Agility and the User Experience

It’s easy to think of a web site in terms of the teams who participate in the project: content, design, information architecture, hardware, platform, application development. But it’s the user who ties all the parts together: the user experience is the end-product of a web application.

This is why people freak out about user experience design, or UxD, these days. We can define and justify and normalize everything we do during the course of a web project by referring to the user experience, and we can keep this experience in mind as a theoretical model to help us make decisions along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Build what you need, not what you want

I met a writer the other night who has spent months freelancing for a prominent national magazine.  The magazine had enjoyed a reasonably popular web audience, including a community of frequent posters to its bulletin board.  The community was mostly middle-aged, middle-American women who used the magazine’s online space to chat and bring up issues that were loosely related to the magazine’s content.

It was an open question how best to take advantage of this community to benefit the magazine.  But instead of starting with obvious questions — Who are these users? What do they care about?  How can we increase their enthusiasm for our brand? — someone high up in the magazine’s interactive food chain had a classic technological panic. Read the rest of this entry »

The Web is Expensive

It’s easy to forget that we work in a new and strange industry.  We surround ourselves with ourselves, so we take the nature of our product for granted.  But for the majority of web users, we create virtual products — they take up no space; their size, complexity, and location are indeterminate; they appear and disappear from the screen in an instant.  So how to value their worth?

Read the rest of this entry »

Dangerous Phrases: “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”

Now, we at Helen Marie think the web is very cool. That’s why we’re in this business.  We get excited on a daily basis about all manner of new design and interface ideas and technology.  (Personally, I discover a new way to love jQuery almost every day, and that’s exciting.)  It’s this constant fascination that energizes each one of our projects, and that we hope to find reflected in our clients.

Part of our job is to focus this enthusiasm into disciplined decisions about how best to serve a particular client and a particular project.  We have a lot of healthy arguments that start with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”  The question is often followed by, “I agree, but we shouldn’t do that in this case because….”  Or, just as often: “That’s great — but let’s consider that for phase 2.”

We go through this in order to avoid three big pitfalls: building more than the client needs or can immediately use, rejecting new approaches or techniques because we’re unfamiliar, and committing to unreliable approaches or techniques because the coolness factor affects our judgment.  We wrestle with these issues so you don’t have to.

Read the rest of this entry »

Buddy, You Need an Agent

Let’s say you enter the real estate market as a first-time buyer.  The process at first seems to be a matter of identifying your budget and wish list (must: open kitchen; maybe: wood-fired brick oven), getting pre-qualified for a mortgage, looking at listings, pursuing your favorites, making an offer, etc.  As you start, though, you realize that with all this money at stake, so many variables in the process, and nobody interested in getting you the best deal, you could use an advocate on your side — a seasoned hand who can help guide you past serious mistakes, act as a sounding board to your evolving ideas, and help you optimize negotiations with the selling agent.

This is a broker.  The good ones are worth their weight in gold (especially the smaller good ones).  You can get them to clear an enormous amount of brush for you — weeding out the bad listings, giving you a sales history of any property on the market, speaking the secret language of brokers with the other side.  They save you time and ultimately money.

It occurred to us at Helen Marie, after many years of working with clients of all stripes and sizes, that this is desperately needed in the design and interactive industry: a kind of creative broker.  Clients often need to commit large amounts of funding, human capital, and time to a project with an outside agency. Ironically, while this is the stage where they most need expertise, they’re often unaware of, or resistant to, the option to bring in an outside specialist right from the beginning.  We want to change this.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dangerous Phrases: “I Know a Guy”

This dangerous phrase occurs mostly in the world of development, not in design (although there is a variation: “My friend is a designer”).  It could be a woman, of course, but in the world of IT and web development, you’re usually dealing with men.  This person will have some kind of experience with the web, or web servers, or some technology you associate with the web.  He may configure your email server.  He may be a friend who once had a web site of his own.

In any case, your (limited, possibly anecdotal) understanding of this person’s skills may lead you to think, “I don’t need an overpriced agency to design and build our site.  We’ll just get him to do it.  We know him, we trust him, we already pay him….”  You might also think, “Let’s keep the risk low this first time around by keeping the investment low.  If we need to, we can hire specialists to clean this up later.”

Read the rest of this entry »