BlogmyQuery – BMQ

If you like the idea of being your own boss (I certainly do), chances are you get the itch sometimes to create your own product — a product whose direction you control, that you do not have to compromise on with someone else, and whose fruits you get to fully enjoy, instead of being paid by the hour or a flat rate. It could be a Web service, a WordPress plugin or a desktop application, but the core problem is the same: how do you pick an idea that will succeed?

Most of us take a very simple approach: we stumble on something that doesn’t work well for us or we identify a problem that we have a lot of experience with, and we think, “All right, I’ll just build x for y and make a mint.� The problem is that we don’t have any indicators of whether others feel the same pain and would be inclined to pay for a solution.

This post presents a systematic approach to finding inspiration for a good software product, and to validating that there is an actual need for it in the real world. No product is guaranteed to succeed, yet our goal should be to minimize risk and maximize opportunity by picking the ideas that will most likely succeed.

(Please note: this article concerns developing commercial ideas. If you want to build an open-source project and do not care about commercialization, then it might be less relevant to you.)

Finding A Good Idea For A Software Product

Some of us develop a product after naturally coming up with the idea while performing a certain task. But what if you want to start your own venture but don’t yet have an idea of what to build? How do you find inspiration for a new software product?

Community Websites

A great source of inspiration is community websites, such as Q&A platforms, forums and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, where your target audience hangs out. Want to build a WordPress plugin? Visit a forum for professional bloggers. Want to build productivity software? Visit a LinkedIn group for the professionals you want to target. Searching on Twitter for your preferred platform or product type can be an amazing source of inspiration.

Find out where your potential audience hangs out and soak up the atmosphere. Read about people’s problems and pains with their current software. Pick up hints on what would make their lives easier (or, in the case of games, what would entertain them most). Search for things that most of the community agrees on, and try to develop it into a concrete concept.

Don’t expect an idea to be handed to you on a silver platter. Rather, get a feel for what your target audience needs, and from there build a concept. (We’ll go over how to figure out the potential of that concept in a bit.)

Variation of a Successful Product

Successful products have the advantage of a proven concept. Many other factors come into play, of course, such as execution, marketing and timing, but a successful product already at least has traction and a user base that you can target right away, increasing your chances of success.

(Image: Viktor Hertz)

I’m not suggesting that you simply clone an existing idea. That could work, but competing with an established product with a mere clone would likely result in failure (unless other factors were involved); and, frankly, cloning an existing product isn’t much fun. You could, however, attack a weakness in another product, turning it into a strength in yours and creating an attractive variation that feeds on the popularity of the original product.

Playing to Your Strengths

Each of us has experience with certain tools, frameworks, APIs and projects. Go over your old projects and library of code, and think of how to build on that experience to create something new. This is how I created my own product, Binpress, a discovery service and marketplace for source code.

Covering familiar ground by building on past experience instead of trying something completely new helps to eliminate some of the risk. Using old code libraries can save significant development time, thus reducing some financial risk. I’ve previously written about how to extract code from old projects, the benefits of which seem especially relevant when you’re trying to reduce risk in a new software venture.

Taking Notes for Later

You’ve probably had many small a-ha moments, when you identified a missing feature in a software product. I have those all the time, when I think “If only this had feature x� or “This junk just doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do.� Each discovery is an idea for a potential product.

Such ideas pop up and then disappear from our memory. If only we take note, one of these minor revelations could turn into an action item. It’s all about discipline. The next time you have such a thought, write it down somewhere you’ll find later. Going over these notes in a few weeks or months could lead to your next breakthrough.

Assessing The Market

By now you have a few product ideas. But how do you know which is your best bet? A few parameters will affect your choice of which idea to develop. And this information will be useful if you ever want investors to support your product financially.

Market Size and Addressable Market

The bigger the market, the higher the potential payoff. Because you will likely be putting in the same amount of effort and time regardless of market size, targeting a big market makes more sense.

The important metric here is total addressable market, which basically means the total amount of revenue you can expect to capture.

There are two common ways to calculate this number: top down and bottom up. In the top-down approach, you start with the total size of the market, and then filter down to your target audience. For example, you could start with the total amount of revenue generated for online t-shirt sales, and then multiply it by the fraction of the market that you intend to capture (let’s say, biker-themed t-shirts).

In the bottom-up approach, you calculate the addressable market size by developing a formula that calculates profit based on your business model. For example, if your model is subscription-based, then multiplying the amount that you intend to charge by the number of people in your target audience will give you your total addressable market.

This is, of course, a simplification of the process. The complexity of measuring the total addressable market will depend on the market in question and the information available for it. You might want to read “Addressable Market: Making the Estimate� by Mark Peters Davis and “Market Sizing: Numerical Narratives� by Jay Haynes.

Actual and Potential Demand

Total addressable market represents the revenue that your product can capture. But will people actually pay for it? To answer this question, more research and thinking is involved.

Search Engines
You wouldn’t believe how many ideas could have been dumped if people had just bothered to search for them. Think of several keywords that represent the problem you want to solve and run them through Google (or Bing, whichever you fancy).

If more results are for people looking for a solution than for actual solutions to the problem, then you might have a winner. Run several variations of the queries based on the search results, until you have a good sense of what is publicly available when people search for a solution.

If you find little mention of the problem, then either your keywords are wrong or the problem is not as big as you think. This is not a game-breaker, but do take note. Some products create new markets or change established ones by generating demand. The demand for such products is harder to assess through a search engine and requires that you trust your vision and instincts, if you decide to follow through.

Staking Out Your Audience
We mentioned community websites in the idea-searching phase, and your research there might tell you what the community thinks. If not, now would be a good time to read what people are saying about the problem. Relevant discussions in online communities could be a great resource for validating and improving a product idea.

If you have experience in the market, then you might already know potential customers (online or off). In that case, you can get great feedback by approaching the ones you trust and asking them about your idea.

(Image: Viktor Hertz)

You might be protective of your idea and reluctant to share it with a relative stranger, but I recommend putting it out there as early as possible and getting real-world feedback. Feedback will help you determine whether the idea is worth pursuing and how to refine it. Steer clear of feedback from family and friends, because their opinions will obviously be biased.

Don’t let negative feedback get you down either; take it at face value. Remember, despite the old adage, the customer is not always right — otherwise, we’d be all riding faster horses instead of driving cars.

Your Personal Evaluation
Despite these methods, getting a sense of the demand might still be difficult, especially if you expect the product to generate new demand. In this case, you will have to rely more on your market experience and intuition.

It all boils down to, do you personally believe this idea is worth developing? From my experience as an entrepreneur, if you believe strongly enough that something can be a big success, then you will find a way to make it happen. It might not go as smoothly as you’d like, but as long as you keep believing, you will pull through eventually. Your personal belief in the potential of the idea should be the determining factor in developing it.

Check Out the Competition

You can learn a lot about the market by checking out the competition. Even if you don’t have direct competition, you will have indirect competition that competes for the attention and pocketbooks of your target audience. Not being able to find any competition at all is usually a sign that your idea is not commercially feasible — unless it is truly revolutionary (which is rarely the case). The existence of competition will validate your idea and could be a trove of inspiration and information on what works and what doesn’t.

Check out your competition’s websites, their mentions in traditional media (news websites and blogs) and their presence in social media. You will learn a lot about where they are as a business, what people think of them, their level of success, their main problems, people’s complaints about them and much more.

Are there major players in your market already? How entrenched are they? How hard would it be to compete against them? Competition provides both validation and a challenge, and it should factor heavily into your decision on whether to develop your idea.

In The End, It’s All You

Building your own venture might be a little intimidating, but it’s an amazing experience. Reducing the risk by doing research is an important first step. That being said, the most important factor is your belief in the potential of the product.

A strong belief in the product will help you get through difficult times, when development stalls or sales decline. It will be your shield against the doubters and haters — and if you gain any traction, you’re certain to get both.

To build your own business, you have to believe in your abilities and in the product. Everything will fall into place from there, and it will be one heck of a ride. Don’t be afraid to fail; make your best effort and learn from your mistakes. If you can tough out the bad times, the good times will arrive, and they will be worth it. Good luck!

(al) (il)

© Eran Galperin for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

In the digital age, don’t forget to use your digits! Your hands are the original digital devices

— Lynda Barry

People often ask how I arrived at a finished illustration. Honestly, it’s different every time, but it always starts with a hand-drawn sketch. Sometimes, I paint it completely by hand; sometimes I’ll scan in a pencil drawing. Many of my pieces are 100% analog that I’ll show only at shops or galleries. Use anything you can; if the illustration would work as a wood carving, go that route. There are concrete steps one can take, but they certainly don’t have to be the same every time. My goal is to take a sketch or idea as far as it can go — and also, to get out of my comfort zone and challenge myself with every new job. For this article, I’ll use handcrafted brushes and Photoshop as my tools.

Sketching It Out

Concepting for me always starts with pencil and paper. If there is one consistent element through all of my pieces, it’s sketching. I love to draw. If I could establish and execute everything with a single pencil drawing, I would. The best thing to do is keep some type of sketchbook or journal with you as much as possible. Milton Glaser said it best: “Drawing is visual thinking.� Drawing creates many possibilities for any idea you might have. It’s then when the character’s personality starts to emerge. Then, I’ll add some volume to the sketch to show where the textures should really come through.

Researching

This is the most underestimated part of the process, but one of the most important. Here, we’re assessing the sketch. What textures would work? What colors would work? It helps to look at your influences.

Some artists who always inspire me are Mary Blair, Alice Provensen, Charley Harper, Maurice Noble and Eyvind Earle. And there are so many ways now to catalog and bookmark historical artwork.

Also, if I’m drawing an elephant’s skin, or wood on a camera, or a band on a helmet, I’ll want to take a close look at the real thing. Google Images is quick, but if I have time I’ll run to the library. Sometimes I do this as soon as I have an idea. Really seeing what you’ll be working with helps.

Crafting Your Own Brushes

I do this because I want my brushes to be my own. Many great websites out there offer textured brushes for Photoshop. For me, the more unique these brushes, the better. Based on my sketch and research, I will have some idea of what I want to capture. I’ll use oil pastels, paint, paper towels, charcoal and anything else. It’s all about being resourceful — use everything. One more thing: when making brushes, the grittier the paper, the better. The more tooth it has, the more the marks will scan. It is for this reason alone I have to clean my scanner all the time.

Some rough crosshatching for the elephant’s skin, with an oil pastel on drawing paper.

Scanning It All In

Scan everything: the initial sketch, the textures, anything you’ve made to this point. I’ll keep anything that I don’t use at this point in a library, possibly to use for something else. I’ve set the scanner to 600 DPI at “Millions� of colors. If your scanner has a “Sharpen� setting, crank it to “High.� You can scan the sketches in black and white at 1200 DPI, or in grayscale since the brushes will be black and white. I’ve set the colors to “High� so that I can archive the files and use them for something else. Once everything has been scanned, let’s open the images in Photoshop.

Here is a scan of my original sketch. I scanned it in at 300 DPI because I will eventually be printing this piece.

If you scan as black and white, you won’t need to worry about adjusting the levels. I’ve scanned in color, so I’ll increase the black and white values in Photoshop. The levels can be found in Images → Adjustments → Levels.

Defining Brushes In Photoshop

I recommend making each one of these brushes a separate file. For the resolution, you can go up to 2500 × 2500. It really depends on what the finished piece needs to be. For this exercise, I’ll select a portion of the scan and define a brush from it.

From the menu drop-down, go to “Edit� and then “Define Brush.�

Now that we have created a brush, we can name it. It will be added to our Brush palette.

You can view the Brush palette by selecting the Brush tool. Look at the options toolbar, and you’ll see a thumbnail of the brush; you can pull this down to view the entire palette. From the menu arrow in the top right, you can save brushes you’ve created. Brushes are saved in Photoshop’s Presets/Brushes folder. You can also load brushes from this menu as well.

Selecting A Color Palette

Now that our brush set is in order, let’s start painting. For the color palette, I’ve researched my idols. Mary Blair and Alice Provensen are masters of color and shape. I always look at their use of color and design. Again, this is why research is so important. Study the people you admire, and analyze why you admire their work. I really like a somewhat muted palette, with some small areas of intense color. In my scanned sketch, I’ve added another layer and sampled the colors I’d like to use.

Making Shapes And Painting

Let’s go to the Paths menu and draw the shapes that we want to paint. From here, we create a “New Path� using the Pen tool, to define the shapes that we established in the sketch. So, let’s open the sketch that we scanned, select the Pen tool from the toolbar, and select “New Path� from the Path menu. Once the Path is saved, we use the Path tool (which is the Pen tool), and start tracing out our shapes. The image below shows all the paths I’ve created that I intend to paint.

Let’s start by painting the shape that will be the background. From the toolbar, select the Path tool, and select a specific path.

Now that we’ve selected a Path, we can create a selection from that path. To do this, select from the pull-down menu on the right in the Paths menu. You’ll see an option named “Make Selection.�

Once that’s selected, a dialog box will pop up asking for a radius to feather the selection; 0 is fine. Also, enable “Anti-aliased� and “New Selection.�

Now that we have a selection, we can “Create a New Layer.� This layer will be specific to this shape. We’ll end up with many layers for each shape, but they will give us the flexibility to edit down the road.

Now that we have a new layer, and the Path is a selection, we can use a brush from the brush set that we created. Also, I’m still using the colors from the palette that I created earlier.

Here’s where the research, brush creation and painting all come together. Let’s paint the path on a “New Layer,� using the steps described above.

Painting within the shapes you’ve defined is a chance to experiment. You can try all kinds of things, like making the brush more transparent or painting over other textures. For me, it’s a lot of trial and error. This image below is a close-up of the brush I’m painting with.

After many painted layers, I end up with a piece that is digitally painted with hand-crafted brushes.

Other Resources

You might be interested in the following articles and related resources:

• Illustrations of Alice and Martin Provensen
  Alice and Martin Provensen were a husband-and-wife illustration team. They wrote and illustrated numerous children’s books, including many little and giant golden books from the ’40s until Martin’s death in 1987. Alice continues to work as an illustrator.
• “How to Steal Like an Artistâ€�
  An excellent article on creativity and life by the brilliant Austin Kleon.
• The Drawn Blog
  A daily source of inspiration for illustration, animation, cartooning, and comic art.
• Today’s Inspiration
  A great source for inspiration and the history of Illustration by Professor Leif Peng.

(al)

© David Mottram for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

Update 15 Dec 2011: Submissions are now closed! The winners will be contacted tomorrow and announced next week!

2012 is around the corner and the year is (already!) coming to an end. We’d like to know how upcoming holidays are celebrated in your city. Just send us a photo of your kind of Christmas or New Year’s Eve and with some luck you may be the winner of some truly smashing prizes! We’re giving away five wonderfully designed books as well as five golden tickets for our upcoming Christmas special bundles.

But I Don’t Celebrate Christmas…

Of course, not everybody celebrates Christmas, but there is still something special about the atmosphere that upcoming holidays create worldwide. You may take pictures of your office New Year decorations, a market in your town or even a winter wonderland you’ve discovered! You can also make a photo of a special event  —  an event that makes you relate to the year coming to an end, or even your list of your New Year’s resolutions, or anything else really. Just keep in mind to stay creative!

The Prizes

The best photos will be rewarded with one of the five books presented below. The winners can select which book they’d like to have. We hope that the book will be delivered in time before the holidays, but unfortunately we can’t guarantee it. We’ve found the books in a selection by Maria Popova over at Brainpickings. As mentioned above, we’ll also be giving away five golden tickets for our upcoming Christmas special bundles, meaning there will be ten winners in total! So… what are you waiting for?

Visual Storytelling
Stunning, ambitious, and thoughtfully curated, Visual Storytelling is part high-concept dictionary for a language of increasingly critical importance, part priceless time-capsule of bleeding-edge creativity from the Golden Age of information overload, the era we call home. Image source.

Moby-Dick In Pictures: One Drawing For Every Page
This artbook collects Matt Kish’s lo-fi drawings in a 600-page visual masterpiece of bold, breathtaking full-page illustrations that captivate eye, heart, and mind, inviting you to rediscover the Melville classic in entirely new ways.

Visual Complexity
A rigorously researched, beautifully designed, thoughtfully curated anthology of the world’s most compelling work at the intersection of these two relatively nascent yet increasingly powerful techno-cultural phenomena, network science and information visualization. Image source.

Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout
In Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout, artist Lauren Redniss tells the story of Curie through the two invisible but immensely powerful forces that guided her life: Radioactivity and love.

344 Questions: The Creative Person’s Do-It-Yourself Guide to Insight, Survival, and Artistic Fulfillment
A pocket-sized compendium of flowcharts and lists to help you figure out life’s big answers by ever-inventive designer Stefan G. Bucher.

Submission Guidelines

• Your photo should have JPG format, a maximum size of 4000 x 3000 pixels and should not exceed 8 MB in size.
• Each participant may send one photo at most.
• You may take photos of anything or anyone, as long as it fits the theme of the contest and nobody is harmed. Don’t forget to mention the city where your photo was taken at!
• Please name your photo with your full name (john-peterson.jpg)
• Please do not send ZIP, RAR or other compressed archives — just the image.
• You must own the copyright of the photo you are submitting.
• Submit your photo to photos@smashingmagazine.com.

All selected photos will be published in an upcoming Smashing Magazine post. So, get your cameras ready and shoot!

Examples To Get You Inspired

Just to give you an idea and inspiration for your entry, here are some photos to get your creative juices flowing:

Deadline and Announcement

Please submit your photo by December 15th at the latest. The qualifying submissions and the winners will be announced a couple of days later after that. We will showcase the most interesting photos here on Smashing Magazine, including the names of the contributors.

Please note: your photo will be used only for this event, and you will retain the full rights to it.

Let’s Go!

On your marks. Ready? Set? Go! Send your photo to photos@smashingmagazine.com! We look forward to your photos, folks!

Wishing Y’all Happy Holidays!
 —  The Smashing Team

(sp) (il) (vf)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

Ah, the love of a client. That is indeed what we all seek as professionals, is it not? If we lived in a utopia, then that’s all there would be. Openness. Honesty. Passion. Flowing in both directions, client to service provider and vice versa. We want our clients to be right behind us in our ideas and open to new ones. In order for this to happen, there has to be trust.

Clients that deal with large agencies tend to place their trust in the big brand names of these shops. Freelance designers and small agencies do not always inspire the confidence in clients that large shops do, which means that trust has to be built, nurtured and never taken for granted.

So, what tools do freelance designers and small agencies have at their disposal not only to get a client on board with their ideas, but to inspire them and encourage buy-in from other stakeholders in the client’s company? We’ll take a look at few of them in this article.

Getting a Win-Win

Getting a win-win is when you deliver solutions that address the client’s business problem. The client should respond to your ideas with respect, placing their trust in ideas that they may not immediately identify with, and turning down ideas they intuitively know will not work. We must be able to respond with the same respect and trust, allowing some of our ideas to fall by the wayside and letting others shine.

Keep in mind that challenging opinions is OK, especially ones that are bound to fail. In this type of relationship, both parties handle tension objectively, putting aside personal feelings, to complete the goal. Indeed, this well-oiled platform allows for the creation of amazing work. So, how does a win-win transpire? It transpires through actions, research and delivery.

Actions: Engaging Your Clients

The way that the teams from the client and agency engage with each other is critical. First and foremost, be what you want your client to be. If you want them to be honest, be honest. If you want them to be passionate, show your passion. They may not immediately reflect your enthusiasm, but they will feel it, and over time it will reinforce your efforts. This is Client Relations 101 and should not be ignored.

Often, though, this honesty, enthusiasm and passion aren’t enough. One of the stakeholders might have wanted another contractor to win the bid, or a variety of other issues might prevent the relationship from maturing. At this point, get the client to stop thinking about any perceived shortcomings, and get them to think objectively about the problems they’re facing, with you as the catalyst for solving them.

When we come across a resistant client, we look to customer insight as the means to help the client focus on the user and the business problems that need to be solved. By discussing these in a controlled, test-driven environment, the biases of both the client and agency are eliminated, and the issue becomes how to objectively solve the problems together.

Research And Customer Insight: The Objective Problem-Solving Approach

Before diving into ways to use customer insight to guide a project, I’ll go over the types of research methodologies and testing protocols that my firm commonly uses. These include ethnography (a research method from the social sciences that involves field research and up-close observation in the user’s environment), heuristic evaluation (a form of usability inspection, in which usability specialists judge whether each element of a user interface follows a list of established usability heuristics), focus groups, surveys, prototyping, usability testing, user interviews and more.

These methodologies yield valuable data, and from this data we can build persuasive artifacts to convince the client of strategies that we know have a high probability of success in the real world. In addition to customer research, stakeholder interviews can be invaluable in highlighting, and gaining consensus on, the scope of UX engagement.

Some of the research methods described above can be extensive and could require the client to commit some of their budget. But conducting research up front to understand customers and what they want is less expensive than spending time and money correcting a solution after it has launched. If the client does not have a budget that supports social science research, then light inexpensive testing can be performed. Nothing is wrong with heading to the nearest coffee shop, finding five to ten people in your target demographic and asking them contextual questions or giving them a run-through of a proposed solution. This is generally enough to make a case for change.

Case in Point

My company was recently hired by Boeing Commercial Aviation Services, the services arm of Boeing, to help transform its customer portal, MyBoeingFleet.com. As part of this transformation, we conducted a large ethnographic research project. It was a huge endeavour, with more than 150 users interviewed around the globe. Though large in scale, it gave us valuable insight into Boeing’s users, enabling us to identify challenges within its existing customer portal. Once we obtained the data, we analyzed it in detail and created a series of artifacts to help the Boeing team clearly understand what we had learned. These artifacts and deliverables also served to convince the Boeing team of our capabilities and expertise, as well as help sell the project to key internal stakeholders.

Upon completion of the ethnographic study, we created a document called SUDA, or “system, user and domain audit.� This comprehensive document detailed the results of the ethnographic research, transferred knowledge of fundamental UX processes, and compiled our findings into persuasive artifacts. This was then presented to all major stakeholders. Two primary artifacts in the SUDA helped to convince our clients and other stakeholders not only to trust us, but to become our champions: those artifacts were the personas and customer journey maps.

These deliverables are a turning point in translating the user research into design. In addition, you will need to develop other artifacts, including wireframes, which must be thoroughly understood before any design work begins.

Personas

Personas are artifacts commonly produced by agencies that perform research. They are key tools for creating empathy among everyone involved in the project. They consist, by definition, of an archetype that represents the needs, behaviors and goals of a particular set of users.

One of my favorite examples of personas is the diptychs of Jason Travis. While not typical personas, which are generally accompanied by a textual explanation of the archetype, they still convey a user’s state of mind through the objects they carry. In order to build something for someone, you must first put yourself in their state of mind; this is one of the definitions of empathy. In the diptych below, you can quickly gauge how the person might think based on what they are carrying. A tremendous amount of information is conveyed through these objects.

One of the diptychs of Jason Travis.

The challenge in developing personas for the Boeing project was the sheer scope and number of users. It could have easily led to 30 different archetypes, which would have been too many for the stakeholders to consume. To make our findings more digestible, users were divided into four major groups based on their activity or goal with the portal. Each group received one to five personas, based on real users. This was incredibly useful, because it enabled our team not only to construct a general archetype, but to expand on subtler aspects of the archetype through actual users. In the end, we had four archetypes, and nine total users to support those archetypes.

With these personas, we could attach a face to the actual navigation flows and interactions in Boeing’s customer portal. Our goal was to elicit empathy in our client and get them to feel the precise emotions their users felt so that they’d be willing to change the product for the better. To accomplish this, we chose to demonstrate the flows through customer journey maps.

Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps are graphs that demonstrate a user’s level of confidence and patience when performing various touch points in an interaction flow. Data is provided from an interview in which the user is guided through a particular task. As they move through the flow, we ask them how they feel at key intervals. For instance, if they are being guided through a shopping flow, we would let them perform the actions required, but when they click the “Buy now� button, we would ask how they feel about the process so far. They might be very frustrated or at relative ease. These feelings are then recorded, which gives us an emotional rhythm we can graph over time. Displaying the emotional journey in this way makes it easy for clients to understand, and it sometimes reveals shocking pain points.

An example of a customer journey map.

For Boeing, the journey maps were eye-opening. By getting a visual representation of the emotional state of their customers, the client suddenly understood how important planning the user experience is to the product development process — and not only for the development phase, but for overall customer service as well. Presenting these and all of the other findings in the SUDA enabled us to begin tackling the design phase objectively, hand in hand with the client.

Delivery: Design And Interest Curves

There is a cognitive science theory called the “aesthetic usability effect.� It states that functional objects that look appealing inspire confidence in users, imparting in the users a higher tolerance for faults, a higher likelihood of overcoming learning curves and a slew of other benefits over less appealing alternatives. This is true even if the objects are actually harder to use! The theory also applies when you present your ideas and solutions to a client. Once you’ve prepared your materials, it is time to present them to the client. The more appealing the delivery, the more likely the solutions will be accepted.

Delivery is a critical moment in the transformation of a client’s attitude. If at all possible, make it face to face, and bring any executive-level sponsors from your company with you. With Boeing, we took our time to make sure that what we presented was visually appealing and well organized. Paying close attention to delivering the content builds trust; sloppy work will only work against your objective. Because most of you are designers, I am sure your presentations are incredibly visually appealing, but how do you construct your content so that it has the most impact? My advice: use interest curves.

Interest curves set the timing, or pace, of when to introduce various moments into your presentation. Take the following curve:

This shows interest points over time. It is also a poor interest curve. Now look at an optimal interest curve:

You can see that you want to start off the presentation with something that immediately captures the attention of the audience. From there, slowly build to a climactic point (for us, that would be the journey maps), and end the presentation quickly thereafter. This will keep the audience simmering for more, and it generally leaves a great impression. This type of curve can be found in many forms of entertainment, from rock concerts to movies, and, for whatever reason, our minds are tuned to this pacing of interest. To create further interest, these curves can be embedded within each other, as the following graph demonstrates:

Fractal interest curve

The point is, keep the client hooked with undulations of interesting moments, and make those moments grow in intensity until you impress your final point deep into their subconscious.

For The Win: Actions, Research And Delivery

Through your actions, by gathering customer insight and by creating meaningful, engaging visuals and deliverables that support your strategy, not only will you have concrete data to inform your designs and the project’s direction, but you’ll likely achieve that win-win. Getting clients on board with your recommendations translates to a more productive, successful project for everyone.

Good luck in transforming the minds of your clients!

(al)(fi)

© Leonard Souza for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

Ah, the love of a client. That is indeed what we all seek as professionals, is it not? If we lived in a utopia, then that’s all there would be. Openness. Honesty. Passion. Flowing in both directions, client to service provider and vice versa. We want our clients to be right behind us in our ideas and open to new ones. In order for this to happen, there has to be trust.

Clients that deal with large agencies tend to place their trust in the big brand names of these shops. Freelance designers and small agencies do not always inspire the confidence in clients that large shops do, which means that trust has to be built, nurtured and never taken for granted.

So, what tools do freelance designers and small agencies have at their disposal not only to get a client on board with their ideas, but to inspire them and encourage buy-in from other stakeholders in the client’s company? We’ll take a look at few of them in this article.

Getting a Win-Win

Getting a win-win is when you deliver solutions that address the client’s business problem. The client should respond to your ideas with respect, placing their trust in ideas that they may not immediately identify with, and turning down ideas they intuitively know will not work. We must be able to respond with the same respect and trust, allowing some of our ideas to fall by the wayside and letting others shine.

Keep in mind that challenging opinions is OK, especially ones that are bound to fail. In this type of relationship, both parties handle tension objectively, putting aside personal feelings, to complete the goal. Indeed, this well-oiled platform allows for the creation of amazing work. So, how does a win-win transpire? It transpires through actions, research and delivery.

Actions: Engaging Your Clients

The way that the teams from the client and agency engage with each other is critical. First and foremost, be what you want your client to be. If you want them to be honest, be honest. If you want them to be passionate, show your passion. They may not immediately reflect your enthusiasm, but they will feel it, and over time it will reinforce your efforts. This is Client Relations 101 and should not be ignored.

Often, though, this honesty, enthusiasm and passion aren’t enough. One of the stakeholders might have wanted another contractor to win the bid, or a variety of other issues might prevent the relationship from maturing. At this point, get the client to stop thinking about any perceived shortcomings, and get them to think objectively about the problems they’re facing, with you as the catalyst for solving them.

When we come across a resistant client, we look to customer insight as the means to help the client focus on the user and the business problems that need to be solved. By discussing these in a controlled, test-driven environment, the biases of both the client and agency are eliminated, and the issue becomes how to objectively solve the problems together.

Research And Customer Insight: The Objective Problem-Solving Approach

Before diving into ways to use customer insight to guide a project, I’ll go over the types of research methodologies and testing protocols that my firm commonly uses. These include ethnography (a research method from the social sciences that involves field research and up-close observation in the user’s environment), heuristic evaluation (a form of usability inspection, in which usability specialists judge whether each element of a user interface follows a list of established usability heuristics), focus groups, surveys, prototyping, usability testing, user interviews and more.

These methodologies yield valuable data, and from this data we can build persuasive artifacts to convince the client of strategies that we know have a high probability of success in the real world. In addition to customer research, stakeholder interviews can be invaluable in highlighting, and gaining consensus on, the scope of UX engagement.

Some of the research methods described above can be extensive and could require the client to commit some of their budget. But conducting research up front to understand customers and what they want is less expensive than spending time and money correcting a solution after it has launched. If the client does not have a budget that supports social science research, then light inexpensive testing can be performed. Nothing is wrong with heading to the nearest coffee shop, finding five to ten people in your target demographic and asking them contextual questions or giving them a run-through of a proposed solution. This is generally enough to make a case for change.

Case in Point

My company was recently hired by Boeing Commercial Aviation Services, the services arm of Boeing, to help transform its customer portal, MyBoeingFleet.com. As part of this transformation, we conducted a large ethnographic research project. It was a huge endeavour, with more than 150 users interviewed around the globe. Though large in scale, it gave us valuable insight into Boeing’s users, enabling us to identify challenges within its existing customer portal. Once we obtained the data, we analyzed it in detail and created a series of artifacts to help the Boeing team clearly understand what we had learned. These artifacts and deliverables also served to convince the Boeing team of our capabilities and expertise, as well as help sell the project to key internal stakeholders.

Upon completion of the ethnographic study, we created a document called SUDA, or “system, user and domain audit.� This comprehensive document detailed the results of the ethnographic research, transferred knowledge of fundamental UX processes, and compiled our findings into persuasive artifacts. This was then presented to all major stakeholders. Two primary artifacts in the SUDA helped to convince our clients and other stakeholders not only to trust us, but to become our champions: those artifacts were the personas and customer journey maps.

These deliverables are a turning point in translating the user research into design. In addition, you will need to develop other artifacts, including wireframes, which must be thoroughly understood before any design work begins.

Personas

Personas are artifacts commonly produced by agencies that perform research. They are key tools for creating empathy among everyone involved in the project. They consist, by definition, of an archetype that represents the needs, behaviors and goals of a particular set of users.

One of my favorite examples of personas is the diptychs of Jason Travis. While not typical personas, which are generally accompanied by a textual explanation of the archetype, they still convey a user’s state of mind through the objects they carry. In order to build something for someone, you must first put yourself in their state of mind; this is one of the definitions of empathy. In the diptych below, you can quickly gauge how the person might think based on what they are carrying. A tremendous amount of information is conveyed through these objects.

One of the diptychs of Jason Travis.

The challenge in developing personas for the Boeing project was the sheer scope and number of users. It could have easily led to 30 different archetypes, which would have been too many for the stakeholders to consume. To make our findings more digestible, users were divided into four major groups based on their activity or goal with the portal. Each group received one to five personas, based on real users. This was incredibly useful, because it enabled our team not only to construct a general archetype, but to expand on subtler aspects of the archetype through actual users. In the end, we had four archetypes, and nine total users to support those archetypes.

With these personas, we could attach a face to the actual navigation flows and interactions in Boeing’s customer portal. Our goal was to elicit empathy in our client and get them to feel the precise emotions their users felt so that they’d be willing to change the product for the better. To accomplish this, we chose to demonstrate the flows through customer journey maps.

Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey maps are graphs that demonstrate a user’s level of confidence and patience when performing various touch points in an interaction flow. Data is provided from an interview in which the user is guided through a particular task. As they move through the flow, we ask them how they feel at key intervals. For instance, if they are being guided through a shopping flow, we would let them perform the actions required, but when they click the “Buy now� button, we would ask how they feel about the process so far. They might be very frustrated or at relative ease. These feelings are then recorded, which gives us an emotional rhythm we can graph over time. Displaying the emotional journey in this way makes it easy for clients to understand, and it sometimes reveals shocking pain points.

An example of a customer journey map.

For Boeing, the journey maps were eye-opening. By getting a visual representation of the emotional state of their customers, the client suddenly understood how important planning the user experience is to the product development process — and not only for the development phase, but for overall customer service as well. Presenting these and all of the other findings in the SUDA enabled us to begin tackling the design phase objectively, hand in hand with the client.

Delivery: Design And Interest Curves

There is a cognitive science theory called the “aesthetic usability effect.� It states that functional objects that look appealing inspire confidence in users, imparting in the users a higher tolerance for faults, a higher likelihood of overcoming learning curves and a slew of other benefits over less appealing alternatives. This is true even if the objects are actually harder to use! The theory also applies when you present your ideas and solutions to a client. Once you’ve prepared your materials, it is time to present them to the client. The more appealing the delivery, the more likely the solutions will be accepted.

Delivery is a critical moment in the transformation of a client’s attitude. If at all possible, make it face to face, and bring any executive-level sponsors from your company with you. With Boeing, we took our time to make sure that what we presented was visually appealing and well organized. Paying close attention to delivering the content builds trust; sloppy work will only work against your objective. Because most of you are designers, I am sure your presentations are incredibly visually appealing, but how do you construct your content so that it has the most impact? My advice: use interest curves.

Interest curves set the timing, or pace, of when to introduce various moments into your presentation. Take the following curve:

This shows interest points over time. It is also a poor interest curve. Now look at an optimal interest curve:

You can see that you want to start off the presentation with something that immediately captures the attention of the audience. From there, slowly build to a climactic point (for us, that would be the journey maps), and end the presentation quickly thereafter. This will keep the audience simmering for more, and it generally leaves a great impression. This type of curve can be found in many forms of entertainment, from rock concerts to movies, and, for whatever reason, our minds are tuned to this pacing of interest. To create further interest, these curves can be embedded within each other, as the following graph demonstrates:

Fractal interest curve

The point is, keep the client hooked with undulations of interesting moments, and make those moments grow in intensity until you impress your final point deep into their subconscious.

For The Win: Actions, Research And Delivery

Through your actions, by gathering customer insight and by creating meaningful, engaging visuals and deliverables that support your strategy, not only will you have concrete data to inform your designs and the project’s direction, but you’ll likely achieve that win-win. Getting clients on board with your recommendations translates to a more productive, successful project for everyone.

Good luck in transforming the minds of your clients!

(al)(fi)

© Leonard Souza for Smashing Magazine, 2011.