needs in the picture above are taken from comments users made during usability testing and organized under their respective Epics.

Next, I use a framework to break the needs down by the user’s roles, goals / desires, and desired benefits.

Framework: “AS A <Role>, I WANT<Goal/Desire> SO THAT <Benefit>”

Laid out in this framework, the user stories are now more concrete and designable. Note: I choose not to split stories until every last detail is covered because the stories shown above are very reasonable and realistic, and doing so would yield diminishing returns.

Note: Alex can be a Quality-Sensitive Learner, Time-Starved Entrepreneur and an Empowered Technology User because these are characteristics of his persona.

Task Flows: How Alex Interacts With Quora

Now that I have the User Stories laid out, I use Task Flows for two reasons:

1. Visualizing how all the User Stories interact together

2. Considering all problem / edge cases to prevent costly & wasteful product revisions later

Sketches: Making Alex’s Life Easier

After understanding how the user would navigate through each feature, I began sketching on a whiteboard the different ways to visualize them.

Note: The goal here is to diverge, or generate as many ideas as possible. I give myself the safe space to be creative without judgment.

Prioritized Sketches

After sketching a bunch of ideas on a whiteboard, I use a 2 x 2 matrix to prioritize the sketches based on Impact and Ease of Implementation. Many of these are subjective and based purely on assumptions, since I have no access to the inner workings of the product.

Note: Although intuitively it’s usually a good idea to simply choose the highest impact solution with greatest ease of implementation, sometimes it’s better to take a more challenging route for ensured long-term success.

Wireframes

The goal of wireframes is get a better sense of how the sketches would look without going into hi-fidelity mockups. Also, wireframes give richer feature feedback as opposed to nit-picky pixel-perfect critiques that hi-fidelity mockups invoke.

BROWSE

SEARCH

Next Steps

Having created high-fidelity mockups to bring the wireframes to life, the next step is to create a clickable prototype followed by additional usability testing to refine the design.

Note: I don’t work for or represent Quora. It’s just one of my favorite products so I’m exploring how I might help their mission of sharing and growing the world’s knowledge ☺

Lack of communication in the web design process 

As a Creative Director with over 12 years digital agency experience in the UK & Spain, I’ve had the good fortune to work on some amazing projects with some amazing talent. Recently however, I’ve been involved in a few projects where the process’s have been a little back to front; that is the cart has been put well and truly before the horse (in some occasions). It seems like bad practices in the web industry are alive and well, and possibly more prevalent than ever before.

Client A (I can’t name them for obvious reasons) is a moderately large company who sell’s products online & in stores who wish to break into a few new European markets. Company A has just started the process of redesigning their ecommerce website and asked me to get involved as a Creative Director/Advisor for the website design process remotely and to advise their chosen designer throughout the process. I was quite surprised when my first engagement with the project manager was a request to give feedback not on the UX/Wireframes, IA or technical spec (something I’d requested several times), but on a full set of finished website concepts. This was despite me being asked originally, to advise their designer on structure, usability and creative direction for the website. I guess their idea of advise and direct, was for me to positively post rationalise a random designers finished work, and tell them why I thought they were all great. Or something along those lines, judging by the poor reaction to my honesty first approach in my feedback.

I found myself spending a day having to painstakingly wade through a mountain of badly constructed, and very poorly styled visuals and attempt to try and give constructive criticism (the criticism bit was pretty easy). Being constructive when you’re faced with a large set of ugly designs is a difficult situation to be in; be too critical and you come across as being a needless grinch, appear to agreeable, well you wouldn’t be doing your job now! Not being the type of person to want to blow smoke up another persons bottom, I found myself constantly having to back-track and make sure I wasn’t being overly critical and throw in the odd token positive reassurance.

Most of the basic structural/layout problems could have been avoided at the UX process, and most of the design inconsistencies could have been addressed after the very first screen had been designed — if there had been proper communication. Giving detailed feedback at this stage seemed far too late in the day, especially after being informed the next day that the designs had to be signed off within the week.

In my experience the most successful web projects I’ve ever been part of, have had an excellent, motivated project manager, who clearly communicated with each member from the start, understood the processes and clearly defined tasks, and made sure each member of the project team was communicating effectively. This particular project appeared to have been a collection of individuals all doing their own thing, without having any real technical or creative direction at key stages.

Another example in the last year involved a client, who already had a new site/backend built and wanted a new design and some functionality changes without having to engage in a proper UX process. Again, skipping simple steps and doing things backward resulted in a website that was inconsistent in terms of user journey and visually poor. This example is a little extreme, but clearly showed a lack of understanding (or care) of the basic design and development process. Client A will most likely end up paying more in the short term, and the long term when they realise they are seeing the same kind of customer drop offs, and on the same areas of the new site; and probably end up paying to have the site redesigned again in a years time.

There are many different methods and approaches to the website design/dev process — I personally favour the tried and tested waterfall model, that is with clear sign-off stages. Here’s a good article on the subject (although it’s a couple of years old now it’s still very relevant today). Processes have moved on significantly and in different directions, with many favouring more agile methods and prototyping in the browser.

Producing a successful website comes down to education, passion and following tried and tested basic methods. Processes are there for a reason, cutting corners or skipping steps may seem like a short-term time (money) saver, but will ultimately add more cost somewhere down the line.