Daniel Feldt

Alma Mono - A font for charity

2016-09-17T00:00:00+02:00

In may of this year I launched a monospace font called Alma Mono. It's the first one where I gave interpolation a try. That means that by drawing two weights I could, with the help of Glyphs-app get additional weights generated. I learned a TON more of course but that's for another post.

Well, I'm pretty pleased with the result, please check out Alma Mono. It's a pay what you want font and if you choose to pay ALL the proceeds go toward charity. You really should check it out!

Closing the Pin Aid-project

2015-11-14T00:00:00+01:00

Yesterday I went to the post office and mailed out the last batch of pins and stickers to the supporters of my aid pin-project. The above photo is from when I signed "thank you"-cards and packed all the orders.

75 pins and roughly 100 stickers were sent out and spread across countries as Sweden, Norway, UK, USA, Canada and Australia.

I can now close this project and summarize it as a success. With the help of all the supporters we managed to raise 8700 SEK to UNCHR! Amazing! Thank you all for the support and I hope you'll enjoy your pins and stickers.

Aid stickers now available!

2015-09-28T00:00:00+02:00

I've added stickers to the aid pin-project so if you place and order - or have placed an order already - you also get a sticker for your laptop, iPad or local lamp post. You can also buy the stickers separate if you want more.

Buy a sticker - help the refugees

Buy a pin - Help the refugees

2015-09-25T00:00:00+02:00

Update: I'm adding a sticker to be used on your laptop, iPad or local lamp post e t c on every pin order. Don't worry. The sticker cost won't be taken from the order - I'm footing that bill myself.

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

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

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

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

So I took my idea of creating something, sell it and donate all the profit to UNCHR. I've created this pin that you can buy and wear. I will use the money to buy tents and aid packages that will help refugees living in UNs refugee camps.

Goals

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

Now. Reaching these goals would be awesome. In my mind it seems impossible, but you never know and you have to try.

These 100 pins is a limited edition. If we reach the goal of selling 100 pins I will another set of pins with different colors - a second edition - and just keep the editions coming if we get so lucky. Maybe change the charity and illustration.

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

Buy a pin - help the refugees

And this is, roughly, how it will look:

* Note: Production cost for the pin is 9 sek. 116 sek will go directly to UNCHR. International shipping will be added to the purchase.

Introducing Gunnar Bold

2015-05-05T00:00:00+02:00

I started 2015 with a goal of drawing a illustration every day. I had a similar thing going on late last year where I drew a whale every day for 20 something days. It did wonders for my creativity, general energy and not to mention my abiblity to draw whales.

Well, that goal of drawing every day for 2015 held barely a week. I decided to change it to "do something creative (outside of work) for 15 minutes every day". That worked a lot better. I do a lot of creative stuff at work, like UI design for web, iOS and Android and some illustrative work. But it's nice to mix it up a bit.

I've always been curious on creating my own typeface and started a while ago with an unamed sans serif in the style of two of my favorite typefaces: DIN and Futura Bold. So I unpacked that project and started with 1-5 glyphs every day and now I think I'm done. Well, I'm always finding kerning stuff do to with it but it's close enough.

If you wan't to take a closer look at Gunnar Bold have a look at the mini site I created.

Travel time to favorite destinations

2015-03-12T00:00:00+01:00

Today we launched a nice feature on Hemnet that lets you see travel time between your future dream home (or cabin) and destinations by choice.

Try it out!

Hemnet for Android getting a Material Design makeover

2015-03-06T00:00:00+01:00

We are doing small continuous releases of Hemnet for Android and updating it with functions and style in small incremental releases. The last one we did is a small but in my mind significant change with a more Material Design approach for the header of the app. A lot more is on its way in future releases.

The interaction design of the app feels a lot more natural. Available thru Google Play.

Launching quick nav for Hemnet iOS

2015-03-05T00:00:00+01:00

As a power user of Pinterest I use their "press and hold"-navigation pattern quite a lot when repinning pins. That got me thinking on how we at Hemnet could use a similar pattern and give our power users a shortcut.

After a few quick iterations in Sketch and some prototyping in Pixate the quick nav is now implemented and launched for the iOS app.

Get it now on App Store or update your app if you already have it installed.

New iPhone & iPad app for Hemnet available now!

2014-10-21T00:00:00+02:00

I am incredibly proud to present the new iOS app for Hemnet that has been in development for some time. Completely rewritten backend and a shiny new suite.

The old app where originally created by a third party. Not only does it have a very dated look, keeping it up to date codewise and developing new functionality kept getting harder and harder.

It's been a long time coming and this new release with our own code as base will give us freedom to do more useful and fun stuff with the app.

Check it out - My personal favorite is the iPad-version.

Get it now on App Store

PS. The android version is right around the corner. Soon, sooon...

Creating a new map search experience

2014-07-03T00:00:00+02:00

In May of this year a small team at Hemnet launched a new full screen map search experience for 1.8 million weekly visitors at Hemnet.se. From start to finish we researched, designed, built and launched the new search in six months. The new full screen map search is, by far, the most fun and successful web project I've been a part of. This is a short summary of how we did it, from a user experience designer's point of view.

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

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

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

Captain Kirk adresses the redshirts

Setting up the team

To wildy paraphrase, we were told:

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

* previous one was hosted and developed by an external partner

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

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

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

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

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

We felt a true ownership of the project.

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

We had to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Implementation phase

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thumbs up?

The importance of A/B testing or "Scotty, what do you think, forward thrust?"

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

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

Throttle up or "Scotty, we are going to need everything she's got!"

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

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

Why yes Captain Kirk, the new maps are fully responsive and will work just perfectly on tablets and phones.

Post release phase or "The final frontier"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I am sorry for the poor Star Trek references.

Help wanted! We are looking to expand our UX-team at Hemnet. The above process is only 75% of our time at Hemnet and you might want to take a look at how we spend the remaining 25%. If this seems like the place to be (which it is) you should get in touch.

Building an iPad app in two weeks

2014-05-20T00:00:00+02:00

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

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

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

More time for product development

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

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

iOS-developer Robin was so excited for our lab weeks he put on a suit and tie. Here he is pitching his ideas of creating better API:s.

Pitching your idea

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

Getting more inspiration from "Inspiration"

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

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

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

Here it is, the finished product

From zero to app in two weeks

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

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

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

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

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

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

This one has arrived

2014-04-13T00:00:00+02:00

Bosse. Arrived into our family april 13th, 2014. I'm a father to two kids. That's just crazy. Crazy cool, but mindboggling.

The Meaning of Life

2014-02-28T00:00:00+01:00

When looking back at my life I can easily say when I've been the happiest, the most content and just as zen as these cats. And it's whenever your child falls asleep on your chest. There are no greater feeling.

With a 4-year old at home those moments come rather rarely nowadays. Now it's usually an combination of high fever and just passing out. Still a great feeling having your child close, but in those moments you have that grain of worry keeping you from zenness.

April can't come soon enough.

Zombie Survival Tools

2013-12-12T00:00:00+01:00

I started out doodeling useful "zombie tools" while watching the first season of "The Walking Dead" a while ago and never did anything with it. Now I've done something with it. Take a look.

Kano - A computer anyone can make

2013-11-28T00:00:00+01:00

Kano is a computer you make yourself. It's simple, fun, and for everyone. This just blows my mind and it gets kinda dusty in the room when I look at their Kickstarter-video and imagine how I would have enjoyed this when I was a kid, how my kid would interact with it and what the future holds for the kids growing up with something like this. Amazing.

Back the project at Kickstarter or learn more at Kano.me.

From The Wire to a design school

2013-11-25T00:00:00+01:00

Now this is cool. Thanks to a major architectural intervention and funding from Adobe - A decrepit factory is now a high-tech public design school.

Once so decrepit that the show The Wire used it as a set to symbolize the post-industrial urban decay. I just love it and would kill to have daily access to those windows.

Hello World!

2013-11-21T00:00:00+01:00

Months and months in the making and I finally had enough. It might not be done yet, but say hello to my new portfolio site and accompanying blog/notes-section.

Since it is my very own site I have the luxury to decide to ignore images sizes (there are a lot of images and they are HUGE) and which devices to support e t c. In this case taken the short route and choosen to test it only on a Mac with a modern browser, on my iPhone and my iPad. It should work, but maybe with a few glitches, on older browsers and devices.

It is my first time developing a site powered by Jekyll and I must say that the experience is really nice. With Jekyll and SASS I can finally custom design individual pages/posts with eaze instead of using WordPress, plugins and crap. My favorite page at the moment is the Zissou-section.

Typekit delivers the typefaces used. Among the typefaces I use you can find FF Enzo, Freight Text Pro and Futura PT.

Symbolset provides the social media icons and you can also find Font-Awesome here and there.

If you find anything strange on the site, don't hesitate to shoot me an email: daniel@feldt.nu

Scroll hi-jacking by National Geographic

2013-11-20T00:00:00+01:00

National Geographic Channel recently launched their mini-site for their movie Killing Kennedy and it looks quite stunning. If only they weren't killing your basic input device at the same time.

You see, they hi-jack your scroll - which is a trend at the moment. Mainly on marketing- and campaign-sites like the one for iPhone5C and their other recently launched products.

Hi-jacking the scroll will always irritate the user and especially if there is video and sound connected to the scroll. I can't be the only one who scrolled down to far because of the delay in the scroll hi-jacking? I went back - it started over again and all in all it interrupted the intended UX.

Trent Walton:

There comes a time in every URL’s life where it needs to decide whether it wants to be a powerpoint, a movie, or an actual website. I think a video player or slide switcher that operates independent from scroll seems like a more web-friendly approach.

Pretty. Very pretty. But it could have been so much better with conventional scrolling.

Starting out icon work on Hemnet

2013-10-31T00:00:00+01:00

I just posted a dribbble-shot of the first iteration when it comes to refreshing the icons we use for symbolizing the different types of houses and properties on Hemnet.se.

Check it out on Dribbble and let me know what you think. There are 6-7 different types and these types can have several of different states - i.e. for sale, sold e t c.