It’s not the end of the world; as Seth Godin says, “I don’t care so much how much money you raised, or who you raised it from. I care a lot about who your customers are and why (or if) they’re happy.”

Dead-on. Which is why I am even more excited about this graph that we put together:

Those are people getting out of debt on our site. Even better, by comparing the lines, we see that more engaged users are getting out of debt faster. Correlation is not causation, but this connection proves that the use of ReadyForZero can play a serious role in helping people. It gives me confidence that I’m making progress to living up to my standards for great designers.

“With a focus on psychology, UX designers can build services that directly help people improve their lives. It’s not new; AA and Weight Watchers were around before the Internet, and they help people through difficult and long-term behavior change. Still, there are big advances to be made. Web services are starting to blur the edges between online and offline interactions. Nike+ and Fitbit track and provide insight into your exercise. ReadyForZero helps people change their behavior and get out of credit card debt. HealthMonth creates competitive / supportive groups of people who improve at the same time.

This is grander than enabling behavior—it is changing behavior. It is also only just beginning.”

Read the rest of my guest post over at UXMag.

A single click is all you need to sign up for friend.ly. After that, you’re in, with a profile including your picture. You’re connected to friends. You have pre-filled questions to answer based on your interests, as well as pre-filled questions to ask your friends based on their interests and mutual connections. There’s a leaderboard of your connections. You’re in. One click.

Friend.ly landing page

One click later, the newsfeed

This is accomplished via Facebook’s registration plugin, and I’ve never seen it implemented so well. It assumes you have a Facebook account, and works best if you’re logged in to it. For a social app like this, that’s a pretty fair assumption.

Perhaps that’s why their early traffic numbers are looking, well, smoking hot.

Am I a great designer?

The answer to this question matters – to me, and to everyone else.

First, it’s deeply personal. I don’t think many people aim to be mediocre, and this question is the yardstick by which we measure our professional life.

Second, in the vein of Cennydd Bowles’ excellent closing plenary from the IA summit, being a great designer involves having a huge, positive impact on the world. We should all strive for this, and if the field is to realize its full potential, we must. We cannot settle for mediocrity, for focus on profits, for improving the short-term at the expense of the long-term. We cannot use, as Umair Haque puts it, yesterday’s ideas.

So how do we measure it?

The thing is, it’s very hard to even understand the question. What is a great designer? We can judge someone by many metrics: respect, pay, book sales, twitter followers, users of their products, revenues of their products, or any of a million other things. My gut tells me that these things may be a result of greatness, but that they don’t strike at the heart of the issue. One doesn’t need to be popular or rich to be great.

With that in mind, I’ve set down a simple list of things that I think I must do to even begin to enter the realm of greatness. It’s a draft version; let’s collaborate on making it better. I can only claim to check a few of these items off my list, but it’s obvious that trying to fill each of these areas will make me significantly better. I hope you find it equally useful.

A Framework

Using this guide is simple: Answer the questions honestly, and strive to fulfill each one completely.

—

1. Are you working on something truly important?

You should be able to answer this unequivocally. You are increasing happiness on this Earth, and can prove it. In the future, when you look back on what you are doing right now, you will say “yes, I was working on the right thing”. You are tapped into that youthful, driven sense that the world needs saving and you’re playing a vital part. The most important decision we make as designers is not within a project, it is what project we choose to work on.

The guy who codified planned obsolescence was a very successful marketer. He helped sell billions, even trillions of dollars worth of product. But I don’t call him “great”. I call him a bastard, responsible for untold landfills of cheap, discarded consumer goods.

2. Are you learning something new?

You are actively learning a new domain of knowledge. This involves at a minimum reading, being taught or mentored, and practicing in this domain. No matter your age or experience, there are many things to learn. Stagnation does not make a great designer.

3. Are you a mentor?

You periodically meet with a designer more junior than yourself, providing them with guidance, feedback, and inspiration. Mentoring or teaching is one of the most powerful ways a person can use their time. A few hours of your time can have an lasting, sustained impact on the future of both your students and the world. Every great designer should take the time to pass their invaluable wisdom onwards.

4. Are you a mentee?

You periodically meet with a designer more senior than yourself, who helps you continually improve yourself. The most successful people in history have all had mentors. Leonardo da Vinci had Andrea del Verrocchio. MLK had Benjamin Mays. Not only do mentors have answers to your questions, they tell you which questions you should be asking.

5. Do you contribute to your professional community?

You blog, speak, write, evangelize, organize, or curate within your own niche of the design community. Everyone, from the youngest fledgeling designer to the lifelong thought leader, has a unique and important perspective on the design profession. We are lucky to call ourselves members of one of the most flexible, forward-looking, wide open professions in the history of the world. Your contribution is important, and while creating it you shape your own unique expertise.

6. Do you feel ownership of your work?

You endure the unbearable bad feedback that throws your passionate work into a trash can, and bask in the radiant glow of good feedback while staying humble. You champion your designs and the ideals that created them, through unending hurdles and teams and budgets and whatever else can be thrown in your way.

Creating beautiful designs, handing them off, and walking away is easy. Long term ownership of a design is hard. It makes you take heroic stands as well as accept brutal compromises.

7. Are you proud of your day-to-day efforts?

There are many ways to define good work, from quantitative results to qualitative feedback. Here, we take a self-reflective approach: You do great work so long as you feel that it is great. You have produced your very best effort given the constraints and needs of the project. You have battled and danced with these constraints until they made you bleed, and you have left the design room with something to be proud of.

8. Have you ever created anything timeless?

You have made something that even your kids would someday be proud of. This thing has longevity – its effects will last beyond the next version, the next redesign, the next generation. It has impacted the future in a noticeable way, large or small. Someone in the world has benefitted greatly from this thing, and would thank you from the bottom of their heart if they ever met you.

9. Do you empower your team to be better?

You make a conscious effort to improve the dynamic of your team. You are a source of positive energy, selfless in your efforts to help your teammates become great themselves.

Our ability to bring the best out of everyone around us results in better products, smarter people, and happier colleagues. Even when we must fight for our designs, it is with respect and shared optimism that we approach this “fight”.

10. Are you happy?

This is a difficult question, but it pierces the heart of the issue: Your overall happiness is a subconscious yet powerful evaluation of how you’re doing. If you do crappy work and are mean to people, you will be unhappy. Buddhism teaches that attaining happiness is forgetting the self, and this applies profoundly to our work. If we care deeply about what we do, we can lose ourselves in it, become vulnerable to it, grieve when it fails, and experience real bliss when it is successful. This question can be alternatively phrased: Are you vulnerable to your work? Thus, if you have done great work, you are happy.

—

How many of these can I check off? Not enough! I argue that we should all be scoring 100% on the first nine questions, and doing our best on the tenth. If our entire community can hit this stride, we are well positioned to change the future for the better.

Today, we’re launching ReadyForZero, a startup dedicated to helping people manage their credit card debt.

When I decided to join ReadyForZero last November, I was burnt out.

Not that life was bad, but my work as a freelancer had left me unsatisfied. A year of subcontracting interaction design work sapped me. The projects I worked on were awesome, but I had about as much ownership over them as I do over clouds in the sky: here one minute, gone the next. Lengthy release cycles, strict NDAs, and end-of-project handoffs meant that I could hardly even talk about the products that saw the touch of my hand.

Don’t get me wrong – the projects were interesting and the people were fantastic, but one needs something more.

That’s why, with the launch of our site today, a page has been turned. This startup has put the spirit back in my step. I own my work. It owns me too. I care so deeply about it that I forget about stuff that doesn’t matter, and appreciate tenfold the stuff that does. I feel… effective.

ReadyForZero is a product designed to solve a real human problem: credit card debt. It’s not something that wants a lot of your time, but a productive and focused tool with a single real goal. At least, that’s the hope. We’ll get trolled, no doubt, and hopefully get some love too. We’ll probably help a few people get out of credit card debt, and that’s what matters.

Be warned: I’m gonna blog it up.

So get your comment buttons out, polish up that unsubscribe link, or just keep on flipping through Google Reader, but don’t think for a second that I will go ten months without posting again. (Sorry about that).

This is version 2 of the Better Defaults library, expanded to sixty five (or so) interactive and cleanly styled widgets. Use it in place of the standard widget set.

Reasons to use these widgets include:

• Consistent and improved styling.
• Polished interactivity.
• Standardized labeling.
• Expanded set of shapes & controls.
• Rollover, MouseDown, Selected, and Disabled styles for most controls.
• Includes all defaults.

This is for version 5.5 and above. Put the extracted .rplib file in your “My Documents\My Axure RP Libraries\” folder (Windows) or your “Documents\Axure\Libraries” folder (Mac).

Preview |  Download the Axure Library

1. Plan
   • Choose a central theme.
   • Make a list of widgets that will be included.
   • Determine a common style to use throughout the library. This may include color, grid, typography, interactivity, and copy.
2. Create
   • Open Axure RP.
   • In the widgets pane on the left, click the “Wireframe” dropdown and choose “Create library…”
   • Save the new document with a short, clear name—this will be the name that shows up in the library droplist for everyone.
   • Create each widget just like you would create new pages in a normal prototype.
3. Polish
   • Name everything that may be interactive. A dynamic panel for showing a calendar should be named something like “panel – calendar”. A submit button should be something like “button – submit”. This will help your users during annotation and spec generation.
   • Add Rollover, MouseDown, Selected, and Disabled states to interactive shapes like buttons. Right click the object > Edit Button Shape > Edit Rollover Style (etc).
   • Many widgets may contain more than one element. Group them together (ctrl + G) to ensure they don’t get separated when your users move them around.
   • Sort the widgets. This is difficult because you have to do it manually and there is no best sort order. Play around with sorting options, such as alphabetical vs. order or importance, to find what’s right for you. It’s worth the effort.
   • Add custom thumbnails. Another pain-in-the-butt task that will improve the professionalism of your library tenfold. Take your inner icon designer out for a spin and start producing 32 x 32 px thumbnails in .png format. Apply them to widgets by right clicking the Widget > “Widget Properties” > “Import Icon”. Make liberal use of screen grabs. Even your lamest effort at producing an icon will look better than the grainy compressed default that Axure spits out.
   • Add descriptions. I don’t always do this, but for complex widgets, it can be good to explain them a bit. Right click the Widget > “Widget Properties”. Put your description in the text area.
4. Distribute
   • Hosting .rp / .rplib files is fraught with issues due to their resemblance to .zip files. There is one true method for hosting these things successfully (take my word for it): Put the .rp / .rplib file(s) in a folder, and zip the folder. This is the file you distribute.
5. Announce
   • The best places to announce Axure libraries are:
   • Twitter (plug: I’ll probably RT you if you direct a message to @lorenbaxter).
   • On the Axure Forum.
   • Submit to Axure’s official list of resources.

Happy prototyping!

Let your passion out into the world. Every single one of us is great at something unique, and we owe it to ourselves to share that with the greater community. That’s why I produce all this Axure stuff – because I’m good at it, and it makes people happy. Seriously: happy! That’s a damn good feeling.

Few professions provide this opportunity, this interconnectedness and openness that allow people of any age or location to make an immediate, positive impact across the world. Throughout the conference, as I sat through presentation after presentation of really cool people making really cool things, I realized yet again that the world is there for the improving. For each of us. So take some time outside of work to make something awesome – you’ll get back a thousand times what you put in.

Thanks.
-Loren

Kevin Wick has posted a very nice sketchy-styled Axure library.  I highly recommend it.

Prototyping in a very low-fidelity visual style generally helps your stakeholders provide feedback at the right level, as discussed in this article, and has been adopted by many other design tools, notably Balsamiq.

I recently joined a wave of about seven user experience professionals, with all of us participating and discussing, in real-time, the merits of Wave. In fairness, if you send seven UX snobs to review almost any interface, you can expect some berating. And this is a closed “preview” (read: beta) version. But what occurred was an absolute evisceration. In this post I attempt to distill the feedback by providing three criticisms and three suggestions about how Google Wave can be improved.

Criticism 1: An Identity Crisis – What is Google Wave?

“Google Wave is all this interesting stuff on the screen, all around me. A wave is a shared space, where you can discuss, and work, and communicate, with friends and colleagues, using text, and videos, and photos, and maps, and all sorts of interesting stuff.” - Doctor Wave

Holy crap! It’s everything! In the instructional video that Google expects the user to discover floating in their inbox, the Google-PM-turned-mad-scientist “Doctor Wave” point out that, really, they aren’t too clear on what it’s for either. Herein lies the first problem with using Wave: it has no idea what need to fulfill.

Criticism 2: Out of Context – Why am I here?

Upon receiving the invite to use Wave and signing in, I found myself staring at a bunch of functionality. The internal conversation went something like this:

“Why am I here?”
“To check out Google Wave”
“Yeah. It’s pretty crazy.”
“… What now?”

This highlights the second problem with Wave: many people arrive in the software with no context. Because it’s not marketed or designed as an application to solve a specific need, it’s up to the community to discover what problems can be solved in a better way by using a wave. You have to come at it with a goal: to plan a trip, to organize a project. If your goal reads vaguely, like “figure out how Wave can be useful to me”, you will probably walk away frustrated. Unfortunately, you can’t help but enter the application with this goal at the moment.

Criticism 3: Do I make you nervous?

As you type in a wave, other participants can see you typing in real time. (There is a feature to disable this, but it’s not implemented yet). Imagine yourself sweating, nervous, your hands shaking as you mash out typo after typo in front of a conference chat. You type something which you decide you don’t want to say, but by the time you erase it, everyone has read it anyway.

Furthermore, when a few people are typing and clicking around at once all the “blips” (messages) in the wave start jumping all over the place. Text appears and disappears everywhere, things move around, the other parts of Wave ping you with chat messages and unread inbox items, and you can’t see the screen because it’s covered in the remnants of your brain, which has just exploded in protest. Imagine everyone in a big room, standing in their own spots and just yelling in all directions at the same time.

Finally, and this just confounds me, anyone can edit anyone else’s messages, even while they’re typing them. Imagine the disaster that happens when four people start editing the same content at once.

So what should Google do?

Suggestion 1: They should start small.

Instead of telling people that Wave will solve all their problems, if only they could figure out how, Wave should introduce itself to solve a single problem. This could be something like.. Plan a party. Google Wave is your new party-planning software. Give people a reason to be there, and a goal to work towards as they navigate and discover Wave’s features. People will naturally discover new and interesting applications of their software, and the use will broaden over time. But people have to use it first, and right now they have no clear reason to do that.

Suggestion 2: They should end the closed beta.

I cannot imagine what made Google think that it was a good idea to give out limited invitations to a closed space that is fundamentally social. Many of us arrived in Wave staring at an empty contacts list and no idea who else was using it. Furthermore, the invites tend to spread to the ultra-connected early adopters. But most of my real friends aren’t that person. How do I plan a camping trip on Wave when none of my friends use it? It will open up someday soon, but the taste is already bitter. Google should open things up now, so that we can begin to contact the people we actually need to communicate with.

Suggestion 3: The real-timeyness needs changing.

But I don’t know what. Moderation? Guidelines? Established etiquette? Outright deletion? Currently, any lively real-time conversation between more than two people evolves into mayhem. Either some sort of social rules that keep things in order will arise from the user base, or Google needs to change how this feature works. They can start by turning the real-time typing off by default.

Google Wave may turn out to change how we communicate after all, but they need to build a lot of bridges. The large gap between novice and effective use of the system, in its current form, will stifle its success.