Tuesday, 30 September 2014

What Chess Can Teach You About Making Decisions - Vanseo Design

What Chess Can Teach You About Making Decisions - Vanseo Design

What Chess Can Teach You About Making Decisions

Posted: 29 Sep 2014 05:30 AM PDT

A couple of topics I frequently come back to are decision-making and iteration. Decision-making is central to the design of anything. An iterative process provides a roadmap to improving and shaping something over time. You might think I formed these opinions while studying design, but the truth is they came to me while learning to play chess. Sometimes you learn things in unexpected places.

The moves on the board available to a knight in the center and one in the corner
A knight in the center of the board has eight potential moves, while one next to a corner has three

I recalled my unexpected learning after reading the article Good Design is About Process, not Product, by Jared Sinclair. The article argues that process differentiates the quality of your work and that you develop a better process through good habits. It’s a good read.

Jared offers several habits of successful designers. One is to delay decisions until they need to be made. The delay allows for more exploration and keeps you from being locked into your first thoughts. While I agree with the idea, I didn’t like that the advice was listed as be indecisive.

The word indecisive carries a negative connotation about not being able to decide. It suggests more than delaying a decision so can remain open to new possibilities.

Improving your position increases the probability of your success

I started thinking about decision-making, which led me back to my chess learning days. I thought I’d share what little I learned about positional and tactical play in chess and how I apply it to the decisions I make now.

Note: Please know I’m not a great chess player. There’s a good chance I’ll get some things wrong discussing positional and tactical play. It’s ok. The reason for sharing isn’t to teach you about chess, but to show you something I learned and apply from my understanding or perhaps misunderstanding of chess.

Positional and Tactical Chess

When I first moved to Colorado I didn’t have a lot of money. I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to stay here for any length of time either. For both reasons I found myself living in the hostel here in Boulder within a few days of arriving.

People from all over the world passed through. Few of them stayed beyond a few days. The overall character of the place would change with the change of people. For a few days chess was the thing. A young man from Switzerland was taking on all challengers, defeating each and every one.

I thought I’d give it a try and see how I could do against him. It had been years since I played chess and I knew I wasn’t good so I picked up a beginner’s book in the hopes of learning something.

Among the earliest lessons was the value of different squares on the board. The ability of a given pieces increases when it can attack and defend more squares on the board. It’s a simple concept and it means the center of the board provides a stronger position than the sides, because the center offers the most possible moves to pieces that occupy it.

When you control the center of the board you hold a stronger position. You have more and better ways to attack your opponent’s pieces or position and defend your own. Consequently a poor position ties your hands and restricts what you can do with your turn without making a bad move.

With my newfound, albeit limited, knowledge about chess, I sat down for a game against Stephan (I think that was his name). I lost, though I played better than most people had against him. After the game I was even sure I had the advantage at one point, but didn’t have the tactical skills to press my advantage into victory.

The experience made me want to learn more about chess, which I did until something else came along and grabbed my attention. I’m still not a good player, but I did learn a few things such as the concepts of positional and tactical play.

Positional play is focused on longer term movements that aim to improve your position on the board. Tactical play seeks shorter term advantage, usually the capture of an opponent’s piece. Tactical chess seizes an opportunity for short-term gain. Positional chess improves your position, knowing it’ll provide more tactical opportunities at some point.

Again, I’m quite possibly getting the above wrong when it comes to playing chess, but what’s important is where my understanding led me in regards to making better decisions.

Chess as a Guide to Decision-Making

In chess and in life you’re faced with a lot of difficult choices. Sometimes there isn’t enough quality information to decide and you have to lean on your values, principles, and process to guide your decision-making.

I think the central idea that should guide you is to improve your position. For example I never worry about where I’d show up on a list of talented designers. All I care about is getting better so that tomorrow I’ll be a more skilled designer than I was yesterday. I’m concerned with improving my position.

Whatever your situation when faced with a decision, choose the path that improves your situation. Your choice doesn’t have to solve your problem or take you to the promised land. Just improve your position and you’ll find yourself a little closer to where you ultimately want to be.

If the idea sounds like iteration, that’s because it is. You iterate your position in life because a better position will provide more opportunities for success. You position yourself to be in the right place and right time to act on the opportunities that are always in front of you.

Have you ever known someone who’s luckier than everyone else? It’s not luck. That person has simply put themselves in a better position. Luck is probability. When the odds of something happening (winning the lottery for example) are very low we say someone who’s successful against those odds is lucky.

Improving your position increases the probability of your success. It’s what’s meant by making your own luck. In the case of a lottery the initial odds are stacked against you to the point where it won’t make a difference, but it will make a difference in many other things.

For example your odds of finding a job increase the larger your social network. Increasing the size and quality of your network improves your position. Luck doesn’t get you the job. A better position does.

Positional and Tactical Design Decisions

I’ve hardly talked about design and yet I feel as though I’ve been talking about design this whole time, given how important decision-making is to design.

When you gather information from clients and define the problem to solve you’re establishing a position on the board. You improve that position by developing a concept, adding constraints, and working toward unified goals.

Your concept, your solution to the problem, provide the guidelines for what is a better position. Make a decision in unity with these guidelines and you improve your position. Veer from them and you weaken your position.

The stronger your design position, the more tactical opportunities you’ll discover and the more confident you’ll be in exploring them from the solid foundation your position gives you.

Closing Thoughts

Perhaps it’s a strange place for a lesson about decision-making, but my limited understanding of chess has been influential in helping me make difficult decisions.

I no longer try to go from start to finish in a single bound. Instead I think of my current position and the choices in front of me. Most of the time I choose the option that put me in a better position. I don’t care if the increase was 100% or 0.1%. As long as the decision improves my overall situation in some small way, I have no worry in making it.

I keep an eye out from my current position to identify potential opportunities. These opportunities may temporarily distract for some gain within reach. I’m confident in my position to know I can defend it and continue improving it after exploring the opportunity.

The idea to make decisions that improve my position has served me well. I hope something in my story, experience, and observations will serve you well too.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Friday, 26 September 2014

The Good And Bad Of Minimum Viable Products - Vanseo Design

The Good And Bad Of Minimum Viable Products - Vanseo Design

The Good And Bad Of Minimum Viable Products

Posted: 25 Sep 2014 05:30 AM PDT

When is the right time to release a product? How do you know when it’s finished and ready for the public? Should version 1.0 be released as soon as possible to begin the process of collecting feedback? Should you hold onto the product longer to ensure it’s something more mature?


Note: This post includes an audio version. If you don’t see the audio player above, Click here to listen. You can also subscribe in iTunes

A few weeks ago, Joshua Porter at Bokardo pointed me to an article by former Apple designer Mark Kawano. Both articles talk about Apple and how Apple doesn’t do minimum viable products. Instead they wait until a product is mature before releasing a first version.

My apologies if you’re tired of hearing the term minimum viable product and let me apologize in advance for the remaining mentioned in this post. I know I’ve had my fill of term. Still, I think it’s something important to understand.

I want to look at the idea of releasing something rough and early and then iterating based on customer feedback. Your customers tell you what’s wrong with the product and you fix it. They tell you features they want and you add them. They let you know what they don’t want and you remove it. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? A little of both?

The Value of Minimum Viable

Plenty of people talk about releasing minimum viable products. Not everyone is crazy about the idea. Some think it can lead to subpar first efforts. In an effort to ship earlier you release something closer to garbage than a usable product.

To some degree a minimum viable product could be seen as ripping off your customers, because you’re selling them a product you know isn’t ready and probably not worth what you’re charging. In exchange for a not quite ready product your customers get to work to help you improve the product for the next wave of customers. It’s putting your most loyal customer to work and charging them for the privilege.

Of course, most of these people wouldn’t see themselves as being ripped off. They’d be happy to help test your product. They want to get in on something early, especially if it’s something they want. It gives them the chance to help shape the product to their tastes. Still, a low cost first version or a free beta, might be the best way to start.

You do want to get your product in the hands of your most loyal fans and customers. They’ll be more likely to give you feedback and be more understanding about using an unfinished product. You want to attract more people like your loyal customers so it only makes sense to listen to their feedback. The others you want to attract will likely want similar things.

The counter argument is the Henry Ford quote

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

It is possible even your most loyal customers don’t know what they really want in a product. This can be especially true with a new product category. They’re feedback may not be what you need or want at times.

Iteration from a Starting Point

Iteration is a good idea. Regardless of when you release a product, it only makes sense to continue improving it if you expect to continue selling it.

Assuming you’ve created a product people want, others will copy it and improve on what you’ve done. If you aren’t doing the same, your customers will leave for your competitors. Even if you have no competition, you have to improve your products if you want people to buy again.

Back to the articles and Apple being the anti minimum viable product company (say that 10 times fast). They typically release something beyond what their customers think of as minimum viable. They want to perfect products before releasing. I’ll leave it to you to decide if they do, but it is their stated goal.

Because they work on the product beyond the minimum viable stage they start with a better product. Better than what they would have released as minimum viable. It’s one of the reasons people find delight in Apple products. They take the time to put the delight into version 1.0. Again I’ll leave it to you to decide if they do, but their customers certainly think they do.

It’s All About Defining Minimum

I don’t think what Apple does is really all that different, though. I mentioned last week how everything is a point on a scale and Apple has a different definition for minimum viable. Their minimum is at a different point on the scale of viable.

They’re following the same basic model of release and iterate. The differences is in the definition of what’s minimum viable to release to the public. Despite what some may think Apple does listen to customers and iterates based on customer feedback. In fact they’re often criticized for iterating this way and not coming up with something brand new every year.

In waiting Apple gets to add more of their own design opinions. Their opinions lead the product direction. It’s their vision for what the product will become.

When you release a rougher first version seeking customer feedback, it’s your customers who are shaping the product with their opinions, with their wants and needs. The product becomes their vision. Depending on your definition of minimum viable, your product could become nearly all your customer’s vision.

I think visions work best when unified and singular, which comes about when fewer people (or one person) create that vision. The danger of a minimum viable product is that it can lack this unified vision. Many voices are creating the vision as opposed to a few or even one.

You can still guide the vision of a product after releasing it rough and early, but the approach is clearly aimed at listening to more voices before your vision has completely formed. Your’s may be the lone guiding voice, but there are many voices informing it. That may be good or bad depending on your point of view.

Minimum Viable and the Design Process

Releasing rough and early and then iterating based on feedback has become my design process when working with clients. The overall vision is my vision for what the client wants plus what I think they need plus their thoughts about what needs to change. I guide the vision throughout to keep it as unified as possible with the original concept. The battles I pick with clients tend to be when client feedback is veering most from the unified vision.

No one other than myself and the client (and anyone either of us might show) sees the minimum we started with. It isn’t public. Hopefully by the time the public sees the site we’ve iterated a few rounds past minimum viable and start with something more mature.

What’s minimum viable between client and myself is different than what’s minimum viable for us together to release to the public. I determine what I think is the minimum the client needs to begin offering feedback. The process then becomes a push toward our combined definition of minimum viable.

I won’t let a client release until I think an acceptable minimum is reached. Once it is, I’ll let the client know I think the site is ready and let them agree or continue to supply feedback. I’ve had clients push for early release, but knew the important functionality wasn’t working so I held them back.

Every person and every company is different. Every client is unique. I don’t want to tell you or anyone else there’s only one way to do something. I do think the general idea of releasing something and improving it based on customer feedback is a good one. I also think waiting and perfecting and surprising your customs are good things to generate desire in your product and build brand loyalty.

In the end it’s a matter of how minimum viable is defined.

Thoughts for Defining Minimum Viable

This debate is another example of creativity and productivity at odds. It’s more productive to release early. It keeps you from chasing things your customers don’t want. You have more people filing bug reports and you can set up analytics to help detect problems.

If you start with something rougher and less unified though, it’s unlikely your high end will be as high as someone who’s definition of minimum viable is a more mature product with a more unified vision.

Who you define as your market helps define what the acceptable minimum is. Who are your customers? Will they accept less then your best effort to help you get to your best effort? Would they prefer not to wait for your product?

Think about your business and business model. Think about your revenue models and how you want to differentiate your business from the competition. These can also help you set the line for minimum viable.

Like most things balance is required. Too rough and it’s possible no one is interested. Too polished and you may have missed an opportunity cost or you may waste time and effort down an incorrect path.

You can see this playing out with Apple and Samsung. Apple releases more mature products that delight their customers. Samsung releases rough and often to the delight of their customers. Different company’s operating with different definitions of minimum viable and both pleasing their customers.

My definition for any project changes based on how much a client is willing to spend. Money certainly helps determine what’s minimum viable. A lower budget will lead to a rougher minimum with more iteration after launch and when the client has more to spend.

It’s end points on a scale. At one end you try to perfect everything, but never release, because you can never make something perfect. At the other end you release so rough there’s no idea for anyone to hold onto. There’s no interested in your product or worse you produce a faster horse at the dawn of the automobile.

Balance is important, but it doesn’t have to occur between equidistant opposites. What you’re balancing depends on so many things. You’re balancing everything you can to move the minimum viable point to where you think acceptable.

This point of balance depends on who your customers are and what level of minimum they’re willing to accept. What level of minimum will make them happy enough to buy and continue buying.

Where minimum viable is located is something you should think about as early as you can. Decide whether to release early or wait for something more mature. Either path can work, but once you choose you’re setting expectations for your customers. It could be difficult to change paths later without having to find a different group of people to become customers.

A rough first version could lead to less patience for a more mature second version. A more mature first version could lead to less patience for anything less than a mature second version.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Tuesday, 23 September 2014

Mea Culpa — How A Lapse In Focus Helped Me Write A Book - Vanseo Design

Mea Culpa — How A Lapse In Focus Helped Me Write A Book - Vanseo Design

Mea Culpa — How A Lapse In Focus Helped Me Write A Book

Posted: 22 Sep 2014 05:30 AM PDT

I have a confession to make. I’m guilty of not putting my all into this blog for the last few months. It’s not that I wasn’t putting effort into it. It’s that my main focus was elsewhere, leading to a loss of focus everywhere else, including here.

Hopefully you’ll agree I have a good reason for the lapse. Last year I wrote and published a book on design fundamentals. The last few months I worked on another; this time for a publisher.

The new book is titled CSS Animations and Transitions for the Modern Web and it’s currently available for pre-order at Amazon and directly from the publisher, Peachpit. Read on for the story about how it came to be.

title

Being Approached to Write a Book

You might remember about a year ago I wrote an article for the Adobe website on how to work with flexbox. When they asked I remember thinking how busy I was and if I could squeeze in an article, but I figured it would be good visibility to have an article on a site like Adobe’s.

Turns out it is good visibility, at least within the Adobe brand. Early this spring I was contacted by someone at Adobe Press (which is now a division of Peachpit) asking if I’d be interested in writing a book. He explained that he’d seen my flexbox article and thought I did a good job explaining technical information.

Cool. That’s literally what I thought to myself. It’s a nice compliment from someone who works to produce technical books and and it’s a publisher thinking I’d be a good candidate to author a technical book. Again, pretty cool.

We talked on the phone for an hour or so. I had some questions about what I was being asked to do and how everything would work and proceed. I assume at the same time he was evaluating me to make sure his instincts were correct about my ability to write and complete a book.

He (Victor) asked if I would send him three ideas. Until that point I thought he had a specific title in mind when choosing me, though why I thought that I have no idea. I maintain a list of ideas for books and I pulled three of them to send.

  • A book about the past, present, and future of developing layouts for web pages.
  • A book about Sass that would teach both beginner and intermediate Sass.
  • A book about css animation that would cover transforms, transitions, and animation in css.

If you paid attention when I mentioned the title of the book above, you know we decided to go with css animation. If you didn’t pay attention you know now.

Victor then asked for an outline that could serve as a table of contents, which I sent. Next was to present a more fleshed out version of the table of contents. All this time Victor was discussing the book in editor meetings and a week or so later we had approval to get started.

After approval there was some back and forth over the contract and then one day the contract was signed and I had four months to write a book about transforms, transitions, and css animation. I took a deep breath and started to shift focus.

How am I Going to Find the Time to Write a Book?

Right away I knew I wasn’t going to be able to take on as much client work as usual for a few months. I was finishing one project at the time and don’t tell Victor, but some of the back and forth we went through was me trying to buy a little more time to finish up the project. Shhh.

I also had a couple of people wanting me to start on new projects. I explained the general situation and let them know that I could take on their projects, but only if they were fine with it taking longer, possibly a lot longer, than usual.

A part of me thought of saying no and focusing all my energy on the book and the blog. Four months isn’t much time when you think you really need five or six. Unfortunately I learned that an advance for writing a book doesn’t mean in advance of writing the book. It means in advance of royalties, which don’t come until after the book starts selling. I needed to figure out a way to make some money to keep me going.

The only answer I could come up with was to take on the projects and schedule it over a longer time frame than usual. I was upfront with my clients and honest that I couldn’t give them a date for when I could finish. Neither was in a hurry and it all worked out.

One thing I did to free up some time was tweak my blogging process for the podcasts. Instead of working on one each week, I switched to working on two over two weeks. It may not seem like a big change, but it saves time opening Garage Band and getting the headphones plugged in. More important it keeps me in the same flow longer. The result was that working the podcasts two at a time freed up a few blocks of time each week for the book.

Deadlines? I have Deadlines?

At first the writing was a little slow. I like to research a topic as much as possible before starting to write a draft. I’ll take the mass of notes I’ve made and organize them to find themes. It helps shape the narrative and helps me identify additional topics that could either include or use as the basis for another piece of writing.

After getting through the first chapter of notes I realized how much quicker I needed to work if I was going to finish on time. Apparently I was in sync with my editor (Robyn), because she sent out a project schedule a day or two later showing exactly what I was thinking. I needed to get through each chapter in about two weeks. I now had deadlines to meet.

In addition to the new podcasting process, I started working weekends. Not a lot. Just enough to get through a task or two. At first it was an hour or two over the weekend. Then it was an hour and half each day over the weekend. It ramped up to whatever time was needed as the last deadlines approached.

I’m happy to say I met every deadline, with one exception, that I prepared everyone for. It was a chapter I knew would take more than two weeks to write. Fortunately I also knew the following chapter would take a week at most so it wasn’t so much missing a deadline as it was shifting one to a new date.

One nice outcome of being held to deadlines is that I think I figured out something about how I can multipurpose better and get more written with the same level of quality in less time. I haven’t had a chance yet to test the theory in full, but I should be able to within a few weeks.

First I have to get to some client projects that started coming in as I was wrapping up on the book. I’m sure my bank account will appreciate the decision.

CSS Animations and Transitions for the Modern Web

As I said the title of the book is CSS Animations and Transitions for the Modern Web, which I’d love to take credit for, but can’t. It’s Victor’s title. It’s currently available for pre-order as a typically sized and typically priced paperback technical book.

Amazon lists only the paperback at the moment, but Peachpit is offering an ebook and bundle that includes both the print and ebook versions. I’m not sure when or if an ebook will be available directly through Amazon or Apple’s iBooks store. Peachpit has you covered though, with .epub, .mobi, and .pdf versions.

The publication date is set for November 24 of this year, which I learned after discovering the book is already available for pre-order. I may have written the book, but publishing decisions are out of my control.

I feel safe in saying versions of the ebook will come to Amazon and Apple, but your guess is as good as mine as to when that will be. My guess is the paperback makes a run, while the ebook remains a Peachpit exclusive for a time and then the ebook comes out everywhere else. It’s also possible the ebook will be available beyond Peachpit by the time you read this.

Here again is where you can currently pre-order.

What’s Inside the Book

Hopefully you’re curious to know a little more about what’s in the book. Here’s the table of contents, though I imagine the chapter titles could still change between now and publication.

The general format is to walk you through how to work with transforms, transitions, and then animations. I tried to do that through examples as much as I could. I’ll explain a concept and show a simple example to illustrate and then explain the code I used and why I used it.

In early chapters the examples are more abstract to illustrate the concepts. In later chapters I build up the examples beyond simple abstract things to make them more practical and useful.

Closing Thoughts

I hope you agree I had a good reason for the lapse of focus here. I really hope it hasn’t been too noticeable. The good news is the book is finished other than some typical late polishing and I can put more focus back on the blog again.

It was an interesting experience writing a book for a publisher and working with editors and deadlines. It’s not the first book I’ve written, but it is the first one where I was working with other people to complete it.

I realize this is a design and development blog, but if you’d like to know more about what it’s like writing for a publisher let me know. I’m also happy to share more details about my writing process or how I used Scrivener to keep track of research, organize thoughts, and write a book. If you’re interested in knowing more about the writing let me know in the comments.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

The post Mea Culpa — How A Lapse In Focus Helped Me Write A Book appeared first on Vanseo Design.

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Friday, 19 September 2014

Which Revenue Model Should You Use For Your Business? - Vanseo Design

Which Revenue Model Should You Use For Your Business? - Vanseo Design

Which Revenue Model Should You Use For Your Business?

Posted: 18 Sep 2014 05:30 AM PDT

What revenue model do you use for your business? If you’re a freelancer you likely sell services to clients, but there are additional revenue models you can use in addition to or instead of selling services.


Note: This post includes an audio version. If you don’t see the audio player above, Click here to listen. You can also subscribe in iTunes

I think it’s important for freelancers to understand and think about different revenue models so they can move their business toward those they think will work best for them. Today I want to talk about the pros and cons 4 different types of revenue models.

  • Selling services or products directly
  • Advertising, affiliate marketing, and lead generation
  • Selling subscriptions or generating a recurring revenue in some way
  • The freemium model of giving away a limited version of a product or service or giving away a platform and charging for extras

Services and Products

Again, if you’re a freelancer, your revenue model is selling services. Someone needs or wants something done and they hire you to do the work and to supply your expertise to the project.

One problem with this model that I’m sure you’ve encountered, is your revenue is directly tied to the time you spend working. When you’re not working, you’re not making money.

Some of your time will go into finding new clients, managing the daily operation of your business, and performing tasks that aren’t billable. Your revenue isn’t necessarily consistent from month to month as you go through the ebb and flow of having a project to work on and for which to charge.

To make more money selling services you can

However, you can only raise your rates so much, you can’t create more time in the day or week, and there’s a limit on how low you can reduce your costs. It’s not even realistic you could do all three to their maximum limit.

Making more per client usually comes down to raising your rates and to a less extent cutting costs. I find the amount of work each client sends me tends to remain consistent over the course of a year.

One of the obvious things we can do to begin exploring revenue models is switch to selling products. The easy example for designers and developers is to sell themes and templates or extensions and plugins for content management systems and similar.

Products scale better than services, but it’s not necessarily easy to sell products just because you have them. You also need to reach a certain level of scale in order for the revenue to equal what you’d make selling services.

For example you might charge $5,000 for a custom WordPress theme. That means selling 50 themes at $100 or 100 themes at $50 or some combination of sales and price that totals $5,000 or you might as well have built a custom theme (assuming that option was available to you).

Odds are you’ll make less per sale when selling products so you need more sales. Making more money usually means selling more products. You can attract more traffic and work to increase your conversion rate. You can cut costs to a degree, though with digital goods there’s not much of a production cost associated with each product in the first place.

Making more money per customer probably means creating more products and enticing them to buy.

Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Lead Generation

Advertising, affiliate marketing, lead generation are really three different revenue models. I’m grouping them together because they all involve you helping to sell someone else’s services or products.

That means this model is reliant on another person or business. Your job is to prep your visitors to buy, but the site you point them to needs to close the deal and that’s out of your control.

This revenue model can raise questions about who’s the customer and what’s the product. There’s nothing specifically wrong with advertising, but it can call into question the integrity of the publisher. Are you recommending a product because you believe in it or because you make more money to recommend it. The truth is money in general does this, but I think advertising helps to make it more obvious.

The revenue model also leads to the page view culture you currently see on the web. More eyeballs means more advertisers competing for ad space and more people to click banners and links. More page views ultimately means more money for the publisher.

That’s why you see click bait style headlines and why a single article gets broken up into page after page or why an image gallery needs to place every image on a unique URL. All those clicks means it takes longer for you to consume the article and images. It requires more work on your part. The system is less usable.

I don’t think a revenue model should lead to less usable websites or products or raise questions about motivation. As you can guess this isn’t my favorite revenue model. Of course, that hasn’t stopped me from using it.

Anither thing to consider is that advertising is always an interruption. You don’t visit a website or tune into a tv or radio program for the ads. The ads interrupt what you came to do. It’s one reason we learn to ignore them and develop ad blindness leading to less effective advertising.

It’s led to the creation of native advertising. Sometimes native advertising is in the form of product placement. A character on a tv show holds up a Coke or Pepsi, which Coke or Pepsi paid to have placed in the scene. More likely it’s referring to promotional content created to appear as though it’s unbiased. Somewhere the content will say sponsored content or sponsored post.

This form of advertising can also be questionable. How obvious is it to the viewer that the conent has been sponsored? The less obvious, the more manipulative the practice will seem.

More money will usually require more traffic and more people to view pages and click things. You could optimize the design so clicks are more likely and you could build an audience with a demographic more valuable to advertisers. Still more money likely comes down to more traffic.

Subscriptions and recurring revenue

The last few years have seen a lot of businesses moving to this model. It’s a better predictor of monthly income and it improves your cash flow. It keeps customers longer and increases revenue per customer because your customers are giving you money more than one time.

You become less focused on sales and more focused on the size of your customer base, your rates of acquisition, retention, and churn. You become concerned with the lifetime value of customers.

For example themes and plugins might offer subscriptions for support or updates. They might be set up as a subscription that gives you access to everything inside. Adobe recently turned software that had been products into a subscription service with the switch to Creative Cloud.

Many websites are becoming more web app and offering an ongoing service. With some it makes sense, but I’ve seen examples where the subscription seemed artificial and comes across as being there just because it can be.

I think for subscriptions to work long term you have to offer something worth paying for month after month or year after year. That likely means an ongoing service or creating new content or products each month. It could also be something like a maintenance plan for a website.

I think many see this kind of recurring charge as the holy grail. It feels like there’s less need to find new customers each month once a customer base is in place. And again, I’ve seen some charging a recurring fee for things that don’t require recurring working, at least not to an amount equal in value to the recurring charge.

This revenue model can be good for customers and clients. It’s a known quantity for them every month. They can budget for it and then mostly forget about it. That’s part of what makes it good for business as once it’s budgeted it tends to get paid without question each month.

As a customer myself I often prefer paying a single monthly charge for unlimited access to something instead of paying each time I want to use the service, simply because it’s one less thing to think about.

At the same time there’s only so much any of us want to pay even if it probably ends up costing less to subsidize things we don’t want to watch than paying for each thing we do want to watch separately.

This model can also get out of control. $10 here and $20 there doesn’t sound like a lot when you sign up, but before you know it they add up to hundreds or even thousands per month.

Freemium

The last model I want to talk about is the freemium model, the idea of giving away the basic product or service for free or building a platform you give away for free and then charging for extra features and functionality.

You aren’t limited to the sale of a single extra in this model. Your customers will likely buy more than once. An extra could also be subscription based. In a sense it’s like the traditional sales funnel where you give something away for free to get people into your funnel and then move some deeper into the funnel where they’ll buy from your.

You see this in the app store with free apps and in-app purchases that unlock features. You see it in WordPress plugins for shopping carts and event calendars and any other plugin that offers more than a single function or two. For example free shopping cart plugins usually work with PayPal out of the box, but charge to work with other payment gateways. Themes are also sold this way as a framework, with child themes for sale.

I suppose the idea comes from how everyone only uses 10% or 20% of your product, but they all use a different 10% or 20%. You build a minimal viable product and let your customers decide which additional features to purchase.

This is how WordPress is built. The core comes with the things they’ve determined most people actually use and then everyone can add functionality through the plugin architecture. It’s a good system for development. It forces you to be more modular. It leads you to build a minimum viable product for everyone and let some add to your system via modules.

I tend to think this revenue model is a win-win most of the time. It’s good for the customer who can try your product or service for free. Most will be happy with the limited set of free functionality. Still, they’re people in your funnel. They’re people with whom you can connect. It should be easier to convert these people than to convert total strangers into paying customers, at least some of them.

You don’t really lose revenue by giving away a version of the product or service. The people who only use the free version, weren’t likely to buy regardless. However, they might increase support costs so it’s important to find a way for them to get support or understand they need to support themselves.

I think there’s a potential danger with this model where you don’t improve the free platform and only add features as extras so you can charge for them. You should continue to improve the free version in this model and not let it stagnate.

One last thought is this model also gives you the option of creating the platform so others can build the extras. You let them sell these extras in your marketplace where you take a cut in exchange for providing an audience of buyers. It could be a good way to start having others work for you.

Closing Thoughts

I think it’s important for freelance designers, developers, writers, and any other service provider to be aware of and think about different revenue models and business models.

We tend to fall into the one revenue model, which is selling services to clients. Some of us expand into selling products, but it’s really the same model. What we sometimes miss is the other revenue models we might apply to our businesses.

Admittedly it can be hard to find time to move into other models when you sell a service. There never seems to be enough time as it is, so when are you going to find time to build a product or ongoing service

Difficult though it may be, I encourage you to explore other revenue models. If you offer only services, be a customer and think about a product you’d like yourself and set aside time to create it. Take things you do as part of your services work and see if it can be turned into a product. Can the functionality you just added to a WordPress theme become a plugin? Think like that.

Think about the revenue models you don’t use and think about how they might fit with your business. Look to the things you already do and think how you can modify them in a way where they work in a different revenue model.

How can you multipurpose your service so it works as a product, subscription, or freemium product or service? Think and try. The worst case is you’ll try a few things that don’t work. The best case is your business grows healthier by relying less on any one source of revenue for your income.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Tuesday, 16 September 2014

Subjective And Objective Design Choices - Vanseo Design

Subjective And Objective Design Choices - Vanseo Design

Subjective And Objective Design Choices

Posted: 15 Sep 2014 05:30 AM PDT

Earlier this year I said that good design is subjective. I’m guessing quite a few people would disagree with that statement. Most of us want to believe we’re objective decision-makers who rationally think about problems and solutions and make choices based on objective principles. The truth is a little different.

Shades of Gray

Despite my thought that design is subjective, I also talk about design principles and I’ve urged you to take a step back from your work and think as critically and objectively as possible about it. In fact I pride myself on usually being one of the more objective people in the room.

Something isn’t adding up. How can I say design is subjective and yet try to help myself and others become better designers through objective means. A post from Seth Godin on the illusion of choice has me thinking about this topic. It has me thinking about how to reconcile what I’ve said and thought about subjectivity and objectivity in design.

Seth talked about essential and inessential choices. Lots of decisions, such as whether to see one movie or another, are for the most part inessential. Which movie you choose to see really doesn’t matter.

I’m sure it matters to those who worked on the movie and it very well could matter to your enjoyment for a couple of hours and there’s always a chance a completely different life unfolds for you based on any choice. However, in the larger picture, which movie you decide to see is mostly irrelevant. You can make the decision arbitrarily if you want.

Seth’s point is to understand which decisions are the essential ones so you could put your energy into them and not waste your time and energy on those decisions that really don’t matter.

Everything is on a Scale

I don’t believe in absolutes. Things are rarely, if ever, absolute. Most things in life are not explicitly either/or. Black and white are just different shades of gray. Still, I often talk about dualities. For example a topic I come back to a lot is the tension between creativity and productivity.

It’s impossible for us to remove every bias we hold when making a decision

While these dualities might seem either/or on the surface I see them more as two ends of the same spectrum or scale. At one end sits 100% creative and 0% productive and at the other the percents are reverse. In between these end points every other point on the scale is some combination of creative and productive.

A non-design related example is love and hate. I think most people understand love and hate aren’t opposites. They’re different end points on a scale of passion. Wen your passion is at the positive maximum you get love and when it’s at the negative maximum you get hate.

You’re highly unlikely to be at 100% passion in either direction and it’s just as unlikely your work is either entirely creative or productive. Nearly all the time, we’re somewhere in between on some scale or spectrum.

I think there’s a similar thing happening with subjectivity and objectivity. Human beings are subjective. It’s impossible for us to remove every bias we hold when making a decision. We’re not even aware of many of our biases, so how could we remove them from the equation?

Any choice you make is going to have some measure of subjectivity in it simply due to the personal biases that influence you.

On the other hand, the universe around you doesn’t care much about biases. It operates independently of them. You can believe the earth is flat and the center of all things and the universe doesn’t care. You still aren’t flat and you still aren’t the center of everything.

We can observe the universe objectively through scientific method. Biases can still get in the way, but the science eventually prevails, breaking through the subjectivity of what you hoped to discover.

And yet, it’s still us deciding what to observe and how to observe it. We’ve even discovered our observations have an impact on the thing we’re observing. Our subjectivity can apparently change the objective.

We’re far from perfect and we make mistakes too. We interpret data incorrectly, or fail to see a flawed experiment as flawed. In the end though we’re pretty good at observing and measuring and determining how the universe around us works with a great deal of objectivity.

But, we are human so everything we do is going to carry some small amount of subjectivity at the very least.

Objectivity and Subjectivity in Design

When you consider design in the micro sense, we can do a reasonable job of being objective. We have design principles to guide us. We develop concepts at the outset to follow. We add constraints to make options more manageable. We bring our own subjectivity to each decision, but we can generally lean far toward the objective side when deciding.

In the macro sense, the bits of subjectivity that enter into each decision add up to something that moves the scale toward the subjective side. It reaches a point where the sum is no longer objective enough to be considered objective. I don’t think that point would be at 50% along the line. Is 15% subjectivity enough to lose objectivity? 25% 35%? I don’t know, but I don’t think it takes 50% subjectivity to make something subjective.

Even if the decisions we make are as objective as possible and all follow a unified logic, they contain some measure of the subjective and add up to something more subjective than we might care to admit.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Think about all the decisions you make over the course of a design. Then think of all the decisions you could have made, but didn’t. It’s a lot of decisions. Think of all the potential combinations of decisions you could make and how the resulting design might be different depending on which of the many combinations of decisions you end up making.

Can you honestly say after a design is finished the result was objectively and clearly the best design you could have created? I think you’d be lying to yourself if you answer yes. I think you can honestly say you came up with a good solution and even among the best, but I don’t think you can ever know you objectively came up with the single best solution, unless you test far more potential combinations than you reasonably could.

Pretend for a moment you could know. You’d still have no control over how the design is received or works for people. Things can change after you launch that turn a good decision into a bad one. Maybe the trend that informs your aesthetics, falls out of favor shortly after launch. Maybe the day after your site goes live someone releases a revolutionary navigation system rendering your site less usable. Who knows? Things change that are out of your control. You simply can’t know if every decision will have the best results.

Even if everything stayed exactly the same, you have no way of knowing the experience and mental models visitors bring to your design. Different people could very well come away with completely different interpretations of your design based solely on what’s happened to them over the course of their lives.

The design of a website is a complex thing with every part ideally complementing every other part. Just typing it, makes it sound difficult. It’s too complex to even try all the reasonable possibilities to know for certain you’re choosing the best one.

The sum of your design decisions are subjective, even if each decision was made as objectively as possible, because there’s no objective way to realistically determine which combination of decisions is best.

Essential and Inessential Choices

Back to Seth’s post and the idea that there are essential and inessential choices. When designing a website there are far too many decisions for each of them to be mission critical. Some are going to be more important to the design than others.

It suggests that how we prioritize the things we need to do and think about in any design is important. It also suggests that some things are likely to be toward the inessential side across projects. We can extract these these decisions and abstract solutions for them.

For example type. Now let me be clear, I’m not saying typographic decisions are inessential. I think they’re among the most important decisions you make in any design. However, there’s a point where deciding between two different typefaces isn’t very important in the the sense that either will work just as well and you no longer have any objective reason for choosing one over the other.

Instead of trying to spend time at this level of decision on every project, why not develop a type palette with a handful of typefaces. Choose some that have clear distinctions for how each is best used. You can grow palette independent of any project. Your choices will contain a measure of subjectivity, but it’ll help you objectively make a choice given the constraint.

You can do similar with color and work with a limited set of color choice. You reduce subjectivity within a defined set of options even if the set of options was subjectively chosen. You’ll find enough good choices within your subjective palette to objectively work out a design solution.

No decision you make during a design is entirely inessential. They all add up and contribute. Realistically though some are going to be far more important to the success or failure of your design. The least important won’t impact the final design all that much. They might not even make any measurable difference.

You can and probably do make many of these decisions subjectively. There’s little reason to think about them in any great degree, because they won’t have enough impact to justify the effort. A certain amount of personal preference and the arbitrary is going to enter into these decisions.

You can follow all the rules and guidelines about color theory, and in the end you’ll probably use your eye to tweak things. Your eye sees differently from my eye and both of us see things differently than everyone else. There will always be a degree of subjectivity in the choice because none of us can ever know exactly how the colors we choose will be perceived by someone else.

Closing Thoughts

I want to believe I’m an objective person. I think I am, at least as much as anyone can be, and yet I know that every decision I make carries some amount of subjectivity. Whether it’s my personal bias or not having enough information to objectively determine the best decision to make, some subjectivity creeps in.

The more I learn about people, the more I learn this is true of everyone. We’re controlled more by emotion and subjectivity than we’d like to admit.

The universe around us doesn’t care about any of that. It’s far more objective than any of the creatures that inhabit it. We’re subjective beings surrounded by things that follow objective rules we can mostly determine.

There’s a duality between the internal subjective and the external objective that’s at play in everything we do. Understanding this is a step toward letting each do what it does best when conditions allow.

Understanding that not all decisisons are equally important and that your own subjectivity and biases influences all your decisions are big steps in reducing the impact of the sometimes arbitrary choices we inevitably make as well as the sum of those choices.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Friday, 12 September 2014

How Good Habits Become Craft And How You Can Use Them To Create A Better You - Vanseo Design

How Good Habits Become Craft And How You Can Use Them To Create A Better You - Vanseo Design

How Good Habits Become Craft And How You Can Use Them To Create A Better You

Posted: 11 Sep 2014 05:30 AM PDT

Habits can be good or bad. When good habits are applied to a craft they can lead to craftsmanship and when bad they can cause all sorts of problems for you. The repetition of habits leads to muscle memory. It moves conscious thought to the unconscious and allows you to respond automatically and without thought.


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You can also use habits to modify your own behavior through small changes that move the habit to something more positive.

Building Muscle Memory Through Repetition and Habit

A few days ago I was listening to an episode of John Gruber’s Talk Show with Joanna Stern as guest for the week. I think it was Joanna that brought up a study in which people were asked to save a document using the keyboard (CTRL-S, CMD-S) or using a mouse and moving it to a menu to select to save the document.

The people who participated were asked which method they thought faster and they invariably chose the keyboard as the faster of the two. The data however, showed the mouse was actually the faster method.

If you use keyboard shortcuts like me, you might immediately think the study crazy and there’s no way the mouse was faster than the keyboard. The rationale was that keyboarders had to do two things. They had to think or remember the keystrokes and then physically perform the keystrokes. The mouse method had only the physical component.

I still have a hard time believing it. Maybe when you’re first learning a keyboard shortcut, having to think about it slows you down. Use them enough though, and those shortcuts become muscle memory. Do you really need to think CTRL+S or CMD+S? My brain thinks save and then my fingers save. Sometimes my fingers don’t even need to wait for my brain. They automatically save any time I stop writing for a moment.

The habit comes from my early college days at Drexel University. The computer system we used my freshman year had been greatly expanded since the previous year. The computers had grown from something like 15 or 20 to about 120. The problem was the network was only designed to handle the 15 or 20. If you were lucky you could write a line of code and save it before your terminal crashed. Some days you couldn’t even finish the line of code to make it to the saving.

A few years back I switched from using Windows machines to Macs. Right away I felt comfortable using the operating system, but it was about a week before I really felt productive. I had to relearn where keys were, find new ones, and replace shortcuts I could no longer use. It was a week to relearn muscle memory.

I find there’s always a short period of adjustment every time I use a new keyboard. My fingers reach too far or not far enough. I’ll make more mistakes initially, but within a few days the new muscle memory will have developed.

Similar things happened at a couple of jobs I had in the past. For one I worked in a picture framing shop. You bring in your artwork and we’d build the frame and put everything together. The way I had to hold the pieces of the frame when building them, was awkward at first. My fingers didn’t quite want to bend a certain way or have enough strength to hold the frame. In time and practice the muscle memory developed and the awkwardness went away.

At another job we made what I think was called a hakima (I’m probably getting that wrong). It was a heavy piece of cloth that I had to fold precisely. It was difficult. Again it took time to build strength in my hands. As part of the job we had to cut through pieces of rubber with a razor blade. I’d be all proud of myself for making it through in 15 or 20 cuts and my boss would come over and cut through in 2 or 3 cuts. Strength and muscle memory through repetition and habit.

Turning Good Habits into Craftsmanship

One reason you keep practicing and learning is to develop a craft. In many ways craftsmanship arises out of muscle memory and habit. The more you know and the more you practice what you know, the more it all becomes muscle memory. You don’t have to think about it. It’s something you can do automatically while you think about something else.

Where efficiency is concerned, it’s good to be able to take things you had to consciously think about and turn them into something that’s part of an automatic process. It can also improve quality. Assuming you developed good habits while practicing, the automatic parts will turn out well and they’ll free your mind to work on other things.

Again the quality comes from practicing “correctly” and through good habits. Otherwise it’s garbage in, garbage out. The better the practice, the better you’ll be when responding automatically.

To some degree we use tools for the same benefits. We offload some things to the tool so we don’t have to think about it. For example if you work with a code editor, it probably offers some kind of code completion. Instead of having to remember to close a tag, your editor does it for you. It saves time and saves you a little conscious thought.

None of this should be taken as an endorsment that thinking less is ok. The idea is really the opposite. It’s that making some things automatic allows you to have more room to think of other things and apply critical thought to them..

It’s the 10,000 hours things Malcolm Gladwell talked about. Regardless of the actual number of hours needed to become an expert, the general idea of putting in the time to practice well turns muscle memory into good habits, which eventually become craftsmanship and expertise.

Using Habits to Alter Behavior

You can also use habits to alter your behavior for the better. You never want to be locked into a single way of doing things. Everything changes. Everything needs to adapt. Everything needs to be adjusted.

Instead of seeing habits as something etched in stone, either there or not there, see them as something more malleable. Seem them as things you can bend and shape and generally control. You don’t have to make wholesale changes at once. Instead you can modify a habit so it’s one step closer to something more positive.

We all develop habits and while it would be nice to think they’re all good, we all have some bad ones. Like most, I’m a creature of habit, both good and bad. I used to let bad habits get me down and at times I’d be upset with myself for not being able to completely drop the habit.

I’ve found instead that for me it works better to use habits to generate positive change in an iterative process. I make a small change to the habit. It’s small enough that it’s easy enough to do and make stick. Little by little the habit becomes something more desired.

For a simple example, say you want to wake up an hour earlier than usual. Odds are you wake up to the alarm at the same time every day or on your own around the time the alarm is about to go off.

Set your alarm to ring five minutes earlier than usual. The five minute change isn’t a big difference to your body. You should get used to the new time quickly. Maybe you’re groggy for a day or two and then you adjust.

Once you’re waking up five minutes earlier without trouble, set the alarm another five minutes earlier and go through the adjustment period again. Within a few months you should be waking up an hour earlier than when you started and it shouldn’t feel like any extra effort. The whole process shouldn’t feel like it was too much effort at all.

You’re making controlled evolutionary changes as opposed to one quick revolutionary change. The general idea is to:

  • Observe how you naturally do something
  • Turn it into some kind of repeatable process by finding patterns and making them more deliberate
  • Observe where you are and where you want to be
  • Make small adjustments in the attributes of your habit that take it closer to your desired outcome

Turn things into repeatable habits. Then change attributes of the repetition. Change the time between or time spent in each repetition. Change how your hand holds the paint brush by a small amount. Concentrate on not using an overused word when writing. Make an effort to improve one line of code you commonly include in projects.

Turn the whole thing into a process you can iterate toward a desired outcome. Because the change is slow the good habits you develop along the way tend to have greater odds of sticking.

Closing Thoughts

It’s possible you might not iterate your habit toward the “correct” way. In those cases you’ll get better at your way. The consistent practice will make whatever and however you’re doing something easier and quicker. You’re going to get better at something. Maybe some of the times you aren’t better at doing something correct, you’re developing personality and voice. You find a way to make your way work that others haven’t repeated enough to do as well.

Ideally you’d be developing good habits. The way you practice and the routines and processes you develop, are going to become muscle memory. They’re going to become automatic. You want your muscle memory to be doing things the right way most of the time, though sometimes it’s ok to go your own way.

When you develop good habits, it has a nice side effect in that it improves your work on days when you’re less than your best. A sloppy job is relative to your usual job. If your usual is excellent due to quality practice and good habits, then your sloppy job is probably still pretty good.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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