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An insight from Jared Spool talk at Mirror Conf 2018 Edition
An insight from Jared Spool talk at Mirror Conf 2018 Edition
Last October, we had the opportunity to attend Mirror Conf, and since it happened in our city, it was a great opportunity to learn something from the best guys in the industry. One of the speakers that I was really looking forward to listening to was Jared Spool. He entitles himself as a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre/UIE and gave us an awesome talk about Design, more specifically, the importance of knowing the context about what we are designing, as well as its limitations, how to educate a team of people who are not so sensitive about the topic and its real importance to the success of a project. Here, I’ll break down the main points of Jared’s talk and adapting them to my personal experience.
When we talk about rendering the intent it does not mean having an idea and start to explore it without knowing the essential information about the project. Even if our intention is the best, we must take a deep breath and analyze the whole thing before action.
The example, in which Jared focused his talk, was the meeting between two designers and their trail of thoughts. Did you ever hear about the Delta Onboarding Passes made by Tyler Thompson? They were inspired by Dustin Curtis work for American Airlines old website, which in his point of view the design was really poor.
Let’s talk about Tyler! After buying his ticket at Delta to fly from New York to Seattle, he received this boarding pass (img 1). Which made him feel instantly mad by the way it was designed.
As you can see why, Tyler was not satisfied with it, and inspired by Dustin’s work, he grabbed his Moleskine and started to do some sketches. While doing it he thought about his trip and how should the information be organized, until he got to this point:
As you can see, this suggestion led to a visually appealing and well-designed boarding pass with great typography, very well structured information and with some nice details to make the experience of buying a boarding pass way better.
What he didn’t think about, were the limitations that the company had to face if they wanted to follow its idea and the logistics that would be necessary to apply his design, including the costs that would come along with it.
SEE ALSO: BUILDING A DESIGN PROCESSIf you look closely, you will notice that to apply the suggested design, Delta would have to:
As Tyler, there are a lot of people who think that can improve something, and at some point, we all think that we are all designers. Aren’t we?
The big difference, in this case, is that when you have great design skills but don’t have the full context of what are you designing for, it can look great, but it can be badly designed at the same time, because the big difference between poor design and great design lays in the render of the designer’s intent.
Poor design is based on the right intention but executed poorly - a poorly rendered intention! Tyler matches perfectly this example. He had an intention, and it was a good one, but it was executed poorly, not because the design was ugly, but because there was a lack of context when designing.
So in order to improve design, and create something meaningful, we must work on both, the intention and the skills of rendering it in the best way possible and when doing it, there are two things to have to take in consideration, so you must ask yourself:
On his talk, Jared referred Six Flags Mountain theme park vs Disney adventure park as well as the differences between the two. Long story short, let’s get straight to the point.
Six Flags Mountain
The Six Flags Mountain (img 3) is all about the rides, that come together with as many activities as you want. The main idea of this one is to experience fun and excitement with your chosen ride. Ok, let’s jump to the next until you think we are done for the day.
Disneyworld Magic Kingdom
On the other side of the coin, there’s the map of Disneyworld Magic Kingdom. If you notice in the image above, there are no rides represented on, but that’s not because they don’t exist, that’s because Disneyworld wanted it that way.
They want to focus on the experience they can provide to you and to your children, turning your day into a memorable one, a day full of experiences. The day usually starts with the Character Breakfast, then people walk around the park and experience as more activities as they want to, and at the end of the day, there’s a marvelous fireworks display.
Let’s try to adapt this thought to a digital product. When designing for something, what is your main objective? Do you want to lead your user to perform some specific action? Or do you want to tell your user a story about your company, or who knows, explain something about your product and how it can improve your user’s life in some way through storytelling?
If you want to create a great experience, focus on discrete activities, like what your user wants to do? How can you guide them? What will you make through the process to make their experience better? These are some of the questions you can ask yourself in order to create a better experience for your user.
In order to do it, maybe you will need a design process.
Like mentioned previously, having a great experience plays an important role on the way that the user think and feel about your product, but if you’re looking forward to create the greatest experience possible, you need a design process and discipline to help you get there.
“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.” — Jim Rohn
SEE ALSO: BUILDING A DESIGN PROCESS
Every time we approach a new project, there’s a process we follow each time to help us to get better results along the way. This process led us to know exactly which are our clients needs, what is the project about and in which context do the clients use our product. With this in mind, we can work in order to solve them.
How building a design process helped in digital project management!
How we built our process in order to improve our work, organization, and collaboration with clients.
A year ago, after joining Vitamina. the main goal was to improve the quality of our services, so we could provide our clients with a more consistent work and also to improve our communication with them.
From developing marketing campaigns to creating websites and designing a new brand image for the company, these were among the firsts steps I took in building a Design Process.
SEE ALSO: WHY SHOULD WE WORK IN COLLABORATION WITH CLIENTS?
Things were not always perfect.
Projects went well, but there was always something missing.
There were some details that needed to be polished and there were key pieces of information that were lost constantly, from the briefing up until the project development.
After a conversation with the rest of the team, taking some courses and doing the research that I needed, we decided that the best way to improve the way we were working was to create a design process, in order to avoid loss of information and a lack of communication.
This process was inspired by the Design Sprint book by Jake Knap from Google Ventures and the Design Thinking process created and taught by Tom & David Kelley by IDEO, and last but not least some valuable information was taken from the Process Masterclass course by Nguyen Le.
With all the collected information, it was time to divide our process into these 6 following steps (before moving forward, check my other blog post: Design for your clients, not for your ego):
Since the digital world is constantly changing and improving, it is important to keep up with new solutions in order to achieve our client’s goals and to be flexible enough to find a way that could be applied to most projects.
This means that you don’t need to look at it as a golden rule and follow it like a manual, since every client has different needs, but it's a way and you can adapt it and change it, according to your needs.
As we are constantly striving to improve the way we work, the next step we want to take is to create a Design System in order to improve our design consistency and visual style guides, so if you want to know more, stay tuned for the next Design article.
Egos, clients and design. Wanna know our web designer’s opinions about the relationship between those three things?
Dear friend designer, I'm sure you've been through this.
SEE ALSO: WHY SHOULD WE WORK IN COLLABORATION WITH CLIENTS
As a designer, when I had a new project on the way, I fell in the trap of being “creative” and get right into photoshop pushing some pixels. In the meanwhile, I tried my best to make my work look as much great as I can. It was my goal to impress the client.
I was looking to get noticed and I thought that the thing that would get people’s attention was to build up a portfolio, but I was forgetting about the most important thing about design: it has solved real business problems as a way to improve people’s lives.
Since wasn’t noticing what I was missing out, as main result, I had to deal with unsatisfied clients. They would have a great looking website but at the same time a lack of user experience. Worse than that, I would put a lot of time and effort for...nothing.
As I was moving forward with my work, I’ve started to notice that design it’s not all about typography, colors and shapes - of course they play a big role in the design process, like defining if users will like or not - but we have to think about our final user.
We can have the most beautiful product - which people will enjoy - but have zero use for it, because they don’t know how to do it.
People make businesses grow - so if I wanted to change and grow as well, it was time to think about their problems (not mine, for once) and how could I solve them - this was the first step to get rid of my ego.
At the end of the day, you should provide services that solve people’s problems and make their life easier. Being honest, they’re paying us to do it, so the best we can do is to do it properly!
That’s why at Vitamina we are refining our design process.
This design process was created to improve the communication between the team and the client and it’s divided into 5 steps - Discover, Explain, Ideate, Prototype and Test:
So, first of all, we try to get as much information as we can from our clients:
These are all questions we have to ask ourselves every time we start a new project. It will help us to get as much context and information as we can.
Get on your client’s shoes and make sure you both are on the same page.
With all the information, you will have a better understanding of the problem, and you will be able to find a better solution.
Thinking about our client will help us to understand them. If we want to find a way to get valuable we have to provide value to others.
SEE ALSO: WHY SHOULD WE WORK IN COLLABORATION WITH CLIENTS
When we create something thinking about who is on the other side while we blend the client in the process - our solution will increase user experience.
Ultimately, it is a win-win situation. Clients pay us to solve problems, to work with them and care about their concerns, not just to build up beautiful products, it will help us go further and create a better relationship for both ways.
Our web designer, Rui Bogas, has a really strong opinion about how you should bond with your clients. See if you agree!Clients are not evil, they are just taking care of their business.SEE ALSO: DESIGN FOR YOUR CLIENTS, NOT FOR YOU
Every time we start a new project, we have to put ourselves in other people’s shoes in order to understand what are their main concerns and find a way to solve their problems, but there’s a thing that we seem to forget sometimes and we seem to be most afraid of (even more than our final users). I’m talking about clients.
Of course there are all kinds of clients all over the world, but why do we feel afraid of them most of the times? In a matter of fact, they run their business and they want to succeed. But just like the steps we take to discover what our user wants, why don’t we force ourselves to understand our clients deeper and build a better relationship with them? What if we were in the same situation as them? What would be our needs? What do we value and we would like to see in other companies that we work with? How can I trust in those companies?
These are some important questions, but there’s a lot more that we need to ask in order to put ourselves in their shoes. If we were on their side, I’m sure we would do the same thing.
First of all, we need to meet our clients and get to know them as much as possible. What does he like? What’s the most important for him?
Then we can think about some questions like: What does he really want to do? What’s the work all about? Why would he even think about that? Why not? How can it benefit his business? And so on…
Getting to know the client can be extremely powerful and that’s when they start to feel confident about us. It’s a great way to introduce ourselves and show him how do we work and which are the procedures. Here’s where our key point comes in! What about if instead of only showing him what we do, we integrate him in the work process in order to work towards the same goal?
That way it will help us understand his point of view and he will understand our way of work, experiencing working along with us.
Here at Vitamina., we are starting to do that and the results are showing. The only way to improve our work and deliver a product that solves real problems is through collaboration with clients and there’s nobody that understand their business better than themselves and at the same time, we are “designing for our client, not for us.”
Working together with our clients will help us building a better and healthier relationship between us, we will be able to fulfill their needs, so that we can create more opportunities to work with them in the future.
Together, we can create better products with a better user experience, that solve real problems for every user's needs.
This is not an easy task, because every client is different, but with a lot of practice we start to get some results and provide more value for our clients, only this way we can be valuable.
SEE ALSO: DESIGN FOR YOUR CLIENTS, NOT FOR YOU
