aktionitems

When I asked Jim Collins to explain Steve Jobs!

itsadifferent — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:32:35 -0400

As I mourn the death of Steve Jobs, I remember my time in School when I got the opportunity to meet Jim Collins.

Jim Collins is the author of the best seller “Good to Great” where in he explains why some companies make the leap and others don’t.

He does this with the help of a strict data driven process and explains at the core of it lies the leadership.

He then explains that there are 5 levels of leadership, level 4 is Good and level 5 is great. Following this, he explains that it is easy to go upto level 4 but very difficult for level 4s to become level 5’s.

Having read the book based on recommendation by my Professor and fascinated by the stories of Great leaders ( a good chunk of whom we haven’t heard in popular media) I was excited to receive an opportunity to meet Jim.

After listening to his keynote and selected to be one of the few to ask him a question, I thought to myself “what is the one question that can stump Jim?”

Then it struck to me, why not ask him (the researcher of leadership) to explain Steve Jobs.

I asked him, how would you tag Steve Jobs? Level 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5.

There was a silence, everyone was looking for an answer and then Jim replied…

You cannot tag Steve Jobs, you cannot put him in a bucket, its very difficult to compare someone like Steve Jobs with even the likes of Darwin E Smith.

Just like his company Apple, he’s different.

7-up added 15% more yellow to the color of the can and people complained the taste was more lime-y. But the flavor had not changed..

itsadifferent — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 19:56:25 -0400

Hello!

Knee deep in spending 50% of my time on MNVR and filling the UX Designer Gap and the other 50% doing my day job+keeping the family happy I have been unable to post as frequently as I should.

My apologies for not doing so!

Everyday, since I took the helm of UX Designer for MNVR I spend atleast 4 hrs learning new tricks in Photoshop, Copy Writing for the Web, Digging thru inspiration on PatternTap.com/Dribbble.com or simply reading User Experience Books/Research/Papers/Blogs/Publications.

If I am unable to I ‘Instapaper’ them or ‘email them to future akshay for reading/reference’ and with that I even anticipate to share all of my amazing findings with you. However, the latter has been difficult.

As a new beginning and a promise to start sharing my findings as I journey thru the Interweb building products and finding inspiration, I share this awesome article shared by the great Jefferey Zeldman and posted here originally by the cool Luke Wroblewski.

An Event Apart: Crafting the User Experience

In her presentation at An Event Apart in Atlanta, GA 2011 Sarah Parmenter discussed how principles from human psychology can reframe how we think about Web Design. Here’s Luke Wroblewski’s awesome notes from her talk:

The Impact of Psychology on Design

We naturally make use rapid cognition. We take 3-5 seconds to form a first impression of someone. We take 1-3 minutes to confirm or dispute our original impression of someone. Sometimes it can take years to make up our mind.
Our mind relegates a good deal of sophisticated thinking to the subconscious. It does a great job of managing things for us in the background.
Sensation transference: we directly transfer aesthetic properties to products. Most of us don’t make a distinction between the packaging and the product itself.
In 1972, 18% drank Coke. 4% drank Pepsi. In 1981, 11% drank Pepsi. In a blind taste test people 57% preferred Pepsi. Coke went and tinkered their formula and created new Coke. It cost many millions to create but most people did not like it.
Even though after the formula tinkering, 56% preferred Coke in blind taste-tests. Coke attributed their loss of drinkers to taste testing vs. the brand they had. But people liked the brand so new Coke turned out to be a big mistake.
Another example of sensation transference: 7-up added 15% more yellow to the color of the can and people complained the taste was more lime-y. But the flavor had not changed.
It is possible to influence our visitors actions and their reactions. We need to predict the reactions we want and design accordingly.

Speed, Simplicity, Surprise, Social Behavior, Stirring Emotions

Speed: most people make up their minds in 2-6 seconds subconsciously about something. Pre-conditioning graphics push products on people. Example: grocery store moved popular lunch products to front of store and increased foot traffic by 50%. One-click shopping minimizes the time you have to consider a purchase so you buy more.
Simplicity: we often try to say too much. Removing irrelevant elements drives people to important elements. Example: Coke posted 1 tweet and one post on their Facebook page about a viral video. Sales on vending machines went up but they didn’t use any ads to promote it.
Simplicity is about context. Teens might have more time but less money. Adults might have more money but less time. Examples of simple messages: MailChimp, 37signals, TypeKit, Soft Facade.
Copy used to be written in third person on the Web. Now we are seeing a revert to simpler copy that grabs our attention instantly: a simpler form of first person communication. Changing a tagline on Cityclick lead to a 90% increase in sign-ups.–“create a Website for your business”. Used to say “Businesses need to be online to reach the biggest audiences.”
There is a difference between true simplicity and perceived simplicity. If things go faster than you assume they will, you feel even better.
Color is represented with different colors around the World: red, green, yellow, blue. So you have to be aware of context even when you are doing things simply.
Surprise: create something delightful that people don’t expect. On a mobile event site, found people were trying to interact with an image of an iPhone on the page. Inserted a discount code in the phone as an interaction secret door. People felt like they earned the prize. It was delightful. Appeal to people’s curiosity.
Social Behavior: social proof and herding behavior is how we look to others to guide what we do. If we see others doing something, we are more likely to do it. Workers feed their tips jars to make it clear what you are supposed to do.
Marketing professor stood on a street and looked at the sky. When he added three friends that also looked, they had to close the street cause so many people were stopped looking up. We don’t like to miss out on stuff –so seeing what people are doing influences our behavior.
Social influence helps shape values. Social proof is not social media.
Stir emotions: aspirational displays show us how we could live our lives. We want to be like the images we see. This doesn’t translate well to the Web. White space in Web design makes products look more expensive. Stories can influence behavior.
The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of things we know best. Instead of just starting with a gird and layout for your Web sites, add some psychology into the mix and see what can happen. We can manipulate people towards our intended purposes and goals.

Gestalt Principles Applied in Design

itsadifferent — Mon, 23 May 2011 14:50:45 -0400

As I endeavor to upgrade my existing Graphic Design Skills to fill the Gap of UX Designer at Menoovr, I have landed myself at many a situtation and as stated in my previous posts been getting out of it thanks to a lot re-designing and feedback followed up with some good amount of reading (standing on the shoulder of others thingy :D).

Here’s one such reading exercise, hope you find it helpful. Please do drop a note when you get a chance and do “menoovr” me to many more articles to help better my Design Skills.

The article was originally published here: http://goo.gl/xbZSW and is just a reposting below. You are encouraged to use the link above and read it on SixRevisions.com. I am forever thankful to them for articles such as these and more.

Web designers, like other artists and craftsmen, impose structure on the environment. We enforce order and beauty on the formless void that is our blank computer screen.

We do it in different ways — creating an organized layout first, writing text and content first, or even basing a design concept on an image, a color palette, or something that visually trips your trigger, whether it’s a sunset or a Song Dynasty painting.

Wherever you gain your inspiration, it’s often not just the particular element that sparks your artistic impulse; it’s the totality of the element and its surroundings.

Grasping that totality concept — both the individual element and the whole in which it exists are important both separately and together — is essential to understanding how gestaltism influences our design choices.

We’ll cover 6 principles related to gestalt, in the context of design, and they are:

Proximity
Similarity
Prägnanz (Figure-Ground)
Symmetry
“Common Fate”
Closure

Gestaltism: A Matter of Perception

I think it’s imperative that we should use psychological techniques more in our designs.

I’m not saying design should be completely scientific or mathematical, but I do believe the best design comes when proven theory works in harmony with art.

The idea of the “gestalt” is a fairly old one, originating with early 20th century philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels along with his contemporary, psychiatrist Max Wertheimer, among others.

At its simplest, gestalt theory describes how the mind organizes visual data. The stronger the clarity of form, the more effective the design.

Let’s start with an illustration. This is called the “subjective triangle.” What do you see when you look at the figure below?

Source: Dr. Russ Dewey.

If you said “a hamburger,” go get some lunch and come back.

If you said “three Pac Man-looking things chomping on a triangle,” then you’re on target.

Except where’s the triangle?

The triangle is implied. It isn’t there, except as whitespace.

But look at it and tell me the triangle isn’t there. Yes, it is.

One of the bright minds of gestaltism, Kurt Koffka, made the famous statement, “The whole is other than the sum of its parts.”

His statement is often mistranslated as the much more familiar “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

Mr. Koffka didn’t like that translation, and pointed out that in his statement, he means the whole exists independently from the component parts.

The famous “Dog Picture,” shown below, illustrates a Dalmatian dog sniffing under a stand of trees. When you squint at it for a moment, you see the dog “come together” from the disparate black and white blobs of the picture.

Source: José Pedro Gomes.

You don’t say, “Oh, I see the feet, and the legs, and the head, and the trees, and okay, now I see the entire picture.”

You look at it for a moment and say, “I see it, a spotted dog sniffing the ground near some trees.”

You went from the initial “What the heck?” straight to “Ah a spotted dog under trees” — no stopping to list items and deduce from that list that you must be looking at a dog sniffing the ground near some trees.

This is an illustration of the concept of totality — you grasp the “totality” of something before worrying about the details. As Interactive Telecommunications professor Clay Shirky puts it, “you cannot understand all of the properties of water from studying its constituent atoms in isolation.”

So “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” misstatement is wrong. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.

We’ve seen this concept dozens of times with beautifully executed websites that have one glaring flaw — a poor graphical or typographical choice, bad use of spacing, a dysfunctional chunk of JavaScript, a dropped bracket in the CSS file that renders the whole thing less than what it should be, sometimes to the point of non-functionality.

The whole is different than the sum of its parts; not greater, not less than, just different.

We’ve seen this time and again as well, with sites constructed with simple design choices that work harmoniously and beautifully together.

The whole is important.

The parts of the whole are important.

The whole as it is comprised of its parts is important, and separate from the other two.

Let me stop before I start sounding like Yoda.

Proximity

The concept underlying the concept of proximity is grouping. When we have a group of objects, we tend to see them as forming a group.

Proximity in Site Navigation

One basic concept of grouping in web design is with navigational links, where not only do we keep the navigation links together, but also group them internally, putting links to similar pages together, categorizing them into sub-categories, and so on.

The example below is from the site of a Lake Tahoe ski resort. Like most dropdown menus, it’s fairly simple at first glance, consisting of a single row of seven primary navigation link items (four are shown in the screenshot).

Site source: Alpine Meadows.

Hovering over a primary navigation link item reveals more sub-navigation links.

When a user hovers over or clicks on one of the primary navigation link items and sees that it reveals a dropdown sub-navigation menu, he’ll expect the same thing to happen with the next item.

They look the same and they’re grouped together — they should act the same way. And if we’ve done our job, they will.

Nothing new here, I know, but it’s something we use frequently, and we didn’t need to know about proximity to pull it off. But now perhaps we know more about why this design pattern works so well.

Proximity in Grouping Images

The 2002 Europe Music Awards site illustrates a different use of grouping. The MTV and Europe Music Awards logos form a separate group in the top left corner, while the logos of the sponsors form a group in the bottom right corner.

Source: Mads Soegaar.

The white space helps form the two groups, as do the two blue triangles in the corners. Note that the triangles are not present in the “unoccupied” corners, thus they reinforce the notion of the two groups.

Also note that the two organizational logos are larger and positioned top-left, thereby increasing their importance in relation to the cluster of smaller logos to the bottom-right.

The two clusters of logos not only form groups for design purposes, but for semantic purposes.

Proximity in Web Forms

The next example is of a fairly straightforward Web form from Yahoo!. Notice how the form is grouped into three segments: personal information, ID generation, and alternate ID provision.

The form implies that first set of fields is the most important and the third is the the least important.

They are grouped by headings (themselves ordered by number and set apart by color), and the fields themselves are arranged vertically, with the left sides of the field aligned with one another.

All of this reinforces the relationships of the of three groups of information, sorted by importance. Proximity is used to indicate grouping and importance.

Proximity in Icons

Another aspect of proximity is the propensity to perceive items arranged on a line or curve to be related to one another.

Web designer Stu Nicholls created a nifty (albeit non-traditional) circular menu in 2008.

Source: Stu Nicholls.

Because of the circle that all eight icons sit on, and because of the light gray circles that compose the “background” of the menu, the icons are perceived to be part of a similar group.

It also helps that the icons are thematically similar — with similar colors, sizes, and styles. In Nicholls’s live menu, hovering over an icon brings up a menu description inside the inner circle.

Are you grouping things correctly? Are you using proximity to help imply importance and relationships?

Similarity

We’ve already seen this illustrated above — an example of parts of a whole (totality) working together to achieve a specific goal.

We group things perceptually if they appear similar to one another. This is also why so many designers prefer to use blue, underlined links, or at least have all the links appear distinct and the same as each other.

Similar appearance equates to similar function.

In the screenshot of the Opera browser’s old Preferences dialog window, the menu items are grouped by color.

Source: Mads Soegaard.

The gray background of the first four menu items group them together, and also sets them apart from the other items.

They are also highlighted by the icons that sit beside the first item in each group.

Inadvertent Dissimilarity

Like everything in life, incorrectly applying the similarity principle can cause unwanted effects.

During the 2008 US presidential campaign, People Magazine ran a cover photo of the McCain family, with then presidential candidate John McCain in the center.

Source: Melissa McEwan.

The McCains’ adopted daughter Bridget, a young woman from Bangladesh, was apparently “shoved into the corner,” occupying the bottom left corner of the magazine cover.

Combined with the effect of the top line of the cover text — which, if extended to the left, essentially “cuts” Bridget out of the picture — the photo gave some observers the idea that the McCains (or rather, the McCain campaign) were trying to “segregate” Bridget from the rest of the far more homogeneous family group.

One blogger, Melissa McEwan, noted that at the store she visits, the plastic holders that contain the magazines on the store displays blocked Bridget from view by potential buyers.

Truth be told, I’m no fan of John McCain, but I have no reason to believe that he does anything else except love and support his daughter.

The effect of the arrangement went unrealized, I’m sure, by McCain and the family members (who were on the other side of the camera and unable to see the effect of the arrangement until too late).

But because of the compositional choice of the photographer, art director, and the various editors involved in designing the cover, the image gave viewers the idea that the McCains were trying to hide the only member of their family that looked dissimilar physically, and caused John McCain, Bridget McCain, and the other family members some unasked-for grief.

McEwan wrote of People, “It doesn’t matter whether they intended to diminish Bridget on their cover, or merely failed to consider what message that would send. Either way, it’s a mess.”

And a mess that an understanding of similarity could have prevented.

What elements of your designs are you unintentionally over- or under-emphasizing as a result of a misuse of the principle of similarity?

Prägnanz (Figure-Ground)

Our perception of the figure-ground relationship allows us to organize what we see by how each object relates to others.

– Andy Rutledge

The “figure-ground” principle has to do with objects portrayed against a background.

There’s a reason why design gurus started telling us sometime in 1998 to stop using busy tiled graphics for our backgrounds — because they took away from the foreground objects.

This is Design 101. Foreground objects should be more prominent than their backgrounds.

There’s more to the figure-ground principle than just using appropriately unobtrusive backgrounds. The contrast and the visual tension between the figure (foreground object) and the ground (background) makes for interesting graphics and logos.

Examples of the “Figure-Ground” Principle

Take, for example, the old Visit Norway logo shown below.

Source: Mads Soegaard.

The designers made use of both the foreground and background, creating three irregularly shaped objects (ocean waves, a tree branch, and a lump in a bird’s stomach — okay, I won’t swear to that last one) that combine to form the outline of a person with his or her arms outstretched.

Don’t see it? Think of the triangle illustrated above, and look again. If you still don’t see it, then you must have had the same trouble with those “magic eye” illustrationsthat I did; those things are all about figure-ground, as are many optical illusions.

Or you can just find the two people in the Hope for African Children Initiative logo below. Hint: a child is looking up at a woman, presumably his mother. (That’s why Namibia seems to have grown some real estate on its western coastline.)

Linux users will quickly recognize the old Gnome Desktop Environment logo.

It’s a “G”, yes indeed, but it’s also a footprint.

And Macintosh fans know that the Mac logo shows not just a happy face — but a happy face in profile, presumably looking with delight into their computer screen.

On the other end, we can see how the figure-ground principle is horrendously violated in this horse-training site. Usually I don’t hold up examples of sites doing things wrong, but since Vincent Flanders and “Web Pages That Suck” outed this site some time back, and the site proprietors left the problematic design in place anyway, I feel no compunction to show restraint here.

For those of you who sensibly hesitate to click the link, the site designer uses an animated background image of a lightning strike that’s tiled all over the page. Eeek!

It doesn’t take a sophisticated web designer to know that putting an obtrusive, visually aggressive image like that as your background takes away from your foreground objects.

Either those objects get lost in the background — which pretty much defeats the purpose of having anything in the foreground — or the foreground objects have to “shout” to be “heard” over the background “noise” usually by being very large and brightly colored to overcome the attempt of the background to dominate the design.

In two years of teaching web design and construction to middle- and high-school students, this is the biggest single challenge I’ve had; “weaning” them off of using extremely “loud” and obtrusive background designs. Many of them would love that lightning strike, almost as much as they love those “background” images of Waka Flocka Flame. I kid you not. I blame MySpace.

Rutledge points out that rounded buttons with gradient or other non-solid color backgrounds can be important in establishing them as calls to action.

Here’s Jacob Gube’s slick and clean call-to-action button as an example.

The rounded corners, borders, gradient color scheme, and resulting illusion of 3D “depth” set the button apart from its surroundings, inviting the user to perceive as something apart from the background and makes it easily identifiable as something that can be activated.

Lose the rounded corners, the borders, and especially the gradient color, and the button loses something of what makes it stand out from the background

Some of the most visually stimulating designs I’ve seen recently actually blur the lines between figure and ground elements, even interweaving the two. This is a classic example of understanding the intricacies of a rule; essentially once you have understood the rule completely you have a license to break it.

– in.house.media

Are your foreground objects working with your backgrounds to create a lovely, harmonious whole? Are your foregrounds fighting for the users’ attention? Are the backgrounds serving as an aesthetically and functionally workable backdrop to contain and set off your foreground elements?

Symmetry

Basically, the principle of symmetry tells us that when we look at certain objects, we see them as symmetrical shapes that form around their center.

You don’t have to get into advanced design to know that humans like symmetry, and find it aesthetically appealing.

When your designs are asymmetrically, you know you’d better have a good reason for making your design “askew.”

Symmetry occurs in nature, in math, in molecules, in everywhere.

Usually, symmetry to the average viewer means an object that is made up of two complementary halves.

What designers sometimes fail to realize is that when a viewer sees two unconnected elements that are symmetrical, they subconsciously integrate them into a coherent whole.

Finland’s CSC (the nation’s Center for Science and Technology) has a very simple logo that illustrates the idea of symmetry in design.

Though the logo sports two separate elements pointing in different directions and having different colors, the logo is easily viewed as a single entity because of symmetry.

Unlike most graphics and designs that deliberately employ symmetry in their design aesthetic (and that’s pretty much all of them — even the most grungy and off-kilter sites are aware of the principle; if only to use it minimally to contrast against all the asymmetry in their work), this one is almost perfectly reflective in its two elements. The only real difference is in the colors used.

Most designers use at least a trace amount of asymmetry to give their designs some character. Some use considerably more, to dramatic and beautiful effect.

Pepsi’s Famous Mid-2000s Logo

No longer in use in the US, the old Pepsi logo is an excellent example of near-perfect symmetry. Aside from the artistically “randomized” ice crystals, the logo is perfectly symmetrical both horizontally and vertically, with a wavy “axis” dividing the upper and lower halves.

Even the 3D airbrush “light and shadow” effect is almost perfectly symmetrical, varying just enough to give the image a realistic appearance of depth. The “ice” and the airbrushing are excellent examples of how “pops” of asymmetry liven up a largely symmetrical design.

Pepsi’s Asymmetrical Redesign

Pepsi redesigned its logo in 2008, using a variant on the old logo (itself a variant on an even earlier one) that some felt diverged too strongly from the symmetry of the earlier offering, with the tilted, variable-width axis and the red area far larger than the blue.

How do you feel about the newer design?

Symmetrical = Successful?

Bizcovering did a feature on ten symmetrical (and successful) corporate logos in 2007. The article poses the question, “All are symmetrical, perhaps this has something to do with their effectiveness?”

What do you think?

Asymmetry in Ransom Note Design

A more extreme example of asymmetry is the classic “ransom note,” which traditionally is made up from letters cut out of magazines, pasted onto a sheet of paper, and delivered to the victim during a thunderstorm with ominous music playing in the background. The whole thing stands for disorganization and a likelihood that the perpetrator isn’t concerned about delivering Aunt Gertrude home safe and sound.

Image generated by the Ransom Note Generator.

Notice anything symmetrical about the lettering? Most of them line up quite nicely, which is unusual for mad kidnappers with no sense of balance and form. I think the folks at Ransom Note Generator let their inner designer impose some unwarranted symmetry in their work.

Part of the reason why the ransom note is considered “scary” is because of its random, chaotic nature; asymmetry means action and the wildly asymmetrical nature of the letters implies action escalating into violence.

How’s the balance between symmetry and asymmetry on your sites?

“Common Fate”

I think I watch too many crime shows on television, because the first time I came across this concept, an image popped into my mind of some hardboiled New York copslamming his fist down on a table and yelling, “If you don’t roll on your brother, you’re gonna suffer the same fate he does! Is that what you want, both of you doing twenty up in Attica? Sharing a common fate?!?”

If the idea unnerves you, then you probably watch the same shows I do, and you shouldn’t worry, you won’t go to jail by employing the principle of “common fate.”

The idea of “common fate” is simple: We perceive items or objects moving (or appearing to move) in the same direction as related to each other, more so than elements that are stationary or appear to be moving in different directions. Those related items are sharing a “common fate.”

The cars in the photo below form two “streams,” the left “stream” moving from top to bottom of the image (essentially “toward” the viewer) and the right “stream” moving from bottom to top, “away” from the viewer.

Source: stock.xchng

Although this is an entirely static image, movement is implied, and relationships immediately form.

In our designs, elements that “move” with one another relate to one another, while elements that resist that common movement or move in a different direction, do not relate.

This is a powerful, primal sensory cue among humans. Just think of the drivers’ reactions when a car comes down the lane in the opposite direction from everyone else. Consternation and chaos ensue within moments.

Common Fate in Dropdown Menus

Drop-down and sliding menus such as the one from RedBrick Health shown below — especially the ones that “slide” as opposed to just appearing in the blink of an eye — appeal to the “common fate” principle.

This main menu item has a slide-out sub-menu, so do the others. therefore the two items are related in our minds.

Common Fate in Tooltips

Tooltips also form an important informational relationship. If your tooltips always contain secondary but pertinent information, it won’t take long for a site user to put together — subconsciously — the relationship between moving/hovering the cursor and bringing up new information. As Rutledge notes, “[p]ointer-plus-information all moving together is a useful association.”

Counter-Example of Common Fate

This doesn’t just apply to moving elements, but also the orientation of designs. In my earlier days, I designed a site with two background color gradients inadvertently “fighting” with one another. The header gradient went from light to dark, left to right; the navigation bar immediately underneath went from light to dark, top to bottom. Individually, they worked well enough, but together, they clashed.

The horizontal “movement” of the header gradient didn’t go well with the vertical “movement” of the bottom gradient.

The “movement” of the two gradients flow against one another. The effect violates feng shui and “common fate” both.

Are there design elements in your work that fight instead of flow together?

Closure

Closure means that we “close” objects that are themselves not complete; not only completing the figure in our perception, but perceiving the figure as having an extra element of aesthetic design; we look for a simple, recognizable pattern.

Take a look at the old IBM logo.

You recognize the letters as an I, a B, and an M, no problem there.

But they aren’t letters at all; the whole thing is a compilation of bright blue horizontal lines arranged to create the perception of a set of letters.

Does it put you in mind of the old ASCII art that was so popular during the 70s and 80s? It does me.

Here’s a 1975 rendition of a Spanish conquistador, created by using punched cards and reprinted in a 1978 Dominican newspaper:

Source: Wikipedia.

One of my favorite examples of closure is depicted on the cover of Paul Thagard’s book called Coherence in Thought and Action.

It’s a nifty three-dimensional cube hiding in among the “spotlights” of lighter red. They are, in reality, 24 dissimilar red shapes on a darker red background. Our perception fills in the blanks.

Another example hit the newspapers in the late 1990s, when the “Face on Mars”stirred the public imagination. Some people were put in mind of the monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey, wondering if aliens hadn’t left us some cyclopean artifact for our use if we could just find a way to get to it, while others thought about War of the Worldsand stockpiled their bunkers with ammunition and MREs.

Source: Wikipedia.

A closer look proved the “Face” was just a landform. Guess we didn’t need all those MREs after all.

Pulling It Together

This article is just a quick look at the principles of gestalt as they apply to design. There is far, far more to the topic than can be addressed here. Do remember, though, that we introduced the concept of “totality” in the beginning of the article. Mindful of that concept, think back over the 6 principles we delineated.

None of them stood apart from the other; each one employed other principles as well as standing on its own.

For example, Nicholls’s circular menu depended as much on the laws of similarity and symmetry as that of proximity. Make the icons dramatically different from one another, for example, and the menu loses much of its functionality and aesthetic appeal.

Same with the “triangle that isn’t there” — it depends as much on the principle of closure as it does on figure-ground.

The RedBrick Health menu featured in this article not only employs the principle of “common fate” in its drop-down, but also the principle of similarity in its color choices.

None of these principles stands alone, and all of them function “in totality” with one another.

The concepts work with one another to achieve a totality of function, elegance, and aesthetic appeal.

Some of the best designers in the world know nothing of gestalt principles. They use them intuitively; when designs look and feel right, usually they incorporate gestalt principles whether the designers knows the terminology or not.

Gestalt principles aren’t artificial constructs that people have concocted to apply to design; they are attempts to describe and verbalize how we naturally perceive things.

It’s arguable that in at least some sense, “design talent” is an ability to naturally — and perhaps even unconsciously — understand how human perception works, and how to create designs for websites, paintings, or wedding dresses that are artistically beautiful and functionally efficient by appealing to it.

It doesn’t matter if you use these principles by instinct or by deliberation; what matters is how they can help you make better designs.

Sources and Further Reading

About the Author

Michael Tuck is an educator, writer, and freelance web designer. He serves as an advisor to the Web Design forum on SitePoint. When he isn’t teaching or designing sites, he is doing research for the History Commons. You can contact him through his website, Black Max Web Design.

LinkedIn's Road to IPO - Infographic

itsadifferent — Mon, 23 May 2011 11:49:55 -0400

via 7.mshcdn.com

Launching Effectively: Just Launch It - A must read for all Startup Enthusiasts

itsadifferent — Wed, 18 May 2011 16:36:36 -0400

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Jesse Maddox, the Founder & CEO of TripLingo. TripLingo creates a customized experience for learning languages, particularly for travelers. You can follow Jesse on twitter at @onwardly and @TripLingo. TripLingo was one of the first LaunchRock users. This is Part 3 of 3. Part 1 discussed ways to structure your launch, and Part 2 covered page content.

Lesson #8: Twitter sharing generates more views, but FB more signups

We’re not the first to realize this, but sharing on Twitter leads to lots of clicks at a much lower conversion rate. Sharing on FB led to fewer clicks but many more signups. The reason for this seems obvious- people trust recommendations from their friends (Facebook) more than they do “strangers” on Twitter. So what does this mean for you? I suggest using different copy for the Twitter and Facebook share buttons.

Facebook is for personal relationships, so emphasize how the person thinks your product is cool (e.g. “Just signed up for an awesome new tool for travelers. Check out TripLingo.com to sign up for beta access (plus you can win a prize)!”

Twitter, on the other hand, revolves around common interests. Here, you’ll want something that appeals to your target markets interests (e.g. “Awesome new website for travelers, check it out if you love travel!”)

I’m no expert in this area, so I’d love to hear others’ comments on how to differentiate Facebook and Twitter content!

Lesson #9: Test the page before you blast your friends

This was just a dumb mistake that we made. Before we’d really done any proper testing to see what people thought of the page, we jumped the gun in our excitement and started sending it out to friends.

The problem was twofold: 1) the page wasn’t optimized, and 2) your friends are potentially your best bet of getting the snowball effect started. That is, people who know you personally are the ones most likely to send it out to all of their friends.

That’s the initial launch you need to get the friends of your friends to sign up. If your page isn’t optimized beforehand, you’ll blow your biggest chance at going viral. Test before you send it out to all of your friends.

Which brings me to…

Lesson #10: Get it started by reaching out to your friends on a personal level

Speaking of blasting your friends, don’t just draft a short email and beg them. For one, they’re your friends and you want to treat them as such. Second, you’re asking them to put their own reputation on the line by publicly telling their friends. Many people are very conscious about this, some aren’t. But you should understand that in some sense they are putting their reputation on the line by talking about you.

When reaching out to your friends, tell them your story, what you’ve been up to, what your product does, and why you need their help. Be sure to give them clear steps of action. DON’T pressure them. If they want to help they will, if not there’s no point making them feel bad.

Giving them clear steps of action is really important. You don’t want to just say “help me!”, you have to tell them exactly how they can help you. Here’s an example from TripLingo, where I told my friends how they can help at the end of the email:

If you feel so inclined, I could really use your help in 2 ways:

Sign up to hear about our launch at TripLingo.com . (We’re giving away $1K towards a flight anywhere in the world, so you could actually get something)

Post a link to TripLingo on Facebook and Twitter (we provide links on the homepage)

Lesson #11: Use Google Analytics and measure changes you make in terms of hits and signups

Being thorough with your metrics from the beginning is really important. Even if your marketing prowess is God’s gift to mankind, you and your team’s opinion is just a small data set. Combining this idea with the idea that you should rapidly iterate based on feedback, its important to test and monitor the performance of your landing page as you iterate. Luckily, LaunchRock makes this easy. Install Google Analytics from Day 1, and keep note of when you make changes to the page. You can then monitor conversion rates and figure out what’s working and what’s not working.

On a related note, the key number you’re looking at is the “Viral Coefficient”. The viral coefficient answers one question: “For every person referred to your site, how many people do they refer?” If each person referred to your site refers one other person, then your Viral Coefficient is 1. You’ll have growth but it will be flat. If its above 1, then you’ll experience exponential growth (1 person refers 2 who refer 4 who refer 8…). Less than 1, and referrals will gradually sink until they disappear completely.

Your Turn

I hope the above and the previous posts have helped you think more clearly about how you approach and execute on your launch page. With the entrance of tools like LaunchRock and the generally explosive pace of innovation on the web in general, there is much change afoot. In addition, every product/company is different, and you’ll need to view each piece of input through the lens of the specific problem and market you’re addressing. But I hope this helps, and I’d love to hear any feedback in the comments!

via blog.launchrock.com

Expect important info such as: What kind of “Copy” to use for Twitter vs Facebook and more importantly “Why?”

Living in SF Means... - The Bold Italic - San Francisco

itsadifferent — Wed, 18 May 2011 15:55:06 -0400

Living in San Francisco means coming over the Bay Bridge and having your heart race a little when you see the city’s skyline.

Crossing the Golden Gate and smiling at the way the fog sits right on top of it. Snaking up the 101 and Candlestick Park being the greeting that tells you you’re almost home. It means visiting Middle America and being thought of as some kind of socialist gay hippie. It means traveling Europe and being considered one of the enlightened Americans. It means missing burritos, missing pho, missing Tapatio. It means missing Dolores Park, missing farmers’ markets, missing the ability to walk wherever you need to go. It means flying back from two and a half months in South America and getting a little teary-eyed watching Doctor Doolittle , just because it’s set in San Francisco.

via thebolditalic.com

So True!

Infographic: Is It Time To Scale Back on Social Networking?

itsadifferent — Wed, 18 May 2011 13:46:23 -0400

via good.is

Infographic | Understanding What's Behind the Fair Trade Label (Raw Image)

itsadifferent — Wed, 18 May 2011 13:44:32 -0400

via awesome.good.is

Infographic | Educating the Workforce of the Future (Raw Image)

itsadifferent — Wed, 18 May 2011 13:42:19 -0400

via awesome.good.is

That's Version ∞. First launch version 0.1.

itsadifferent — Mon, 16 May 2011 15:11:07 -0400

Inspiration is like milk. It expires! - SebastianMarshall.com

This is absolutely true and one that pushes me to look for inspiration very frequently on a multitude of things. Especially while working on a startup there are a gazillion things that can boost you and equal or more gazillion things that can bring you down. The best remedy for this is inspiration. As I started this week and was trying to learn about how to improve our landing page & launch strategy (yes we did launch on Apr 17 @ Startup Weekend San Jose,but are re-launching soon :)) I ended up at Derek Sivers’ amazing blog post and wanted to repost it here for anyone and everyone looking for inspiration in general and startup inspiration in particular.

Do visit Derek’s Blog @ sivers.org, catch the original post here -> http://sivers.org/infinity

Version ∞

I hear lots of business plans.

Most of them are trying to do a ton of things.

EXAMPLE: “It’s a social networking e-commerce portal for live music, where everyone creates a profile to enter all their dates, if they’re a musician or venue, or their available dates if they’re a music fan. Then we connect the fans with artists’ dates. Then we can sell the tickets for the events, and give a digital download preview of the music. After the show, the artist uploads the video from the night, and people can purchase the video of the show they were at, and connect with other people who attended that same show to create tribes of people, who will recommend other music you may like if you like that. Oh and it will have a dating component, and real-time chat.”

(It sounds like I’m exaggerating but this is unfortunately a very typical example.)

I have to say, “OK. You know software version numbers? Mac OS version 10.4? 10.5? What you just described is version infinity. That’s everything it will ever do in the future. First focus on launching version 0.1.”

What’s the one crucial part of that giant plan? What’s the one killer feature that nobody else is doing? Get it launched with just that. Then add the rest later.

The Hedgehog Concept

The book “Good to Great” studied hundreds of companies that started out as good, then at some point in their history became great.

They found that all of these companies had the “Hedgehog Concept”:focusing on the one thing they do best, and letting go of the rest.

(A fox is smart, with many tricks. A hedgehog only knows one trick: curl into a ball with its spikes out. But the fox’s many tricks are no match for the hedgehog’s one. A fox can’t eat a hedgehog. Many companies are trying to be the fox. The book says the winners are like the hedgehog.)

Got a complex business idea? Break it down into its ingredients, and let the specialists do what they do best.

Video aspect? Let YouTube handle that part. E-Commerce aspect? Use Amazon’s system. Payments? PayPal. Social networking? Facebook.

Don’t reinvent any of these wheels. Focus on what’s left - what hasn’t been done.

Specialize at that one thing, and become that go-to company that nobody can beat in your niche.

What are the UX/UI considerations for expanding text fields in iOS/Android app design?

itsadifferent — Sat, 14 May 2011 07:36:59 -0400

Hello!

As mentioned in my previous blog post, I have taken up the role of UX Designer/Developer for Menoovr to fill the Gap and keep the momentum going.

Since then I have discovered and rediscovered the UI/UX Designer in me and while doing so run into umpteen problems/roadblocks.

Here’s the newest one -

The following question was raised by me on Quora (http://qr.ae/EvSn) :

What are the background graphic/s considerations for expanding text fields in iPhone applications?

I have created background UI Assets for text fields but there is a good chance that the height might not be sufficient for lengthy text inputs even on wrapping them.

It would be great if you could point me in the right direction to pre-emptively resolve this problem and incorporate the advice to all my UI Assets.

I look forward to your response.

Cheers,

Akshay

Founder/Interim UX Designer, Menoovr

Menoovr.com, blog.menoovr.com, aktionitems.com

@menoovr, @chillaxsingh

5622GOMNVR

http://menoovr.wufoo.com/forms/vip-feedback-machine/

Why We Need Storytellers at the Heart of Product Development?

itsadifferent — Mon, 09 May 2011 19:05:13 -0400

I started this week thinking about UX as I spent almost 35 hours this weekend thinking & re-thinking our product design until my brains went numb. Having taken the role of iterim UX Ninja (more a Grass Hopper for now) to avoid additional costs for our Boot Strapped Startup, this has become a key component of my day (& night) living in a de ja vu of “How will we mesmerize our users?”. As a kid I spent most of my time drawing, painting, caricaturing or simply origami. Till the age of 16 I was hyper actively indulged in art but then I cut loose. Although, I did continue to doodle here and there and flaunt my skills in Biology Courses it was like hearsay. Even with college, where I got my hands on shiny new computers (initially at school and later at home) where I went back to my roots even without tools like Photoshop or Editors like Dream Weaver, continuing to create art using just MS Paint & word. When Copy writing became a hobby as I used witty Ad Lingo in my presentations, reports and poster designs it still did not have the same feeling as I did when I was a kid. But now it’s back & I ‘m Luvin It! Celebrating this feeling I ran into this article and wanted to share it with you. Relive your creative edge! Have a great week ahead!

The original article can be found here and was written by SARAH DOODY .

There’s an interesting question on Quora right now:

If you had to pick between an amazing product designer or an amazing engineer to build a new company around, which would you pick and why?

This question reflects a painful problem that is common at both small startups and large corporate organizations. Far too often, teams focus on execution before defining the product opportunity and unique value proposition. The result is a familiar set of symptoms including scope creep, missed deadlines, overspent budgets, frustrated teams and, ultimately, confused users. The root cause of these symptoms is the fact that execution focuses on the how and what of a product. But in a world where consumers are inundated with choices, products that want to be noticed and adopted must be rooted in the why.

A product is more than an idea, it’s more than a website, and it’s more than a transaction or list of functionalities. A product should provide an experience or service that adds value to someone’s life through fulfilling a need or satisfying a desire. The ultimate question then becomes: who identifies that value? After the executive or stakeholder identifies the initial idea, who in the organization ensures that the product and experience deliver value to the user? Maybe it isn’t the product manager, marketer, technologist, or designer; perhaps what we need is a new role: the product storyteller.

Who are the product storytellers? Part matchmaker, marketer, technologist, and artist, the product storytellers ask questions, find answers, and figure out how to distill a vision or idea into a product story. They develop a plot, identify the people, and shape the product around the specific values it should offer consumers. Product storytellers think about the whole, and they see the big picture. But they also can go deep because they understand that the product’s true value lies in the details of its interactions and every touchpoint that a consumer has with it.

The first goal of a product storyteller is to facilitate collaboration and co-creation. Today, many companies have their product and marketing groups disconnected from each other. Marketing decisions are often made at the executive level—much higher than where product decisions are made. The result is that marketing tells one story, and the product tells a different story. In the end, consumers are left to put together the conflicting messages and try to determine why they should engage with the product. A product storyteller should be positioned in the company to help break down the walls between all groups, facilitate the development of a single story, foster collaboration between groups, and ensure that every interaction a consumer has with a product or brand maps back to that story.

Not only do product storytellers identify the intended product value, they also share and evangelize this story throughout their organizations. This is important because it ensures that the entire team understands the why behind what they are doing. A common understanding of the product story allows a team to incubate a shared vision. This vision turns into passion, and people with both passion and vision are more likely to produce products that others want to use. Without a firm understanding of the why, the team risks becoming task focused, losing sight of the big picture, and deflating any sense of empowerment or excitement that once existed. When this happens, consumers and the team feel the effects. Consumers experience a disconnected product and message and, as a result, don’t have a clear perception of its value. Organizations and teams feel the effects through slow, little, or no product traction with consumers.

If one of the primary factors in consumer arousal, interest, and adoption of new products is the ability of the product to answer the question, “Why would I use this?” then why do so many teams either let execution come before defining the product value or allow multiple groups to do this independently? The answer is simple: the process of identifying a product opportunity and value statement is not easy and the skillset required is still coming of age.

In his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule The Future, Daniel Pink explains that we’re in the “Conceptual Age” and that skills that were revered in the Industrial Age and Information Age are not as integral to where we are as a society today. Pink writes:

We’ve progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we’re progressing yet again—to a society of creators and empathizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers. We’ve moved from an economy built on people’s backs to an economy built on people’s left-brains to what is emerging today: an economy and society built more and more on people’s right-brains.

Who are the right-brain thinkers? Through years of research, Pink has identified six aptitudes for the Conceptual Age: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. Most relevant to us is the aptitude of story. Crafting stories is not about assembling facts. Instead, according to Pink, people who understand story have “the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.” The impact to story in business is that, “like design, it is becoming a key way for individuals and entrepreneurs to distinguish their goods and services in a crowded marketplace.” If you want your product to be heard by consumers, it must be rooted in a story that consumers can emotionally connect with.

The challenge today is that we face a shortage of storytellers because our current organizational structures and cultures are not optimized for the activities involved in storytelling. First, as I’ve already discussed, ownership of product value is not clearly defined and instead is distributed across or shared between teams. The result is a series of communication disconnects that produce a product experience and message that is not in line with the original vision—like a childhood game of “Telephone.” But the second, and more interesting, reason for the shortage of storytellers is that the individuals who may have the skills to develop the story are not in the right environments.

Marty Cagan, a product management and product strategy expert, addresses this issue in his book Inspired: How To Create Products That Customers Love. Cagan notes that there are two key responsibilities of the product manager: “assess product opportunities, and define the product to be built.” However, he asserts that product managers often become “consumed in the details and pressures of producing detailed specs rather than looking at the market opportunity and discovering a winning strategy and roadmap.” The reason for this is that product management is often placed within the engineering organization. Ultimately, an engineering organization is focused on execution and that culture is not optimized for the process of discovery, curiosity, and play, all of which are fundamental to those who engage in storytelling.

Product storytellers should be at the intersection of product, marketing, and technology to help ensure that what’s being created clearly maps back to a product story that identifies the plot, people, and perceived value to the consumer. Before a technologist writes a line of code, or a marketer writes a line of copy, or a designer creates a single wireframe or design, you have to establish the story that your product is going to tell.

The role of a product storyteller is not meant to take away from the founder, executive, marketer, designer, or technologist. As well, the development of product strategy and vision shouldn’t be contained in a silo belonging to the product storyteller. But someone does need to own it. Now more than ever, cross-role collaboration is critical to product conception, incubation, and development. The product storyteller synthesizes rather than analyzes, sees the big picture rather than becoming stuck in the details, and ensures that all product interactions and touchpoints form a cohesive and value-based consumer experience.

So whether you are at a small start up or a large organization, whether you are a founder, executive, technologist, designer, manager, or marketer, ask yourself this: do you know your product’s story? And perhaps more importantly, who creates your product story?

Mobile Marketing - The Shizzle!

itsadifferent — Mon, 02 May 2011 20:19:54 -0400

« April Fools 2011 On The Web infographic | Main | Do You Need a Social Media Detox? [infographic] »

Friday
Apr012011

Microsoft’s Growth of Mobile Marketing

Friday, April 1, 2011 at 6:00AM

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I love to see the big companies experimenting with new media like infographics! The Growth of Mobile Marketing and Tagging was published by Microsoft Tag last week, and explores the data behind mobile devices.

Sure, it seems like everyone’s got a cell phone – but what are the hard numbers? How many people have smart phones, and what demographic is the most active group in mobile socialization? (Surprise — it’s actually not teenagers!) Find out the statistics on the present (and future!) of mobile marketing in our new infographic

They also broke the graphics down into individual pieces (roughly) and created a presentation version for anyone that wants to use it on SlideShare:

The growth of mobile marketing and tagging
View more presentations from Microsoft Tag

Thanks Elliott for send me a link!

Update on Friday, April 1, 2011 at 11:04AM by
Randy

The designer was Andrew Martinolich from http://www.distilled.co.uk

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Reader Comments (5)

Very interesting stuff! One particular decision of the artist jumped out at me—the decision to depict “Women aged 35 to 54” as a woman and a child. It doesn’t say “Mothers aged 35 to 54,” but it implies that women and mothers are one and the same, even though there are plenty of childless women in that demographic. I seriously doubt that if the demographic in question was “Men aged 35 to 54” there would have been a picture of a man with a child. I just find it interesting that the artist chose this particular depiction for that demographic.

April 1, 2011 |
Jessica

Is it just me or does that first pie chart add to 127%? What a horrible misuse of a pie chart!
Some other strange things:
1) I don’t think I like using clocks like pie charts.
2) I don’t think anyone uses their mobile phone for “dining” - perhaps to locate places to eat or make reservations…
3) Trying to make a bar chart out of the Facebook “f” gets an “F” for a grade from me.

April 4, 2011 |
Anti-Pie Chart

@anti-pie-chart
in the first pie chart, the 27% is a subset of those mobiles that are sms enabled. in fact, all of smartphones are sms enabled. you can see the frame of the same colour.

April 6, 2011 |
ebbre

nice post , well mobile marketing is the better way to gain and earn profit ,it is basically use of the mobile medium as a means of marketing communication.

April 9, 2011 |
Sara Williams

As marketers we have to understand these new types of consumers and how best to reach them, TXTimpact mobile marketing provides a business with his or her cell phone number in exchange for special offers or alerts delivered via text message. http://www.txtimpact.com

April 15, 2011 |
mobile marketing

via coolinfographics.com

You Are Solving The Wrong Problem

itsadifferent — Mon, 02 May 2011 14:31:52 -0400

My first blog post for the Month of May came to me while I was in search of some inspiration to stay calm and composed and let the Agile Way do its thing for our efforts at Menoovr.

When I decided to pursue menoovr as a business after receiving raving fan reviews at Startup Weekend San Jose 2011 that ended on Apr 17,2011 met with my friends at Karthavya and discussed the project. As members of a fraternity that believes in Good Customer Service and having experience in Customer Expectation Management in India, they duly asked me when does this need to be completed by.

I had the option of telling my team that we needed to be “done” by this date and over a course of time see that deliverable missed and/or frustration/friction fly around, but I didn’t do that as I have but many a times in my career seen it happen and decided to pursue the Agile way.

The agile way or to be more precise the SCRUM way says cut a slack of 40% during iteration one and 20% at iteration two allowing for learning curves and infrastructure setup especially when working with very new technologies. But to do that for an aggressive person like me involves some learning curve. When you are on such a learning curve you sometimes need inspiration. This one is mine, I hope it inspires you too.

The blog post is “as is” from the article “You Are Solving The Wrong Problem” by Aza Raskin posted on UX Magaznine. To view it at UX Magazine’s web site please click here.

There is some problem you are trying to solve. In your life, at work, in a design. You are probably solving the wrong problem. Paul MacCready, considered to be one of the best mechanical engineers of the 20th century, said it best: “The problem is we don’t understand the problem.”

Story time.

It’s 1959, a time of change. Disney releases their seminal film Sleeping Beauty, Fidel Castro becomes the premier of Cuba, and Eisenhower makes Hawaii an official state. That year, a British industry magnate by the name ofHenry Kremer has a vision that leaves a haunting question: Can an airplane fly powered only by the pilot’s body power? Like Da Vinci, Kremer believed it was possible and decided to push his dream into reality. He offered the staggering sum of £50,000 for the first person to build a plane that could fly a figure eight around two markers one half-mile apart. Further, he offered £100,000 for the first person to fly across the channel. In modern US dollars, that’s the equivalent of $1.3 million and $2.5 million. It was the X-Prize of its day.

^{Paul MacCready holding a “Speed Ring,” a device he invented for competitive glider flying.}

A decade went by. Dozens of teams tried and failed to build an airplane that could meet the requirements. It looked impossible. Another decade threatened to go by before our hero, MacCready, decided to get involved. He looked at the problem, how the existing solutions failed, and how people iterated their airplanes. He came to the startling realization that people were solving the wrong problem. “The problem is,” he said, “that we don’t understand the problem.”

MacCready’s insight was that everyone working on solving human-powered flight would spend upwards of a year building an airplane on conjecture and theory without the grounding of empirical tests. Triumphantly, they’d complete their plane and wheel it out for a test flight. Minutes latter, a years worth of work would smash into the ground. Even in successful flights, a couple hundred meters latter the flight would end with the pilot physically exhausted. With that single new data point, the team would work for another year to rebuild, retest, relearn. Progress was slow for obvious reasons, but that was to be expected in pursuit of such a difficult vision. That’s just how it was.

The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours not months. And he did. He built a plane with Mylar, aluminum tubing, and wire.

The first airplane didn’t work. It was too flimsy. But, because the problem he set out to solve was creating a plane he could fix in hours, he was able to quickly iterate. Sometimes he would fly three or four different planes in a single day. The rebuild, retest, relearn cycle went from months and years to hours and days.

Eighteen years had passed since Henry Kremer opened his wallet for his vision. Nobody could turn that vision into an airplane. Paul MacCready got involved and changed the understanding of the problem to be solved. Half a year later later, MacCready’s Gossamer Condor flew 2,172 meters to win the prize. A bit over a year after that, the Gossamer Albatross flew across the channel.

What’s the take-away? When you are solving a difficult problem re-ask the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.

The Salesman

itsadifferent — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 08:47:18 -0400

AK to Mom: What’s the fondest Childhood memory you have of me?

Mom: Selling Idlis at 2.5 yrs of age! It was like you were born for it, I gave you idli’s and before I could tell you what to do you were on the stage pitching and selling!

My Favorite Article of the Week - Subject: Airbnb by Paul Graham

itsadifferent — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 07:02:05 -0400

Revenue, Personified - An Excellent Article on tuning to the "Right User Group"

itsadifferent — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:46:17 -0400

In this excellent article from Cindy Alvarez (Cindyalvarez.com) Cindy explains why it’s not just important to ask what %age of your visitors are getting converted to customers but to which bucket do they belong and using the data to tune your landing pages to attract more from that group.

Read on and let me know if any of you have implemented this or have a different opinion :)

Revenue seems like the one part of the AARRR metrics that shouldn’t need explaining. More money = better, right? It hardly takes a rocket scientist to know that.

But as you’ve probably figured out by now, my personal bias is towards starting with metrics where you can immediately translate them into a natural-language statement (“this means X customer type is more likely to pay us”).

So instead of talking about customer lifetime value or average revenue per user, I’m going to talk about revenue in terms of two simple questions you should be asking to start with:

What percentage of Activated customers have given us money, even once?
What types of customers were more likely to give us money?

These are both fairly short-term questions, but what I like about them is that they can immediately narrow where you should focus on improving next.

(Everyone ought to be improving their customer lifetime value, but that’s about as vague as your New Year’s Resolution to lose 10 pounds. And about as likely to succeed, unless you break it down.)

So let’s look at some examples.

What percentage of Activated customers have given us money, even once?

Let’s look at fake-Amazon.com:

You’d have defined Activated customers as the people who were had reached the potential to get value — in this case, they found a product that was interesting enough for them to view in detail. This is your potential pool from which to extract Revenues.

How many of those people give you money?

In this example, 2.2% of your potential pool is giving you money. So now the obvious question is, how can I get more of this potential pool of pre-qualified, full-of-intent, people to give us money?

I’d expect that it’s quite common for someone to view a product and not proceed with purchase — you could be just browsing, or perhaps you were just curious about that electronic toenail polisher. But here I’d hone in on the big dropoff between “Added to Cart” and “Completed Purchase” — and try to figure out why via customer interviews, user testing, or a KISSinsights survey.

If I could win back just 5% of those “Added to Cart” people, that’s more than 150 additional purchases. Assuming a $20 average sale, that’s more than $3,000 additional revenue per day, and the solution is probably just fixing something that you should’ve fixed anyways.

For a second example, let’s look at fake-Netflix.com:

This would probably signal to me that my focus belongs on getting more Acquired users, versus trying to improve upon either of these steps.

What types of customers were more likely to give us money?

Most of us are targeting more than one type of customer. I strongly suggest collecting that information — either via the registration form, or some required post-signup configuration — and using it to confirm where your dollars are coming from.

In this example, suppose you were selling a website service, and asked your customers what type of site they maintained:

The overall percentage of upgraders — 2.8% is interesting — but a lot less interesting than the fact that people running e-commerce sites are dramatically more likely to pay you than other types of customers.

This tells me that, rather than trying to create a “generic” marketing homepage that appeals to all customers, you should try tailoring your marketing site to specifically appeal to e-commerce customers.

Once you’ve experimented and improved some of the more obvious areas, you’ll feel a lot more comfortable tackling the more complex “lifecycle” metrics (and these can only help those, as well).

Popularity: 100% [?]

You should add this blog to your RSS feed.

Trackback: http://www.cindyalvarez.com/data-driven/revenue-personified/trackback/—>

5 Simple Tips To Help You Increase User Sign Ups

itsadifferent — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 13:23:38 -0400

via blog.kissmetrics.com

KISSmetrics as always providing great insight and value posts for the startup community just like it’s founder (@hnshah. hitenism.com).

Food!Drink!Dishoom

itsadifferent — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:48:11 -0400

via dishoom.com

As a foodie I am always on the look out for great places to try out around the globe and on most occasions I am drawn to websites that have this info. But this is the first time I was drawn to a restaurant site for its great design that is as cool as the unique dishes they have listed. Next time I am in Bombay (Mumbai for some) I am definitely going to Bombay Cafe….firstly to congratulate the team on Dishoom and then try out their awesome menu :D

How do colours affect purchases?

itsadifferent — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:14:46 -0400

via litmanlive.me