This post is the first of a series about how we develop StyleJam following the predicaments of the Lean Startup movement. 

The last months have been crazy and exciting, we spent countless hours hunting for bugs and implementing the features we thought were necessary to test the most important assumptions of this startup. We are finally ready to release our MVP to our patient users.

Interviews.

At the beginning of May I started interviewing designers about my idea. The most important thing I wanted to understand is if the problems I were trying to solve were commonly perceived as problems by my potential customers. I then wrote them down:

• Visibility: "build it and they will come" problem
• Maintenance: updating a static portfolio is time consuming and building a dynamic website requires programming skills.
• Feedback: getting unbiased feedback is hard.

I then invited the interviewees to talk about each problem and at the end to order by importance. What I had is some seriously useful feedback, a bunch of new ideas that I will pivot if the MVP turns out to be what my customers need, and a bunch of ideas to pivot if it's not what my customers need.

Of the three problems the first two seem to be the most prominent and important, while the third is more like a "nice to have" feature, which was quite surprising to me because I believed that feedback should be one of the first (if not the main) ways to improve a portfolio that doesn't convert.

What will you be able to accomplish with this MVP?

Since StyleJam is all about design portfolios, the first assumption I decided to test is that designers need a highly customizable portfolio, something they can relate with not only at the "content level", but also at the "design level". In my opinion changing the background color or the font is not and will never be enough for someone who makes a living out of web design and is using his portfolio to generate revenues.

This is what our MVP is all about, designers will be able to have our platform generate some static HTML to style through CSS and images, and publish it as a static website. The HTML will be based on the informations you enter, this means your bio, your works, your price, your location and so on. When you want to change the content of your portfolio, just update your info and republish it.

These are the questions I want answered:

• How valuable is a portfolio that can be fully customized and resides on his own URL? 
• How much time a designer is willing to spend on our platform to customize his portfolio?
• How much "official" will it be? Are designers going to share it with friends, collegues and customers?

What is our business model then?

We will sell a subscription based service that will add (or remove) features to the base offer, like for example removing ads (powered by InfluAds) and our branding from the portfolios.

More important, we built inside every portfolio a contact form where potential customers can contact the designer to ask a quote and explain their projects. A free account will be able to receive a maximum of 5 messages, then the designer will need to upgrade.

The reason behind this is that if a designer can make $100 out of five potential customers, he will be able to pay for a "pro" account for several months, in my book this is the most classical win win situation. We also won't put any lock-in system in the platform, a message only represents the initial contact, the designer will be required to follow up using his personal email - meaning that he will retain every contact without any need to "export" his messages.

Of course this business model is really more like a "wild guess", and we need to test it thoroughly and gather users' feedback as with pretty much everything else.

What you think? How did you put your MVP in place and what expectations did you set? Do you see any pitfalls in my approach?

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The first time I heard about the role of the Chief Designer Officer was when reading for the first time one of my favourite books: "Sketching User Experiences", from Bill Buxton. 

Is design leadership an executive level position?
Do you have a Chief Design Officer reporting to the president?

These are very good questions to ask to a CEO, and I agree with Mr Buxton's conclusions:

If the answer to the last two questions is no, (...) the likely message you are telegraphing to your employees is that you are not serious about design and innovation.

Design and Innovation

I know I've got quite a crowd coming from Hacker News, and I can bet that right now most of them are already getting suspicious: why on earth is this guy (and his so-called design-guru) putting design at the same level of innovation?

In the minds of most, innovation happens at the engineering level. Coming myself from the engineering part of things, I can understand this position: crafting software can definitely be innovative. If you take Facebook, for example, there is undoubtedly a lot of innovation going: from Cassandra to HipHop, their way of operating helps reducing costs, increase scalability, and do other great things that actively help Facebook success.

Product innovation though comes mostly from design, and is normally the result of a successful design process. Let's just make another simple example: Basecamp owes most of its success to how it was designed. Everything in Basecamp, especially right after launch, was rather basic: a simple todo application, a basic wiki, some messaging and a way to share files, tools that most project management tools had, most of the times with more features (some would say "more complete"). Basecamp put together those features to be very easy to use, understand and learn, introducing practices that are now the rule of thumb (build less, blank states, start with no), and serving their segment wonderfully. Was that product innovative? Hell yes, in 2006 a product with more features was objecively better than a product with less features, and Basecamp started changing that idiotic rule.

The point is that design and engineering are equally important in bringing innovation, and sometimes can also be complementary. I can go as far as to say that engineering is useless without design as much as design is useless without engineering.

Why we have a CTO, an executive responsible of the engineering, and not a CDO, an executive responsible of design? Who is accountable for the design process? Who can enforce good design practices and bring professional ethic in the craft of design? In a few words, if the CEO wants Comic Sans, who can say no and by no means win over such a terrible decision?

Nobody.

What's the job?

Let's take the classical lean startup loop. Even though coming from Agile development practices the lean startup loop always made a lot of sense, since the first time I looked at it I noticed a huge competency gap, that arrow that goes from "ideas" to "code", with that enigmatic "build" label.

What does it mean "build"? Of course, that's where design comes in.

A CDO should take care of whatever happens between idea generation and code writing, he should be the link between the problem team and the solution team, putting the CTO in the position of not guessing a solution, but having already a solution to discuss and implement.

From my experience, design is most likely to be first of all a process of filtering, eliminating what's not important "right now" and setting priorities and scopes. It honestly never happened to me to have a well defined solution right after problem definition, but most likely a problem with a range of possible solutions, sometimes very different one to the other, indicating that the problem wasn't defined that well after all. A good designer must be very good when it comes to reducing a problem at its minimum terms, that's why I'm suggesting he is perfect to stand between problem and solution team.

To summarize: a Chief Design Officer should be accountable of the design process and of the design itself, he should iterate over the solutions he implements caring about a whole different problem area: the interaction between users and the application.

Am I the only one to think that design should have a clear leadership and deserves a better position in an executive? Who is accountable of design in your startup/company? Who answers for that? Let me know in the comments.

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Working for a startup is not easy, even though most designers I talk with are convinced that it's just designing yet another website for yet another company.

After working for 3 startups and being in the process of bootstrapping my first one, I can say that this kind of work is very different from working for an agency or being a freelancer, especially because you're not dealing with client work and a customer, but with a product and, hopefully, lots of users.

These are the 5 basic skills I think are absolutely necessary for a web designer to operate in a startup. It doesn't matter if you have them when you accept startup work, but that you're ready to develop them very fast.

I will also try to suggest some books you might want to read to improve your skills, books I've actually read, enjoyed and used in my day to day work.

1) Information Architecture

Information Architecture (from now on IA) is the art of organizing informations in a hierarchy that is understandable to users. Startups normally operate in highly innovative contexts, making their communication difficult and their need for users to find the right content at the right time critical. A designer can and should lead the effort, actively increasing the "findability" of the content (and by consequence the ability to convert effectively).

The most famous book on this subject is the famous O'Reilly polar bear book, but I would like to suggest the more modern and concise "A Practical Guide to IA" from Donna Spencer.

2) User Experience

User Experience (UX from now on) is the ability to create "affection" to a product or, more precisely, to a product's design. Implementing a good UX means increasing satisfaction and working on the perception the user has about your product. Startups most of the times live of word of mouth and virality, and that's exactly why UX is important, it increases how much your users "love" you, and by consequence, do something for you. 

There are literally a ton of books on this subject, my personal suggestions is Robert Hoekman's "Designing the Obvious" because it's clear and practical. I also particularly love Mr. Hoekman's style of writing

3) Usability

Usability is how a designer can improve the process of learning how to use an application. The core of every startup business model is being useful to it's users, and this is why you need your product to be easy to learn and easy to use. What a startup needs in particular is to be able to prove itself useful over time, and knowing usability helps dramatically when adding features.

My favurite book on usability is O'Reilly's "Designing Interfaces", because it's very easy to follow and can give an immediate return, while other books tend to be sparse and a bit too much theoretic.

4) Javascript

I don't think I have to explain what Javascript is, but probably it may sound strange that I decided to include it in this list. In a startup a designer can't depend on someone else to experiment and change an interface, and this is why Javascript is most of the time a required skill when applying for a job in a startup. A designer needs to execute and iterate fast on the interface he is building, or he will fast become a bottleneck and depend on the development team, which is actually the worst thing that can happen and will deeply impact results.

In the unfortunate case you don't know Javascript, the best book is the famous Rhino book from David Flanagan, recently revamped in a fifth edition.

5) Data Driven mindset

The last and most important skill is having a data-driven mindset, or most of the skills I've talked about are going to be completely irrelevant. You decisions must be based on real data from real users, there's absolutely no way to "divinate" UX or IA, you must follow and use the data you have, and test, test, test.

Avinash Kaushik's "Web Analytics 2.0" explains how to get the most out of your web analytics platform of choice and especially how to extract "actionable data" out of it. If you work (or want to work) for a startup and can buy only one book from this list, buy this one, it's a safe bet.

When working for a startup a designer should be ready to change his mindset. While normal client work revolves (obviously) around the client, startups are user-centric, and the designer must find an effective way to gain insights and take action to improve his design using real data.

And you, fellow startup designer, what are the books you can suggest about these subjects? Leave a comment and let me know!

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As most of you probably already know, the term "startup" commonly means a high tech company with a limited history, commonly based on a particular product or idea than on a service.

To clarify, Dribbble and Lendle are startups funded respectively by web design rockstars Dan Cederholm and Jeff Croft. To make things short Dribbble is some kind of Twitter for web designers and Lendle is a social network for Kindle owners that lets you loan out your books and loan books from others.

In this article I would like to illustrate how designers can help startups, why they should and how they can do it. I would also like to illustrate how startups can use designers, as it appears that a lot of startups are putting design in a secondary role, thinking that A/B testing and similar programmatic ways of handling content can solve all their problems.

A good design speaks a thousand words

Startups normally implement ideas and models that have a high degree of innovation, and by consequence a high level of risk.

Design is absolutely critical for startups, much more than for every business out there. The innovative and risky nature of a startup itself asks for great design, for people who can organize and make the experience unique while keeping the whole thing easy enough to learn and use.

There are plenty of startups that succeeded thanks to design, Facebook for example (anyone remembers a thing called MySpace?), Flickr, Gowalla, Mint, too many to name. Even a good part of the success of Google is because of how it was designed: having a simple form in the middle of the page was innovative when compared with what Google's competitors were doing.

Still, lots of designers do not see the opportunity.

When being hungry is a Good Thing(tm)

Working for a startup is an intense experience and a great way to learn the craft, first of all because the designer speaks directly to the public without any filter, but also because you have the chance to experiment and take care of the whole design process.

Taste and subjective evaluations don't really fit in a startup, and this is a huge plus: everybody knows that if you take responsibility in a decision you're going to answer about it over data, and not marketing chit chat - if the website doesn't convert, it doesn't convert, and the only thing someone can realistically do is reiterate. This is a wonderful way to design, being able to continuously reiterate over your design using real feedback and real data is a learning experience that can dramatically improve a designer's skills and give a real sense of what works and what doesn't.

Hungriness for knowledge, insights and results is the real common denominator of every startuper, but when it comes to design it must become almost a religion. Being design a mix between knowledge and talent, a designer is consequently brought to use his knowledge to gather data and his talent to produce an iteration. Implementing a process in design like the one I (very briefly) just described is fundamental, and not because it's the dogmatic "right thing" to do, but because it's the only sure way to bring in real touchable results.

I found myself with a homepage that definitely made sense and that in my opinion (and in the opinion of my coworkers) was very clear, but that for some reasons had a very high bounce rate. First of all I had to start making assumptions about the reasons users where leaving the page, but all these assumptions were failing when I started A/B testing the page, the situation was always more or less the same for all my tests. At that point I started reading about usability tests and organized one. What I discovered? The amount of informations I had on the page was overwhelming, even though it was perfectly reasonable from a business owner point of view. In a certain sense it was "too clear", I was saying too much, and all my testers were showing a clear lack of desire, even though they all admitted it "might" be interesting.

At that point I removed all the navigation, took away half of the content (including some elements that are highly respected in the design community, like for example all the testimonials / social validation) and simplified the copy, asking users to register to know more, and moving some of that content inside the confirmation email I was sending at completion of the signup process. I've also put more call to actions, all very similar but in different areas of the page, something I would never do in a normal condition, but I wanted to take a drastic approach, and I was in charge of bringing a result, not please someone. Good lord, it worked like a charm, and I was so surprised: bounce rate went down and conversions went up.

This is just an example that involves ux, usability, information architecture, analytics, plus obviously the coding part. I don't know you, maybe you're more lucky than me, but I never exercised such a wide spectrum of skills and learned so much in the meantime during my freelancing days.

Something like this is very powerful to add to a designer's portfolio, you have hard facts that show how much you can impact on a business: the message "I increased by 10% conversion for X" is different than the more than common "I designed for X" and brings your portfolio to a whole different level.

How to stop worrying and love the bomb.

It's not all roses, unfortunately. Startups, especially in their early stages, are chronically out of money, living out of small investments and personal savings. This shouldn't be surprising, it's actually quite normal. Every freelance designer with a medium sized market can make far more money with his actual business than working for a startup, and this should be very clear, I'm not here to build hype, but to put designers in the condition to make an informed choice.

As it usually comes when talking about entrepreneurship, it's all about making an investment: in the case of a designer it means investing intellectually.

My belief is that even though it's very risky, it will pay off, no matter what happens to the company: it will pay off in experience and personal prestige, in knowledge, and in relationships - when your adventure is over, you will at least be a better designer, granted.

On the other hand prestige doesn't pay bills, and designers should definitely check their finances before dropping their jobs, and in the case the pay is too low or inadequate they shouldn't *completely* drop their jobs, and keep some clients around for some freelancing.

I'm probably biased, I know, I love startups and I don't see myself working in another field. Still, I believe that designers should take startups in serious consideration for their careers, without basing their decisions only on pay but also on the opportunities it can bring.

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At this point most of you have probably heard in the news that 99designs, one of the most criticized startups in the field of design, raised 35M in their first round of investment.

I don't have anything in particular against 99designs or crowdsourcing in general, and I don't share the idea that they are "destroying the market" or similar claims, I actually believe that the market was already in a very bad shape and didn't need any help for getting worse.

Everything that is happening is a normal effect of the commoditization of design.

The art of plumbing.

When you call a plumber, you want him to fix your kitchen's sink. When you call a web designer, you want him to make a website.

If the sink works, the plumber made a good job. If you like the website, the web designer made a good job.

It's very easy to spot the difference between the two professions: while plumbing is very objective, design is very subjective.

This is critical in understanding the difficulties designers face every single day: if customers change their perception of what quality is from an objective, measurable point of view to something that is completely subjective and based on the customer itself, quality becomes an unknown variable that nobody can predict in a sane (design-wise) way.

This has many consequences. 

Everybody can easily notice a constant lowering in the barrier of entrance to the profession - if making your customers happy means blindly following orders the designer stops being a designer and becomes an implementor, with very obvious implications. 99designs is a great example in this respect, a customer asks for design work, has almost no contact with his potential hires, and choose a design by following his taste (incredible as it can be, this is the best case scenario).

Is lowering the barrier of entrance good? Sometimes it is, in this case I believe it's a total disaster, because the number of services a designer gives right now is less in quantity and quality. I believe a designer should drive the realization of a design, and the customer should literally use the designer to pursue business objectives that are measurable and objective, not his own ego or taste.

Another consequence is that once designers started their career in an agency and that was part of the normal professional formation, under the supervision of more experienced designers and learning everything that is around the profession, like for example pricing and contracts. Now a lot of designers go directly from school to freelancing, and more experienced designers make speeches about how designers need to sign a contract before they work. Seriously, does this seem normal? A famous Zen proverb goes like "To follow the path, look to the master, follow the master, walk with the master, see through the master, become the master".

Last but not least, the main differentiator between a designer and the other became price and recommendations. I know there are still some green oasis out there, but let's face it, the common designer is not Zeldman or Clarke, he has no "name that speaks by itself". Only thing that works is lowering the price, or good recommendations.

Some are convinced that this is what the market asks calling it "true capitalism" but honestly sometimes the market is plain wrong. I don't need to go too far to find an example, some years ago the development world went through some kind of outsourcing madness, where every single company seemed to move all development teams to India or Ukraine (or to rentacoder). Obviously that didn't happen, companies needed to learn the hard way that development is not a commodity, and started to outsource when there was a real gain. Probably the same thing will happen to design, companies will understand that a designer is much more than "some kind of developer".

And that's my point about 99designs too, it's the rentacoder of design. Hardly a "problem", more likely a consequence.

Look to the master, follow the master, walk with the master, see through the master, become the master.

There's no easy fix to this situation.

The first thing that I believe is necessary is raising the level of this profession. Contracts should be common practice, design evaluations should be based on objective measurements and not on someone's taste. These two very simple rules would already help a lot.

I also believe a designer should behave as an independent professional, the customer shouldn't be hiring an implementor but someone that can actively help him with his business by adding his knowledge and intellect to the project. This is something developers do all the time, the difference is that while development work is hidden from the customer's eyes, design is not.

Finally, I believe designers should be designers. What I mean with this is that during the years I've seen pretty much every kind of professional calling himself a designer: from graphic artists to developers, and even some cases of Dreamweaver power users. Design is a craft that relies on a mix of talent and knowledge. You're not a designer if you rely only on talent, and you're not a designer if you rely only on knowledge, you need both.

We don't want design to be a commodity, not only for the sake of designers, but especially for the sake of customers. Customers deserve a better service than an implementation. They need guidance and they need something that works for their business.

We don't want design to be a commodity for us as well, without a strong qualitative distinction between a designer and the other our service would be mined at the base.

And you, fellow designer, how do you fight these problems? What possible solutions do you have in mind? Leave a comment and let us know.

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I've got to admit that at one point I felt a bit guilty because I called Dribbble a "show and tell thing". I will try to explain better my point of view in this article, suffice to say is that I love Dribbble and I don't see anything negative in being a "show and tell thing".

Everybody loves triangles.

Dear designers, you have a function. The things you do, think, and make, are used for doing something. And with this I don't mean that your design is made for breaking the doors of perception, no lizard king here, people really use what you do, they might think that your work is "easy to use", or "difficult to use", a "pleasure" or a "nightmare".

This is really important, and I really hope you understand it. Saying that there's a lot of common things between design and art is no news, they all go under the same umbrella called "esthetics", what's different is that design is made with a use in mind, should answer to a defined environment (you know, like the web), and satisfy requirements (like, don't design a car without wheels).

For example, geometry is very important. Spatial relationship is. In 200 years, I bet there will be someone citing Khoi Vinh and Mark Boulton in his neuroblog for their use of typographic grids, maybe saying that it represented a common way to handle spatial relationships as much as the triangle in reinassance art represented a relationship with god and the trinity. Both have very deep esthetic implications, but very different means.

Art is not useful.

Sorry about that, but it's too late, I said it.

I love it, and I've studied it with passion. But the only usefulness art has is for growing your soul, and as bad as it can sound, no e-commerce is going to use your soul for selling you stuff (seriously, is it bad?).

This is quite a lot if you think about it. Someone might argue that design as art is a craft, and that's very true, still designers are not artists, they have a different use.

We help people understand what is difficult. We're not Leonardo Da Vinci, but we are so important. 

Considering we are close to typography, I think it's enough to mention that the revolution that print brought was about Martin Luther and his 95 theses. Everybody could read what he had to say, and everybody started reading translations of the Bible, that's why he succeeded. This is the point, everybody could use that information to make a change, this is the role of the designer, help people understand through design. Design has never been and will never be elitist, design is for the people.

And that's why I love it so much.

The case about Dribbble.

I like Dribbble. You've got to show something, so obviously you show your imagery. It's made by designers for designers by the way, there's nothing wrong with it. Dribbble is funny, really, and useful too.

It's very dangerous to practice this kind of reduction on design though, because you're making everything very subjective, and this is against designers' interests. Design is not subjective, it's a skill, while Art is "only" talent.

If design is about "using things", the problem is not if you like it or not, but if your people (call it segment, call it as you wish) can use it, if it's helpful.

If it's not, it still can be good art, maybe even revolutionary art, but it's definitely bad design.

Can designers find inspiration on Dribbble ? For sure they can, imagery in a design is very relevant, and the designs cited by Joshua show it, in both cases the imagery is of great help in empowering the main message, which becomes stronger and more effective. It's not a war between minimalism and art, if you have artistic talent I'm very happy for you, because you can use it to craft better design.

I welcome answers from Joshua or from someone that has something to say about the matter, and if comments are not enough, I will publish them here in another article.

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“Ideas are like poop. Not a thing to get excited about, but the end product of a repeatable process. And everybody can do it.”  Amy Hoy

A couple of weeks ago I was reading a great essay from Andy Budd about selling design. Everything he says is, sadly, very true. A lot of people is promising "magic and drama", throwing "ideas" around like if design is some kind of black magic that "happens" in a designer's brain. 

This is a big part of the problem, and really the most surprising: our product is just the side dish, customer's ego is much more important.

The fact is that customers are not able to correctly evaluate a design, plain simple. To understand what's going on, they need to talk about something else, "ideas", "feelings", "character", and never content, conversions and outcomes.

That's why hiring a designer is an exercise of blind trust, and this is just not right: they trust a particular recommendation, a "feeling", or the chit chat of the seller during the pitch. This hurts this business like anything else, and this is exactly when this job, and the web designer, become a commodity.

A possible solution.

We're trying to build a possible solution. I'm interviewing a ton of designers, and I'm confident it will work (they're confident too, I would say).

Of course, I want to make money out of it, I'm an entrepreneur after all. But the real motivation is to fix this business, and do it through the web.

I would like designers to make their portfolios on StyleJam. Real handcrafted portfolios, not "galleries" or "show and tell" things, we already have a solution for that, a good one.

Then, I want to index and rank them through an algorithm that uses designers' feedback.

This index is going to be searchable and sortable in many ways. I mean, it might be that someone is searching for a startup friendly designer in Portland, or a junior designer in New York that costs under $5000 with experience with Flash, no ?

In this way web designers are going to publish their portfolios on StyleJam, cutting basically every cost they have, like hosting (obviously) and maintenance (you use our backend to update it). You also retain your design, we make the HTML, you give us CSS (yes, you already saw something like this).

Customers in need of design work come to StyleJam and find the designer they like.

At this point, some questions might arise, let me answer directly:

1. We're out of the way, customers talk directly with the designer, no "contests", no underselling, no tricks.
2. There's no way to pay to rank better. It's just something we're not going to do. Ever. The reason behind this is that we firmly believe that giving ways to trick the system is not going to work on the long term.

Our model will be to sell services to the designers, services that are highly interwined with their portfolios and can help improve rankings in a natural, meritocratic way.

What do you guys think? Leave a comment and tell us your impressions, and if you want to be one of the first to try StyleJam register for a beta account and spread the word!

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Many entrepreneurs realized how important execution is, but apparently design still belongs to the "making things pretty" area, forgetting that our job is centered around communication (or as someone likes to say,"conversions").

Common knowledge says that 4 over 5 startups fail, and this is not a magic recipe to improve your chances of succeeding, only a way to keep that single chance alive.

1) Doesn't matter how you put it, design is fundamental.

It's surprising to see how many entrepreneurs try to outsource design lately even though design is the single most important thing to get right, as an impressing number of startups have already proven. Surprising because, if I can be totally honest, it's incredibly naïve and I dare say stupid.

What happens to your precious MVP if nobody understands what you're trying to say? What kind of businness validation are you expecting if you don't know if your MVP failed or your design did?

If a startup has consumers, you need a designer. If an entrepreneur fails to understand this very simple point, he is probably doomed to fail.

2) Let the designer work.

Design, as most sane development practices, is an iterative process.

Once it wasn't, and sometimes it still isn't: Web agencies used to have one user to make happy, the customer, but those days are long gone for startups. Now designers are talking to crowds, and everything became much more difficult.

Unfortunately, being a designer doesn't mean having a working crystal ball, so let your designer work.

Just to make things clear, everybody understands you can actually *see* your website, but this doesn't make your taste objective, and unfortunately the first ones to ignore it are going to be your customers, as much as the only one to care about your taste is probably going to be, well, your designer.

3) If you don't know what you're doing, your designer can't help you.

You must have a vision and you must be able to communicate it clearly. If you're not able to explain your designer what you want to do, your designer will fail or even worst, he will guess. This is really the main point: the entrepreneur has a vision, and it's up to the designer to explain it.

On a side note, this is also a wonderful reality check: if you're not able to explain your vision to your designer, it needs some more work.

4) Don't give orders but set expectations.

Try to understand that designers study as much and sometimes more than developers. There's really a lot to know about it, trust me.

Would you tell your CTO how to scale the platform ? I don't think so. And if you're a developer, would you listen your CEO about scaling ? Again, I don't think so. If you hired him, you must believe in your designer, tell him clearly what your expectations are, be realistic, and if you chose right you will have it.

5) Refuse the temptation to guess (cit.).

Once your designer defined his own process (that should definitely include A/B and usability tests) check conversions, funnels, direct feedback, and pretty much every kind of data you're able to find, that's more than enough without asking the poor boy to move a box 10px on the left. Again, your taste is not objective, only data is.

If you don't have data to prove your point, your point is unlikely to be relevant, or your design process is wrong. It's this simple.

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Neuro Web Design from Susan M. Weinschenk is an interesting book with a slightly misleading title, that can be an enjoyable and useful read for most web designers that want to sharpen their knowledge on human behaviour.

Our brain.

The author explains the inner working of our brain in a truly remarkable way, dividing the brain in three main parts: the new brain (logic and analysis), the mid brain (emotions) and the old brain (survival and instinct). She goes on explaining how those parts are interwined together and influence each other.

This part of the book is literally filled with "aha!" moments, not just for the content but also because of her fresh and clear style of writing. I actually believe it's the best and most valuable part of the book, the one that helps the designer switch from mindlessly adopting best practices and patterns to making better and more informed decisions.

Every section of the book is dedicated to a particular behaviour and it's quite easy to reconnect what she writes to things we saw million of times on the web. The added value of "Neuro Web Design" is that the author explains exactly what happens inside the brain and why these solutions work so well and influence our behaviour so much.

To make an example, in "Invoking scarcity - If something seems unavailable, we seem to want it even more" she explains why we're more likely to buy something that is scarce, banned, unavailable or have very limited availability. I've seen it so many times ("Only two left in your size", "Offer ends at the end of month") but I've never been able to understand or explain why it works and how before reading this book. In my opinion this alone would make the investment in buying and reading this book a very good one.

Not so much to do with Web Design.

In the introduction I mentioned that the title is slightly misleading: the main problem I have is that this text doesn't go very far away from a simple explanation of some well known and common patterns. In a few words, it doesn't tell you how to use what you read, it just explains some concepts, and it's very unfortunate as I believe the author has the knowledge, the ability and the writing skills necessary to go far more in depth on the subject.

Most designers would do themselves a service by buying this book along the probably most famous "Designing for the social web" from bokardo's fame Joshua Porter, a much more practical and much less theorical text.

Conclusion.

"Neuro Web Design" is a good book that explains very well how our brain works and will improve most designers work by giving a solid foundation of neuroscience written in a very accessible style. It's also a fast read, around 200 pages.

The author also mantains a blog at What Makes them Click, one of my favourite reads.

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Unfortunately, I'm a hacker who is in love with design. As every respectable hacker, I tend to go deeper than the average in things I love, and sometimes I also feel the need to correct people when I believe they are not getting things straight.

Some days ago my attention was grabbed by a post on Hacker News where an entrepreneur was asked some crazy amount of money for the design of "a pretty standard web app".

I can definitely understand the frustration of the guy, and I don't want to comment on the price asked, but let's put things in order.

Design what?

A pretty standard web app, composed by "pages", which need n hours each to get done. Seems fair and standard, doesn't it?

It might, but what is not standard is that all pages require more or less the same amount of time in an almost linear way. As far as I know it's unlikely to happen if the designer knows what he is doing.

Design is not "making things pretty", it's defining the grammar you will use in your application to talk with your users. The designer needs to act as a filter between the entrepreneur and the public, translating a vision to an implementation.

There's a reason I chose the word "grammar", it's because most elements, like typography, the navigation, the grid system, the palette used and the general branding, should be common in all the pages: consistency is a good thing.

What must be done page by page is defining goals and put content under a hierarchy, using the grammar previously defined.

Work on projects, not pages.

Designers should work on projects, not pages. To make a comparison, it's like a programmer charging a customer for every function or class he writes. Both don't make sense.

A project is much different, it makes the designer responsible of every aspect of a design, from concept to realization. First of all, it implies a different level of commitment from the designer, a commitment that revolves around results and not personal taste of who pays for the job.

An entrepreneur in need of someone to "make things pretty" can pretty much use every student in the country, and probably doesn't need a designer, but an advanced Photoshop/DreamWeaver (ugh!) user.

Pricing must be fair

Pricing must be fair, for the credibility of the web design industry itself: pages are the result of a much larger process, with much larger implications.

Entrepreneurs on the other hand need to understand what they want. If they want someone to follow orders, they don't need design, they need some basic technical skills that can be found pretty much everywhere.

There's nothing wrong with it, just a different set of expectations and a different pricing, the important thing is that expectations must be clear, and pricing must reflect the job done.

In the next weeks I will write again about how important design is for startups, how to find a designer and what pitfalls to avoid.

And you, dear entrepreneur, what are your expectations from a designer? How did you find a designer, and were you happy with the job?

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“A spectre is haunting the web - the spectre of web design. All the powers of Web 1.0 have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre. ” Karl Marx (kinda)

I remember myself listening a lot to this Sham 69 tune when I was a youngster, during my so called rebellion years. I've seen countless times this song used to invoke a revolution of some kind in many different contexts, and with very good reason, it's definitely a very catchy song. So I thought why not? I will seem a tad pretentious maybe, but hey, I can post Sham69 videos and nobody will notice.

I must admit there's something wrong between me and the web design business, I really don't get it. I might be naïve (or maybe only someone with a working logic) but I don't get the reason a web designer is handled as some kind of implementor in 90% of cases.

Let me summarize a bit: a good web designer needs to master the technical aspects of web design, meaning HTML, CSS and Javascript. That's the easy part, you need some good books and plenty of free time for experimenting, and you're good to go (at least until you discover that people use different browsers). Web sites are made mostly of written content, that's why a good web designer needs to have a working knowledge of typography and grid systems, 2 very old and quite wide subjects. Unfortunately web sites are made to be used, a good web designer needs to study usability, learn how to conduct usability tests (I made some, not an easy task even when blessed by Steve Krug and find solutions to the problems he discovers. He needs to be able to organize content in a structure, the so called Information Architecture. Some basics about Search Engine Optimization, enough to know that if your page titles are the same on every page you need to change them later. Let's not even start with User Experience, color theory, accessibility, web personas, and the incredibly huge amount of topics a web designer needs to grasp before calling himself experienced.

And here comes my problem.

We have Joe Businessman, looking for help for his 1998 Frontpage powered website that he did by himself during the glorious days of the bubble. He needs someone to “redesign” it. Joe starts surfing the interwebs browsing a portfolio after the other of every freelancer and web agency he can find in his town. Then something clicks, he doesn't know what but he just likes the guy. He never bothered reading all the bio and the resume, but now he feels like the guy, Joe Designer, definitely worths it.

Now, a sane person would think:

“This is what I want to happen with my own site, this guy really knows what he's doing. He convinced me, and I'm definitely not a moron!”

At this point Joe Businessman hires Joe Designer, and they start talking about the project. All is good, Joe Designer goes home and starts mocking up an interface to gather feedback from the customer. And feedback he gets, a ton of feedback. The font is not ok, Comic Sans is the way to go. That box doesn't “pop” enough, even if it's shocking blue on a white background. I used to have my logo blink, can we have it here too?

What happened? Why parts switched? Who is the designer here, Joe Businessman or Joe Designer?

My (very) wild guess is that Joe Businessman can see the product. It's not like he feels like an expert or something, just that it's his product, his money, and he is silently exchanging facts and skills with his own uneducated taste without noticing. Does the website bring new business repaying several times the initial investment? It doesn't matter, because the logo blinks, and he likes it.

At the end, Joe Businessman has thrown away money for something that doesn't have any kind of positive return in his business (but most probably negative), and Joe Designer had to deal with yet another “monkey on heroin” customer, for a job that he doesn't even feel putting in his personal portfolio.

Everybody lose, nobody is happy.

I would love to hear from you if you share the same feelings. Why customers behave like this? Some "almost punched him in the face" horror stories maybe?

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