In a world in which technology enables people to maintain a connection to information and, theoretically, makes us more productive, we’re actually becoming less efficient communicators. When you attend your next meeting, take a moment to peek up from your handheld device and look around. How many people are looking at the person speaking? For many of us, our phones, tablets, and laptops have become a constant distraction—for some, it’s an addiction; for others, it’s a self-imposed multi-tasking ideal; and for a few, it’s lack of courtesy when they choose to do what they want rather than grant colleagues, clients, or vendors their attention. Whatever the cause of your attention deficit, the result is the same: reduced productivity.

What happened? What’d I miss?

Would you go into a meeting and cover your eyes or ears? Would you attend a meeting and ignore everyone in the room? It sounds absurd, but this is what you’re doing when you attend a meeting and spend time scanning your device for the latest email, tweet, or Facebook notification. What makes meetings effective (and worthwhile) is that they allow participants to engage in verbal and nonverbal communication for shared meaning. In order for this to work, “the individual sending the message must present their message clearly and in detail, but just as important, the person receiving the message must decide to listen, ask questions for clarity and trust the presenter.”^†

“One study at UCLA indicated that up to 93 percent of communication effectiveness is determined by nonverbal cues. Another study indicated that the impact of a performance was determined 7 percent by the words used, 38 percent by voice quality, and 55 percent by the nonverbal communication.”^‡

These findings confirm that we communicate less effectively in email or IM communication when a lack of verbal and nonverbal communication accompanies the medium. Yet increasingly, we prioritize this less effective channel over person-to-person communication. Why?

I am a multi-tasker!

Many argue that handheld devices make them more productive. Multi-tasking makes it all worthwhile! But this isn’t the case. The myth of multi-tasking demonstrates why we can’t talk on the phone, read email, send or read IMs, or watch streaming content and listen all at the same time. What many think is multi-tasking is actually serial tasking, or shifting from one task to another in rapid succession. I call it the ability to do more than one thing poorly.

I realize meetings can be a tremendous waste of time; many smart people are examining the proper planning and execution of meetings. But the other side of the poor meeting equation involves us.

Become a Single Tasker

There are practices that reduce distractions and improve meeting efficiency. Topless meetings remove the distraction of the portable devices. Short duration, stand-up meetings reduce your time commitment. The goal is to make the time together more efficient and the results more productive, i.e., what do we do next based on what we learned. If these practices aren’t being enforced at your place of work, try some self-control—keep your phone in your pocket. Don’t wake up your tablet, and keep the laptop closed. Better yet, leave them at your desk, and remove the apple from Eve’s hand altogether.

“There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.”
— Lord Chesterfield

When you accept a meeting invitation, accept that your attention and focus for that time is also blocked. Avoid distractions that take your focus from the subject matter at hand. Be more connected to what you are doing by being less connected.

It was a big event on a very cold day. Camera crews and equipment were everywhere. Big construction lights formed a perimeter around the site (during the winter the sun comes up around 10:00 a.m. and dives back down around 3:45 p.m.) and trucks of every make and model were in constant movement. We went to watch all of the action, but it turned out to be pretty boring. While they were working quickly, in tandem, and seemingly on track, it didn’t make for a very entertaining event.

As I recall, they finished the house with little more than an hour to spare. While the paint on the walls was still drying, the keys to the “24 Hour House” were handed over to a “lucky” family who had won the home in a contest. Later that night, the evening news showed everyone cheering wildly as if they had just performed their own Miracle on Ice.

Months later, news crews came back to the 24 Hour House to find it full of problems. None of the developers or contractors had a plan to come back and fix any problems that might arise when you’re slapping and tacking together an arctic home in a day. Turns out building a quality home was never a priority. Eventually, the lucky family moved out and that house sat empty for a long time afterwards looking nothing like the world record it used to be. What a waste of time.

It’s Tuesday evening and I’m finally on my way home to Austin after spending last week in Philadelphia for a little event we called Site Week. For those who missed our previous announcement, most of Happy Cog banded together in a single room and cranked out everything we needed to begin evolving our brand in a week.

Starting nearly from zero, we ended up with a brand new website, a new content strategy (with all new content), a new social strategy, and a new hand-built content management system running on Ruby on Rails platform. Not too shabby for a few days worth of work.

Did we end up with the perfect site in five days? No. Did we end up with everything finished so we don’t have to touch it again in six years? No! Next question. Did we end up moving into a new home with wet paint on the walls, potentially leaky plumbing, and windows that let in a little draft? Yes we did, but that’s what we set out to do. We didn’t sit in a single, musty room for a week just so we could make headlines. This isn’t the end but only the beginning.

Our goal for this week was to reset Happy Cog. We set out to create a succinct experience with a design and message that would appeal to our old friends and family while speaking clearly to the industry and future clients. Our old site had succumbed to the typical bloat and wear most sites do when they’re not cared for properly. A good, strong site needs constant tending and trimming, otherwise messages get blurred, links go bad, and you end up with a five hundred page mess with all the curb appeal of an 80’s Buick missing a hubcap.

Everything about our new site is intentionally simple. While we used a lot of gray matter to create what you see, we did everything to avoid overthinking problems and solutions—which we have all had a tendency to do in the past. On the surface it may have appeared site week was all about “damn the torpedoes!” when in reality it was “how many torpedoes do we need and what kind?” We set out to reshape how we stay focused and on target while executing quickly.

The bigger victory for us may have been in our decision to allow ourselves to make mistakes. After reflecting upon the results, I gotta say, I’m very pleased with the new Happy Cog. From here on out we’re not treating our website as a sacred cow as we once did. It becomes too easy to second-guess new ideas and avoid any level of risk. The “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality is a mantra of slow death to creative people. In some ways Happy Cog fell victim to this, but not anymore.

Last Friday, after we launched our awesome and slightly imperfect website, the team marched off to celebratory beers and BBQ. Within minutes, the bug reports started to fly in from across the globe via email, SMS, and Twitter. Our friends and family started to notice everything from minute to large problems with our “24 Hour House.” A year ago this would have been enough for some of us to rush back to the office in order to make things right as rain, but for the most part that’s all changed now.

As part of our rebranding project with Helms Workshop, the company founder, Christian, gave us a pretty big compliment. He said, “the folks at Happy Cog are the same in meetings as they are while grabbing a hot dog and a beer at Frank. They take what they do very seriously, but not themselves. They genuinely love what they do.”

We really do genuinely love what we do. We love what Happy Cog has become. And we hope that our project will serve to inspire you to shake off what prevents your businesses from taking that big step forward. Next Wednesday we have scheduled a two-hour postmortem for Site Week. During this meeting we’ll talk about what we did right, what we could have done better, and where we failed. After we’re able to fully process and reflect upon the outcomes, we’ll be sharing a lot more about Site Week through the lenses of project managers, designers, and developers through blogs, podcasts, presentations, and professional gatherings.

Meanwhile, keep watching as we continue to work on our new home.

Yeah. That’s kind of us right now with happycog.com. Granted, we have shoes, and we have a roof. But the shoes have some holes in the soles and the roof leaks just enough to make your hair wet.

Our site was last redesigned in 2007. The sentence-based navigation we deployed was a simple solution that a lot of people dug at the time, and I still dig it. The site was a great example of what was possible back then, and has remained a functional, albeit a bit faded, marketing vehicle for us. Sure, we’ve made some tweaks here and there, but we’ve never really been fully satisfied. And you shouldn’t be.

We started down a redesign path in 2010, but we ended up back-burnering the project. We created some compelling design concepts, but we applied the brakes when scrutinizing them. When you assemble passionate people who live and breathe a brand for so long, you’re going to have strong convictions. But the trick is working through it.

What did we learn along the way? Well, for one thing, crucial internal initiatives should be given the same priority as projects that pay the bills, and they should be subject to the same kinds of controls. They should have established budgets, timelines, project managers, and clear decision makers. Subscribing to that mindset changes your perception. But even with that structure in place, it can still be difficult prioritizing internal projects over paying gigs when payroll needs to be met.

We are going to try something new, partially inspired by PhilaMade, a community of creative people in Philadelphia. Many Philly-based Happy Cog folks are active participants in this community. PhilaMade had Site Night back in April of 2011. It was described as, “One night, one website. You put a bunch of smart people into a room, provide them an environment to succeed, and enough alcohol and caffeine to keep them awake.”

For us, a website in a single night is a bit ambitious. But a week? A week is good. So next week, we are redesigning happycog.com. We are pulling people off of projects, importing people from different cities, and hunkering down. We will step outside of comfort zones and experiment with smaller teams and agile processes. We will make quick decisions. This process will be as much about experimenting with how we work together as it will be about creating something. And most importantly, we hope to emerge with new ideas we can use on our client projects.

Will we have an entire website at the end of it all? Probably not. But we will definitely have the foundation upon which we will make frequent, incremental improvements. And yes, there will be a few surprises thrown in to keep it interesting.

We’ll be capturing our progress over the course of the week, so stay tuned to @happycog and Cognition for updates.

LESS and other CSS preprocessors are tools which, through the use of things like variables, mixins and operations, weave programmatic principals and logic into otherwise static CSS. Think of it as supercharged CSS. Recently, I had the opportunity to work with LESS professionally, since it was a requirement for a client project. Over the course of development, I found things to both love and loathe about LESS.

LESS is Less

Among developers, LESS is looked at as a tool for rapid development. I was told I should give it a try for an hour and I’d be hooked. Sure, I was able to learn the key concepts behind what makes LESS special in about an hour. As I dug deeper and actually applied those concepts to my style sheets and essentially restructured the way I’ve grown accustomed to writing CSS over the years, it proved to be a bit more time-intensive.

It’s fair to chalk some of my gripes up to inexperience. As I was getting started writing LESS, I’ll admit I struggled to recall the appropriate variables and mixins on the fly. Surely, if I wrote LESS all day every day, I would have had my conventions nailed down and this would no longer be an issue. No, my major issue with LESS, the one which I feel most dramatically negated the time-savings benefit to me, was debugging.

LESS, by virtue of the compiler, rewrites and reformats CSS, which means the line numbers referenced by Web Inspector or Firebug are guaranteed to be wrong. I found myself having to search for styles a lot more, whereas in the past I would have simply referenced the line number in the debugger. While this may seem like a small annoyance to many, it slowed me down quite a bit.

And my last point of contention with LESS: code bloat. Let’s face it, CSS is not exactly a champion of the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) programming principal. Repetitious values in a pure CSS style sheet are the mark of a solid design system. Even the most well-written, pure CSS is typically teeming with identical declarations repeated over and over. I like that LESS advocates a very DRY approach to writing styles with shortcuts like mixins. And while the DRY approach is promoted inside the LESS files themselves, the generated CSS is anything but DRY. In fact, it’s far less DRY than pure CSS. Take image replacement, for example. In pure CSS, I would write an image replacement declaration once and add selectors to it as necessary.

h1 a, .pagination em, .cog a { display: block; text-indent: -9999em; background-color: transparent; background-position: 0 0; background-repeat: no-repeat; overflow: hidden; }

With LESS, we are encouraged to embed the declaration into each selector individually in the form of a mixin which then renders out to:

h1 a { display: block; text-indent: -9999em; background-color: transparent; background-position: 0 0; background-repeat: no-repeat; overflow: hidden; }
.pagination em { display: block; text-indent: -9999em; background-color: transparent; background-position: 0 0; background-repeat: no-repeat; overflow: hidden; }
.cog a { display: block; text-indent: -9999em; background-color: transparent; background-position: 0 0; background-repeat: no-repeat; overflow: hidden; }

Yikes. Not exactly DRY.

LESS is More

I know I’ve come down hard on LESS thus far, but I promise you, it wasn’t all bad. I found using LESS definitely had some fantastic benefits. For instance, I loved being able to use variables and simply write color: @green; instead of color: #6fcd58; and mixing in .border-double instead of writing

border-bottom: 2px solid #f8f8f8; padding-bottom: 11px; margin-bottom: 22px;

inside each appropriate declaration.

But even more than those small victories, I love how LESS forced me to focus on how I build both the horizontal and vertical grids. Assigning variables up front, which are then woven throughout each LESS file, promotes a very systematic approach and is, far and away, the best feature I found.

Take the vertical grid, for example. Our designs used a baseline of 11px. In order to maintain a vertical rhythm, I set up these variables:

@baseline: 11px;
@unit-xsmall: @baseline/2;
@unit-small: @baseline;
@unit-medium: @baseline*2;
@unit-large: @baseline*3;

Which I then wove into my style sheets like so:

h2 { font-size: @unit-large; margin-bottom: @unit-large; }
h3 { font-size: @unit-medium; margin-bottom: @unit-medium; }

Variables like these help keep me honest when writing styles.

The horizontal grid was even more fun to work with using LESS.
Our grid had 54px wide columns and 30px wide gutters.

I set these values up to be variables:

@grid-col: 54px;
@grid-gutter: 30px;

Then set up a function to pass parameters through:

.grid-width (theColumn: 1, @theGutter: 0) 
   { width: (grid-col * theColumn) + (grid-gutter * @theGutter); }

So, in Photoshop, all I’ll need to do is count the grid columns and gutters and punch them into .grid-width inside my LESS file like so

.sub { .grid-width(4,3); }

LESS then does the math for me, compiling this into the CSS which actually renders in the browser:

.sub { width: 306px }

This hardworking little parametric mixin definitely saved me a lot of time. Fumbling to write in widths quickly became a hurdle of the past.

I’ll admit I’m still wrestling with the pros and cons of LESS. The jury is out for me on whether or not LESS will make it into my preferred workflow moving forward. Either way, working with a CSS preprocessor was both a fun challenge and an eye-opening experience that I’m glad I dove into. I’m looking to try Sass on for size in the near future and compare the the two in an upcoming article.

Let me know your thoughts about LESS. What do you like? What can’t you stand?

Working behind the curtain

As Project Manager, I’ve had the challenge (and privilege) of managing projects both remotely and in a traditional office setting. Working in a virtual environment makes answering the question of “which line of communication is best?” that much more difficult. I don’t have the luxury of peeking into someone’s office to see if they’re on the phone or chatting with a co-worker, or to say, “Hey, do you have a quick minute?” There are so many options from which to choose, it usually comes down to how best to communicate with specific individuals or the individual situation or circumstance.

Last March, Ryan Irelan wrote a post about The Challenges of Working Remotely, which touched on the different means of communication we use here at Happy Cog. The methods of communication Ryan outlined in his article are essential to our day-to-day goings-on. Given our roster of in-office and virtual full-time staff, contractors, and consultants, we’ve narrowed our lines of communication down to five key methods:

Basecamp = Project logging and one-stop shop for all things project-related
Email = Project and non-project items; easily organized and trackable
Skype/Phone = Verbal, direct and clear communication
IM = Quick check-ins, yes/no questions
Campfire = Group project discussions and water cooler chatter

To further explore how and why we use each of these, I took a quick poll of the Happy Cog crew to see which methods my co-workers prefer, as well as how they use each mean of communication. For the sake of this article, I left out the obvious first choice: the in-person (like, in real life) conversation, which is always the best method, bar none. Below is a ranked list (by preference) of the different methods of communication:

1. Basecamp
2. Instant Messaging (IM)
3. Email
4. Skype/Phone
5. Campfire

Aside from Basecamp ranking at the top, I found the results to be surprising and very informative.

What to choose…what to choose…

More often than not, I begin by asking myself this question, “Will it take less than 2 minutes to talk about?” If the answer is “Yes,” then I have one of two options: hop on over to IM or walk down to someone’s desk and ping them with a question. If the answer is “No,” then it’s either over to the phone, off to Basecamp, or to Google Calendar I go! As you saw in my office poll, most of my co-workers preferred Basecamp as the top means of communication with IM coming in at a close second. Let’s explore the “why” behind the rankings.

Basecamp
Basecamp is our central repository for any and all project and client communications, both internal and external. It’s no wonder it took the top spot in the poll. Basecamp is where we post milestones and timelines, schedule meetings with clients, post deliverables, hold internal brainstorms or discussions, place meeting notes, etc. Without Basecamp, everyone would have a different way of organizing client communication in either their preferred mail application or some form of Dropbox and too much would get lost. If/when conversations happen outside of Basecamp that are project-related, they should immediately be accounted for in a public or private post for the benefit of the rest of the project team.

Instant Messaging (IM)
Instant Messaging ranked second. While most find the bouncing IM icon annoying, the overwhelming response was that IM is very useful for providing a quick answer to a question. The key to using IM effectively, and in a way that doesn’t piss off your co-workers, is to be careful not to engage in long conversations over IM. Too much miscommunication can occur and, hey, isn’t it easier to just walk over to their desk, or hop on the phone/audio chat and avoid the headache?

Email
Email’s ranking, and reasoning, surprised me the most as it seems everyone uses email for different purposes. Some prefer to go directly to Basecamp for their project notifications and communications. Others prefer to use the email notifications from Basecamp as a means to organize their day and project deliverables. Then there are the few who either hate email or only use it for non-project-related communications. I see the logic behind all of the responses. As Project Manager, I prefer the level of organization Apple’s Mail app offers that Basecamp doesn’t. I can flag messages that need an extra level of attention, organize messages into project folders and subfolders to make it easier to find them quickly because, as we all know, Basecamp’s search functionality is sub-par at best. However you use your mail app (or don’t), make sure it has a purpose rather than just being a secondary place to store information.

Skype/Phone
Shockingly, Skype/Phone conversation placed fourth. Alexander Graham Bell must be rolling over in his grave. So much can be misinterpreted over written communication and yet clear, direct verbal communication came in almost last in the poll. Given the larger percentage of virtual team members, Skype/Phone was more popular with the Happy Cog West office while Happy Cog East trumps all with their in-person pow-wows. Skype/Phone is largely used to solve key project issues, to hash out any miscommunications, to virtually brainstorm on a project, or to video/audio chat with co-workers.

Campfire
It came as no surprise that Campfire was dead last among everyone polled. Its main use is to chit-chat throughout the day, post cat videos, share silly (and not so silly) links, etc. The Happy Cog West office uses it as a forum to provide status: if you go to lunch, are on a long phone call, etc. Additionally, it is used as a place for group brainstorms where it’s useful to have an open chat to post updates, ideas, and progressing work, usually in the final push of a deliverable.

Untying the Knot

So, now we know a little bit more about why and how we use these lines of communication. I’ll ask the question again: does allowing for all of these different methods further complicate things or does it actually help streamline our communications? Perhaps a little bit of both. Only having one or two methods (phone and email) can become frustrating. People are oftentimes in meetings or on the phone for long periods throughout the day. When they do finally emerge from behind closed doors, they have about fifty emails to get through, or there are five other people waiting in line ahead of me to talk to them. Limiting yourself to a couple ways of communicating with someone more often than not results in delayed responses and, inevitably, a lot more time spent being reactive rather than proactive.

On the other hand, adding too many inter-office methods of communication: Google Chat, Skype/Phone, iChat, Campfire, Basecamp, Email, MSN Messenger, Text/Blackberry messenger, Twitter, etc. creates a jumbled mess where nobody knows where anything lives or how to reach someone quickly and effectively. By narrowing down the options to a select five or six and establishing clear directives on how each is used, you can create some structure around each method as outlined above. It takes away a lot of the guessing game and constant feeling of being interrupted. Haven’t we all received the same message via our work email address, personal email address, text, Basecamp, IM, etc. just because the person sending it wasn’t sure how to get the message to you and really wanted to make sure you got it? By considering who you’re communicating with, the priority of the message, and what best suits the situation, you can easily determine the best and (hopefully) least intrusive way of getting the answer you need.

When it comes down to making the choice, I follow a simple formula:

Personal Assessment (PA) + Desired Response (DR) = Method of Communication (MC)

Take everything into consideration in making a personal assessment of who you’re communicating with, what type of question it is, etc. Factor in the desired response: Yes/No vs. long conversation. What you’ll get is how best to reach out to said person. Try it on for size. If it doesn’t work for you, tweak it a little.

Finding difficulty communicating with a couple folks in the office? Try doing a quick office poll. You might find the results useful and helpful the next time you need information. Knowing how each person prefers to communicate and be communicated with can be an extremely valuable tool.

What do you do? How have you streamlined your communications?

Instead, he asked me to paint him a picture.

…

Now, I like to believe there’s always some perfect combination of words you can jam together whose collective prose makes it possible to talk your way out of (or into) anything—like some kind of Word Voltron—but I was a blank.

My colleague in the room was giggling. I stared at the Polycom, hoping for rescue, waiting for our account manager to step in and politely (but firmly) suggest moving the call to a time when it might be possible to actually hold a productive review. Help never came. And so I described, in detail, from top to bottom, every pixel.

And our client gave actual feedback on an imagined website.

…

I think I blacked out. I came to 15 minutes later, jolted by the realization that I’d lost. Graphic design was surrendered. The latest edition of Choose Your Own Photoshop Adventure was written and I was on the wrong side of the hypertext.

Do you: A. Blame Others? or B. Learn Your Lesson?

Truth is, I surrendered before I ever launched Photoshop.

I probably don’t have to tell you about the waterfall model, a relic from which many practitioners still suffer and one the Web outgrew when the dot-com gold rush ran dry. (You could argue it was never right for web design at all.) Phases with a distinct beginning and end are easy to scope, easy to resource, easy to sell (in theory). And so we wait and watch for the artifacts to plunge our way over the falls—developers for designs, designers for wireframes, etc. If something is amiss, it’s the fault of whoever came before. The waterfall method avails complacency and I was complicit in my client’s client-from-hell moment. He treated graphic design as decoration and rightfully so because I colored wireframes. I put gloss on buttons. I was stylist, not strategist.

I had stood by and waited to be called.

Web designers who don’t UX is the new web designers who don’t code.

Designing a site without some prescription for interaction and content is, at best, reckless—what are we, savages?—and the waterfall method assumes phases are fulfilled before moving on, satisfying an immutable law of experience design: form follows function. But Sullivan’s credo never called for a divide. Rather, the process should mimic nature, to be organic; it posits an object’s form naturally evolves out of resolving its purpose, the way bees instinctively build a beautiful and efficient, geometric honeycomb. Nature has no “visual design” phase. Why do we?

Process, however, is not the real problem. Iterative methods more closely honor “form follows function” and their adoption is a certainty as “mobile web” becomes “the web” and organizations—both clients and vendors—admit waterfall’s failings. But waterfall isn’t going to give up easily, and I’m not advocating we all swear allegiance to our new Scrum overlords just yet. (Responsive web design may very well be their harbinger—look busy!) Because, dear designer, if you’re not collaborating with your IA and content counterparts, you’re done for.

Flowing water follows the path of least resistance.

Collaboration may not come easy, but we are on the brink of convergence and there’s no room for aestheticians. We’re taught to go it alone and re-emerge days later with something brilliant and clever (and finished) because we are judged on individual contributions. Design is ugly in the middle. Collaboration means feeling exposed and vulnerable. Collaboration requires faith.

I didn’t learn this lesson on my own. (I blamed the account manager.) In my story, I bemoan the waterfall process, but in fairness I made little effort to seek out collaboration and I paid the price. Without the small and agile team we had, launching Club Nintendo in the compressed timeframe afforded might have been impossible. We sketched together. We brainstormed. We debated. We exposed issues and course-corrected quickly. We shared accountability and the product is better for it. A seat at the table is a privilege, not a right; you earn it through commitment to user experience—from discovery to deployment—and through persistence.

How will you avoid going over the falls?

It’s going to be a very good year.

But these company-wide initiatives would be nowhere without the hard work of Happy Cog employees. So we’ve asked our coworkers, “What are you most looking forward to in 2012?” Responses, resolutions, and giddy excitement ahead. Happy New Year!

Sharing Some Ideas at SXSW, AEA and Beyond

I’m stoked about new projects kicking off in 2012 and speaking at SXSW for the first time. – Yesenia Perez-Cruz

I’m incredibly honored to be speaking at An Event Apart in both Chicago and my place o’ birth, Washington D.C. I’m looking forward to sharing the best of what I’ve learned to provide tactical value to people who build the web each and every day. I also hope some people show up and I don’t accidentally fall off of the stage. – Kevin M. Hoffman

Looking forward to intelligent and civil discussions of the successes and failures of our community and the death of snark. – Kevin Sharon

I’m excited to see some of the projects I’ve worked on in 2011 launch in 2012. I’m also looking forward to several speaking engagements in the spring, as well as UX Book Club Philly meetings (I’m a hard-core nerdy bookworm). – Jessica Ivins

I’ll be speaking at SXSW this year, which I’m very excited about. – Allison Wagner

Schmoozing and Meeting New People

I have the enviable task of telling Happy Cog’s story to prospective clients and it’s a story of partnerships and projects. I can’t wait to spend this year talking about the MTV O Music Awards, Harvard.edu, Fonts.com, Club Nintendo. These are going to be fun conversations. – Joe Rinaldi

Welcoming some new members to the Happy Cog team, and continuing to meet and work with new project partners. – Rawle Anders

I look forward to Silicon Valley snatching up more and more “talent” which leaves the client service space wide open. Thanks losers. – Greg Storey

The Work Ahead

2011 was pretty amazing for me, but there a lot of great opportunities coming in 2012. Right now, I am pretty excited about the projects we’re kicking off in 2012. – Brett Harned

Collaborating on new projects. – Ryan Irelan

I am most excited about more collaboration between the Austin and Philadelphia Happy Cog offices. The idea of a group get together sounds fantastic. – Blythe Goodell

New projects, new processes and techniques. – Matt Clark

There’s always an opportunity to improve upon our product and process. My goal is to continue that pursuit, never settling. – Chris Cashdollar

As a Project Manager, I’m excited about our continuing quest to streamline our processes both internally and in front of the client. I’m also really excited about some of the projects we’ve been working on all year (and some since the end of 2010) launching, but sad to say goodbye to some clients. – Helenita Frounfelkner

Hosting, Apps and New Directions

I am looking forward to driving a stream of revenue for Happy Cog that frees our company to grow without concern or worry of the everyday! I am also looking forward to Happy Cog beginning a new journey in app development, contributing to app standards and maintaining our position at the front of the class in all interactive channels that create the new web experience. – Dave DeRuchie

What the surge in mobile devices and designing for multiple screen sizes and scenarios will mean for collaboration across our disciplines—designers, project managers, content strategists—not just at Happy Cog, but our industry as a whole. More agile, less waterfall. – Michael Johnson

I’m looking forward to some amazing new initiatives we have planned, a new Happy Cog website, and watching Happy Cog Hosting take the next step forward under the leadership of Dave DeRuchie. – Greg Hoy

I can’t wait to see what we do next with Cognition. It’s been an awesome project, but now that we’ve had it around for over a year, we’re due for some fun changes, methinks. On a related note, I can’t wait for us to redesign happycog.com. – Brian Warren

New work in areas outside our own comfort zone. Applications, mobile, and all the other things we’ve just barely scratched the surface of. – Mark Huot

Redesigning and restructuring A List Apart and Happy Cog. – Jeffrey Zeldman

Don’t Mess with Texas

I am absolutely most excited for the opening of the new Austin office and getting involved in the local community in Austin. It’s going to be a blast! – Stephen Caver

Seeing how the new Happy Cog Austin, TX stronghold will look and feel like when it all comes together. – Drew Warkentin

Cutting Edge Innovation

More cat innovation such as http://procatinator.com/ – Jenn Lukas

We asked the whole Happy Cog family to think about the rookies in our field: the students, interns, and first year designers just getting up to speed in this brave new world. To quote a great philosopher, “People say the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.” But, how do we teach them well? If you could pick one indispensable tool that you would gift to a newly budding web designer for the holidays, what would it be?

Here’s what they had to say.

Tools of the Trade

A computer. You need one of those. – Jenn Lukas

A subscription to rdio. If “newly budding” web designers are anything like this old project manager, they need music to do good work. The desktop and iPhone apps are great and the selection of music keeps getting better. – Brett Harned

A professional training budget. And we have one. :) – Greg Hoy

A twitter account. Follow excellent resources like @envatowebdev, @real_css_tricks, @alistapart, @paul_irish, @methodandcraft, @thenerdary, @sixrevisions and read the articles they post. – Allison Wagner

A subscription to the New York Times. Invaluable to everyone, really, but particularly to aspiring young professionals looking to stay balanced; teaches layout, content curation, and editorial style, informs on world news, and, most importantly, provides perspective. With the subscription including both print and digital access, designers can glean insights into how the NY Times team chose to translate their stories from print to digital—something they’ll be tasked with regularly. – Rawle Anders

A ticket to a museum. Observe how a space fills with people of all different shapes and sizes, all manner of abilities and disabilities, engaging with content that answers and raises questions, and provides contextual information and theoretical ideas crucial to understanding and learning. Ponder. Then get a coffee and maybe a tasty slice of pie and think about how crucial it is to take a break from your day to day routine. – Kevin Sharon

Hands-on Experience

Observing a usability test conducted on a site you’ve designed. It will humble you and open your eyes to user experience. – Jess Ivins

An internship, a co-op, any kind of first-hand work experience. Often what sets apart stunningly talented professional designers (whether new to the industry or long-tenured) is not their talent, but their professionalism. Work with other people and clients, figure that out. – Joe Rinaldi

A great project that’s just beyond their comfort level. Enough to drive them to learn new things but comfortable enough that they’re not biting off more than they can chew. – Mark Huot

The Gift of Knowledge

A mentor; find someone that you can learn from and who is willing to patiently share their knowledge and war stories. Why, Philadelphia’s own PhilaMade would be a great organization to potentially find one! – Chris Cashdollar

Ask questions! When I started out, this terrified me. The more questions you ask, the stronger your work will be. Ask yourself questions too. What am I strong at? What do I need to work on? What do I enjoy working on the most? – Yesenia Perez-Cruz

The ability to ask questions and talk with the team. From my time working with Happy Cog, I have totally appreciated that the designers are always willing to listen and push themselves to work with the client and team. – Blythe Goodell

Hitting the Open Road

The ability to attend an inspiring and enlightening web conference. – Jeffrey Zeldman

A ticket to a good, small/medium-sized conference, preferably as far from where they already live as possible. Meeting new people in an environment where everyone is unfamiliar with their surroundings forces the group to bond in order to forage for food and fun. That foraging leads to conversations regarding the way other people think about what they do, and how they do the things that they think about. – Kevin M. Hoffman

Drive and Determination

Fire in their bellies. Students and young professionals right out of college have more free time and more guts to try new things than us old folk. I’d love some of that free time back so I could create something new, invent something interesting, or design a product/app/service that didn’t exist before me. – Brian Warren

Self determination. Too many times new designers turn into followers which means they’re designing like everyone else, coding like everyone else, using the same applications. Borrring! Take the path less traveled and enjoy the education and confidence-building along the way. – Greg Storey

A sense of humility and an eagerness to learn. Too many newbies come out of college thinking they know everything, which may have been true among their peers, but isn’t true in the real world and with clients. Being able to admit what you don’t know is key. – Helenita Frounfelkner

Never consider yourself an expert. As soon as you do, you lose the motivation to learn. – Matt Clark

The Intangibles

The wisdom to know when to remove distractions and focus on their work. – Drew Warkentin

Curiosity. Of course, be curious about code and design, how it was built, why it works, and why it works well. But also a basic curiosity about the world in general. Nothing we make exists in a vacuum and a greater understanding of that helps you grow as a person as well as a web worker. – Stephen Caver

Patience to understand that most people sitting across from you don’t know or can’t see solutions the way that you do. – Dave DeRuchie

Learn team play. Despite being in the era of “personal brands,” great teams still do great things; not just individuals. – Ryan Irelan

Patience. Try to make the most of everyday. Take your time. Pay your dues! And fill those inspiration coffers. Soak in everything around you. You’ll appreciate it 10 years from now. – Michael Johnson

Okay so maybe all of the code would be more of a confusing kegger. Luckily, we can all pick and choose our favorite tools to learn from without a code hunting hangover. There are a few fantastic educational resources that always come to mind for me when I’m looking for the best way to solve a code conundrum. I’m always amazed at how thoughtful the answers on Stack Overflow are and how easily I can share the good parts of my code with JSFiddle. I can also share the bad parts and people can fix if it they choose at GitHub. Collaboration within the development community is getting easier every year.

So, in the holiday spirit of sharing, and with Blue Beanie Day just passing, I thought we could share our favorite resources that give back.

I’ll go first: I’ve been stoked to teach for GirlDevelopIt, a wonderful organization that offers low-cost intro development classes in an environment women can feel confident in. While I love reading and writing on this here nerd box, it’s also super neat to get in a room with 30 other people to teach and learn together.

So give back here and let’s collect the most beloved online resources in one big rager. It’s probably cheaper than that Master Chief Costume your coworker asked for in the office gift exchange. What’s the one site/group/article that you’ve loved this year?

I’ve sold allied health text books to nursing schools and UX consulting services for internal pharmaceutical applications. I’ve cold called upwards of 75 clients per day while working in staffing, and been lucky enough to work with clients who were true partners. Whether I was the last phone call a prospective client wanted to receive, or offered a truly valued service, successful business development often rests in knowing when to walk away, and when to run.

It’s Our Time

I have about 40 hours per week to work with when I’m lucky, and right off the bat a minimum of five hours per week is spent in internal meetings. Five daily status meetings, an hour long weekly sales meeting, plus a two hour long weekly estimating meeting take an eighth of that week out of the picture. In addition, sales calls can easily take an hour each, a pitch or client meeting can be an all day affair, and a new project kickoff takes a full day off the books. And that’s just my time.

We’re a boutique-sized team. Our practitioners are hands-on at every step of the process. This means every time I pull someone into a meeting about a prospective client, they’re not working on an existing client’s project. If they’re traveling to a pitch, which they often do, they lose even more billable time. So the challenge becomes not only investing my time wisely, but theirs as well. That’s when the stakes get higher.

Moneyball

The trick is ensuring that you have the opportunity to spend the time you need on the valuable investments while simultaneously avoiding the pitfalls of a bad time investment. If you are scheduling intro cold calls with clients, determining top priorities and lowest priorities is key. If you are choosing between responding to a lengthy RFP with a company you might want to work with, or spending that time connecting more personally with potential clients through email or generating a referral, you need to decide where your time currency is best spent.

Comparing prospective clients can feel like evaluating apples against pineapples, but I’ll let you in on a secret: I grade client prospects against a series of criteria. I assign a total value to each opportunity or prospect, and evaluate based partially on this grade. I’m still working out the kinks, but, man, is it satisfying to look at grades on a scale. Additionally, I work with a variety of passionate, entrepreneurial leaders on our team, and it’s not always 100% my call to walk away from a prospective client. That said, empirical measurement becomes useful in these conversations too. Defining what you (and your team) consider a valuable opportunity is the first step. For our team, this tends to be a client that meets a mix of tactical and strategic criteria.

Dollars and Sense


Tactically, budget and timeline expectations have to be appropriate. This sounds terribly mercenary, but there is little reason to dig deeper if a potential client’s expectations are completely unreasonable. Budgets that come in at a fraction of what you’ll propose, or timelines that will compromise work quality are difficult to overcome in the best of situations. If a client is close-lipped and unwilling to disclose budget, share your ballpark with them and see how they respond. Ask about the money tactfully and up front, every time. If the project is flawed at the ground level, winning it may actually be the worst possible outcome.

Process is King/Queen/Important

You can evaluate a lot about a client through their vendor selection process. If clients:

• Reach out via a criminally bad RFP delivered by mail
• Deny you access to the project team
• Miss calls or are late for meetings
• Become unresponsive
• Exhibit fundamental differences of opinion on critical concepts

You can bet, heavily, that you will experience these issues throughout the course of the project. The excitement of finally engaging a client you have been long pursuing can sometimes blind you to their faults once you break through. Sales cycles can be lengthy, but stubbornly pursuing increasingly difficult clients, merely due to the time invested to date, can be throwing away good money after bad. We all know that brand appeal is hard to resist. RESIST IT. Similarly, the appeal of the end result of the project can often overshadow a shaky roadmap getting there. Don’t allow yourself to get too excited by the potential project outcome and blind yourself to what you’ll endure in order to get there.

Get Someone on the Phone, Anyone.

The next criteria is the authority of your client contact. Are you talking to the right people? I hate to harp on RFPs, but procurement folks are rarely the right people. Lovely as they may be, typically they are involved in the vendor selection process specifically because they are insulated from the actual project itself. If you are talking to the project or product lead, good. They should know what you need to know. However, if this person is not also the budget owner, a lot of hard work can be wasted when/if that budget owner swoops in down the road. The wrong contact at the right client is a liability and very difficult to overcome. Soldiering on is an admirable quality, but results are pretty sweet too.

Between the Lines

Then there are significantly more subtle, and occasionally critically important criteria: project appeal. Over time, it should become extremely clear what your team and your organization find valuable in prospective projects. In my first year at Happy Cog, our team’s priorities became crystal clear: baseball and cats. Alright those are not everyone’s top priorities, but absent those, we tend to agree that the most important criteria, number one with a bullet, is the client project team. Everything else takes a back seat. Historically, our most satisfying and most successful projects have been the byproduct of meaningful client collaboration.

Awesome client teams can be difficult to identify this early in this process. Fortunately, we employ a Project Planner to organize and diagnose prospective projects, and I couldn’t recommend utilizing something similar highly enough. This is a diagnostic tool you can utilize no matter the size or maturity of your organization. If nothing else, a document like this tells clients that you take your work seriously, are organized, and deliberate. It doesn’t have to be pages and pages, just enough to ask a few critical questions. If a client balks at completing a well-defined form where the value is clearly communicated, fold ‘em.

When a client takes the time to fill it out fully and thoughtfully, they immediately get points for process with our team. We recently received a Planner from a potential client and after reviewing the document, one of our directors turned to me and said “We need this project”. Need. All based on a thorough Planner that was thoughtfully and creatively completed. They “got” us and sounded like an awesome partner. It was like a love letter, so it received top priority.

Also important when looking at potential projects is the opportunity to try something new. Maybe it’s a new kind of problem our team has not previously addressed, or a new platform with unique constraints and opportunities, or a chance to adjust our internal process. We learn from each and every project. It’s exciting when we get to ask ourselves, “How much are we going to learn here?”

How do you evaluate clients and opportunities? Wanna share any war stories? Blog back and we’ll swap them like Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws.