One of the great things about working at Grasshopper is that each member of the team is given the tools needed to be successful and to advance their skillset. In our main office we have a library (check out some of our book reviews), hold Grasshopper University (team members teach the company something they know a lot about) and employees can attend various seminars & trainings related to their field…on the company dime. We are encouraged to become better!

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a 2-day management training seminar put on by the American Management Association. Taught by Adam Vane, a leader in leadership and conflict resolution, I received some solid advice and real world tips on working with members of your team and becoming a better manager.

Overall, there were a two main things that stuck out in my head and they both revolved around communication:

Listen Listen Listen

We all “hear” what people are saying but we don’t always “listen”. As a manager you need to listen to what your employees are telling you. This is especially true if you are a small business or startup…your employees are your insight into what’s happening both inside and outside the company. You need to listen. Here are a few ways you can listen to what your team members are saying:

• Take a Walk

  Work in an office by yourself? Have team members on the other side of the building? It can be hard to get to know people can’t it?

  When I started working at Grasshopper, the marketing team was in a section by itself. It took me a while to get to know those people not on my team since they didn’t sit near me. The nice part was, my desk was near the kitchen and most people would walk over there at least once a day. It helped me to get to know them better (and provided me first dibs on cake day..another benefit).

  Minus the cake part, the same thing applies to managers or even company owners. You need to get out of your office and take a walk. Stop at people’s desks, ask them how their weekend was, what they have planned this summer, etc. Get to know them and listen to what they have to say. You may learn a few things.

• One-on-Ones

  Here at Grasshopper we have weekly one-on-ones with our managers. It’s extremely helpful in staying organized but also helps keep everyone informed about what is happening around the company and the office. For managers, it allots a time each week to listen to what each member of your team has to say.

  One great tip Adam gave us, make sure you are asking the right questions. You can listen to what someone has to say but if they don’t say much, it doesn’t help. Open-ended questions can be extremely beneficial in getting people to talk.

Keep an Open Mind

I’m not sure there’s a company out there made up of people with all the same attributes (unless of course you work alone). We have different values, different work habits, different comfort levels and most importantly, different personalities. Because of this, it’s important as a manager to keep an open mind when working with others, especially when speaking to them. Here are a couple of tips on keeping an open mind:

• Don’t assume

  Never assume you know what someone is going to say, what they are thinking or how they are going to respond. When you do, you don’t really hear what they are saying, you hear what you think they mean. It can cause unwanted issues and may prevent the desired outcome from being achieved.

• Don’t Infer Tone

  One thing my manager always has to remind me is, don’t infer tone from emails or IMs.

  The internet has changed the way we communicate. As human beings, we communicate and interpret using three main things – words, voice & body language. The issue here is that only 7% of that comes from the actual words. So, when someone sends you an email…93% of the message doesn’t come through!

  Just because someone send you a succinct email, it doesn’t mean they are angry at you. They probably just wanted to get the message across in the simplest way possible.

This was really just a snippet of the great information we were given over the two-day span. For those interested in becoming a better manager or even just improving your communication skills, I highly recommend the AMA courses.

At the end of our second quarter, the Grasshopper Engineering team conducted its first ever “skunk works” iteration. With most of the quarterly initiatives wrapped up, we thought it would be a good idea to devote the last two week iteration to projects that were more fun, creative, and longer-term in nature.

We are certainly not the first company to do this sort of thing – Atlassian and Google are two well-known examples of companies giving developers time to work on side projects – but we figured we’d give this a shot as well and see how it turned out.

What the heck is skunk works?

In short, the term refers to teams within organizations that have a high degree of autonomy and work on advanced or “secret” projects. See the wikipedia definition for more.

Why did we do it?

1. While we are an Agile team and have a degree of freedom on what gets worked on day to day, our quarterly business initiatives are our highest priority. This means developers don’t always get to work on things that they want to. Having a development iteration dedicated to skunk works gives all developers the chance to set their own coding agenda.

2. Skunk works gives developers opportunity to break away from the day to day and think about the business at a higher level – by coming up with new product ideas or enhancements, automating manual processes, etc. It is our hope that the ideas that come out of skunk works will directly impact the business but, at a minimum, the exercise in higher-level thinking makes everyone smarter in how they go about their work.

What were the rules?

This process wouldn’t have been very skunkworks-ish if there were lots of rules so there weren’t very many. Here’s the gist:

1. Everyone can work on anything they want – a new feature, a new product, a new development tool, refactoring some especially aromatic code smells, etc.

2. Everyone must demonstrate what they did at the end of the iteration and share why they thought it was important.

What was worked on?

1. One team member worked on prototyping a new telephony SDK that would provide enormous flexibility in our infrastructure.

2. A couple people worked on a Google Chrome extension that allows the playing of voicemails in a browser widget.

3. One developer demonstrated the use of a couple open source tools – StructureMap and Automapper – that speed up .NET development time by automatically taking care of certain otherwise monotonous tasks.

4. A team member used the iteration to overhaul a critical section of code that was hard to manage and needed to be ripped apart and put back together to work correctly and scale properly.

How did it go?

For the first run-through of this, I have to say it went really well. There are some things that I would like to see done differently next time to make it even better and, overall, I give it an A-. The things I really liked are:

1. We actually went ahead and did this. We’ve talked about it before but it was great to see it happen.

2. The positive impact to morale. Developers really got excited that they could work on things that were interesting to them.

3. Opening up the demonstrations to more than just the Engineering team. This gave developers visibility and allowed them to showcase their work to other departments as well as the two founders who attended the session.

4. The demonstrations themselves. All the demonstrations were quite good and the discussions that took place as a result were really, really productive.

What I think could have been better was:

1. Some people commented that they were not able to spend as much time on their projects as they would have liked due to other issues that came up.

2. While it was good to invite others outside of the Engineering team to the demonstrations, I think it would be even better to invite the entire company next time.

In summary, I think skunk works was a great use of time and I know the Engineering team enjoyed it a lot. It was also well received by others in the company and I think we’re going to make it a quarterly thing.

I was brought into Grasshopper as a user experience designer about three months ago and have been serving as the lead designer for the new interface we are working on. During this recent redesign phase, we’ve been doing a lot of usability testing and today I will be sharing ideas on it.

To start off, we need a definition for usability testing and I couldn’t find one clear cut definition for ‘usability testing’ but through utilizing Google search, I was able to compile the following:

Usability testing is defined as:

Usability testing is a technique used to evaluate a design involving use of a prototype or product by its intended users, testing to determine the extent to which the design is understood, easy to learn, easy to operate and attractive to its users. In a collaborative usability test the usability specialist moderates an active dialog with the participant in order to better understand his/her behaviors and opinions.

Now as we have a basic understanding of what usability testing is we can speak about reasons why it is important and the benefits of including it during your design process.

First off, usability testing is a great way to complete a simple form of user research, so that we are better able to understand who our customers are and what they really want. This is a core design principle of mine because knowing who your customers are and what they want has a lot of huge implications.

This knowledge allows you to provide your customers with a better product and attain more customer satisfaction, which can equate to more sales and profits. It also allows you to know your target audience for marketing purposes and can help figure out what tactics to use to reach those specific types of people.

What You Need

You have a lot of flexibility in what you need to actually be able to run usability tests. Basically all you need are your designs in some form (paper sketches at the low end, a beta system at the high end) and a way to contact people to gather their feedback on it. Sessions can last 5 minutes or up to a few hours, you can have one on one sessions or include multiple people in focus groups. You can be very formal with the participants and structure sessions around completing certain tasks in the system or you can be very informal and let them explore the design themselves and encourage them to think aloud. Sessions can be done in person or remotely over the internet using collaborative software. The combinations are endless and you really need to find what best fits for your situation.

Using Prototypes

Typically we have been doing remote interviews with one customer at a time in 1-hour sessions focusing on using our prototypes of new designs. Prototypes require less effort than fully functional systems to get ready to test because you don’t have to hook up everything, and they look more professional than a sketch on paper. We keep the design in black and white from the beginning and worry about making it look nice later. It also allows users to focus on the functionalities of the system and not focus on the colors. This gives us a solid base to start off of rather than making a sexy design that people love but don’t actually understand how to use very well.

Using a prototype allows us to use minimal effort to create a design that works so we can test it and validate these designs with actual customers, before creating a fully functional system that we waste time on when we have to go back and make changes. It saves time to try and get things right as early as we can, because of that fact that it takes less effort to fix a broken design prototype than a broken design attached to a fully functional system.

Using Customers

Using actual customers is a key part for usability testing in our case, because our customers are the real experts on how they want to use the system. When creating any design, be it in a sketch, wireframe or prototype it is really the designers best guess when they have not done any prior user research. It is much better to design the system for the people who will be actually using it than how anyone internal to the company may want it, because it ideally will lead to less frustration for people to want to use our system with the added intuitiveness coming from their own peers.

These are just a few of the reasons that usability testing is important to us here at Grasshopper. It is a great way to put your best foot forward with your designs and show your customers that you care about their feedback. It is easy to start integrating usability testing into your process because there are not many things you need to do to get going, before it can start to become a vital part of designing. Hopefully you too can see the benefits in improving your designs and reap the rewards, even if you start off small.

With the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, 2009 was, without a doubt, one of the worst years for the economy. Is it a pure coincidence that this year also represented the highest year on record for entrepreneurial growth? No.

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition of entrepreneur is “one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.” They are in fact undertaking a risk when they open a business and what better time to take a risk then when you have the freedom to do so- when you’re laid off? The last thing many people want to do when they get laid off is to go through the long, difficult and often frustrating task of searching through hundreds of job search websites, sending out cover letters and resumes only to receive that e-mail saying “Thank you for your interest but we have found another candidate…”

So why not do something you’ve always loved? Sure you may not make money right away, but committing yourself to doing something sure beats sitting around feeling sorry for yourself and your wallet. Not sure where to start? Check out Entrepreneur.com’s 55 Home-Based Startup Business Ideas

Remember the famous saying “Do what you love and the money will follow?” It’s true. Put your mind to it and success and money will come. And if it doesn’t, it’s never a mistake if you learned something from it.

When I started thinking about it, I realized that many of our customers probably are using WordPress as well, so why not provide some tips here on how to make a WP site SEO friendly.

All in One SEO Pack

One of the great things about WordPress is that it is open source so people are always making it better and keeping it current with technology. While SEO certainly isn’t new it has become much more important over the last few years.

The All in One SEO Pack is a terrific plugin that can help improve your site and eliminate issues that can be caused through WP, including duplicate pages (the plugin blocks /tag, /author & /category) and canonicalization.

The other great thing about the All In One plugin is it allows you to set a custom title and meta description.

URL Configuration

With so many people using WP for their business website, it’s important that you can configure the URLs to your specifications. No one wants to have an about or contact page with a numeric URL. You want your URLs to be clean and logical.

Using the permalinks setting, it’s easy to select how you want to display your URL. For blogs it makes sense to have the date in the URL but for a more professional look, you may want to just use the name of the post title (/%postname%/).

Sitemaps (HTML& XML)

We all know sitemaps are a basic yet essential part of SEO and WordPress makes it easy to create and update them.

For both HTML and XML sitemaps (sitemaps designed for the search engines) you can very easily create your own but then you have to worry about updating them. There are a lot of great sitemap plugins out there and a search for sitemaps brings up 111 different options. We use the Google XML sitemaps plugin but make sure that whatever you choose is compatible with your version of WP.

ALT text

ALT text is a simple element that can be added to images. It tells both search engines and visually impaired users using screen readers what the image is. ALT text is also a great way to get some additional keyword text on your page but please, don’t stuff it. ALT text can be added in WP when you upload your image:

There are a ton of great tips out there on optimizing your WordPress site and if you want to learn a little more on SEO and WordPress, check out my presentation below:

The tragic irony of minimalist design is that it’s actually quite complex in its implementation. The purpose of this series is to outline a few of the significant aspects of minimalist design and to define some of the complexities involved in creating a website that is both minimalist and rich in user interaction.

To begin, I’d like to establish a loose definition of minimalism and what you can expect to be discussed in this series. While the untrained eye may define minimalism as black and white with very few objects on which to gaze, I’d like to begin to unpack the complexities that make up a well designed minimalist website. I believe minimalist design can be described, at a high level, as the effective use of subtlety, typography, spacing, and pixel-perfect accents spread across a well thought-out canvas.

Because I have a particular affinity for minimalism and choose to do all my designs in that mindset, I am often asked the question if there are good designs that are not minimalist. The answer is, of course, yes. I just can’t think of any! The bottom line is that, in a world so cluttered with information and objects, minimalism is what makes certain entities stand out from the crowd. If you picture yourself staring at white noise (fuzz/snow) on a television screen and then suddenly a 4cm black dot appears in the bottom right corner of the screen, where would your attention be drawn? I can say with certainty that, without exception, everyone would at least glance at the black dot, if not completely shift their attention to staring away from the white noise and solely on the black dot.

The first part of this series will be dedicated to subtlety and its involvement in minimalist design.

Subtlety

The dictionary defines subtlety as “so delicate or precise as to be difficult to analyze or describe”. Given that definition, it would seem my work in this article is cut out for me. When I am designing a website, I prefer to think of subtlety as the intangible, “wow” factor. Of course, this is going to be a subjective reaction, but for the most part designers will agree on “well designed” websites. It gives me great joy to see a site like that for the first time. The initial impression is always “wow”, then I immediately move into “why?”. As I begin to study well designed minimalist websites, I find many similarities. But before I get into the assets of subtlety, I’d like to touch on a very important aspect that all designers must continually revisit.

Subtlety in design is a very delicate balancing act because, as designers, we should always keep the user in mind. After all, without the user there is no company to pay you for your design. Depending on the project you’re working on, users are most likely not visiting the website simply to admire a great design (as might be the case in an art museum). Rather, they are visiting the site to accomplish a purpose like purchasing a service or product, or attaining information. Somehow, while remaining subtle, it is our responsibility to create clear CTA’s (Calls to Action) to optimize usability and profitability for your paying client. Personally, I use this as an advantage when presenting my minimalist design to business thinkers. From a user’s stance, CTA’s are much more clear when there aren’t dozens of other objects on the page competing for your attention. It is much easier to funnel a user into taking out their credit card when they aren’t worried about where to locate the “buy now” button. This plays nicely into an argument to keep everything on the site trending toward minimalism.

Let’s take a look at a real life example. The people over at Cultured Code, of Things fame, have done an outstanding job of clearly defining their CTA’s while still remaining subtle in their design. They’ve chosen a wonderfully pleasing colour theme with light blues and whites, integrated some very nice faint gradients and light drop shadows for texture, and they’ve defined their CTA scheme with complimentary orange icons. The result is a very subtle, pleasing site where users can easily find that for which they are looking. Throughout this series, I will be referring to the Cultured Code website because they’ve done such a fantastic job implementing the theory behind this article.

Since subtlety is both difficult to define and subjective, please take a moment to navigate through and study the design of the Cultured Code website. Spend time looking at the use of gradients, drop shadows, accent lines, typography, colour schemes, spacing and overall layout. I have absolutely no connection to Cultured Code whatsoever, but as winners of various design awards, they are no doubt used to the attention.

Stay tuned for my next post directed at the concept of the proper use of spacing in good (and minimalist) design.

With all that can be said about agile and the concepts surrounding it, from my point of view there a few simple things that are absolutely key to finding success using this process: know yourself, know your team, know your project.

Knowledge of self is the first key factor to being able to find success in an agile environment. In order to achieve your goals within small, demanding iterations, you have to be aware of your own limitations within that span of time. Work life, personal life, and everything else in-between can be factors that impact not only the amount of time that is at your disposal during a development cycle, but the level of focus that you will be able to give your tasks. Having a solid understanding of yourself is the first step towards successfully producing high quality work with the rest of your team.

Knowledge of your team is also of the utmost importance to finding success in an agile environment. Understanding and trusting your fellow team members as you develop a piece of software is what truly facilitates the process of making high quality software with limited resources and time. Here at Grasshopper the planning process is very collaborative – with all involved team members being in constant communication as the tasks at hand are analyzed.

A key component for me personally is knowing that I have full confidence in all of the people I work with to evaluate our goals realistically, know themselves and their schedules, and plan accordingly. It’s this kind of trust that truly creates and environment where work can be done full throttle and produce results.

Last, but not least, you have to know your project inside out. I imagine that it’s difficult for new hires entering an agile project already in progress, because in order to achieve the highest level of success with an agile project, you have to know the guts of the project just as well as you know yourself and your team.

Essentially, work produced from a small agile team receives the kind of attention that a 2 year old does – the team tries to nurture and guide the product to be the best that it can be, and only the team who has worked on it really knows what it’s like to have to run around and clean up after the little monster.

So what it all really comes down to is the team. If you can’t trust yourself and your team to truly come together and work towards successful outcomes, then you really don’t have a chance of creating a successful product that you can really be proud of. Thankfully, here at Grasshopper I work with some of the finest players around on our projects, and we’re always only getting better as we continue to learn more about each other and our ever-evolving products. Be sure to keep an eye out for some really impressive new developments from us in the second half of the year!

Corrine Ayoub is the current marketing intern here at Grasshopper. She will be writing several guest posts over the next few months.

1. Importance of Customer Loyalty and Satisfaction

   It’s 10 times more expensive to gain new customers than to retain them. Therefore, customer loyalty, connection, and satisfaction is very important. Keep in contact with your customers via social networks and occasionally conduct surveys to see if they are satisfied with your company.

2. Free is better

   Sounds obvious right? As a consumer culture Americans love the idea of not paying. Offering free trials for your products or even discounted promotions are an excellent way to get people to try them out. Once they see how good the product is, they’ll be willing to pay more for it!

3. Network Network Network

   A stranger at a bar who orders the same thing as you? Your parents old college roommate who is visiting? Your best friends cousin’s uncles stepbrother twice removed? You never know who you know. Engaging in conversation is key to getting your name out there and networking. You never know who you really know. And they may know someone too. So don’t be afraid to talk!

4. Remember your client and be a friend!

   Studies show that clients are much more likely to be persuaded to buy your product if they like you.  So for example, if you’re pitching an idea or engaging in a sales offer and your client mentions something like “Oh I will definitely think about that after I get back from the Carribean for my honeymoon…” make sure that when you do follow up with them ask “So how was the Carribbean? I hear it’s beautiful…”

5. Word of Mouth is the New Billboard

   We live in a hugely ad-cluttered society. Every time you log on a webpage, walk down the street or step out your door there’s an ad slamming you in the face about something. If there’s ads constantly around us how are we going to remember what they’re really advertising? And do we really trust the advertising industries? Get people to talk to their friends and family about your stuff. People are much more likely to listen and respond if they hear it from an honest source.

 

6. Be Funny! But Not Too Funny…

   Sure everyone loves a good laugh. Incorporating humor into your marketing campaigns is successful because it makes the customer smile, making them more likely to think about your product. But  sometimes going over the top with humor will make the customer forget what you’re actually marketing. Find a happy medium.

7. Social Networking is Key

   It may seem obvious but a lot of companies fail to take advantage of the social networking opportunities available. They’re simple, generally somewhat successful, but most of all free! Take time to make and update Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and any other social network relevant to your company. It will pay off in one way or another. And remember, getting your name out there is key!

In town for the recent Recruit DC “Unconference“, our very own Ben Madden was interviewed by ABC 7 WJLA about the recent sales tax increase on soda. He’s famous! (Check it out at 0:19)

If the video doesn’t load for you, check it out over at WJLA

Click on the image to view the video on the Boston Channel.