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.

Design is the Rendering of Intent

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.

This is was the boarding pass Tyler got from Delta

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:

The Delta Boarding Pass suggestion designed by Tyler

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:

Replace more than 10.000 boarding pass printers;
Change the paper size and add cutting for bleeds;
Create a new supplied chain for colored inks.

‍

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.

What causes poor Design?

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:

Are we design activities or experiences?

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.

Map of Six Flags Magic Mountain Theme Park

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.

Design process - A design process is a designed experience

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

‍

My, yours, our 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.

SET UP

The question in my mind for a good 2 days while I was letting this book sit there on my coffee table was: Why should I read it?

I’m not starting my own business or managing a team, I’m between jobs leaving a company that I love which couldn’t love me in return for a job in the stressful world of a digital agency. And so, I felt that there were more accurate books that would be more helpful in that moment.

However, one day (while I quickly ran out of other things to do - that were sooo major) I started reading the first paragraph in the book. And two weeks later, I had devoured the whole thing.

THE HOOK

Rework is all about asking the right questions. Although, you might think that does not apply to you, it does. If you are part of an industry, of a company, if you are a CEO, a freelancer or an intern you should read this book.

Rework makes you think about your behavior in the workplace and questions your attitude towards different problems. The solutions might not be what you are looking for but what’s key is the crucial questions it raises.

MUNDANE CONCLUSIONS

Business plans are trash, long meetings are the plague, the phrase “long-term strategy” means nothing and the ideal work week has between 10 and 40 hours in it. Yep. You read that right.

The authors live by the premises in the book, it’s their guide and has help them found a small company that every year makes millions of dollars which is 37 signals.

Here’s my take away from their philosophy:

Develop something that you would want to use on your daily life.

Start with something that could solve your personal problems or your work problems.
Focus on doing one thing right.

Failure it’s not a premise for success, learning from mistake is overrated.
Problems usually have simple solutions.

Don’t sweat more than you have to. You usually know what the consequences are, deal with them. Be open, humble and transparent.
Meetings are toxic.

If a meeting is mandatory then something concrete must come out of it.
The time to launch is now not later.

An ideal setting is never going to happen. Find out soon rather than later if your idea works.
Before hiring for a specific area, do the job yourself.

Then you know what works and what to expect from your employee.

‍

SEE ALSO: Why having a content strategy matters? Rework preaches what worked for the authors: a revolutionary work philosophy that focuses on personal satisfaction, productivity and the pursuit of an ideal.

‍It’s up to you to take away the conclusions that might really work for you.

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.

Why to put ourselves in their shoes?

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.”

The main advantages of working together

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.

‍