rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic
229,Sketching to Communicate,"As a web designer I’ve always felt that I’d somehow cheated the system, having been absent on the day God handed out the ability to draw. I didn’t study fine art, I don’t have a natural talent to effortlessly knock out a realistic bowl of fruit beside a water jug, and yet somehow I’ve still managed to blag my way this far. I’m sure many of you may feel the same.

I had no intention of becoming an artist, but to have enough skill to convey an idea in a drawing would be useful. Instead, my inadequate instrument would doodle drunkenly across the page leaving a web of unintelligible paths instead of the refined illustration I’d seen in my mind’s eye. This – and the natural scrawl of my handwriting – is fine (if somewhat frustrating) when it’s for my eyes only but, when sketching to communicate a concept to a client, such amateur art would be offered with a sense of embarrassment. So when I had the opportunity to take part in some sketching classes whilst at Clearleft I jumped at the chance.

Why sketch?

In UX workshops early on in a project’s life, sketching is a useful and efficient way to convey and record ideas. It’s disposable and inexpensive, but needn’t look amateur. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a well executed sketch of how you’ll combine funny YouTube videos with elephants to make Lolephants.com could be worth millions in venture capital. Actually, that’s not bad… ;-)

Although (as you will see) the basics of sketching are easy to master, the kudos you will receive from clients for being a ‘proper designer’ makes it worthwhile!

Where to begin?

Start by not buying yourself a sketch pad. If you were the type of child who ripped the first page out of a school exercise book and started again if you made even a tiny mistake (you’re not alone!), Wreck This Journal may offer a helping hand. Practicing on plain A4 paper instead of any ‘special’ notepad will make the process a whole lot easier, no matter how deliciously edible those Moleskines look.

Do buy yourself a black fine-liner pen and a set of grey Pro Markers for shading. These pens are unlike any you will have used before, and look like blended watercolours once the ink is dry. Although multiple strokes won’t create unsightly blotches of heavy ink on the page, they will go right through your top sheet so always remember to keep a rough sheet in the second position as an ink blotter.

 photo by Tom Harrison

Don’t buy pencils to sketch with, as they lack the confidence afforded by the heavy black ink strokes of marker pens and fine-liners.

If you’re going to be sketching with clients then invest in some black markers and larger sheets of paper. At the risk of sounding like a stationery brand whore, Sharpies are ideal, and these comedy-sized Post-Its do the job far better than cheaper, less sticky alternatives. Although they’re thicker than most standard paper, be sure to double-layer them if you’re writing on them on a wall, unless you fancy a weekend redecorating your client’s swanky boardroom.

The best way to build confidence and improve your sketching technique is, obviously, to practise. Reading this article will be of no help unless you repeat the following examples several times each. Go grab a pen and some paper now, and notice how you improve within even a short period of time.

Sketching web UI

Most elements of any website can be drawn as a combination of geometric shapes.

 photo by Nathanael Boehm

Circles

To draw a circle, get in position and start by resting your hand on the page and making the circular motion a few times without putting pen to paper. As you lower your pen whilst continuing the motion, you should notice the resulting shape is more regular than it otherwise would have been.

Squares and rectangles

Draw one pair of parallel lines first, followed by the others to complete the shapes. Slightly overlap the ends of the lines to make corners feel more solid than if you were to leave gaps. If you’re drawing a container, always draw the contents first, that way it won’t be a squash to fit them in. If you’re drawing a grid (of thumbnails, for instance), draw all parallel lines first as a series of long dashes to help keep line lengths and angles consistent.



Shadows

To lift elements from the page for emphasis, add a subtle shadow with a grey marker. For the most convincing look, assume the light source to be at the top left of the page – the shadow should simply be a thick grey line along the bottom and up the right edge of your shape. If the shape is irregular, the shadow should follow its outline. This is a good way to emphasise featured items, speech bubbles, form buttons, and so on.



Sketching ideas

Arrows

Use arrows to show steps in a process or direction of movement. Giving shadows a 3-D feel, or adding a single colour, will help separate them from the rest of the sketch.



Faces

Start by drawing the circle. The direction of the nose (merely a point) indicates the direction of the person’s gaze. The eyes and mouth show emotion: more open and curvy for happy thoughts; more closed and jagged for angry thoughts. Try out a few shapes and see what emotions they convey.



People

Remember, we’re aiming for communication rather than realism here. A stick man would be fine. Give him a solid body, as shown in this example, and it becomes easier to pose him.



I know you think hands are hard, but they’re quite important to convey some ideas, and for our purposes we don’t need to draw hands with any detail. An oval with a stick does the job of a pointing hand. Close-ups might need more fingers showing, but still don’t require any degree of realism.

Signage

Don’t be afraid to use words. We’re sketching to communicate, so if the easiest way to show an office block is a building with a big ‘office’ sign on the roof, that’s fine!



Labels

Likewise, feel free to label interactions. Use upper-case letters for legibility and slightly angle the horizontal bars upwards to create a more positive feel.

Clichés

Clichés are your friend! Someone’s having an idea? Light bulb above the head. Computer’s crashed? Cloud of smoke with “$£%*!”





It’s good to practise regularly. Try applying these principles to still life, too. Look around you now and draw the cup on the table, or the books on the shelf. Think of it as a combination of shapes and aim for symbolism rather than realism, and it’s not as hard as you’d think.

I hope this has given you the confidence to give it a shot, and the ability to at least not be mortified with the results!

Tip: If you’re involving clients in design games like Leisa Reichelt’s ‘Design Consequences’ it may be wise to tone down the quality of your drawings at that point so they don’t feel intimidated. Remember, it’s important for them to feel at ease with the idea of wireframing in front of you and their colleagues, no matter how bad their line work.

For more information see davegrayinfo.com – Dave Gray taught me everything I know :-)",2010,Paul Annett,paulannett,2010-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/sketching-to-communicate/,business
51,Blow Your Own Trumpet,"Even if your own trumpet’s tiny and fell out of a Christmas cracker, blowing it isn’t something that everyone’s good at. Some people find selling themselves and what they do difficult. But, you know what? Boo hoo hoo. If you want people to buy something, the reality is you’d better get good at selling, especially if that something is you.
For web professionals, the best place to tell potential business customers or possible employers about what you do is on your own website. You can write what you want and how you want, but that doesn’t make knowing what to write any easier. As a matter of fact, writing for yourself often proves harder than writing for someone else.
I spent this autumn thinking about what I wanted to say about  Stuff & Nonsense on the website we relaunched recently. While I did that, I spoke to other designers about how they struggled to write about their businesses.
If you struggle to write well, don’t worry. You’re not on your own. Here are five ways to hit the right notes when writing about yourself and your work.
Be genuine about who you are
I’ve known plenty of talented people who run a successful business pretty much single-handed. Somehow they still feel awkward presenting themselves as individuals. They wonder whether describing themselves as a company will give them extra credibility. They especially agonise over using “we” rather than “I” when describing what they do. These choices get harder when you’re a one-man band trading as a limited company or LLC business entity.
If you mainly work alone, don’t describe yourself as anything other than “I”. You might think that saying “we” makes you appear larger and will give you a better chance of landing bigger and better work, but the moment a prospective client asks, “How many people are you?” you’ll have some uncomfortable explaining to do. This will distract them from talking about your work and derail your sales process. There’s no need to be anything other than genuine about how you describe yourself. You should be proud to say “I” because working alone isn’t something that many people have the ability, business acumen or talent to do.
Explain what you actually do
How many people do precisely the same job as you? Hundreds? Thousands? The same goes for companies. If yours is a design studio, development team or UX consultancy, there are countless others saying exactly what you’re saying about what you do. Simply stating that you code, design or – God help me – “handcraft digital experiences” isn’t enough to make your business sound different from everyone else. Anyone can and usually does say that, but people buy more than deliverables. They buy something that’s unique about you and your business.
Potentially thousands of companies deliver code and designs the same way as Stuff & Nonsense, but our clients don’t just buy page designs, prototypes and websites from us. They buy our taste for typography, colour and layout, summed up by our “It’s the taste” tagline and bowler hat tip to the PG Tips chimps. We hope that potential clients will understand what’s unique about us. Think beyond your deliverables to what people actually buy, and sell the uniqueness of that.
Describe work in progress
It’s sad that current design trends have made it almost impossible to tell one website from another. So many designers now demonstrate finished responsive website designs by pasting them onto iMac, MacBook, iPad and iPhone screens that their portfolios don’t fare much better. Every designer brings their own experience, perspective and process to a project. In my experience, it’s understanding those differences which forms a big part of how a prospective client makes a decision about who to work with. Don’t simply show a prospective client the end result of a previous project; explain your process, the development of your thinking and even the wrong turns you took.
Traditional case studies, like the one I’ve just written about Stuff & Nonsense’s work for WWF UK, can take a lot of time. That’s probably why many portfolios get out of date very quickly. Designers make new work all the time, so there must be a better way to show more of it more often, to give prospective clients a clearer understanding of what we do. At Stuff & Nonsense our solution was to create a feed where we could post fragments of design work throughout a project. This also meant rewriting our Contract Killer to give us permission to publish work before someone signs it off.
Outline a client’s experience
Recently a client took me to one side and offered some valuable advice. She told me that our website hadn’t described anything about the experience she’d had while working with us. She said that knowing more about how we work would’ve helped her make her buying decision.
When a client chooses your business, they’re hoping for more than a successful outcome. They want their project to run smoothly. They want to feel that they made a correct decision when they chose you. If they work for an organisation, they’ll want their good judgement to be recognised too. Our client didn’t recognise her experience because we hadn’t made our own website part of it. Remember, the challenge of creating a memorable user experience starts with selling to the people paying you for it.
Address your ideal client
It’s important to understand that a portfolio’s job isn’t to document your work, it’s to attract new work from clients you want. Make sure that work you show reflects the work you want, because what you include in your portfolio often leads to more of the same.
When you’re writing for your portfolio and elsewhere on your website, imagine that you’re addressing your ideal client. Picture them sitting opposite and answer the questions they’d ask as you would in conversation. Be direct, funny if that’s appropriate and serious when it’s not. If it helps, ask a friend to read the questions aloud and record what you say in response. This will help make what you write sound natural. I’ve found this technique helps clients write copy too.
Toot your own horn
Some people confuse expressing confidence in yourself and your work as boastfulness, but in a competitive world the reality is that if you are to succeed, you need to show confidence so that others can show their confidence in you. If you want people to hear you, pick up your trumpet and blow it.",2015,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2015-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/blow-your-own-trumpet/,business
103,Recession Tips For Web Designers,"For web designers, there are four keys to surviving bad economic times: do good work, charge a fair price, lower your overhead, and be sure you are communicating with your client. As a reader of 24 ways, you already do good work, so let’s focus on the rest.

I know something about surviving bad times, having started my agency, Happy Cog, at the dawn of the dot-com bust. Of course, the recession we’re in now may end up making the dot-com bust look like the years of bling and gravy. But the bust was rough enough at the time. 

Bad times are hard on overweight companies and over-leveraged start-ups, but can be kind to freelancers and small agencies. Clients who once had money to burn and big agencies to help them burn it suddenly consider the quality of work more important than the marquee value of the business card. Fancy offices and ten people at every meeting are out. A close relationship with an individual or small team that listens is in.

Thin is in

If you were good in client meetings when you were an employee, print business cards and pick a name for your new agency. Once some cash rolls in, see an accountant. 

If the one-person entrepreneur model isn’t you, it’s no problem. Form a virtual agency with colleagues who complement your creative, technical, and business skills. Athletics is a Brooklyn-based multi-disciplinary “art and design collective.” Talk about low overhead: they don’t have a president, a payroll, or a pension plan. But that hasn’t stopped clients like adidas, Nike, MTV, HBO, Disney, DKNY, and Sundance Channel from knocking on their (virtual) doors.

Running a traditional business is like securing a political position in Chicago: it costs a fortune. That’s why bad times crush so many companies. But you are a creature of the internets. You don’t need an office to do great work. I ran Happy Cog out of my apartment for far longer than anyone realized. My clients, when they learned my secret, didn’t care. 

Keep it lean: if you can budget your incoming freelance money, you don’t have to pay yourself a traditional salary. Removing the overhead associated with payroll means more of the budget stays in your pocket, enabling you to price your projects competitively, while still within industry norms. (Underpricing is uncool, and clients who knowingly choose below-market-rate vendors tend not to treat those vendors with respect.)

Getting gigs

Web design is a people business. If things are slow, email former clients. If you just lost your job, email former agency clients with whom you worked closely to inform them of your freelance business and find out how they’re doing. Best practice: focus the email on wishing them a happy holiday and asking how they’re doing. Let your email signature file tell them you’re now the president of Your Name Design. Leading with the fact that you just lost your job may earn sympathy (or commiseration: the client may have lost her job, too) but it’s not exactly a sure-fire project getter.

The qualities that help you land a web design project are the same in good times or bad. Have a story to tell about the kind of services you offer, and the business benefits they provide. (If you design with web standards, you already have one great story line. What are the others?) 

Don’t be shy about sharing your story, but don’t make it the focus of the meeting. The client is the focus. Before you meet her, learn as much as you can about her users, her business, and her competitors. At the very least, read her site’s About pages, and spend some quality time with Google. 

Most importantly, go to the meeting knowing how much you don’t know. Arrive curious, and armed with questions. Maintain eye contact and keep your ears open. If a point you raise causes two people to nod at each other, follow up on that point, don’t just keep grinding through your Keynote presentation. 

If you pay attention and think on your feet, it tells the potential client that they can expect you to listen and be flexible. (Clients are like unhappy spouses: they’re dying for someone to finally listen.) If you stick to a prepared presentation, it might send the message that you are inflexible or nervous or both. “Nervous” is an especially bad signal to send. It indicates that you are either dishonest or inexperienced. Neither quality invites a client to sign on. Web design is a people business for the client, too: they should feel that their interactions with you will be pleasant and illuminating. And that you’ll listen. Did I mention that?

Give it time

Securing clients takes longer and requires more effort in a recession. If two emails used to land you a gig, it will now take four, plus an in-person meeting, plus a couple of follow-up calls. This level of salesmanship is painful to geeks and designers, who would rather spend four hours kerning type or debugging a style sheet than five minutes talking business on the telephone. I know. I’m the same way. But we must overcome our natural shyness and inwardness if we intend not to fish our next meal out of a neighbor’s garbage can. 

As a bonus, once the recession ends, your hard-won account management skills will help you take your business to the next level. By the time jobs are plentiful again, you may not want to work for anyone but yourself. You’ll be a captain of our industry. And talented people will be emailing to ask you for a job.",2008,Jeffrey Zeldman,jeffreyzeldman,2008-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/recession-tips-for-web-designers/,business
2,Levelling Up,"Hello, 24 ways. I’m Ashley and I sell property insurance. I’m interrupting your Christmas countdown with an article about rental property software and a guy, Pete, who selflessly encouraged me to build my first web app. It doesn’t sound at all festive, or — considering I’ve used both “insurance” and “rental property” — interesting, but do stick with me. There’s eggnog at the end.

I run a property insurance business, Brokers Direct. It’s a small operation, but well established. We’ve been selling landlord insurance on the web for over thirteen years, for twelve of which we have provided our clients with third-party software for managing their rental property portfolios. Free. Of. Charge.

It sounds like a sweet deal for our customers, but it isn’t. At least, not any more. The third-party software is victim to years of neglect by its vendor. Its questionable interface, garish visuals and, ahem, clip art icons have suffered from a lack of updates. While it was never a contender for software of the year, I’ve steadily grown too embarrassed to associate my business with it.

 The third-party rental property software we distributed

I wanted to offer my customers a simple, clean and lightweight alternative. In an industry that’s dominated by dated and bloated software, it seemed only logical that I should build my own rental property tool.

The long learning-to-code slog

Learning a programming language is daunting, the source of my frustration stemming from a non-programming background. Generally, tutorials assume a degree of familiarity with programming, whether it be tools, conventions or basic skills. I had none and, at the time, there was nothing on the web really geared towards a novice. I reached the point where I genuinely thought I was just not cut out for coding. Surrendering to my feelings of self-doubt and frustration, I sourced a local Rails developer, Pete, to build it for me.

Pete brought a pack of index cards to our meeting. Index cards that would represent each feature the rental property software would launch with.

 

“OK,” he began. “We’ll need a user model, tenant model, authentication, tenant and property relationships…” A dozen index cards with a dozen features lined the coffee table in a grid-like format. Logical, comprehensible, achievable. Seeing the app laid out in a digestible manner made it seem surmountable. Maybe I could do this.

“I’ve been trying to learn Rails…”, I piped up.

I don’t know why I said it. I was fully prepared to hire Pete to do the hard work for me. But Pete, unprompted, gathered the index cards and neatly stacked them together, coasting them across the table towards me. “You should build this”.

Pete, a full-time freelance developer at the time, was turning down a paying job in favour of encouraging me to learn to code. Looking back, I didn’t realise how significant this moment was.

That evening, I took Pete’s index cards home to make a start on my app, slowly evolving each of the cards into a working feature. Building the app solo, I turned to Stack Overflow to solve the inevitable coding hurdles I encountered, as well as calling on a supportive Rails community. Whether they provided direct solutions to my programming woes, or simply planted a seed on how to solve a problem, I kept coding. Many months later, and after several more doubtful moments, Lodger was born.

 Property overview of my app, Lodger.

If I can do it, so can you

I misspent a lot of time building Twitter and blogging applications (apparently, all Rails tutorials centre around Twitter and blogging). If I could rewind and impart some advice to myself, this is what I’d say.

There’s no magic formula

“I haven’t quite grasped Rails routing. I should tackle another tutorial.” 

Making excuses — or procrastination — is something we are all guilty of. I was waiting for a programming book that would magically deposit a grasp of the entire Ruby syntax in my head. I kept buying books thinking each one would be the one where it all clicked. I now have a bookshelf full of Ruby material, all of which I’ve barely read, and none of which got me any closer to launching my web app. Put simply, there’s no magic formula.

Break it down

Whatever it is you want to build, break it down into digestible chunks. Taking Pete’s method as an example, having an index card represent an individual feature helped me tremendously. Tackle one at a time. Even if each feature takes you a month to build, and you have eight features to launch with, after eight months you’ll have your MVP. Remember, if you do nothing each day, it adds up to nothing.

Have a tangible product to build

I have a wonderful habit of writing down personal notes, usually to express my feelings at the time or to log an idea, only to uncover them months or years down the line, long after I forgot I had written them. I made a timely discovery while writing this article, discovering this gem while flicking through a battered Moleskine:


	“I don’t seem to be making good progress with learning Rails, but development still excites me. I should maybe stop doing tutorials and work towards building a specific app.”


Having a real product to work on, like I did with Lodger, means you have something tangible to apply the techniques you are learning. I found this prevented me from flitting aimlessly between tutorials and books, which is an easy area to accidentally remain in.

Team up

If possible, team up with a designer and create something together. Designers are great at presenting features in a way you’d never have considered. You will learn a lot from making their designs come to life.

Your homework for the holiday

Despite having a web app under my belt, I am not a programmer. I tinker with code, piecing enough bits of it together to make something functional. And that’s OK! I’m not excusing sloppiness, but if we aimed for perfection every time, we’d never execute any of our ideas.

As the holidays approach and you’ve exhausted yet another viewing of The Muppet Christmas Carol (or is that just my guilty pleasure at Christmas?), you may have time on your hands. Time to explore an idea you’ve been sitting on, but — plagued with procrastination and doubt — have yet to bring to life. This holiday, I am here to say to you what Pete said to me.

You should build this.

You don’t need to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page. You just have to learn enough to get it done.

PS: I lied about the eggnogg, but try capturing somebody’s attention when you tell them you sell property insurance!",2013,Ashley Baxter,ashleybaxter,2013-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/levelling-up/,business
94,Using Questionnaires for Design Research,"How do you ask the right questions? 

In this article, I share a bunch of tips and practical advice on how to write and use your own surveys for design research.

I’m an audience researcher – I’m not a designer or developer. I’ve spent much of the last thirteen years working with audience data both in creative agencies and on the client-side. I’m also a member of the Market Research Society. I run user surveys and undertake user research for our clients at the design studio I run with my husband – Mark Boulton Design.

So let’s get started!

Who are you designing for?

Good web designers and developers appreciate the importance of understanding the audience they are designing or building a website or app for. I’m assuming that because you are reading a quality publication like 24 ways that you fall into this category, and so I won’t begin this article with a lecture.

Suffice it to say, it’s a good idea to involve research of some sort during the life cycle of every project you undertake. I don’t just mean visual or competitor research, which of course is also very important. I mean looking at or finding your own audience or user data. Whether that be auditing existing data or research available from the client, carrying out user interviews, A/B testing, or conducting a simple questionnaire with users, any research is better than none. If you create personas as a design tool, they should always be based on research, so you will need to have plenty of data to hand for that.

Where do I start?

In the initial kick-off stages of a project, it’s a good idea to start by asking your client (when working in-house you still have a client – you might even be the client) what research or audience data they have available. Some will have loads – analytics, surveys, focus groups and insights – from talking to customers. Some won’t have much at all and you’ll be hard pressed to find out much about the audience. It’s best to review existing research first without rushing headlong into doing new research. Get a picture of what the data tells you and perhaps get this into a document – who, what, why and how are they using this website or app? What gaps are there in existing research? What else do you need to know? Then you can decide what else you need to do to plug these gaps. Think about the information first before deciding on the methodology. The rest of my article talks mostly about running self-completion online surveys. You can of course do face-to-face surveys, self-completion written questionnaires or phone polls, but I won’t cover those here. That’s for another article.

Why run a survey?

Surveys are great for getting a broad picture of your audience. As long as they are designed carefully, you can create an overview of them, how they use the site and their opinions of it, with an idea of which parts of this picture are more important than others. By using a limited amount of open-ended questions, you can also get some more qualitative feedback or insights on your website or app. The clients we work with surprisingly often don’t have much in the way of audience research available, even basic analytics, so I will often suggest running a short survey, just to create a picture of who is out there.

OK, what should I do first?

Before you rush into writing questions, stop and think about what you’re trying to find out. Remember being in school when you studied science and you had to propose a hypothesis? This could be a starting point – something to prove or disprove. Or, even better, write a research brief. It doesn’t have to be long; it can be just a sentence that encapsulates what you’re trying to do, like a good creative brief. For the purposes of this article, I created a short, slightly silly survey on Christmas and beliefs in Father Christmas.

My research brief was:


	To find out more about people’s beliefs about Father Christmas and their experiences of Christmas.


Inevitably, as you start thinking of what questions to ask, you will find that you go off at tangents or your client will want you to add in everything but the kitchen sink. In order for your questionnaire not to get too long and lose focus, you could write lists of what it is and what it’s not. This is how I’d apply it to my Christmas questionnaire example:

What it is about


	How people communicate with Father Christmas
	If someone’s background has affected their likelihood of believing in Father Christmas


What it is not about


	What colour to change Father Christmas’s coat to
	Father Christmas’s elves


Let’s get down to business: the questions. 

Kinds of questions

There are two basic kinds of questions: open-ended and closed. Closed questions limit answers by giving the respondent a number of predefined lists of options to choose from. Typically, these are multiple-choice questions with a list of responses. You can either select one or tick all that apply. Another useful type of closed question I often use is a rating scale, where a respondent can assess a situation along a continuum of values. These can also be useful as a measure of advocacy or strength of feeling about something. There is a standard measure called the Net Promoter score, which measures how likely someone is to recommend your product or service to a friend or acquaintance. It’s a useful benchmark as you can compare your scores to others in a similar sector.



Open-ended questions often take the form of a statement which requires a response. Generally, respondents are given a text box to fill in. It’s useful to limit this in some way so that people have an idea of how long the expected response should be; for example, a single line for an email address (Q18), or a larger text area for a longer response (Q6).

If you plan to send your survey out to a large number of people, I would suggest using mostly closed questions, unless you want to spend a long time wading through comments and hand-coded responses. I’d always advise adding a general request at the end of a survey (‘Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?’). You’d be surprised how many interesting and insightful comments people will add.

There are times when it’s better to provide an open-ended text box rather than a predefined list makes assumptions about your audience’s groupings. For example, we ran a short survey for our Gridset beta testers and rather than assume we knew who they were, we decided to ask an open-ended question: “What is your current job title?”



The analysis took quite a bit longer than responses using a predefined list, but it meant that we were able to make sure we didn’t miss anyone. And next time we run a survey for Gridset, I can use the responses gathered from this survey to help create a predefined list to make analysis easier.

What to ask

The questions to ask depend on what you want to know, but your brief and lists of what the survey is and isn’t should help here. I always ask the design team and client to give me ideas of what they are interested in finding out, and combine this with a mix of new and standard questions I have used in other surveys. I find Survey Monkey’s question bank a very useful source of example questions and help with tricky wording.

I always include simple demographics so I can compare my results to the population at large or internet users as a whole – just going on age, gender and location can be quite illuminating. For example, with the Christmas survey, I can see that the respondents were typical of the online design and dev community, mainly young and male.

If appropriate, I add questions on disability, ethnic background, religion and community of interest. Questions about ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, disability and other sensitive subjects can feel awkward and difficult to ask. This is not a good reason to not ask them. Perhaps you’re working for a public sector client, like a local council, so it’s likely you will need to consider groups of people who maybe under-represented, who may have differing views to others, or who you need to look at specifically as a subset.

How to ask

Although they may seem clunky and wordy, it’s often best to use the census wording or professional body wording for such demographic questions. For example, I used the UK census 2011 wording for Wales on my Christmas questionnaire in my questions on religion [PDF] (Q16) and ethnicity [PDF] (Q17). I had to adapt them slightly for the Survey Monkey format – self-completion online, rather than pen and paper – which is why “White Welsh” came up as the first option for the ethnicity question. For similar questions for US audiences, try the Census Bureau website.

When conducting a survey for a project that has a global audience, you need to consider who your primary audience is. For example, I recently created a questionnaire for a global news website. A large proportion of its audience is based in the USA, so I was careful to word things in a way Americans would find familiar. I used the US ethnic background census question wording and options, and looked at data for US competitor news websites to decide which to include.

You should also consider people whose first language isn’t English. Working as an audience researcher at BBC Wales, every survey we did was bilingual. I’ve also recently run a user survey in Arabic using Google Forms. During this project, we found that while Survey Monkey supports different languages, including Arabic, the text ran left to right with no option to change it to right to left – an essential when it comes to reading Arabic! If research is a deliverable in a client project, and you know you’ll need to conduct it in a foreign language, always build in extra time for translation at both the questionnaire design and analysis stages. Make sure you also allow for plenty of checks. In this case we had to change to Google Forms after initially creating our survey with Survey Monkey to get the functionality we needed.

Look and feel

Think about the survey as another way your audience will experience your brand. Take care getting the tone of voice right. There are plenty of great articles and books out there about tone of voice – try Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish for starters, or Brand Language by Liz Doig. The basic rule of thumb is to sound like a human, and use clear and friendly language. If, like me, you are lucky enough to work with journalists or copy editors, you should ask for their help, particularly in the preamble, linking text and closing statements. I find it helpful to break my questions down into sections and to have a page for each. I then have an introductory piece of text for each section to guide the respondent through the survey.

You should also make sure you check with your designers how your survey looks – use a company logo and branding, and make the typography legible. Many survey apps like Survey Monkey and Google Forms have a progress bar. This is helpful for users to see how far through your survey they are. I generally time the survey and give an indication in the preamble: “This survey will only take five minutes of your time.”

You also need to think about how you will technically serve the questionnaire. For example, will it be via email, social media, a pop-up or lightbox on your website, or (not recommended but possible) in an ad space?

Ethical considerations

Something else to think about are any local laws that govern how you collect and store data, such as the Data Protection Act in the UK. As a member of the Market Research Society, I am also obliged to consider its guidelines, but even if you’re not, it’s always a good idea to deal with personal data ethically.

If you collect personal data that can identify individuals, you must ask their permission to share it with others, and store it securely for no longer than two years. If you want to contact people afterwards, you must ask for their permission. If you ask for email addresses, as I did in question 18, you have a ready-made sample for a further survey, interviews or focus groups. Remember, you shouldn’t survey people under sixteen years old without the permission of their parents or legal guardians, so if you know your website is likely to be used by children, you must ask for verification of age early on, and your survey should close someone answers that they are under sixteen. The ESOMAR guidelines for online research [PDF] are well worth reading, as they go into detail about such issues, as well as privacy guidelines – using cookies, storing IP addresses, and so on.

Tools

Unless you work in-house and have proprietary software, or at a market research agency and you’re using specialist software such as Snap or IBM SPSS Statistics (previously just SPSS), you will need to use a good tool to run your survey, collect your responses and, ideally, help with the analysis. I like Survey Monkey because of the question bank and analysis tools. The software graphs your results and does simple cross-tabbing and filtering. What this means is you can slice the data in more interesting ways and delve a bit deeper. For example, in the Gridset questionnaire I mentioned earlier, I cross-tabbed responses to questions against whether a person worked in-house, for an agency or as a freelancer. 

Other well known online tools that I also use from time to time are Wufoo and Google Forms. Smart Surveys is a similar service to Survey Monkey and it’s used by many leading brands in the UK. Snap Surveys mentioned above is a well-established player in the market research scene, used a lot for face-to-face surveys and also on tablets and smartphones.

Analysis

Analysis is often overlooked but is as important as the design of the questionnaire. Don’t just rely on looking at the summary report and charts generated as standard by your form or survey software. Spend time with your data. Spend at least a week now and then if you can, looking at the data. Keep coming back to it and tweaking or cutting it a different way to see if there are any different pictures. Slice it up in different ways to reveal new insights. Here is the data from my dummy survey (apart from the open-ended responses). 

For open-ended questions, you can analyse collaboratively. Print and cut out the open-ended responses and do a cluster analysis or affinity sort with a colleague. 



Discussing the comments helps you to understand them. You will also find the design team are more likely to buy into the research as they have uncovered the insights for themselves. Always make sure to treat open-ended responses sensitively and don’t share anything publicly in a way that identifies the respondent.

Write a report

Never hand over a dataset to your client without a summary of the findings. Data on its own can be skewed to suit the reader’s needs, and not everyone is able to find the story in a dataset. Even if it’s not a deliverable, it’s always a good idea to capture your findings in a report of some sort. Use graphs sparingly to show really interesting things or to aid the reader’s understanding. I have written a quick dummy report using the data from the Christmas questionnaire so you can see how it’s done.

I highly recommend Brian Suda’s book A Practical Guide to Designing with Data for tips on how to present data effectively, but that’s a subject that benefits a whole article (indeed book) in itself. 

I am not a designer. I am a researcher, so I never write design recommendations in a report unless they have been talked about or suggested by the designers I work with. More often, I write up the results and we talk about them and what impact they have on the project or design. Often they lead to more questions or further research.

So that’s it: a brief introduction to using questionnaires for design research. Here’s a quick summary to remind you what I have talked about, and a list of resources if you’re interested in reading further.

Top 10 things to remember when using questionnaires for design research:


	Start by auditing existing research to identify gaps in data.
	Write a research brief. Work out exactly what you’re trying to find out – what is the survey about, and what is it not about?
	The two basic kinds of questions are open-ended and closed.
	Closed questions limit responses by giving the respondent a number of predefined lists of options to choose from (multiple choice, rating scales, and so on).
	Open-ended questions are often in the form of a statement which requires a response. Always ask one at the end of a questionnaire.
	Always include simple demographics to enable you to compare your sample against the population in general.
	It’s best to use official census or professional body wording for questions on ethnicity, disability and religion.
	Be sure to think carefully about your tone of voice and the look of your questionnaire.
	Pay attention to guidelines and laws on storing personal data, cookies and privacy.
	Invest plenty of time in analysis and report writing. Don’t just look at the obvious – dig deep for more interesting insights.


Some useful resources for further study

Online research


	Design Research: Methods and Perspectives edited by Brenda Laurel
	Online Research Essentials by Brenda Russell and John Purcell
	Handbook of Online and Social Media Research by Ray Poynter
	ESOMAR guidelines for online research [PDF]
	Online questionnaires


Market research books on questionnaire design


	Using Questionnaires in Small-Scale Research: A Beginner’s Guide by Pamela Munn
	Questionnaire Design by A N Oppenheim
	Developing a Questionnaire by Bill Gillham",2012,Emma Boulton,emmaboulton,2012-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/using-questionnaires-for-design-research/,business
196,Designing a Remote Project,"I came across an article recently, which I have to admit made my blood boil a little. Yes, I know it’s the season of goodwill and all that, and I’m going to risk sounding a little Scrooge-like, but I couldn’t help it. It was written by someone who’d tried out ‘telecommuting’ (big sigh) a.k.a. remote or distributed working. They’d tested it in their company and decided it didn’t work. 
Why did it enrage me so much? Well, this person sounded like they’d almost set it up to fail. To them, it was the latest buzzword, and they wanted to offer their employees a ‘perk’. But it was going to be risky, because, well, they just couldn’t trust their employees not to be lazy and sit around in their pyjamas at home, watching TV, occasionally flicking their mousepad to ‘appear online’. Sounds about right, doesn’t it?
Well, no. This attitude towards remote working is baked in the past, where working from one office and people all sitting around together in a cosy circle singing kum-by-yah* was a necessity not an option. We all know the reasons remote working and flexibility can happen more easily now: fast internet, numerous communication channels, and so on. But why are companies like Yahoo! and IBM backtracking on this? Why is there still such a negative perception of this way of working when it has so much real potential for the future?
*this might not have ever really happened in an office.
So what is remote working? It can come in various formats. It’s actually not just the typical office worker, working from home on a specific day. The nature of digital projects has been changing over a number of years. In this era where organisations are squeezing budgets and trying to find the best value wherever they can, it seems that the days of whole projects being tackled by one team, in the same place, is fast becoming the past. What I’ve noticed more recently is a much more fragmented way of putting together a project – a mixture of in-house and agency, or multiple agencies or organisations, or working with an offshore team. In the past we might have done the full integrated project from beginning to end, now, it’s a piece of the pie. 
Which means that everyone is having to work with people who aren’t sat next to them even more than before. Whether that’s a freelancer you’re working with who’s not in the office, an offshore agency doing development or a partner company in another city tackling UX… the future is looking more and more like a distributed workplace.
So why the negativity, man?
As I’ve seen from this article, and from examples of large corporations changing their entire philosophy away from remote working, there’s a lot of negativity towards this way of working. Of course if you decide to let everyone work from home when they want, set them off and then expect them all to check in at the right time or be available 24/7 it’s going to be a bit of a mess.  Equally if you just jump into work with a team on the other side of the world without any setup, should you expect anything less than a problematic project?
Okay, okay so what about these people who are going to sit on Facebook all day if we let them work from home? It’s the age old response to the idea of working from home. I can’t see the person, so how do I know what they are doing?
This comes up regularly as one of the biggest fears of letting people work remotely. There’s also the perceived lack of productivity and distractions at home. The limited collaboration and communication with distributed workers. The lack of availability. The lower response times.  
Hang on a second, can’t these all still be problems even if you’ve got your whole team sat in the same place? “They won’t focus on work.” How many people will go on Facebook or Twitter whilst sat in an office? “They won’t collaborate as much.” How many people sit in the office with headphones on to block out distractions? I think we have to move away from the idea that being sat next to people automatically makes them work harder. If the work is satisfying, challenging, and relevant to a person – surely we should trust them to do it, wherever they are sat?
There’s actually a lot of benefits to remote working, and having distributed teams. Offering this as a way of working can attract and retain employees, due to the improved flexibility. There can actually be fewer distractions and disruptions at home, which leads to increased productivity. To paraphrase Jason Fried in his talk ‘Why work doesn’t happen at work’, at home there are voluntary distractions where you have to choose to distract yourself with something. At the office these distractions become involuntary. Impromptu meetings and people coming to talk to you all the time are actually a lot more disruptive. Often, people find it easier to focus away from the office environment. 
There’s also the big benefit for a lot of people of the time saved commuting. The employee can actually do a lot that’s beneficial to them in this time, rather than standing squeezed into people’s armpits on public transport. Hence increased job satisfaction. With a distributed team, say if you’re working with an off-shore team, there could be a wider range of talent to pick from and it also encourages diversity. There can be a wider range of cultural differences and opinions brought to a project, which encourages more diverse ways of thinking.
Tackling the issues - or, how to set up a project with a remote team
But that isn’t to say running projects with a distributed team or being a remote worker is easy, and can just happen, like that. It needs work – and good groundwork – to ensure you don’t set it up to fail. So how do you help create a smoother remote project?
Start with trust
First of all, the basis of the team needs to be trust. Yes I’m going to sound a little like a cheesy, self-help guru here (perhaps in an attempt to seem less Scrooge-like and inject some Christmas cheer) but you do need to trust the people working remotely as well as them trusting you. This extends to a distributed team. You can’t just tell the offshore team what to do, and micromanage them, scared they won’t do what you want, how you want it because you can’t see them. You need to give them ownership and let them manage the tasks. Remember, people are less likely to criticise their own work. Make them own the work and they are more likely to be engaged and productive.
Set a structure
Distributed teams and remote workers can fail when there is no structure – just as much as teams sitting together fail without it too. It’s not so much setting rules, as having a framework to work within. Eliminate blockers before they happen. Think about what could cause issues for the team, and think of ways to solve this. For example, what do you do if you won’t be able to get hold of someone for a few hours because of a time difference? Put together a contingency, e.g. is there someone else on your time zone you could go to with queries after assessing the priority? Would it be put aside until that person is back in? Define team roles and responsibilities clearly. Sit down at the beginning of the project and clearly set out expectations. Also ask the team, what are their expectations of you?
There won’t be a one size fits all framework either. Think about your team, the people in it, the type of project you’re working with, the type of client and stakeholder. This should give you an idea of what sort of communications you’ll need on the project. Daily calls, video calls, Slack channels, the choice is yours.
Decide on the tools
To be honest, I could spend hours talking about the different tools you can use for communication. But you know them, right? And in the end it’s not the tool that’s important here - it’s the communication that’s being done on the tool. Tools need to match the type of communications needed for your team. One caveat here though, never rely solely on email! Emails are silos, and can become beasts to manage communications on.
Transparency in communication
Good communication is key. Make sure there are clear objectives for communication. Set up one time during the week where those people meet together, discuss all the work during that week that they’ve done. If decisions are made between team members who are together, make sure everyone knows what these are. But try to make collective decisions where you can, when it doesn’t impact on people’s time.
Have a face-to-face kick off
Yes, I know this might seem to counter my argument, but face-to-face comms are still really important. If it’s feasible, have an in-person meeting to kick off your project, and to kick off your team working together. An initial meeting, to break the ice, discuss ways of working, set the goals, can go a long way to making working with distributed teams successful. If this is really not viable, then hold a video call with the team. Try to make this a little more informal. I know, I know, not the dreaded cringey icebreakers… but something to make everyone relax and get to know each other is really important. Bring everybody together physically on a regular basis if you can, for example with quarterly meetings. You’ve got to really make sure people still feel part of a team, and it often takes a little more work with a remote team. Connect with new team members, one-on-one first, then you can have more of a ‘remote’ relationship. 
Get visual
Visual communication is often a lot better tool to use than just a written sentence, and can help bring ideas to life. Encourage people to sketch things, take a photo and add this to your written communications. Or use a mockup tool to sketch ideas.
But what about Agile projects?
The whole premise of Agile projects is to have face-to-face contact I hear you cry. The Agile Manifesto itself states “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation”. However, this doesn’t mean the death of remote working. In fact loads of successful companies still run Agile projects, whilst having a distributed team. With all the collaborative tools you can use for centralising code, tracking tasks, visualising products, it’s not difficult to still communicate in a way that works. Just think about how to replicate the principles of Agile remotely - working together daily, a supportive environment, trust, and simplicity. How can you translate these to your remote or distributed team? 
One last thought to leave you with before you run off to eat your mince pies (in your pyjamas, whilst working). A common mistake in working with a remote project team or working remotely yourself, is replacing distance with time. If you’re away from the office you think you need to always be ‘on’ – messaging, being online, replying to requests. If you have a distributed team, you might think a lot of meetings, calls, and messages will be good to foster communication. But don’t overload these meetings, calls, and communication. This can be disruptive in itself. Give people the gift of some uninterrupted time to actually do some work, and not feel like they have to check in every second.",2017,Suzanna Haworth,suzannahaworth,2017-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/designing-a-remote-project/,business
178,Make Out Like a Bandit,"If you are anything like me, you are a professional juggler. No, we don’t juggle bowling pins or anything like that (or do you? Hey, that’s pretty rad!). I’m talking about the work that we juggle daily. In my case, I’m a full-time designer, a half-time graduate student, a sometimes author and conference speaker, and an all-the-time social networker. Only two of these “positions” have actually put any money in my pocket (and, well, the second one takes a lot of money out). Still, this is all part of the work that I do. Your work situation is probably similar. We are workaholics.

So if we work so much in our daily lives, shouldn’t we be making out like bandits? Umm, honestly, I’m not hitting on you, silly. I’m talking about our success. We work and work and work. Shouldn’t we be filthy, stinking rich? Well… okay, that’s not quite what I mean either. I’m not necessarily talking about money (though that could potentially be a part of it). I’m talking about success — as in feeling a true sense of accomplishment and feeling happy about what we do and why we do it.

It’s important to feel accomplished and a general happiness in our work. To make out like a bandit (or have an incredible amount of success), you can either get lucky or work hard for it. And if you’re going to work hard for it, you might as well make it all meaningful and worthwhile. This is what I strive for in my own work and my life, and the following points I’m sharing with you are the steps I am taking to work toward this.


	I know the price of success: dedication, hard work & an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen. — Frank Lloyd Wright


Learn. Participate. Do.

The best way to get good at something is to keep doing whatever it is you’re doing that you want to be good at. For example, a sushi-enthusiast might take a sushi-making class because she wants to learn to make sushi for herself. It totally makes sense while the teacher demonstrates all the procedures, materials, and methods needed to make good, beautiful sushi. Later, the student goes home and tries to make sushi on her own, she gets totally confused and lost. Okay, I’m not even going to hide it, I’m talking about myself (this happened to me). As much as I love sushi, I couldn’t even begin to make good sushi because I’ve never really practiced.

Take advantage of learning opportunities where possible. Whether you’re learning CSS, Actionscript, or visual design, the best way to grasp how to do things is to participate, practice, do. Apply what you learn in your work. Participation is so vital to your success. If you have problems, let people know, and ask. But definitely practice on your own. And as cliché as it may sound, believe in yourself because if you don’t think you can do it, no one else will think you can either.

Maintain momentum

With whatever it is you’re doing, if you find yourself “on a roll”, you should take advantage of that momentum and keep moving. Sure, you’ll definitely want to take breaks here or there, but remember that momentum can be very difficult to obtain again once you’ve lost it. Get it done!

Deal with people

Whether you love or hate people, the fact is, you gotta deal with them — even the difficult ones. If you’re in a management position, then you know pretty well that most people don’t like being told what to do (even if that’s their job). Find ways to get people excited about what they’re doing. Make people feel that they (and what they do) are needed — people respond better if they’re valued, not commanded. Even if you’re not in a management position, this still applies to the way you work with your coworkers, clients, vendors, etc.

Resolve any conflicts right away. Conflicts will inevitably happen. Move on to how you can improve the situation, and do it as quickly as possible. Don’t spend too much time focusing on whose screw up it is — nobody feels good in this situation. Also, try to keep people informed on whatever it is you need or what it is you’re doing. If you’re waiting on something from someone, and it’s been a while, don’t be afraid to say something (tactfully). Sometimes people are forgetful — or just slacking. Hey, it happens!

Help yourself by helping others

What are some of the small, simple things you can do when you’re working that will help the people you work with (and in most cases, will end up helping yourself)? For example: if you’re a designer, perhaps taking a couple minutes now to organize and name your Photoshop layers will end up saving time later (since it will be easier to find things). This is going to help both you and your team. Or, developers: taking some time to write some documentation (even if it’s as simple as a comment in the code, or a well-written commit message) could potentially save valuable time for both you and your team later. Maybe you have to take a little time to sit down with a coworker and explain why something works the way it does. This helps them out tremendously — and will most likely lead to them respecting you a little more. This is a benefit.

If you make little things like this a habit, people will notice. People will enjoy working with you. People will trust you and rely on you. Sure, it might seem beneficial at any given moment to be “in it for yourself” (and therefore only helping yourself), but that won’t last very long. Helping others (whether it be a small or large feat) will cause a positive impact in the long run — and that is what will be more valuable to you and your career.

Do work that is meaningful

One of the best ways to feel successful about what you do is to feel good and happy about it. And a great way to feel good and happy about what you’re doing is to actually do good. This could be purpose-driven work that focuses on sustainability and environmentalism, or work that helps support causes and charity. Perhaps the work simply inspires people. Or maybe the work is just something you are very passionate about. Whatever the work may be, try working on projects that are meaningful to you. You’ll do well simply by being more motivated and interested. And it’s a double-win if the project is meaningful to others as well.

I feel very fortunate to work at a place like Crush + Lovely, where we have found quite frequently that the projects that inspire people, focus on global and social good, and create some sort of positive impact are the very projects that bring us more paid projects. But more importantly, we are happy and excited to do it. You might not work at a company that takes on those types of projects. But perhaps you have your own personal endeavors that create this excitement for you. Elliot Jay Stocks wrote about having pet projects. Do you take on side projects? What are those projects?

Over the last couple years, I’ve seen some really fantastic side projects come out that are great examples of meaningful work. These projects reflect the passions and goals of the respective designers and developers involved, and therefore become quite successful (because the people involved simply love what they are doing while they’re doing it). Some of these projects include:


	Typedia is a shared encyclopedia of typefaces which serves as a resource to classify, categorize, and connect typefaces. It was founded by Jason Santa Maria, a graphic designer with a love and passion for typography. He created it as a solution to a problem he faced as a designer: finding the right typeface.
	Huffduffer was created by Jeremy Keith, a web developer who wanted to create a podcast of inspirational talks — but after he found that this could be tedious, he decided to create a tool to automate this.
	Level & Tap was created by passionate photographer and web developer, Tom Watson. It began as a photography print store for Tom’s best personal photography. Over time, more photographers were added to the site and the site has grown to become quite a great collection of beautiful photography.
	Heat Eat Review is a review blog created by information architect and user experience designer, Abi Jones. As a foodie, she is able to use this passion for this blog, as it focuses on reviewing TV Dinners, Frozen Meals, and Microwavable Foods.
	Art in My Coffee, a favorite personal project of my own, is a photo blog of coffee art I created, after I found that my friends and I were frequently posting coffee art photos to Flickr, Twitter, and other websites. After the blog became more popular, I teamed up with Meagan Fisher on the project, who has just as much a passion for coffee art, if not more.


So, what’s important to you?

This is the very, very important question here. What really matters to you most? Beyond just working on meaningful projects you are passionate about, is the work you’re doing the right work for you, so that you can live a good lifestyle? Scott Boms wrote an excellent article, Burnout, in which he shares his own experience in battling stress and exhaustion, and what he learned from it. You should definitely read the article in its entirety, but a couple of his points that are particularly excellent are:


	Make time for numero uno, in which you make time for the things in life that make you happy
	Examine your values, goals, and measures of success, in which you work toward the things you are passionate about, your own personal development, and focusing on the things that matter.


A solid work-life balance can be a challenging struggle to obtain. Of course, you can cheat this by finding ways to combine the things you love with the things you do (so then it doesn’t even feel like you’re working — oh, you sneaky little bandit!). However, there are other factors to consider beyond your general love for the work you’re doing. Take proper care of yourself physically, mentally, and socially.

So, are you making out like a bandit?

Do you feel accomplished and generally happy with your work? If not, perhaps that is something to focus on for the next year. Consider your work (both in your job as well as any side projects you may take on) and how it benefits you — present and future. Take any steps necessary to get you to where you need to be. If you are miserable, fix it!

Finally, it’s important to be thankful for the things that matter to you and make you happy. Pass it along everyday. Thank people. It’s a simple thing, really. Saying “thank you” can and will have enormous impact on the people around you. Oh. And, I apologize if the title of this article led you to thinking it would teach you how to be an amazing kisser. That’s a different article entirely for 24 ways to impress your friends!",2009,Jina Anne,jina,2009-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/make-out-like-a-bandit/,business
35,SEO in 2015 (and Why You Should Care),"If your business is healthy, you can always find plenty of reasons to leave SEO on your to-do list in perpetuity. After all, SEO is technical, complicated, time-consuming and potentially dangerous. The SEO industry is full of self-proclaimed gurus whose lack of knowledge can be deadly. There’s the terrifying fact that even if you dabble in SEO in the most gentle and innocent way, you might actually end up in a worse state than you were to begin with.

To make matters worse, Google keeps changing the rules. There have been a bewildering number of major updates, which despite their cuddly names have had a horrific impact on website owners worldwide.

Fear aside, there’s also the issue of time. It’s probably tricky enough to find the time to read this article. Setting up, planning and executing an SEO campaign might well seem like an insurmountable obstacle.

So why should you care enough about SEO to do it anyway?

The main reason is that you probably already see between 30% and 60% of your website traffic come from the search engines. That might make you think that you don’t need to bother, because you’re already doing so well. But you’re almost certainly wrong.

If you have a look through the keyword data in your Google Webmaster Tools account, you’ll probably see that around 30–50% of the keywords used to find your website are brand names – the names of your products or companies. These are searches carried out by people who already know about you. But the people who don’t know who you are but are searching for what you sell aren’t finding you right now. This is your opportunity.

If a person goes looking for a company or product by name, Google will steer them towards what they’re looking for. Their intelligence does have limits, however, and even though they know your name they won’t be completely clear about what you sell. That’s where SEO would come in.

Still need more convincing? How about the fact that the seeming complexities of SEO mean that your competition are almost certainly neglecting it too. They have the same reservations as you about complexity, time and danger, and hopefully they aren’t reading this article and so are none the wiser of the well-kept secret: that 70% of SEO is easy.

I’m going to lead you through what you need to do to tap into that stream of people looking for what you sell right now.

What is real SEO?

Real SEO is all about helping Google understand the content of your website. It’s about steering, guiding and assisting Google. Not manipulating it.

It’s easy to assume that Google already understands the content and relevance of each and every page on your website, but the fact is that it needs a fair amount of hand-holding. Fortunately, helping Google along really isn’t very difficult at all.

Rest assured that real SEO has nothing to do with keyword stuffing, keyword density, hacks, tricks or cunning techniques. If you hear any of these terms from your SEO advisor, run away from them as quickly as you can.

Understanding your current situation – Google Analytics

Before you can do anything to improve your SEO status, you need to get an idea of how you’re already doing. Below is a very quick and easy way of doing so.

1. Open up your Google Analytics account.

2. Click on the date range selector on the top-right of the interface and change the year of the first date to last year. So 12 Dec 2014 will become 12 Dec 2013. Then click on Apply.

3. Click on the All Sessions rectangle towards the top-left, click once on Organic Traffic and click Apply.

4. Click the little black-and-white squares icon that has now appeared under the date selector on the top-right, and drag the slider all the way over to Higher Precision.

5. Change the interval buttons on the top-right of the graph to Week to make this easier to digest.

At this point your graph should look something like this:



It’s worth noting the approximate proportion of your visitors that currently come from organic sources.

6. Click the little downwards arrow to the right of the All Sessions rectangle and choose Remove, so that we’re only looking at the organic traffic on its own.

7. Click on Select a metric next to the Sessions button above the graph and select Pages / Session. You should then see something like this:



In the example above we can see that the quantity of traffic has been increasing since the middle of August, but the quality of the traffic (as measured by the number of pages per session) has fallen significantly. 

How you choose to view this is down to your own graph, recent history and interpretation of events, but this should give you an indication of how things stand at the present time. Trends are often much more revealing than a snapshot of a brief moment in time.

Your Google Webmaster Tools data

If you’re not very familiar with your Google Webmaster Tools account, it’s really worth taking ten to fifteen minutes to see what’s on offer. I can’t recommend this enough. From the point of view of an SEO health check, I’d advise you to look into the HTML Improvements, Crawl Errors and Crawl Stats, and most importantly the Search Queries.

From what you see here and the trends shown in your Analytics data, you should now have a good idea of your current status. If you want to explore further, I recommend Screaming Frog as a good diagnostics tool, or Botify if your website is large or unusually complex.

Combining the data into something useful

Your Google Analytics session will have shown you how you’re doing from an SEO point of view in terms of the quantity and, to some extent, the quality of your visitors. But it’s only showing you what is already working. In other words: the people who are finding you on the search engines, and clicking on your links.

The Google Webmaster Tools search query data, on the other hand, will give you a better idea of what isn’t working. It will show you the keyword searches that are getting you listed in the results, but which aren’t necessarily getting clicked. And it doesn’t take much by the way of expertise to see why.

For example, if you see your targeted keyword, which you feel is extremely relevant, has generated over 2,000 impressions in the last month but produced only two clicks, you’ll probably find a very low average position. Bear in mind that an average position of fourteen will mean being around halfway down the second page of results. Think about how rarely you go beyond the first two or three listings, never mind to the second page of results, and you’ll understand why the click-through rate is so low.

So now you have an idea of what you’re being found for at the present time. But what about the other terms?

What would you like to be found for?

This is one of the more common SEO mistakes, on a number of different levels. 

Many businesses assume that they don’t need to worry about keyword research. They think they know what terms people use to find what they sell, and they also assume that Google understands the content on their website. This is incorrect on all counts.

A better starting point is to brainstorm a small number of your most obvious keywords, then run them through Google’s Keyword Planner. Ignore the information in the Ad group ideas tab, and instead go straight to the Keyword ideas tab. Rather than wade through the very unfriendly interface, I recommend downloading the data as a spreadsheet, in which not only is more detail included, but you can also slice, dice, sort and report the data as required.

From there you can delete all the irrelevant columns, and start working your way through the list, deleting any irrelevant keywords as you go along.

It’s around this stage that you may hit a problem in terms of where to focus your efforts. The number of reported searches for a given keyword is of course important, but so is the level of competition. Ideally, you’d like keywords with plenty of searches but not too much competition.

I personally like to factor both together by adding a column that simply divides the number of searches squared by the level of competition:

(number of searches × number of searches) ÷ competition

There are plenty of alternatives to this basic formula, but I like it for ease of use and simplicity. Once I’ve added this column, I then sort the data by this value (largest to smallest) and I then only usually need ten to fifteen keywords at most to give me plenty of ideas to work with.

This is a slightly involved but effective methodology for keyword research, as what you’re left with is a list of keywords that both Google and you consider to be relevant to the content of your website. And relevance is an important concept in SEO.

Real SEO keyword research is about making sure that your customers, website and Google are all in agreement and alignment over the content of your website. Other sources of inspiration and ideas include having a look at what terms your competition are targeting, Google Trends and, of course, Google Suggest. If you’re not sure where to find these things, you can probably work out where to search for them!

If you want to dive further into understanding your current search engine status, search for some of the better keywords that you just discovered and see where you rank compared to your competition. Note that it’s vital to avoid Google serving up personalised results, so either use the privacy, incognito or anonymous mode of your browser for the searches, or use a browser that you don’t normally use. I hope this is Internet Explorer. If what you find isn’t great, don’t despair: everything in SEO is fixable (terms and conditions may apply).

Putting it all together

You should now have a good idea of where things stand with your current search engine traffic, and a solid list of keywords that you’re not getting visitors for but very much want.

All that’s left now is to work out how to use these keywords. But before we do, let’s take a quick step back.

If you have in any way kept up with what’s been happening in SEO over the last couple of years, you’ll have probably heard about Google updates with names like Panda, Hummingbird, Phantom, Pirate and more.

I won’t go into the technical details of what Google is doing, but it is important to understand why they’re trying to do it. At the most basic level, Google understands that there’s a very real problem with people who are trying manipulate its index. In response to this, Google is trying to clean up its results. They don’t want people getting fed up with bad results and considering other options – have you even tried Bing?

This is extremely important. Remember earlier when I said that 70% of SEO was easy? That rule still applies. So, for example, if you have a list of keywords that you know are relevant to what you sell, then all you need to do is create great content for them. Incredibly, that’s all there is to it (terms and conditions apply again, unfortunately – see below).

There is, however, one simple rule to be consistently followed without exception: that the content you create should not only be good quality and completely original, but it should also be written primarily for the human visitor and not the search engine spider.

In other words, if you create some fantastic content for a keyword like “choosing a small business HR service”, then the article should not only make perfect sense if read out loud (as opposed to the same phrase being repeated fifteen times), but also provide real value to the person reading it.

So the process is simple:


	Choose your keywords
	Create spectacular content


Wait. Is it really that simple?

Unfortunately there’s a lot more to the other 30% of SEO than just creating great content and waiting for the visitors. There are issues like helping Google understand the content on your pages and website, incoming links, page authority, domain authority, usage patterns, spam factors, canonical issues and much more.

But there’s the often overlooked fact about Google: it actually does a reasonable job of working out what’s on your website and (to some extent) understanding the gist of it. If you’ve never done any SEO on your website but still get some traffic from Google, this is why.

Even without dabbling in the other 30% of SEO, by creating the right content for the right visitors using the precise language and terminology that your potential customers are using, you’re significantly better off than your competition. And you can only gain from this.

When you’ve checked this off your to-do list and made it an ingrained part of your content creation process, then you’re ready to delve into the other 30% of SEO. The not-so-easy side.

Until then, work on understanding your current situation, exploring the opportunities, creating a list of good keywords, creating the right content for them, and starting 2015 with a little bit of smart, safe and real SEO.",2014,Dave Collins,davecollins,2014-12-15T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/seo-in-2015-and-why-you-should-care/,business
29,What It Takes to Build a Website,"In 1994 we lost Kurt Cobain and got the world wide web as a weird consolation prize. In the years that followed, if you’d asked me if I knew how to build a website I’d have said yes, I know HTML, so I know how to build a website. If you’d then asked me what it takes to build a website, I’d have had to admit that HTML would hardly feature.

Among the design nerdery and dev geekery it’s easy to think that the nuts and bolts of building a page just need to be multiplied up and Ta-da! There’s your website. That can certainly be true with weekend projects and hackery for fun. It works for throwing something together on GitHub or experimenting with ideas on your personal site. But what about working professionally on client projects?

The web is important, so we need to build it right.

It’s 2015 – your job involves people paying you money for building websites. What does it take to build a website and to do it right? What practices should we adopt to make really great, successful and professional web projects in 2015? I put that question to some friends and 24 ways authors to see what they thought.

Getting the tech right

Inevitably, it all starts with the technology. We work in a technical medium, after all. From Notepad and WinFTP through to continuous integration and deployment – how do you build sites?

Create a stable development environment

There’s little more likely to send a web developer into a wild panic and a client into a wild rage than making a new site live and things just not working. That’s why it’s important to have realistic development and staging environments that mimic the live server as closely as possible.

Are you in the habit of developing new sites right on the client’s server? Or maybe in a subfolder on your local machine? It’s time to reconsider.

Charlie Perrins writes:


	Don’t work on a live server – this feels like one of those gear-changing moments for a developer’s growth. Build something that works just as well locally on your own machine as it does on a live server, and capture the differences in the code between the local and live version in a single config file. Ultimately, if you can get all the differences between environments down to a config level then you’ll be in a really good position to automate the deployment process at some point in the future.


Anything that creates a significant difference between the development and the live environments has the potential to cause problems you won’t know about until the site goes live – and at that point the problems are very public and very embarrassing, not to mention unprofessional.

A reasonable solution is to use a tool like MAMP PRO which enables you to set up an individual local website for each project you work on. Importantly, individual sites give you both consistency of paths between development and live, but also the ability to configure server options (like PHP versions and configuration, for example) to match the live site.

Better yet is to use a virtual machine, managed with a tool such as Vagrant. If you’re interested in learning more about that, we have an article on that subject later in the series.

Use source control

Trent Walton writes:


	We use source control, and it’s become the centerpiece for how we handle collaboration, enhancements, and issues. It drives our process.


I’m hoping by now that you’re either using source control for all your work, or feeling a nagging guilt that you should be. Be it Git, Mercurial, Subversion (name your poison), a revision control system enables you to keep track of changes, revert anything that breaks, and keep rolling backups of your project.

The benefits only start there, and Charlie Perrins recommends using source control “not just as a personal backup of your code, but as a way to play nicely with other developers.“

Noting the benefits when collaborating with other developers, he adds:


	Graduating from being the sole architect of your codebase to contributing to a shared codebase is a huge leap for a developer. Perhaps a practical way for people who tend to work on their own to do that would be to submit a pull request or a patch to an open source project or plugin.”


Richard Rutter of Clearleft sees clear advantages for the client, too. He recommends using source control “preferably in some sort of collaborative environment that you can open up or hand over to the client” – a feature found with hosted services such as GitHub.

If you’d like to hone your Git skills, Emma Jane Westby wrote Git for Grown-ups in last year’s 24 ways.

Don’t repeat, automate!

Tim Kadlec is a big proponent of automating your build process:


	I’ve been hammering that home to every client I’ve had this year. It’s amazing how many companies don’t really have a formal build/deployment process in place. So many issues on the web (performance, accessibility, etc.) can be greatly improved just by having a layer of automation involved.

	For example, graphic editing software spits out ridiculously bloated images. Very frequently, that’s what ends up getting put on a site. If you have a build process, you can have the compression automated and start seeing immediate gains for no effort. On a recent project, they were able to shave around 1.5MB from their site weight simply by automating compression.


Once you have your code in source control, some of that automation can be made easier. Brian Suda writes:


	We have a few bash scripts that run on git commit: they compile the less, jslint and remove white-space, basically the 3 Cs, Compress, Concatenate, Combine. This is now part of our workflow without even realising it.


One great way to get started with a build process is to use a tool like Grunt, and a great way to get started with Grunt is to read Chris Coyier’s Grunt for People Who Think Things Like Grunt are Weird and Hard.

Tim reinforces:


	Issues like [image compression]  —  or simple accessibility issues like alt tags on images  —  should never be able to hit a live server. If you can detect it, you can automate it. And if you can automate it, you can free up time for designers and developers to focus on more challenging — and interesting — problems.


A clear call to arms to tighten up and formalise development and deployment practices. The less that has to be done manually or is susceptible to change, the less that can go wrong when a site is built and deployed. Any procedures that are automated are no longer dependant on a single person’s knowledge, making it easier to build your team or just cope when someone important is out of the office or leaves.

If you’re interested in kicking the FTP habit and automating your site deployments, we have an article later in the series just for you.

Build systems, not sites

One big theme arising this year was that of building websites as systems, not as individual pages.

Brad Frost:


	For me, teams making websites in 2015 shouldn’t be working on just-another-redesign redesign. People are realizing that in order to make stable, future-friendly, scalable, extensible web experiences they’re going to need to think more systematically. That means crafting deliberate and thoughtful design systems. That means establishing front-end style guides. That means killing the out-dated, siloed, assembly-line waterfall process and getting cross-disciplinary teams working together in meaningful ways. That means treating development as design. That means treating performance as design. That means taking the time out of the day to establish the big picture, rather than aimlessly crawling along quarter by quarter.


Designer and developer Jina Bolton also advocates the use of style guides, and recommends making the guide a project deliverable:


	Consider adding on a style guide/UI library to your project as a deliverable for maintainability and thinking through all UI elements and components.


Val Head agrees: “build and maintain a style guide for each project” she wrote. On the subject of approaching a redesign, she added:


	A UI inventory goes a long way to helping get your head around what a design system needs in the early stages of a redesign project.


So what about that old chestnut, responsive web design? Should we be making sites responsive by default? How about mobile first?

Richard Rutter:


	Think mobile first unless you have a very good reason not to. Remember to take the client with you on this principle, otherwise it won’t work as a convincing piece of design.


Trent Walton adds:


	The more you can test and sort of skew your perception for what is typical on the web, the better. 4k displays hooked up to 100Mbps connections can make one extremely unsympathetic.


The value of testing with real devices is something Ruth John appreciates. She wrote:


	I still have my own small device lab at home, even though I work permanently for a well-established company (which has a LOT of devices at its disposal) – it just means I can get a good overview of how things are looking during development.


And speaking of systems, Mark Norman Francis recommends the use of measuring tools to aid the design process; “[U]se analytics and make decisions from actual data” he suggests, rather than relying totally on intuition.

Tim Kadlec adds a word on performance planning:


	I think having a performance budget in place should now be a given on any project. We’ve proven pretty conclusively through a hundred and one case studies that performance matters. And over the last year or so, we’ve really seen a lot of great tools emerge to help track and enforce performance budgets. There’s not really a good excuse for not using one any more.


It’s clear that in the four years since Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design article the diversity of screen sizes, network connection speeds and input methods has only increased. New web projects should presume visitors will be using anything from a watch up to a big screen desktop display, and from being offline, through to GPRS, 3G and fast broadband.

Will it take more time to design and build for those constraints? Yes, it most likely will. If Internet Explorer is brave enough to ask to be your default browser, you can be brave enough to tell your client they need to build responsively.

Working collaboratively

A big part of delivering a successful website project is how we work together, both as a design team and a wider project team with the client.

Val Head recommends an open line of communication:


	Keep conversations going. With clients, with teammates. Talking is so important with the way we work now. A good team conversation place, like Slack, is slowly becoming invaluable for me too.


Ruth John agrees:


	We’ve recently opened up our lines of communication by using Slack. It has transformed the way we work. We’re easily more productive and collaborative on projects, as well as making it a lot easier for us all to work remotely (including freelancers).


She goes on to point out how tools can be combined to ease team communication without adding further complications:


	We have a private GitHub organisation (which everyone who works with us is granted access to), which not only holds all our project code but also a team wiki. This has lots of information to get you set up within the team, as well as coding guidelines and best practices and other admin info, like contact numbers/emails for the team.


Small-A agile is also the theme of the day, with Mark Norman Francis suggesting an approach of “small iterations with constant feedback around individual features, not spec-it-all-first”. He also encourages you to review as you go, at each stage of the project:


	Always reflect on what went well and what went badly, and how you can learn from that, even if not Doing Agile™. Ultimately “best practices” should come from learning lessons (both good and bad).


Richard Rutter echoes this, warning against working in isolation from the client for too long:


	Avoid big reveals. Your engagement with the client should be participatory. In business no one likes surprises.


This experience rings true for Ruth John who recommends involving real users in the feedback loop, not just the client:


	We also try and get feedback on what we’re building as soon and as often as we can with our stakeholders/clients and real users.


We should also remember that our role is to serve the client’s needs, not just bill them for whatever we can. Brian Suda adds:


	Don’t sell clients on things they don’t need. We can spout a lot of jargon and scare clients into thinking you are a god. We can do things few can now, but you can’t rip people off because they are unknowledgeable.


But do clients know what they’re getting, even when they see it? Trent Walton has an interesting take:


	We focus on prototypes over image-based comps at all costs, especially when meetings are involved. It’s much easier to assess a prototype, and too often with image-based comps, discussions devolve into how something might feel when actually live, or how a layout could change to fit a given viewport.


Val Head also likes to get work into the browser:


	Sketch design ideas with any software you like, but get to the browser as soon as possible.


Beyond your immediate team, Emma Jane Westby has advice for looking further afield:


	Invest time into building relationships within your (technical) community. You never know when you might be able to lend a hand; or benefit from someone who’s able to lend theirs.


And when things don’t go according to plan, Brian Suda has the following advice:


	If something doesn’t work out, be professional and don’t burn bridges. It will always come back to you.


The best work comes from working collaboratively, not just as a team within an agency or department, but with the client and stakeholders too. If doing your job and chucking it over the fence ever worked, it certainly doesn’t fly any more. You can work in isolation, but doing really great work requires collaboration.

The business end

When you’re building sites professionally, every team member has to think about the business aspects. Estimating time, setting billing rates, and establishing deliverables are all part of the job.

In 2008, Andrew Clarke gave us the Contract Killer sample contract we could use to establish a working agreement for a web design project. Richard Rutter agrees that contracts are still an essential part of business:


	They are there for both parties’ protection. Make sure you know what will happen if you decide you don’t want to work with the client any more (it happens) and, of course, what circumstances mean they can stop taking your services.


Having a contract is one thing, but does it adequately protect both you and the client? Emma Jane Westby adds:


	Find a good IP lawyer/legal counsel. I routinely had an IP lawyer read all of my contracts to find loopholes I wouldn’t have noticed. I didn’t always change the contract, but at least I knew what might come back to bite me.


So, you have a contract in place, and know what the project is. Brian Suda recommends keeping track of time and making sure you bill fairly for the hours the project costs you:


	If I go to a meeting and they are 15 minutes late, the billing clock has already started. They can’t expect me to be in the 1h meeting and not bill for the extra 15–30 minutes they wasted. It goes both ways too. You need to do your best to respect their deadlines and time frame – this is always hard to get right.


As ever, it’s good business to do good business. Perhaps we can at last shed the old image of web designers being snowboarding layabouts and demonstrate to clients that we care as much about conducting professional business as they do.

Time to review

It’s a lot to take in. Some of these ideas and practices will be familiar, others new and yet to be evaluated. The web moves at a fast pace, and we need to be constantly reexamining our tools, techniques and working practices. The most important thing is not to blindly adopt any and all suggestions, but to carefully look at what the benefits might be and decide how they apply to your work.

Could you benefit from more formalised development and deployment procedures? Would your design projects run more smoothly and have a longer maintainable life if you approached the solution as a componentised system rather than a series of pages? Are your teams structured in a way that enables the most fluid communication, or are there changes you could make? Are your billing procedures and business agreements serving you and your clients in the best way possible?

The new year is a good time to look at your working practices and see what can be improved, and maybe this time next year you’ll look back and think “thank goodness we don’t work like that any more”.",2014,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2014-12-01T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/what-it-takes-to-build-a-website/,business
40,Don’t Push Through the Pain,"In 2004, I lost my web career. In a single day, it was gone. I was in too much pain to use a keyboard, a Wacom tablet (I couldn’t even click the pen), or a trackball. Switching my mouse to use my left (non-dominant) hand only helped a bit; then that hand went, too. I tried all the easy-to-find equipment out there, except for expensive gizmos with foot pedals. I had tingling in my fingers—which, when I was away from the computer, would rhythmically move as if some other being controlled them. I worried about Parkinson’s because the movements were so dramatic. Pen on paper was painful. Finally, I discovered one day that I couldn’t even turn a doorknob.

The only highlight was that I couldn’t dust, scrub, or vacuum. We were forced to hire someone to come in once a week for an hour to whip through the house. You can imagine my disappointment. 

My injuries had gradually slithered into my life without notice. I’d occasionally have sore elbows, or my wrist might ache for a day, or my shoulders feel tight. But nothing to keyboard home about. That’s the critical bit of news. One day, you’re pretty fine. The next day, you don’t have your job—or any job that requires the use of your hands and wrists. 

I had to walk away from the computer for over four months—and partially for several months more. That’s right: no income. If I hadn’t found a gifted massage therapist, the right book of stretches, the equipment I should have been using all along, and learned how to pay attention to my body—even just a little bit more—I quite possibly wouldn’t be writing this article today. I wouldn’t be writing anything, anywhere. 

Most of us have heard of (and even claimed to have read all of) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, who describes the state of flow—the place our minds go when we are fully engaged and in our element. This lovely state of highly focused activity is deeply satisfying, often creative, and quite familiar to many of us on the web who just can’t quit until the copy sings or the code is untangled or we get our highest score yet in Angry Birds. Our minds may enter that flow, but too often as our brains take flight, all else recedes. And we leave something very important behind. 

Our bodies. 

My body wasn’t made to make the same minute movements thousands of times a day, most days of the year, for decades, and neither was yours. The wear and tear sneaks up on you, especially if you’re the obsessive perfectionist that we all pretend not to be. Oh? You’re not obsessed? I wasn’t like this all the time, but I remember sitting across from my husband, eating dinner, and I didn’t hear a word he said. I’d left my brain upstairs in my office, where it was wrestling in a death match with the box model or, God help us all, IE 5.2. I was a writer, too, and I was having my first inkling that I was a content strategist. Work was exciting. I could sit up late, in the flow, fingers flying at warp speed. I could sit until those wretched birds outside mocked me with their damn, cheerful “Hurray, it’s morning!” songs. Suddenly, while, say, washing dishes, the one magical phrase that captured the essence of a voice or idea would pop up, and I would have mowed down small animals and toddlers to get to my computer and hammer out that website or article, to capture that thought before it escaped. Note my use of the word hammer. Sound at all familiar? 

But where was my body during my work? Jaw jutting forward to see the screen, feet oddly positioned—and then left in place like chunks of marble—back unsupported, fingers pounding the keys, wrists and arms permanently twisted in unnatural angles that we thought were natural. And clicking. Clicking, clicking, clicking that mouse. Thumbing tiny keyboards on phones. A lethal little gesture for tiny little tendons. Though I was fine from, say 1997 to 2004, by the end of 2004 this behavior culminated in disaster. I had repetitive stress injuries, aka repetitive motion injuries. As the Apple site says, “A brief exposure to these conditions would not cause harm. But a prolonged exposure may, in some people, result in reduced ability to function.” I’ll say. 

I frantically turned to people on lists and forums. “Try a track ball.” Already did that. “Try a tablet.” Worse. One person wrote, “I still come here once in a while and can type a couple sentences, but I’ve permanently got thoracic outlet syndrome and I’ll never work again.” Oh, beauteous web, oh, long-distance friends, farewell.    

The Wrist Bone’s Connected to the Brain Bone

That variation on the old song tells part of the story. Most people (and many of their physicians) believe that tingling fingers and aching wrists MUST be carpel tunnel syndrome. Nope. If your neck juts forward, it tenses and stays tense the entire time you work in that position. Remember how your muscles felt after holding a landline phone with your neck tilted to one side for a long client meeting? Regrettable. Tensing your shoulders because your chair’s not designed properly puts you at risk for thoracic outlet syndrome, a career-killer if ever there was one. The nerves and tendons in your neck and shoulder refer down your arms, and muscles swell around nerves, causing pain and dysfunction. Your elbows have a tendon that is especially vulnerable to repetitive movements (think tennis elbow). Your wrists are performing something akin to a circus act with one thousand shows a day. 

So, all the fine tendons and ligaments in your fingers have problems that may not start at your wrists at all. Though some people truly do have carpal tunnel syndrome, my finger and wrist problems weren’t solved by heavily massaging my fingers (though, that was helpful, too) or my wrists. They were fixed by work on my neck, upper back, shoulders, arms, and elbows. This explains why many people have surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome and just months later say, “What?! How can I possibly have it again? I had an operation!” Well, fellow buckaroo, you may never have had carpel tunnel syndrome. You may have had—or perhaps will have—one long disaster area from your neck to your fingertips. 

How to Crawl Back 

Before trying extreme measures, you may be able to function again even if you feel hopeless. I managed to heal, and so have others, but I’ll always be at risk. 

As Jen Simmons, of The Web Ahead podcast and other projects told me, “It took a long time to injure myself. It took a long time to get back to where I was. My right arm between my elbow and wrist would start aching intermittently. Eventually, my arm even ached at night. I started each day with yesterday’s pain.” Simple measures, used consistently, helped her back. 

1. Massage therapy

I don’t remember what the rest of the world is like, but in Portland, Oregon, we have more than one massage therapy college. (Of course we do.) I saw a former teacher at the most respected school. This is not your “It was all so soothing. Why, I fell asleep!” massage. This is “Holy crap, he’s grinding his elbow into my armpit!“ massage therapy, with the emphasis on therapy. I owe him everything. Make sure you have someone who really knows what they’re doing. Get many referrals. Try a question, “Does my psoas muscle affect my back?” If they can’t answer it, flee. Regularly see the one you choose and after a while, depending on how injured you are, you may be able to taper off. 

2. Change your equipment

You may need to be hands-on with several pieces of equipment before you find the ones that don’t cause more pain. Many companies have restocking fees, charges to ship the equipment you want to return, and other retail atrocities. Always be sure to ask what the return policies are at any company before purchasing.

Mice 

You may have more success than I did with equipment such as the Wacom tablet. Mine came with a pen, and it hurt to repetitively click it. Trackballs are another option but, for many, they are better at prevention than recovery. But let’s get to the really effective stuff. One of the biggest sources of pain is using your mouse. One major reason is that your hand and wrist are in a perpetually unnatural position and you’re also moving your arm quite a bit. Each time you move the mouse, it is placing stress on your neck, shoulders and arms, because you need to lift them slightly in order to move the mouse and you need to angle your wrist. You may also be too injured to use the trackpad all the time, and this mouse, the vertical mouse is a dandy preventative measure, too. Shaking up your patterns is a wise move. I have long fingers, not especially thin, yet the small size works best for me. (They have larger choices available.) What?! A sideways mouse? Yep. All the weight of your hand will be resting on it in the handshake position. Your forearms aren’t constantly twisting over hill and dale. You aren’t using any muscles in your wrist or hand. They are relaxing. You’ll adapt in a day, and oh, oh, what a relief it is. 

Keyboards

I really liked doing business with the people at Kinesis-Ergo. (I’m not affiliated with them in any way.) They have the vertical mouse and a number of keyboards. The one that felt the most natural to me, and, once again, it only takes a day to adapt, is the Freestyle2 for the Mac. They have several options. I kept the keyboard halves attached to each other at first, and then spread them apart a little more. I recommend choosing one that slants and can separate. You can adjust the angle. For a little extra, they’ll make sure it’s all set up and ready to go for you. I’m guessing that some Googling will find you similar equipment, wherever you live. 

Warning: if you use the ergonomic keyboards, you may have fewer USB ports. The laptop will be too far away to see unless you find a satisfactory setup using a stand. This is the perfect excuse for purchasing a humongous display. 

You may not look cool while jetting coast to coast in your skinny jeans and what appears to be the old-time orthopedic shoe version of computing gear. But once you have rested and used many of these suggestions consistently, you may be able to use your laptop or other device in all its lovely sleekness during the trip. 

Other doohickies

The Kinesis site and The Human Solution have a wide selection of ergonomic products: standing desks, ergonomically correct chairs, and, yes, even things with foot pedals. Explore! 

3. Stop clicking, at least for a while

Use keyboard shortcuts, but use them slowly. This is not the time to show off your skillz. You’ll be sort of like a recovering alcoholic, in that you’ll be a recovering repetitive stress survivor for the rest of your life, once you really injure yourself. Always be vigilant. There’s also a bit of software sold by The Human Solution and other places, and it was my salvation. It’s called the McNib for Macs, and the Nib for PCs. (I’ve only used the McNib.) It’s for click-free mousing. I found it tricky to use when writing markup and code, but you may become quite adept at it. A little rectangle pops up on your screen, you mouse over it and choose, let’s say, “Double-click.” Until you change that choice, if you mouse over a link or anything else, it will double-click it for you. All you do is glide your mouse around. Awkward for a day or two, but you’ll pick it up quickly. Though you can use it all day for work, even if you just use this for browsing LOLcats or Gary Vaynerchuk’s YouTube videos, it will help you by giving your fingers a sweet break. 

But here’s the sad news. The developer who invented this died a few years ago. (Yes, I used to speak to him on the phone.) While it is for sale, it isn’t compatible with Mac OS X Lion or anything subsequent. PowerPC strikes again. His site is still up. Demos for use with older software can be downloaded free at his old site, or at The Human Solution. Perhaps an enterprising developer can invent something that would provide this help, without interfering with patents. Rumor has it among ergonomic retailers (yes, I’m like a police dog sniffing my way to a criminal once I head down a trail) that his company was purchased by a company in China, with no update in sight. 

4. Use built-in features

That little microphone icon that comes up alongside the keyboard on your iPhone allows you to speak your message instead of incessantly thumbing it. I believe it works in any program that uses the keyboard. It’s not Siri. She’s for other things, like having a personal relationship with an inanimate object. Apple even has a good section on ergonomics. You think I’m intense about this subject? To improve your repetitive stress, Apple doesn’t want you to use oral contraceptives, alcohol, or tobacco, to which I say, “Have as much sex, bacon, and chocolate as possible to make up for it.” 

Apple’s info even has illustrations of things like a faucet dripping into what is labeled a bucket full of “TRAUMA.” Sounds like upgrading to Yosemite, but I digress.  

5. Take breaks 

If it’s a game or other non-essential activity, take a break for a month. Fine, now that I’ve called games non-essential, I suppose you’ll all unfollow me on Twitter. 

6. Whether you are sore or not, do stretches throughout the day 

This is a big one. Really big. The best book on the subject of repetitive stress injuries is Conquering Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Other Repetitive Strain Injuries: A Self-Care Program by Sharon J. Butler. Don’t worry, most of it is illustrations. Pretend it’s a graphic novel. 

I’m notorious for never reading instructions, and who on earth reads the introduction of a book, unless they wrote it? I wrote a book a long time ago, and I bet my house, husband, and life savings that my own parents never read the intro. Well, I did read the intro to this book, and you should, too. Stretching correctly, in a way that doesn’t further hurt you, that keeps you flexible if you aren’t injured, that actually heals you, calls for precision. Read and you’ll see. The key is to stretch just until you start to feel the stretch, even if that’s merely a tiny movement. Don’t force anything past that point. Kindly nurse yourself back to health, or nurture your still-healthy body by stretching. Over the following days, weeks, months, you’ll be moving well past that initial stretch point.   

The book is brimming with examples. You only have to pick a few stretches, if this is too much to handle. Do it every single day. I can tell you some of the best ones for me, but it depends on the person. You’ll also discover in Butler’s book that areas that you think are the problem are sometimes actually adjacent to the muscle or tendon that is the source of the problem. Add a few stretches or two for that area, too.  

But please follow the instructions in the introduction. If you overdo it, or perform some other crazy-ass hijinks, as I would be tempted to do, I am not responsible for your outcome. I give you fair warning that I am not a healthcare provider. I’m just telling you as a friend, an untrained one, at that, who has been through this experience. 

7. Follow good habits

Develop habits like drinking lots of water (which helps with lactic acid buildup in muscles), looking away from the computer for twenty seconds every twenty to thirty minutes, eating right, and probably doing everything else your mother told you to do. Maybe this is a good time to bring up flossing your teeth, and going outside to play instead of watching TV. As your mom would say, “It’s a beautiful day outside, what are you kids doing in here?” 

8. Speak instead of writing, if you can 

Amber Simmons, who is very smart and funny, once tweeted in front of the whole world that, “@carywood is a Skype whore.” I was always asking people on Twitter if we could Skype instead of using iChat or exchanging emails. (I prefer the audio version so I don’t have to, you know, do something drastic like comb my hair.) Keyboarding is tough on hands, whether you notice it or not at the time, and when doing rapid-fire back-and-forthing with people, you tend to speed up your typing and not take any breaks. This is a hand-killer. Voice chats have made such a difference for me that I am still a rabid Skype whore. Wait, did I say that out loud? 

Speak your text or emails, using Dragon Dictate or other software. In about 2005, accessibility and user experience design expert, Derek Featherstone, in Canada, and I, at home, chatted over the internet, each of us using a different voice-to-text program. The programs made so many mistakes communicating with each other that we began that sort of endless, tearful laughing that makes you think someone may need to call an ambulance. This type of software has improved quite a bit over the years, thank goodness. Lack of accessibility of any kind isn’t funny to Derek or me or to anyone who can’t use the web without pain. 

9. Watch your position 

For example, if you lift up your arms to use the computer, or stare down at your laptop, you’ll need to rearrange your equipment. The internet has a lot of information about ideal ergonomic work areas. Please use a keyboard drawer. Be sure to measure the height carefully so that even a tented keyboard, like the one I recommend, will fit. I also recommend getting the version of the Freestyle with palm supports. Just these two measures did much to help both Jen Simmons and me. 

10. If you need to take anti-inflammatories, stop working

If you are all drugged up on ibuprofen, and pounding and clicking like mad, your body will not know when you are tired or injuring yourself. I don’t recommend taking these while using your computing devices. Perhaps just take it at night, though I’m not a fan of that category of medications. Check with your healthcare provider. At least ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory, which may help you. In contrast, acetaminophen (paracetamol) only makes your body think it’s not in pain. Ice is great, as is switching back and forth between ice and heat. But again, if you need ice and ibuprofen you really need to take a major break. 

11. Don’t forget the rest of your body

I’ve zeroed in on my personal area of knowledge and experience, but you may be setting yourself up for problems in other areas of your body. There’s what is known to bad writers as “a veritable cornucopia” of information on the web about how to help the rest of your body. A wee bit of research on the web and you’ll discover simple exercises and stretches for the rest of your potential catastrophic areas: your upper back, your lower back, your legs, ankles, and eyes. Do gentle stretches, three or four times a day, rather than powering your way through. Ease into new equipment such as standing desks. Stretch those newly challenged areas until your body adapts. Pay attention to your body, even though I too often forget mine. 

12. Remember the children

Kids are using equipment to play highly addictive games or to explore amazing software, and if these call for repetitive motions, children are being set up for future injuries. They’ll grab hold of something, as parents out there know, and play it 3,742 times. That afternoon. Perhaps by the time they are adults, everything will just be holograms and mind-reading, but adult fingers and hands are used for most things in life, not just computing devices and phones with keyboards sized for baby chipmunks. 

I’ll be watching you

Quickly now, while I (possibly) have your attention. Don’t move a muscle. Is your neck tense? Are you unconsciously lifting your shoulders up? How long since you stopped staring at the screen? How bright is your screen? Are you slumping (c’mon now, ‘fess up) and inviting sciatica problems? Do you have to turn your hands at an angle relative to your wrist in order to type? Uh-oh. That’s a bad one. Your hands, wrists, and forearms should be one straight line while keyboarding. Future you is begging you to change your ways. Don’t let your #ThrowbackThursday in 2020 say, “Here’s a photo from when I used to be able to do so many wonderful things that I can’t do now.” And, whatever you do, don’t try for even a nanosecond to push through the pain, or the next thing you know, you’ll be an unpaid extra in The Expendables 7.",2014,Carolyn Wood,carolynwood,2014-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/dont-push-through-the-pain/,business
266,Collaborative Development for a Responsively Designed Web,"In responsive web design we’ve found a technique that allows us to design for the web as a medium in its own right: one that presents a fluid, adaptable and ever changing canvas.

Until this point, we gave little thought to the environment in which users will experience our work, caring more about the aggregate than the individual. The applications we use encourage rigid layouts, whilst linear processes focus on clients signing off paintings of websites that have little regard for behaviour and interactions. The handover of pristine, pixel-perfect creations to developers isn’t dissimilar to farting before exiting a crowded lift, leaving front-end developers scratching their heads as they fill in the inevitable gaps. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading Drew’s checklist of things to consider before handing over a design.

Somehow, this broken methodology has survived for the last fifteen years or so. Even the advent of web standards has had little impact. Now, as we face an onslaught of different devices, the true universality of the web can no longer be ignored.

Responsive web design is just the thin end of the wedge. Largely concerned with layout, its underlying philosophy could ignite a trend towards interfaces that adapt to any number of different variables: input methods, bandwidth availability, user preference – you name it!

With such adaptability, a collaborative and iterative process is required. Ethan Marcotte, who worked with the team behind the responsive redesign of the Boston Globe website, talked about such an approach in his book:


	The responsive projects I’ve worked on have had a lot of success combining design and development into one hybrid phase, bringing the two teams into one highly collaborative group.


Whilst their process still involved the creation of desktop-centric mock-ups, these were presented to the entire team early on, where questions about how pages might adapt and behave at different sizes were asked. Mock-ups were quickly converted into HTML prototypes, meaning further decisions could be based on usage rather than guesswork (and endless hours spent in Photoshop).

Regardless of the exact process, it’s clear that the relationship between our two disciplines is more crucial than ever. Yet, historically, it seems a wedge has been driven between us – perhaps a result of segregation and waterfall-style processes – resulting in animosity.

So how can we improve this relationship? Ultimately, we’ll need to adapt, but even within existing workflows we can start to overlap. Simply adjusting our attitude can effect change, and bring design and development teams closer together.


	Good design is constant contact.

	Mark Otto


The way we work needs to be more open and inclusive. For example, ensuring members of the development team attend initial kick-off meetings and design workshops will not only ensure technical concerns are raised, but mean that those implementing our designs better understand the problems we’re trying to solve.

It can also be useful at this stage to explain how you work and the sort of deliverables you expect to produce. This will give developers a chance to make recommendations on how these can be optimized for their own needs.

You may even find opportunities to share the load. On a recent project I worked on, our development partners offered to produce the interactive prototypes needed for user testing. This allowed us to concentrate on refining the experience, whilst they were able to get a head start on building the product.

While developers should be involved at the beginning of projects, it’s also important that designers are able to review and contribute to a product as it’s being built. Any handover should be done in person, and ideally you’ll have a day set aside to do so. Having additional budget available for follow-up design reviews is also recommended. Learning how to use version control tools like Subversion or Git will allow you to work within the same environment as developers, and allow you to contribute code or graphic assets directly to a project if needed.

Don’t underestimate the benefits of designer and developer sitting next to each other. Subtle nuances can be explored far more easily than if they were conducted over email or phone. As Ethan writes, “‘Design’ is the means, not merely the end; the path we walk over the course of a project, the choices we make”.

It’s from collaboration like this that I’ve become fond of producing visual style guides. These demonstrate typographic treatments for common markup and patterns (blockquotes, lists, pagination, basic form controls and so on). Thinking in terms of components rather than individual pages not only fits in better with how a developer will implement a site, but can also ensure your design works as a coherent whole.

Despite the amount of research and design produced, when it comes to the crunch, there will always be a need for compromise. As the old saying goes, ‘fast, cheap and good – pick two.’ It’s important that you know which pieces are crucial to a design and which areas can allow for movement. Pick your battles wisely. Having an agreed set of design principles can be useful when making such decisions, as they help everyone focus on the goals of the project.


	The best compromises are reached when both sides understand the issues of the other.

	Richard Rutter


Ultimately, better collaboration comes through a shared understanding of the different competencies required to build a website. Instead of viewing ourselves in terms of discrete roles, we should instead look to emphasize our range of abilities, and work with others whose skills are complementary.

Perhaps somebody who actively seeks to broaden their knowledge is the mark of a professional. Seek these people out.

The best developers I’ve worked with have a respect for design, probably having attempted to do some themselves! Having wrangled with a few MySQL databases myself, I certainly believe the obverse is true. While knowing HTML won’t necessarily make you a better designer, it will help you understand the issues being faced by a front-end developer and, more importantly, allow you to offer solutions or alternative approaches.

So take a moment to think about how you work with developers and how you could improve your relationship with them. What are you doing to ease the path towards our collaborative future?",2011,Paul Lloyd,paulrobertlloyd,2011-12-05T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/collaborative-development-for-a-responsively-designed-web/,business
270,From Side Project to Not So Side Project,"In the last article I wrote for 24 ways, back in 2009, I enthused about the benefits of having a pet project, suggesting that we should all have at least one so that we could collaborate with our friends, escape our day jobs, fulfil our own needs, help others out, raise our profiles, make money, and — most importantly — have fun. I don’t think I need to offer any further persuasions: it seems that designers and developers are launching their own pet projects left, right and centre. This makes me very happy.

However, there still seems to be something of a disconnect between having a side project and turning it into something that is moderately successful; in particular, the challenge of making enough money to sustain the project and perhaps even elevating it from the sidelines so that it becomes something not so on the side at all.

Before we even begin this, let’s spend a moment talking about money, also known as…

Evil, nasty, filthy money

Over the last couple of years, I’ve started referring to myself as an accidental businessman. I say accidental because my view of the typical businessman is someone who is driven by money, and I usually can’t stand such people. Those who are motivated by profit, obsessed with growth, and take an active interest in the world’s financial systems don’t tend to be folks with whom I share a beer, unless it’s to pour it over them. Especially if they’re wearing pinstriped suits.

That said, we all want to make money, don’t we? And most of us want to make a relatively decent amount, too. I don’t think there’s any harm in admitting that, is there? Hello, I’m Elliot and I’m a capitalist.

The key is making money from doing what we love. For most people I know in our community, we’ve already achieved that — I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone who isn’t extremely passionate about working in our industry and I think it’s one of the most positive, unifying benefits we enjoy as a group of like-minded people — but side projects usually arise from another kind of passion: a passion for something other than what we do as our day jobs. Perhaps it’s because your clients are driving you mental and you need a break; perhaps it’s because you want to create something that is truly your own; perhaps it’s because you’re sick of seeing your online work disappear so fast and you want to try your hand at print in order to make a more permanent mark.

The three factors I listed there led me to create 8 Faces, a printed magazine about typography that started as a side project and is now a very significant part of my yearly output and income.

Like many things that prove fruitful, 8 Faces’ success was something of an accident, too. For a start, the magazine was never meant to be profitable; its only purpose at all was to scratch my own itch. Then, after the first issue took off and I realized how much time I needed to spend in order to make the next one decent, it became clear that I would have to cover more than just the production costs: I’d have to take time out from client work as well. Doing this meant I’d have to earn some money. Probably not enough to equate to the exact amount of time lost when I could be doing client work (not that you could ever describe time as being lost when you work on something you love), but enough to survive; for me to feel that I was getting paid while doing all of the work that 8 Faces entailed. The answer was to raise money through partnerships with some cool companies who were happy to be associated with my little project.

A sustainable business model

Business model! I can’t believe I just wrote those words! But a business model is really just a loose plan for how not to screw up. And all that stuff I wrote in the paragraph above about partnering with companies so I could get some money in while I put the magazine together? Well, that’s my business model. 

If you’re making any product that has some sort of production cost, whether that’s physical print run expenses or up-front dev work to get an app built, covering those costs before you even release your product means that you’ll be in profit from the first copy you sell. This is no small point: production expenses are pretty much the only cost you’ll ever need to recoup, so having them covered before you launch anything is pretty much the best possible position in which you could place yourself. Happy days, as Jamie Oliver would say.

Obtaining these initial funds through partnerships has another benefit. Sure, it’s a form of advertising but, done right, your partners can potentially provide you with great content, too. In the case of 8 Faces, the ads look as nice as the rest of the magazine, and a couple of our partners also provide proper articles: genuinely meaningful, relevant, reader-pleasing articles at that. You’d be amazed at how many companies are willing to become partners and, as the old adage goes, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

With profit comes responsibility

Don’t forget about the responsibility you have to your audience if you engage in a relationship with a partner or any type of advertiser: although I may have freely admitted my capitalist leanings, I’m still essentially a hairy hippy, and I feel that any partnership should be good for me as a publisher, good for the partner and — most importantly — good for the reader. Really, the key word here is relevance, and that’s where 99.9% of advertising fails abysmally. 

(99.9% is not a scientific figure, but you know what I’m on about.)

The main grey area when a side project becomes profitable is how you share that profit, partly because — in my opinion, at least — the transition from non-profitable side project to relatively successful source of income can be a little blurred. Asking for help for nothing when there’s no money to be had is pretty normal, but sometimes it’s easy to get used to that free help even once you start making money. I believe the best approach is to ask for help with the promise that it will always be rewarded as soon as there’s money available. (Oh, god: this sounds like one of those nightmarish client proposals. It’s not, honest.) If you’re making something cool, people won’t mind helping out while you find your feet.

Events often think that they’re exempt from sharing profit. Perhaps that’s because many event organizers think they’re doing the speakers a favour rather than the other way around (that’s a whole separate article), but it’s shocking to see how many people seem to think they can profit from content-makers — speakers, for example — and yet not pay for that content. It was for this reason that Keir and I paid all of our speakers for our Insites: The Tour side project, which we ran back in July. We probably could’ve got away without paying them, especially as the gig was so informal, but it was the right thing to do.

In conclusion: money as a by-product

Let’s conclude by returning to the slightly problematic nature of money, because it’s the pivot on which your side project’s success can swing, regardless of whether you measure success by monetary gain. I would argue that success has nothing to do with profit — it’s about you being able to spend the time you want on the project. Unfortunately, that is almost always linked to money: money to pay yourself while you work on your dream idea; money to pay for more servers when your web app hits the big time; money to pay for efforts to get the word out there. The key, then, is to judge success on your own terms, and seek to generate as much money as you see fit, whether it’s purely to cover your running costs, or enough to buy a small country. There’s nothing wrong with profit, as long as you’re ethical about it. (Pro tip: if you’ve earned enough to buy a small country, you’ve probably been unethical along the way.)

The point at which individuals and companies fail — in the moral sense, for sure, but often in the competitive sense, too — is when money is the primary motivation. It should never be the primary motivation. If you’re not passionate enough about something to do it as an unprofitable side project, you shouldn’t be doing it all. 

Earning money should be a by-product of doing what you love. And who doesn’t want to spend their life doing what they love?",2011,Elliot Jay Stocks,elliotjaystocks,2011-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/from-side-project-to-not-so-side-project/,business
170,"A Pet Project is For Life, Not Just for Christmas","I’m excited: as December rolls on, I’m winding down from client work and indulging in a big pet project I’ve been dreaming up for quite some time, with the aim of releasing it early next year. I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for pet projects and currently have a few in the works: the big one, two collaborations with friends, and my continuing (and completely un-web-related) attempt at music. But when I think about the other designers and developers out there whose work I admire, one thing becomes obvious: they’ve all got pet projects! Look around the web and you’ll see that anyone worth their salt has some sort of side project on the go. If you don’t have yours yet, now’s the time!

Have a pet project to collaborate with your friends

It’s not uncommon to find me staring at my screen, looking at beautiful websites my friends have made, grinning inanely because I feel so honoured to know such talented individuals. But one thing really frustrates me: I hardly ever get to work with these people! Sure, there are times when it’s possible to do so, but due to various project situations, it’s a rarity.

So, in order to work with my friends, I’ve found the best way is to instigate the collaboration outside of client work; in other words, have a pet project together! Free from the hard realities of budgets, time restraints, and client demands, you and your friends can come up with something purely for your own pleasures. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to work with other designers or developers whose work you love, the pet project is that excuse. They don’t necessarily have to be friends, either: if the respect is mutual, it can be a great way of breaking the ice and getting to know someone. 

 Figure 1: A forthcoming secret love-child from myself and Tim Van Damme

Have a pet project to escape from your day job

We all like to moan about our clients and bosses, don’t we? But if leaving your job or firing your evil client just isn’t an option, why not escape from all that and pour your creative energies into something you genuinely enjoy? 

It’s not just about reacting to negativity, either: a pet project is a great way to give yourself a bit of variety. As web designers, our day-to-day work forces us to work within a set of web-related contraints and sometimes it can be demoralising to spend so many hours fixing IE bugs. The perfect antidote? Go and do some print design! If it’s not possible in your day job or client work, the pet project is the perfect place to exercise your other creative muscles. Yes, print design (or your chosen alternative) has its own constraints, but if they’re different to those you experience on a daily basis, it’ll be a welcome relief and you’ll return to your regular work feeling refreshed.

 Figure 2: Ligature, Loop & Stem, from Scott Boms & Luke Dorny

Have a pet project to fulfill your own needs

Many pet projects come into being because the designers and/or developers behind them are looking for a tool to accomplish a task and find that it doesn’t exist, thus prompting them to create their own solution. In fact, the very app I’m using to write this article — Ommwriter, from Herraiz Soto & Co — was originally a tool they’d created for their internal staff, before releasing it to the public so that it could be enjoyed by others.

Just last week, Tina Roth Eisenberg launched Teux Deux, a pet project she’d designed to meet her own requirements for a to-do list, having found that no existing apps fulfilled her needs. Oh, and it was a collaboration with her studio mate Cameron. Remember what I was saying about working with your friends?

 Figure 3: Teux Deux, the GTD pet project that launched just last week

Have a pet project to help people out

Ommwriter and Teux Deux are free for anyone to use. Let’s just think about that for a moment: the creators have invested their time and effort in the project, and then given it away to be used by others. That’s very cool and something we’re used to seeing a lot of in the web community (how lucky we are)! People love free stuff and giving away the fruits of your labour will earn you major kudos. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with making some money, either — more on that in a second.

 Figure 4: Dan Rubin‘s extremely helpful Make Photoshop Faster

Have a pet project to raise your profile

So, giving away free stuff earns you kudos. And kudos usually helps you raise your profile in the industry. We all like a bit of shameless fame, don’t we? But seriously, if you want to become well known, make something cool. It could be free (to buy you the love and respect of the community) or it could be purchasable (if you’ve made something that’s cool enough to deserve hard-earned cash), but ultimately it needs to be something that people will love. 

 Figure 5: Type designer Jos Buivenga has shot to fame thanks to his beautiful typefaces and ‘freemium’ business model

If you’re a developer with no design skills, team up with a good designer so that the design community appreciate its aesthetic. If you’re a designer with no development skills, team up with a good developer so that it works. Oh, and not that I’d recommend you ever do this for selfish reasons, but collaborating with someone you admire — whose work is well-respected by the community — will also help raise your profile.

Have a pet project to make money

In spite of our best hippy-esque intentions to give away free stuff to the masses, there’s also nothing wrong with making a bit of money from your pet project. In fact, if your project involves you having to make a considerable financial investment, it’s probably a good idea to try and recoup those costs in some way.

 Figure 6: The success of Shaun Inman‘s various pet projects — Mint, Fever, Horror Vacui, etc. — have allowed him to give up client work entirely.

A very common way to do that in both the online and offline worlds is to get some sort of advertising. For a slightly different approach, try contacting a company who are relevant to your audience and ask them if they’d be interesting in sponsoring your project, which would usually just mean having their brand associated with yours in some way. This is still a form of advertising but tends to allow for a more tasteful implementation, so it’s worth pursuing. 

Advertising is a great way to cover your own costs and keep things free for your audience, but when costs are considerably higher (like if you’re producing a magazine with high production values, for instance), there’s nothing wrong with charging people for your product. But, as I mentioned above, you’ve got to be positive that it’s worth paying for!

Have a pet project just for fun

Sometimes there’s a very good reason for having a pet project — and sometimes even a viable business reason — but actually you don’t need any reason at all. Wanting to have fun is just as worthy a motivation, and if you’re not going to have fun doing it, then what’s the point? Assuming that almost all pet projects are designed, developed, written, printed, marketed and supported in our free time, why not do something enjoyable?

 Figure 7: Jessica Hische‘s beautiful Daily Drop Cap

In conclusion

The fact that you’re reading 24 ways shows that you have a passion for the web, and that’s something I’m happy to see in abundance throughout our community. Passion is a term that’s thrown about all over the place, but it really is evident in the work that people do. It’s perhaps most evident, however, in the pet projects that people create. Don’t forget that the very site you’re reading this article on is… a pet project.

If you’ve yet to do so, make it a new year’s resolution for 2010 to have your own pet project so that you can collaborate with your friends, escape from your day job, fulfil your own needs, help people out, raise your profile, make money, and — above all — have fun.",2009,Elliot Jay Stocks,elliotjaystocks,2009-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/a-pet-project-is-for-life-not-just-for-christmas/,business
281,Nine Things I've Learned,"I’ve been a professional graphic designer for fourteen years and for just under four of those a professional web designer. Like most designers I’ve learned a lot in my time, both from a design point of view and in business as freelance designer. A few of the things I’ve learned stick out in my mind, so I thought I’d share them with you. They’re pretty random and in no particular order.

1. Becoming the designer you want to be

When I started out as a young graphic designer, I wanted to design posters and record sleeves, pretty much like every other young graphic designer. The problem is that the reality of the world means that when you get your first job you’re designing the back of a paracetamol packet or something equally weird. I recently saw a tweet that went something like this: “You’ll never become the designer you always dreamt of being by doing the work you never wanted to do”. This is so true; to become the designer you want to be, you need to be designing the things you’re passionate about designing. This probably this means working in the evenings and weekends for little or no money, but it’s time well spent. Doing this will build up your portfolio with the work that really shows what you can do! Soon, someone will ask you to design something based on having seen this work. From this point, you’re carving your own path in the direction of becoming the designer you always wanted to be.

2. Compete on your own terms

As well as all being friends, we are also competitors. In order to win new work we need a selling point, preferably a unique selling point. Web design is a combination of design disciplines – user experience design, user interface Design, visual design, development, and so on. Some companies will sell themselves as UX specialists, which is fine, but everyone who designs a website from scratch does some sort of UX, so it’s not really a unique selling point. Of course, some people do it better than others.

One area of web design that clients have a strong opinion on, and will judge you by, is visual design. It’s an area in which it’s definitely possible to have a unique selling point. Designing the visual aesthetic for a website is a combination of logical decision making and a certain amount of personal style. If you can create a unique visual style to your work, it can become a selling point that’s unique to you.

3. How much to charge and staying motivated

When you’re a freelance designer one of the hardest things to do is put a price on your work and skills. Finding the right amount to charge is a fine balance between supplying value to your customer and also charging enough to stay motivated to do a great job. It’s always tempting to offer a low price to win work, but it’s often not the best approach: not just for yourself but for the client as well.

A client once asked me if I could reduce my fee by £1,000 and still be motivated enough to do a good job. In this case the answer was yes, but it was the question that resonated with me. I realized I could use this as a gauge to help me price projects. Before I send out a quote I now always ask myself the question “Is the amount I’ve quoted enough to make me feel motivated to do my best on this project?” I never send out a quote unless the answer is yes. In my mind there’s no point in doing any project half-heartedly, as every project is an opportunity to build your reputation and expand your portfolio to show potential clients what you can do. Offering a client a good price but not being prepared to put everything you have into it, isn’t value for money.  

4. Supplying the right design

When I started out as a graphic designer it seemed to be the done thing to supply clients with a ton of options for their logo or brochure designs. In a talk given by Dan Rubin, he mentioned that this was a legacy of agencies competing with each other in a bid to create the illusion of offering more value for money. Over the years, I’ve realized that offering more than one solution makes no sense. The reason a client comes to you as a designer is because you’re the person than can get it right. If I  were to supply three options, I’d be knowingly offering my client at least two options that I didn’t think worked.

To this day I still get asked how many homepage design options I’ll supply for the quoted amount. The answer is one. Of course, I’m more than happy to iterate upon the design to fine-tune it and, on the odd occasion, I do revisit a design concept if I just didn’t nail the design first time around. Your time is much better spent refining the right design option than rushing out three substandard designs in the same amount of time.

5. Colour is key

There are many contributing factors that go into making a good visual design, but one of the simplest ways to do this is through the use of colour. The colour palette used in a design can have such a profound effect on a visual design that it almost feels like you’re cheating. It’s easy to add more and more subtle shades of colour to add a sense of sophistication and complexity to a design, but it dilutes the overall visual impact. When I design, I almost have a rule that only allows me to use a very limited colour palette. I don’t always stick to it, but it’s always in mind and something I’m constantly reviewing through my design process.

6. Creative thinking is central to good or boundary-pushing web design

When we think of creativity in web design we often link this to the visual design, as there is an obvious opportunity to be creative in this area if the brief allows it. Something that I’ve learnt in my time as a web designer is that there’s a massive need for creative thinking in the more technical aspects of web design. The tools we use for building websites are there to be manipulated and used in creative ways to design exciting and engaging user experiences. Great developers are constantly using their creativity to push the boundaries of what can be done with CSS, jQuery and JavaScript. 

Being creative and creative thinking are things we should embrace as an industry and they are qualities that can be found in anyone, whether they be a visual designer or Rails developer.

7. Creative block: don’t be afraid to get things wrong

Creative block can be a killer when designing. It’s often applied to visual design, which is more subjective. I suffer from creative block on a regular basis. It’s hugely frustrating and can screw up your schedule. Having thought about what creative block actually is, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually more of a lack of direction than a lack of ideas. You have ideas and solutions in mind but don’t feel committed to any of them. You’re scared that whatever direction you take, it’ll turn out to be wrong. I’ve found that the best remedy for this is to work through this barrier. It’s a bit like designing with a blindfold on – you don’t really know where you’re going. If you stick to your guns and keep pressing forward I find that, nine times out of ten, this process leads to a solution. As the page begins to fill, the direction you’re looking for slowly begins to take shape.

8. You get better at designing by designing

I often get emails asking me what books someone can read to help them become a better designer. There are a lot of good books on subjects like HTML5, CSS, responsive web design and the like, that will really help improve anyone’s web design skills. But, when it comes to visual design, the best way to get better is to design as much as possible. You can’t follow instructions for these things because design isn’t following instructions. A large part of web design is definitely applying a set of widely held conventions, but there’s another part to it that is invention and the only way to get better at this is to do it as much as possible.

9. Self-belief is overrated

Throughout our lives we’re told to have self-belief. Self-belief and confidence in what we do, whatever that may be. The problem is that some people find it easier than others to believe in themselves. I’ve spent years trying to convince myself to believe in what I do but have always found it difficult to have complete confidence in my design skills. Self-doubt always creeps in.

I’ve realized that it’s ok to doubt myself and I think it might even be a good thing!  I’ve realized that it’s my self-doubt that propels me forward and makes me work harder to achieve the best results. The reason I’m sharing this is because I know I’m not the only designer that feels this way. You can spend a lot of time fighting self-doubt only to discover that it’s your body’s natural mechanism to help you do the best job possible.",2011,Mike Kus,mikekus,2011-12-11T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/nine-things-ive-learned/,business
250,Build up Your Leadership Toolbox,"Leadership. It can mean different things to different people and vary widely between companies. Leadership is more than just a job title. You won’t wake up one day and magically be imbued with all you need to do a good job at leading. If we don’t have a shared understanding of what a Good Leader looks like, how can we work on ourselves towards becoming one? How do you know if you even could be a leader? Can you be a leader without the title?
What even is it?
I got very frustrated way back in my days as a senior developer when I was given “advice” about my leadership style; at the time I didn’t have the words to describe the styles and ways in which I was leading to be able to push back. I heard these phrases a lot:

you need to step up
you need to take charge
you need to grab the bull by its horns
you need to have thicker skin
you need to just be more confident in your leading
you need to just make it happen

I appreciate some people’s intent was to help me, but honestly it did my head in. WAT?! What did any of this even mean. How exactly do you “step up” and how are you evaluating what step I’m on? I am confident, what does being even more confident help achieve with leading? Does that not lead you down the path of becoming an arrogant door knob? >___<
While there is no One True Way to Lead, there is an overwhelming pattern of people in positions of leadership within tech industry being held by men. It felt a lot like what people were fundamentally telling me to do was to be more like an extroverted man. I was being asked to demonstrate more masculine associated qualities (#notallmen). I’ll leave the gendered nature of leadership qualities as an exercise in googling for the reader.
I’ve never had a good manager and at the time had no one else to ask for help, so I turned to my trusted best friends. Books.
I <3 books
I refused to buy into that style of leadership as being the only accepted way to be. There had to be room for different kinds of people to be leaders and have different leadership styles.
There are three books that changed me forever in how I approach and think about leadership.

Primal leadership, by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee
Quiet, by Susan Cain
Daring Greatly - How the Courage to be Vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent and Lead, by Brené Brown

I recommend you read them. Ignore the slightly cheesy titles and trust me, just read them.
Primal leadership helped to give me the vocabulary and understanding I needed about the different styles of leadership there are, how and when to apply them.
Quiet really helped me realise how much I was being undervalued and misunderstood in an extroverted world. If I’d had managers or support from someone who valued introverts’ strengths, things would’ve been very different. I would’ve had someone telling others to step down and shut up for a change rather than pushing on me to step up and talk louder over everyone else. It’s OK to be different and needing different things like time to recharge or time to think before speaking. It also improved my ability to work alongside my more extroverted colleagues by giving me an understanding of their world so I could communicate my needs in a language they would get.
Brené Brown’s book I am forever in debt to. Her work gave me the courage to stand up and be my own kind of leader. Even when no-one around me looked or sounded like me, I found my own voice.
It takes great courage to be vulnerable and open about what you can and can’t do. Open about your mistakes. Vocalise what you don’t know and asking for help. In some lights, these are seen as weaknesses and many have tried to use them against me, to pull me down and exclude me for talking about them. Dear reader, it did not work, they failed. The truth is, they are my greatest strengths. The privileges I have, I use for good as best and often as I can.
Just like gender, leadership is not binary
If you google for what a leader is, you’ll get many different answers. I personally think Brené’s version is the best as it is one that can apply to a wider range of people, irrespective of job title or function.

I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.
Brené Brown

Being a leader isn’t about being the loudest in a room, having veto power, talking over people or ignoring everyone else’s ideas. It’s not about “telling people what to do”. It’s not about an elevated status that you’re better than others. Nor is it about creating a hand wavey far away vision and forgetting to help support people in how to get there.
Being a Good Leader is about having a toolbox of leadership styles and skills to choose from depending on the situation. Knowing how and when to apply them is part of the challenge and difficulty in becoming good at it. It is something you will have to continuously work on, forever. There is no Done.
Leaders are Made, they are not Born.
Be flexible in your leadership style

Typically, the best, most effective leaders act according to one or more of six distinct approaches to leadership and skillfully switch between the various styles depending on the situation.

From the book, Primal Leadership, it gives a summary of 6 leadership styles which are:

Visionary
Coaching
Affiliative
Democratic
Pacesetting
Commanding

Visionary, moves people toward a shared dream or future. When change requires a new vision or a clear direction is needed, using a visionary style of leadership helps communicate that picture. By learning how to effectively communicate a story you can help people to move in that direction and give them clarity on why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Coaching, is about connecting what a person wants and helping to align that with organisation’s goals. It’s a balance of helping someone improve their performance to fulfil their role and their potential beyond.
Affiliative, creates harmony by connecting people to each other and requires effective communication to aid facilitation of those connections. This style can be very impactful in healing rifts in a team or to help strengthen connections within and across teams. During stressful times having a positive and supportive connection to those around us really helps see us through those times.
Democratic, values people’s input and gets commitment through participation. Taking this approach can help build buy-in or consensus and is a great way to get valuable input from people. The tricky part about this style, I find, is that when I gather and listen to everyone’s input, that doesn’t mean the end result is that I have to please everyone.
The next two, sadly, are the ones wielded far too often and have the greatest negative impact. It’s where the “telling people what to do” comes from. When used sparingly and in the right situations, they can be a force for good. However, they must not be your default style.
Pacesetting, when used well, it is about meeting challenging and exciting goals. When you need to get high-quality results from a motivated and well performing team, this can be great to help achieve real focus and drive. Sadly it is so overused and poorly executed it becomes the “just make it happen” and driver of unrealistic workload which contributes to burnout.
Commanding, when used appropriately soothes fears by giving clear direction in an emergency or crisis. When shit is on fire, you want to know that your leadership ability can help kick-start a turnaround and bring clarity. Then switch to another style. This approach is also required when dealing with problematic employees or unacceptable behaviour.
Commanding style seems to be what a lot of people think being a leader is, taking control and commanding a situation. It should be used sparingly and only when absolutely necessary.
Be responsible for the power you wield
If reading through those you find yourself feeling a bit guilty that maybe you overuse some of the styles, or overwhelmed that you haven’t got all of these down and ready to use in your toolbox…
Take a breath. Take responsibility. Take action.
No one is perfect, and it’s OK. You can start right now working on those. You can have a conversation with your team and try being open about how you’re going to try some different styles. You can be vulnerable and own up to mistakes you might’ve made followed with an apology. You can order those books and read them. Those books will give you more examples on those leadership styles and help you to find your own voice.
The impact you can have on the lives of those around you when you’re a leader, is huge. You can help be that positive impact, help discover and develop potential in someone.

Time spent understanding people is never wasted.
Cate Huston.

I believe in you. <3 Mazz.",2018,Mazz Mosley,mazzmosley,2018-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2018/build-up-your-leadership-toolbox/,business
14,The Command Position Principle,"Living where I do, in a small village in rural North Wales, getting anywhere means driving along narrow country roads. Most of these are just about passable when two cars meet. 

If you’re driving too close to the centre of the road, when two drivers meet you stop, glare at each other and no one goes anywhere. Drive too close to your nearside and in summer you’ll probably scratch your paintwork on the hedgerows, or in winter you’ll sink your wheels into mud. 

Driving these lanes requires a balance between caring for your own vehicle and consideration for someone else’s, but all too often, I’ve seen drivers pushed towards the hedgerows and mud when someone who’s inconsiderate drives too wide because they don’t want to risk scratching their own paintwork or getting their wheels dirty.

If you learn to ride a motorcycle, you’ll be taught about the command position:


	Approximate central position, or any position from which the rider can exert control over invitation space either side.


The command position helps motorcyclists stay safe, because when they ride in the centre of their lane it prevents other people, usually car drivers, from driving alongside, either forcing them into the curb or potentially dangerously close to oncoming traffic. 

Taking the command position isn’t about motorcyclists being aggressive, it’s about them being confident. It’s them knowing their rightful place on the road and communicating that through how they ride.

I’ve recently been trying to take that command position when driving my car on our lanes. When I see someone coming in the opposite direction, instead of instinctively moving closer to my nearside — and in so doing subconsciously invite them into my space on the road — I hold both my nerve and a central position in my lane. Since I done this I’ve noticed that other drivers more often than not stay in their lane or pull closer to their nearside so we occupy equal space on the road. Although we both still need to watch our wing mirrors, neither of us gets our paint scratched or our wheels muddy.

We can apply this principle to business too, in particular to negotiations and the way we sell. Here’s how we might do that.

Commanding negotiations

When a customer’s been sold to well — more on that in just a moment — and they’ve made the decision to buy, the thing that usually stands in the way of us doing business is a negotiation over price. Some people treat negotiations as the equivalent of driving wide. They act offensively, because their aim is to force the other person into getting less, usually in return for giving more.

In encounters like this, it’s easy for us to act defensively. We might lack confidence in the price we ask for, or the value of the product or service we offer. We might compromise too early because of that. When that happens, there’s a pretty good chance that we’ll drive away with less than we deserve unless we use the command position principle to help us.

Before we start any negotiation it’s important to know that both sides ultimately want to reach an agreement. This isn’t always obvious. If one side isn’t already committed, at least in principle, then it’s not a negotiation at that point, it’s something else. 

For example, a prospective customer may be looking to learn our lowest price so that they can compare it to our competitors. When that’s the case, we’ve probably failed to qualify that prospect properly as, after all, who wants to be chosen simply because they’re the cheapest? In this situation, negotiating is a waste of time since we don’t yet know that it will result in us making a deal. We should enter into a negotiation only when we know where we stand. So ask confidently: “Are you looking to [make a decision]?”

When that’s been confirmed, it’s down to everyone to compromise until a deal’s been reached. That’s because good negotiations aren’t about one side beating the other, they’re about achieving a good deal for both. Using the command position principle helps us to maintain control over our negotiating space and affords us the opportunity to give ground only if we need to and only when we’re ready. It can also ensure that the person we’re negotiating with gives up some of their space.

Commanding sales

It’s not always necessary to negotiate when we’re doing a business deal, but we should always be prepared to sell. One of the most important parts of our sales process should be controlling when and how we tell someone our price. 

Unless it’s impossible to avoid, don’t work out a price for someone on the spot. When we do that we lose control over the time and place for presenting our price alongside the value factors that will contribute to the prospective customer accepting that price. For the same reason, never give a ballpark or, worse, a guesstimate figure. If the question of price comes up before we’re fully prepared, we should say politely that we need more time to work out a meaningful cost. 

When we are ready, we shouldn’t email a price for our prospective customer to read unaccompanied. Instead, create an opportunity to talk a prospect through our figures, demonstrate how we arrived at them and, most importantly, explain the value of what we’re selling to their business. Agree a time and place to do this and, if possible, do it all face-to-face.  

We shouldn’t hesitate when we give someone a price. When we sound even the slightest bit unsure or apologetic, we give the impression that we’ll be flexible in our position before negotiations have even begun.

Think about the command position principle, know the price and present it confidently. That way we send a clear signal that we know our business and how we deal with people. The command position principle isn’t about being cocky, it’s about showing other people respect, asking for it in return and showing it to ourselves.

 

Earlier, I mentioned selling well, because we sometimes hear people say that they dislike being sold to. In my experience, it’s not that people dislike the sales process, it’s that we dislike it done badly.

Taking part in a good sales process, either by selling or being sold to, can be a pleasurable experience. Try to be confident — after all, we understand how our skills will benefit a customer better than anyone else. Our confidence will inspire confidence in others. 

Self-confidence isn’t the same as arrogance, just as the command position isn’t the same as riding without consideration for others. The command position principle preserves others’ space as well as our own. By the same token, we should be considerate of others’ time and not waste it and our own by attempting to force them into buying something that’s inappropriate.

To prevent this from happening, evaluate them well to ensure that they’re the right customer for us. If they’re not, let them go on their way. They’ll thank us for it and may well become customers the next time we meet.

The business of closing a deal can be made an enjoyable experience for everyone if we take control by guiding someone through the sales process by asking the right questions to uncover their concerns, then allaying them by being knowledgeable and confident. This is riding in the command position.

Just like demonstrating we know our rightful position on the road, knowing our rightful place in a business relationship and communicating that through how we deal with people will help everyone achieve an equitable balance. When that happens in business, as well as on the road, no one gets their paintwork scratched or their wheels muddy.",2013,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2013-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2013/the-command-position-principle/,business
56,Helping VIPs Care About Performance,"Making a site feel super fast is the easy part of performance work. Getting people around you to care about site speed is a much bigger challenge. How do we keep the site fast beyond the initial performance work? Keeping very important people like your upper management or clients invested in performance work is critical to keeping a site fast and empowering other designers and developers to contribute.
The work to get others to care is so meaty that I dedicated a whole chapter to the topic in my book Designing for Performance. When I speak at conferences, the majority of questions during Q&A are on this topic. When I speak to developers and designers who care about performance, getting other people at one’s organization or agency to care becomes the most pressing question.
My primary response to folks who raise this issue is the question: “What metric(s) do your VIPs care about?” This is often met with blank stares and raised eyebrows. But it’s also our biggest clue to what we need to do to help empower others to care about performance and work on it. Every organization and executive is different. This means that three major things vary: the primary metrics VIPs care about; the language they use about measuring success; and how change is enacted. By clueing in to these nuances within your organization, you can get a huge leg up on crafting a successful pitch about performance work.
Let’s start with the metric that we should measure. Sure, (most) everybody cares about money - but is that really the metric that your VIPs are looking at each day to measure the success or efficacy of your site? More likely, dollars are the end game, but the metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) people focus on might be:

rate of new accounts created/signups
cost of acquiring or retaining a customer
visitor return rate
visitor bounce rate
favoriting or another interaction rate

These are just a few examples, but they illustrate how wide-ranging the options are that people care about. I find that developers and designers haven’t necessarily investigated this when trying to get others to care about performance. We often reach for the obvious – money! – but if we don’t use the same kind of language our VIPs are using, we might not get too far. You need to know this before you can make the case for performance work.
To find out these metrics or KPIs, start reading through the emails your VIPs are sending within your company. What does it say on company wikis? Are there major dashboards internally that people are looking at where you could find some good metrics? Listen intently in team meetings or thoroughly read annual reports to see what these metrics could be.
The second key here is to pick up on language you can effectively copy and paste as you make the case for performance work. You need to be able to reflect back the metrics that people already find important in a way they’ll be able to hear. Once you know your key metrics, it’s time to figure out how to communicate with your VIPs about performance using language that will resonate with them.
Let’s start with visit traffic as an example metric that a very important person cares about. Start to dig up research that other people and companies have done that correlates performance and your KPI. For example, cite studies:

“When the home page of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70–80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks.” (source).

Read through websites like WPOStats, which collects the spectrum of studies on the impact of performance optimization on user experience and business metrics. Tweet and see if others have done similar research that correlates performance and your site’s main KPI.
Once you have collected some research that touches on the same kind of language your VIPs use about the success of your site, it’s time to present it. You can start with something simple, like a qualitative description of the work you’re actively doing to improve the site that translates to improved metrics that your VIPs care about. It can be helpful to append a performance budget to any proposal so you can compare the budget to your site’s reality and how it might positively impact those KPIs folks care about.
Words and graphs are often only half the battle when it comes to getting others to care about performance. Often, videos appeal to folks’ emotions in a way that is missed when glancing through charts and graphs. On A List Apart I recently detailed how to create videos of how fast your site loads. Let’s say that your VIPs care about how your site loads on mobile devices; it’s time to show them how your site loads on mobile networks.
Open video

You can use these videos to make a number of different statements to your VIPs, depending on what they care about:

Look at how slow our site loads versus our competitor!
Look at how slow our site loads for users in another country!
Look at how slow our site loads on mobile networks!

Again, you really need to know which metrics your VIPs care about and tune into the language they’re using. If they don’t care about the overall user experience of your site on mobile devices, then showing them how slow your site loads on 3G isn’t going to work. This will be your sales pitch; you need to practice and iterate on the language and highlights that will land best with your audience. 
To make your sales pitch as solid as possible, gut-check your ideas on how to present it with other co-workers to get their feedback. Read up on how to construct effective arguments and deliver them; do some research and see what others have done at your company when pitching to VIPs. Are slides effective? Memos or emails? Hallway conversations? Sometimes the best way to change people’s minds is by mentioning it in informal chats over coffee. Emulate the other leaders in your organization who are successful at this work. 
Every organization and very important person is different. Learn what metrics folks truly care about, study the language that they use, and apply what you’ve learned in a way that’ll land with those individuals. It may take time to craft your pitch for performance work over time, but it’s important work to do. If you’re able to figure out how to mirror back the language and metrics VIPs care about, and connect the dots to performance for them, you will have a huge leg up on keeping your site fast in the long run.",2015,Lara Hogan,larahogan,2015-12-08T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/helping-vips-care-about-performance/,business
312,Preparing to Be Badass Next Year,"Once we’ve eaten our way through the holiday season, people will start to think about new year’s resolutions. We tend to focus on things that we want to change… and often things that we don’t like about ourselves to “fix”. We set rules for ourselves, or try to start new habits or stop bad ones. We focus in on things we will or won’t do. 
For many of us the list of things we “ought” to be spending time on is just plain overwhelming – family, charity/community, career, money, health, relationships, personal development. 
It’s kinda scary even just listing it out, isn’t it? I want to encourage you to think differently about next year.
The ever-brilliant Kathy Sierra articulates a better approach really well when talking about the attitude we should have to building great products. She tells us to think not about what the user will do with our product, but about what they are trying to achieve in the real world and how our product helps them to be badass1.
When we help the user be badass, then we are really making a difference. 
I suppose this is one way of saying: focus not on what you will do, focus on what it will help you achieve. How will it help you be awesome?
In what ways do you want to be more badass next year?
A professional lens
Though of course you might want to focus in on health or family or charity or community or another area next year, many people will want to become more badass in their chosen career. 
So let’s talk about a scaffold to help you figure out your professional / career development next year. 
First up, an assumption: everyone wants to be awesome. Nobody gets up in the morning aiming to be crap at their job. Nobody thinks to themselves “Today I am aiming for just south of mediocre, and if I can mess up everybody else’s ability to do good work then that will be just perfect2”. 
Ergo, you want to be awesome. So what does awesome look like? 
Danger!
The big trap that people fall into when think about their professional development is to immediately focus on the things that they aren’t good at. When you ask people “what do you want to work on getting better at next year?” they frequently gravitate to the things that they believe they are bad at. 
Why is this a trap? Because if you focus all your time and energy on improving the areas that you suck at, you are going to end up middling at everything. Going from bad → mediocre at a given skill / behaviour takes a bunch of time and energy. So if you spend all your time going from bad → mediocre at things, what do you think you end up? That’s right, mediocre. 
Mediocrity is not a great career goal, kids. 
What do you already rock at?
The much better investment of time and energy is to go from good → awesome. It often takes the same amount of relative time and energy, but wow the end result is better! So first, ask yourself and those who know you well what you are already pretty damn good at. Combat imposter syndrome by asking others. 
Then figure out how to double down on those things. What does brilliant look like for a given skill? What’s the knowledge or practice that you need to level yourself up even further in that thing?
But what if I really really suck?
Admittedly, sometimes something you suck at really is holding you back. But it’s important to separate out weaknesses (just something you suck at) from controlling weaknesses (something you suck at that actually matters for your chosen career). 
If skill x is just not an important thing for you to be good at, you may never need to care that you aren’t good at it. If your current role or the one you aspire to next really really requires you to be great at x, then it’s worth investing your time and energy (and possibly money too) getting better at it.
So when you look at the things that you aren’t good at, which of those are actually essential for success?
The right ratio
A good rule of thumb is to pick three things you are already good at to work on becoming awesome at and limit yourself to one weakness that you are trying to improve on. That way you are making sure that you get to awesome in areas where you already have an advantage, and limit the amount of time you are spending on going from bad → mediocre. 
Levelling up learning
So once you’ve figured out your areas you want to focus on next year, what do you actually decide to do? 
Most of all, you should try to design your day-to-day work in a way that it is also an effective learning experience. This means making sure you have a good feedback loop – you get to try something, see if it works, learn from it, rinse and repeat. 
It’s also about balance: you want to be challenged enough for work to be interesting, without it being so hard it’s frustrating. You want to do similar / the same things often enough that you get to learn and improve, without it being so repetitive that it’s boring. 
Continuously getting better at things you are already good at is actually both easier and harder than it sounds. The advantage is that it’s pretty easy to add the feedback loop to make sure that you are improving; the disadvantage is that you’re already good at these skills so you could easily just “do” without ever stopping to reflect and improve. Build in time for personal retrospectives (“What went well? What didn’t? What one thing will I choose to change next time?”) and find a way of getting feedback from outside sources as well. 
As for the new skills, it’s worth knowing that skill development follows a particular pattern:

We all start out unconsciously incompetent (we don’t know what to do and if we tried we’d unwittingly get it wrong), progress on to conscious incompetence (we now know we’re doing it wrong) then conscious competence (we’re doing it right but wow it takes effort and attention) and eventually get to unconscious competence (automatically getting it right). 
Your past experiences and knowledge might let you move faster through these stages, but no one gets to skip them. Invest the time and remember you need the feedback loop to really improve. 
What about keeping up?
Everything changes very fast in our industry. We need to invest in not falling behind, in keeping on top of what great looks like. There are a bunch of ways to do this, from reading blog posts, following links on Twitter, reading books to attending conferences or workshops, or just finding time to build things in new ways or with new technologies. 
Which will work best for you depends on how you best learn. Do you prefer to swallow a book? Do you learn most by building or experimenting? 
Whatever your learning style though, remember that there are three real needs:

Scan the landscape (what’s changing, does it matter)
Gain the knowledge or skills (get the detail)
Apply the knowledge or skills (use it in reality)

When you remember that you need all three of these things it can help you get more of what you do. 
For me personally, I use a combination of conferences and blogs / Twitter to scan the landscape. Half of what I want out of a conference is just a list of things to have on my radar that might become important. I then pick a couple of things to go read up on more (I personally learn most effectively by swallowing a book or spec or similar). And then I pick one thing at a time to actually apply in real life, to embed the skill / knowledge. 
In summary

Aim to be awesome (mediocrity is not a career goal).
Figure out what you already rock at.
Only care about stuff you suck at that matters for your career.
Pick three things to go from good → awesome and one thing to go from bad → mediocre (or mediocre → good) this year.
Design learning into your daily work.
Scan the landscape, learn new stuff, apply it for real. 
Be badass!





She wrote a whole book about it. You should read it: Badass: Making Users Awesome ↩


Before you argue too vehemently: I suppose some antisocial sociopathic bastards do exist. Identify them, and then RUN AWAY FAST AS YOU CAN #realtalk ↩",2016,Meri Williams,meriwilliams,2016-12-22T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2016/preparing-to-be-badass-next-year/,business
158,10 Ways To Get Design Approval,"One of the most challenging parts of the web design process is getting design sign off. It can prove time consuming, demoralizing and if you are not careful can lead to a dissatisfied client. What is more you can end up with a design that you are ashamed to include in your portfolio.

How then can you ensure that the design you produce is the one that gets built? How can you get the client to sign off on your design? Below are 10 tips learnt from years of bitter experience.

1. Define the role of the client and designer

Many of the clients you work with will not have been involved in a web project before. Even if they have they may have worked in a very different way to what you would expect. Take the time at the beginning of the project to explain their role in the design of the site.

The best approach is to emphasis that their job is to focus on the needs of their users and business. They should concentrate on the broad issues, while you worry about the details of layout, typography and colour scheme.

By clarifying what you expect from the client, you help them to provide the right kind of input throughout the process.

2. Understand the business

Before you open up Photoshop or put pen to paper, take the time to make sure you properly understand not only the brief but the organization behind the site. By understanding their business objectives, organizational structure and marketing strategy your design decisions will be better informed.

You cannot rely upon the brief to provide all of the information you need. It is important to dig deeper and get as good an understanding of their business as possible. This information will prove invaluable when justifying your design decisions.

3. Understand the users

We all like to think of ourselves as user centric designers, but exactly how much effort do you put into knowing your users before beginning the design process?

Take the time to really understand them the best you can. Try to meet with some real prospective users and get to know their needs. Failing that work with the client to produce user personas to help picture exactly what kind of people they are. 

Understanding your users not only improves the quality of your work, but also helps move the discussion away from the personal preferences of the client, to the people who’s opinion really matters.

4. Avoid multiple concepts

Many clients like the idea of having the option to choose between multiple design concepts. However, although on the surface this might appear to be a good idea it can ultimately be counterproductive for design sign off.

In a world of limited budgets it is unwise to waste money on producing designs that are ultimately going to be thrown away. The resources would be better spent refining a single design through multiple iterations.

What is more, multiple concepts often cause confusion rather than clarity. It is common for a client to request one element from one design and another from the second. As any designer knows this seldom works.

5. Use mood boards

Clients are often better at expressing what they don’t like than what they do. This is one of the reasons why they favour producing multiple design concepts. An alternative less costly approach is to create a series of mood boards. These boards contain a collection of colours, typography and imagery which represent different “moods” or directions, which the design could take. 

Mood boards are quick and easy to produce allowing you to try out various design approaches with the client without investing the time needed to produce complete design concepts. This means that by the time you develop a concept the client and designer have already established an understanding about the direction of the design.

6. Say what you like

It is not uncommon for a client to ask for a design that looks similar to another site they like. The problem is that it can often be hard to establish exactly what it is about the site that attracts them. Also in many cases the sites they like are not something you are keen to emulate!

A better approach that was suggested to me by Andy Budd is to show them sites that you think the design should emulate. Keep a collection of screen captures from well designed sites and pick out a few that are relevant to that particular client. Explain why you feel these designs might suit their project and ask for their feedback. If they don’t like your choices then expose them to more of your collection and see what they pick out.

7. Wireframe the homepage

Often clients find it hard to distinguish between design and content and so sometimes reject a design on the basis that the content is not right. This is particularly true when signing off the homepage.

You may therefore find it useful to establish the homepage content before producing the design. That way once they see the design they will not be distracted by the content. One of the best ways to do this is by producing a basic wireframe consisting of a series of content boxes. Once this has been approved you will find the sign off of design much easier.

8. Present your designs

Although it is true that a good design should speak for itself it still needs presenting to the client. The client needs to understand why you have made the design decisions you have, otherwise they will judge the design purely on personal preference. 

Talk them through the design explaining how it meets the needs of their users and business objectives. Refer to the mood boards and preferred sites the client approved and explain how the design is a continuation of those. Never simply email the design through and hope the client interprets your work correctly!

9. Provide written supporting material

Unfortunately, no matter how well you justify the design to the client he is almost certain to want to show it to others. He may need his bosses approval or require internal buy in. At the very least he is going to want to get a second opinion from a friend or colleague.

The problem with this is that you are not going to be there to present to these people in the same way you did for the client. You cannot expect the client to present your ideas as well as you did. The reality is that you have lost control of how the design is perceived.

One way to minimize this problem is to provide written documentation supporting the design. This can be a summary of the presentation you gave to the client and allows him to distribute this along with the design. By putting a written explanation with the design you ensure that everybody who sees it gets the same message.

10. Control the feedback

My final piece of advice for managing design sign off is to control the way you receive feedback. A clients natural inclination will be to give you his personal opinion on the design. This is reinforced because you ask them what they think of the design. Instead ask them what their users will think of the design. Encourage them to think from the users perspective.

Also encourage them to keep that overarching focus I talked about in my first tip. Their tendency will be to try to improve the design, however that should be your problem not theirs. The role of a client should be to defend the needs of their users and business not do the design. Encourage the client to make comments such as “I am not sure that my female users will like the masculine colours” rather than “can we make the whole design pink.” It is down to them to identify the problems and for you as the designer to find the most appropriate solution.

So there you have it. My 10 tips to improve design sign off. Will this ensure design approval every time? Unfortunately not. However it should certainly help smooth the way.",2007,Paul Boag,paulboag,2007-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/10-ways-to-get-design-approval/,business
115,"Charm Clients, Win Pitches","Over the years I have picked up a number of sales techniques that have lead to us doing pretty well in the pitches we go for. Of course, up until now, these top secret practices have remained firmly locked in the company vault but now I am going to share them with you. They are cunningly hidden within the following paragraphs so I’m afraid you’re going to have to read the whole thing.

Ok, so where to start? I guess a good place would be getting invited to pitch for work in the first place.

Shameless self promotion

What not to do

You’re as keen as mustard to ‘sell’ what you do, but you have no idea as to the right approach. From personal experience (sometimes bitter!), the following methods are as useful as the proverbial chocolate teapot:


	Cold calling
	Advertising
	Bidding websites
	Sales people
	Networking events


Ok, I’m exaggerating; sometimes these things work. For example, cold calling can work if you have a story – a reason to call and introduce yourself other than “we do web design and you have a website”. “We do web design and we’ve just moved in next door to you” would be fine. 

Advertising can work if your offering is highly specialist. However, paying oodles of dollars a day to Google Ads to appear under the search term ‘web design’ is probably not the best use of your budget. 

Specialising is, in fact, probably a good way to go. Though it can feel counter intuitive in that you are not spreading yourself as widely as you might, you will eventually become an expert and therefore gain a reputation in your field. Specialism doesn’t necessarily have to be in a particular skillset or technology, it could just as easily be in a particular supply chain or across a market.

Target audience

‘Who to target?’ is the next question. If you’re starting out then do tap-up your family and friends. Anything that comes your way from them will almost certainly come with a strong recommendation. Also, there’s nothing wrong with calling clients you had dealings with in previous employment (though beware of any contractual terms that may prevent this). You are informing your previous clients that your situation has changed; leave it up to them to make any move towards working with you. After all, you’re simply asking to be included on the list of agencies invited to tender for any new work.

Look to target clients similar to those you have worked with previously. Again, you have a story – hopefully a good one!

So how do you reach these people?


	Mailing lists
	Forums
	Writing articles
	Conferences / Meetups
	Speaking opportunities
	Sharing Expertise


In essence: blog, chat, talk, enthuse, show off (a little)… share.

There are many ways you can do this. There’s the traditional portfolio, almost obligatory blog (regularly updated of course), podcast, ‘giveaways’ like Wordpress templates, CSS galleries and testimonials. Testimonials are your greatest friend. Always ask clients for quotes (write them and ask for their permission to use) and even better, film them talking about how great you are.

Finally, social networking sites can offer a way to reach your target audiences. You do have to be careful here though. You are looking to build a reputation by contributing value. Do not self promote or spam!

Writing proposals

Is it worth it?

Ok, so you have been invited to respond to a tender or brief in the form of a proposal. Good proposals take time to put together so you need to be sure that you are not wasting your time. There are two fundamental questions that you need to ask prior to getting started on your proposal:


	Can I deliver within the client’s timescales?
	Does the client’s budget match my price?


The timescales that clients set are often plucked from the air and a little explanation about how long projects usually take can be enough to change expectations with regard to delivery. However, if a deadline is set in stone ask yourself if you can realistically meet it. Agreeing to a deadline that you know you cannot meet just to win a project is a recipe for an unhappy client, no chance of repeat business and no chance of any recommendations to other potential clients.

Price is another thing altogether. So why do we need to know?

The first reason, and most honest reason, is that we don’t want to do a lot of unpaid pitch work when there is no chance that our price will be accepted. Who would? But this goes both ways – the client’s time is also being wasted. It may only be the time to read the proposal and reject it, but what if all the bids are too expensive? Then the client needs to go through the whole process again.

The second reason why we need to know budgets relates to what we would like to include in a proposal over what we need to include. For example, take usability testing. We always highly recommend that a client pays for at least one round of usability testing because it will definitely improve their new site – no question. But, not doing it doesn’t mean they’ll end up with an unusable turkey. It’s just more likely that any usability issues will crop up after launch.

I have found that the best way to discover a budget is to simply provide a ballpark total, usually accompanied by a list of ‘likely tasks for this type of project’, in an initial email or telephone response. Expect a lot of people to dismiss you out of hand. This is good. Don’t be tempted to ‘just go for it’ anyway because you like the client or work is short – you will regret it.

Others will say that the ballpark is ok. This is not as good as getting into a proper discussion about what priorities they might have but it does mean that you are not wasting your time and you do have a chance of winning the work. The only real risk with this approach is that you misinterpret the requirements and produce an inaccurate ballpark.

Finally, there is a less confrontational approach that I sometimes use that involves modular pricing. We break down our pricing into quite detailed tasks for all proposals but when I really do not have a clue about a client’s budget, I will often separate pricing into ‘core’ items and ‘optional’ items. This has proved to be a very effective method of presenting price.

What to include

So, what should go into a proposal? It does depend on the size of the piece of work. If it’s a quick update for an existing client then they don’t want to read through all your blurb about why they should choose to work with you – a simple email will suffice.

But, for a potential new client I would look to include the following:


	Your suitability
	Summary of tasks
	Timescales
	Project management methodology
	Pricing
	Testing methodology
	Hosting options
	Technologies
	Imagery
	References
	Financial information
	Biographies


However, probably the most important aspect of any proposal is that you respond fully to the brief. In other words, don’t ignore the bits that either don’t make sense to you or you think irrelevant. If something is questionable, cover it and explain why you don’t think it is something that warrants inclusion in the project.

Should you provide speculative designs? If the brief doesn’t ask for any, then certainly not. If it does, then speak to the client about why you don’t like to do speculative designs. Explain that any designs included as part of a proposal are created to impress the client and not the website’s target audience. Producing good web design is a partnership between client and agency. This can often impress and promote you as a professional. However, if they insist then you need to make a decision because not delivering any mock-ups will mean that all your other work will be a waste of time.

Walking away

As I have already mentioned, all of this takes a lot of work. So, when should you be prepared to walk away from a potential job? I have already covered unrealistic deadlines and insufficient budget but there are a couple of other reasons. Firstly, would this new client damage your reputation, particularly within current sectors you are working in? Secondly, can you work with this client? A difficult client will almost certainly lead to a loss-making project.

Perfect pitch

Requirements

If the original brief didn’t spell out what is expected of you at a presentation then make sure you ask beforehand. The critical element is how much time you have. It seems that panels are providing less and less time these days.

The usual formula is that you get an hour; half of which should be a presentation of your ideas followed by 30 minutes of questions. This isn’t that much time, particularly for a big project that covers all aspect of web design and production. Don’t be afraid to ask for more time, though it is very rare that you will be granted any.

Ask if there any areas that a) they particularly want you to cover and b) if there are any areas of your proposal that were weak.

Ask who will be attending. The main reason for this is to see if the decision maker(s) will be present but it’s also good to know if you’re presenting to 3 or 30 people.

Who should be there

Generally speaking, I think two is the ideal number. Though I have done many presentations on my own, I always feel having two people to bounce ideas around with and have a bit of banter with, works well. You are not only trying to sell your ideas and expertise but also yourselves. One of the main things in the panels minds will be – “can I work with these people?”

Having more than two people at a presentation often looks like you’re wheeling people out just to demonstrate that they exist.

What makes a client want to hire you?

In a nutshell: Confidence, Personality, Enthusiasm.

You can impart confidence by being well prepared and professional, providing examples and demonstrations and talking about your processes. You may find project management boring but pretty much every potential client will want to feel reassured that you manage your projects effectively.

As well as demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about, it is important to encourage, and be part of, discussion about the project. Be prepared to suggest and challenge and be willing to say “I don’t know”.

Also, no-one likes a show-off so don’t over promote yourself; encourage them to contact your existing clients.

What makes a client like you?

Engaging with a potential client is tricky and it’s probably the area where you need to be most on your toes and try to gauge the reaction of the client. We recommend the following:


	Encourage questions throughout
	Ask if you make sense – which encourages questions if you’re not getting any
	Humour – though don’t keep trying to be funny if you’re not getting any laughs!
	Be willing to go off track
	Read your audience
	Empathise with the process – chances are, most of the people in front of you would rather be doing something else
	Think about what you wear – this sounds daft but do you want to be seen as either the ‘stiff in the suit’ or the ‘scruffy art student’? Chances are neither character would get hired.


Differentiation

Sometimes, especially if you think you are an outsider, it’s worth taking a few risks. I remember my colleague Paul starting off a presentation once with the line (backed up on screen) – “Headscape is not a usability consultancy”. This was in response to the clients request to engage a usability consultancy. The thrust of Paul’s argument was that we are a lot more than that.

This really worked. We were the outside choice but they ended up hiring us. Basically, this differentiated us from the crowd. It showed that we are prepared to take risks and think, dare I say it, outside of the box.

Dealing with difficult characters 

How you react to tricky questioning is likely to be what determines whether you have a good or bad presentation. Here are a few of those characters that so often turn up in panels:

The techie – this is likely to be the situation where you need to say “I don’t know”. Don’t bluff as you are likely to dig yourself a great big embarrassment-filled hole. Promise to follow up with more information and make sure that you do so as quickly as possible after the pitch. 

The ‘hard man’ MD – this the guy who thinks it is his duty to throw ‘curve ball’ questions to see how you react. Focus on your track record (big name clients will impress this guy) and emphasise your processes.

The ‘no clue’ client – you need to take control and be the expert though you do need to explain the reasoning behind any suggestions you make. This person will be judging you on how much you are prepared to help them deliver the project.

The price negotiator – be prepared to discuss price but do not reduce your rate or the effort associated with your proposal. Fall back on modular pricing and try to reduce scope to come within budget. You may wish to offer a one-off discount to win a new piece of work but don’t get into detail at the pitch.

Don’t panic…

If you go into a presentation thinking ‘we must win this’ then, chances are, you won’t. Relax and be yourself. If you’re not hitting it off with the panel then so be it. You have to remember that quite often you will be making up the numbers in a tendering process. This is massively frustrating but, unfortunately, part of it. If it’s not going well, concentrate on what you are offering and try to demonstrate your professionalism rather than your personality. Finally, be on your toes, watch people’s reactions and pay attention to what they say and try to react accordingly.

So where are the secret techniques I hear you ask? Well, using the words ‘secret’ and ‘technique’ was probably a bit naughty. Most of this stuff is about being keen, using your brain and believing in yourself and what you are selling rather than following a strict set of rules.",2008,Marcus Lillington,marcuslillington,2008-12-09T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/charm-clients-win-pitches/,business
268,Getting the Most Out of Google Analytics,"Something a bit different for today’s 24 ways article. For starters, I’m not a designer or a developer. I’m an evil man who sells things to people on the internet. Second, this article will likely be a little more nebulous than you’re used to, since it covers quite a number of points in a relatively short space. 

This isn’t going to be the complete Google Analytics Conversion University IQ course compressed into a single article, obviously. What it will be, however, is a primer on setting up and using Google Analytics in real life, and a great deal of what I’ve learned using Google Analytics nearly every working day for the past six (crikey!) years.

Also, to be clear, I’ll be referencing new Google Analytics here; old Google Analytics is for loooosers (and those who want reliable e-commerce conversion data per site search term, natch).

You may have been running your Analytics account for several years now, dipping in and out, checking traffic levels, seeing what’s popular… and that’s about it. Google Analytics provides so much more than that, but the number of reports available can often intimidate users, and documentation and case studies on their use are minimal at best. 

Let’s start! Setting up your Analytics profile

Before we plough on, I just want to run through a quick checklist that some basic settings have been enabled for your profile. If you haven’t clicked it, click the big cog on the top-right of Google Analytics and we’ll have a poke about.


	If you have an e-commerce site, e-commerce tracking has been enabled

	If your site has a search function, site search tracking has been enabled.
	Query string parameters that you do not want tracked as separate pages have been excluded (for example, any parameters needed for your platform to function, otherwise you’ll get multiple entries for the same page appearing in your reports)
	Filters have been enabled on your main profile to exclude your office IP address and any IPs of people who frequently access the site for work purposes. In decent numbers they tend to throw data off a tad.

	You may also find the need to set up multiple profiles prefiltered for specific audience segments. For example, at Lovehoney we have seventeen separate profiles that allow me quick access to certain countries, devices and traffic sources without having to segment first. You’ll also find load time for any complex reports much improved. Use the same filter screen as above to set up a series of profiles that only include, say, mobile visits, or UK visitors, so you can quickly analyse important segments.


Matt, what’s a segment?

A segment is a subsection of your visitor base, which you define and then call on in reports to see specific data for that subsection. For example, in this report I’ve defined two segments, the first for IE6 users and the second for IE7.



Segments are easily created by clicking the Advanced Segments tabs at the top of any report and clicking +New Custom Segment.



What does your site do?

Understanding the goals of your site is an oft-covered topic, but it’s necessary not just to form a better understand of your business and prioritize your time. Understanding what you wish visitors to do on your site translates well into a goal-driven analytics package like Google Analytics.  

Every site exists essentially to sell something, either financially through e-commerce, or to sell an idea or impart information, get people to download a CV or enquire about service, or to sell space on that website to advertisers. If the site did not provide a positive benefit to its owners, it would not have a reason for being. 

Once you have understood the reason why you have a site, you can map that reason on to one of the three goal types Google Analytics provides. 

E-commerce 

This conversion type registers transactions as part of a sales process which requires a monetary value, what products have been bought, an SKU (stock keeping unit), affiliation (if you’re then attributing the sale to a third party or franchise) and so on.

The benefit of e-commerce tracking is not only assigning non-arbitrary monetary value to behaviour of visitors on your site, as well as being able to see ancillary costs such as shipping, but seeing product-level information, like which products are preferred from various channels, popular categories, and so on.



However, I find the e-commerce tracking options also useful for non-e-commerce sites. For example, if you’re offering downloads or subscriptions and having an email address or user’s details is worth something to you, you can set up e-commerce tracking to understand how much value your site is bringing. For example, an email address might be worth 20p to you, but if it also includes a name it’s worth 50p. A contact telephone number is worth £2, and so on.

Page goals

Page goals, unsurprisingly, track a visit to a page (often with a sequence of pages leading up to that page). This is what’s referred to as a goal funnel, and is generally used to track how visitors behave in a multistep checkout. 



Interestingly, the page doesn’t have to actually exist. For example, if you have a single page checkout, you can register virtual page views using trackPageview() when a visitor clicks into a particular section of the checkout or other form. If your site is geared towards getting someone to a particular page, but where there isn’t a transaction (for example, a subscription page) this is for you.

There are also behavioural goals, such as time on site and number of pages viewed, which are geared towards sites that make money from advertising.

But, going back to the page goals, these can be abstracted using regular expressions, meaning that you can define a funnel based on page type rather than having to set individual folders.



In this example, I’ve created regexes for the main page types on my site, so I can create a wide funnel that captures visitors from where they enter through to checkout.

Events

Event tracking registers a predefined event, such as playing a video, or some interaction that can trigger JavaScript, such as a Tweet This button. Events can then be triggered using the trackEvent() call. If you want someone to complete watching a video, you would code your player to fire trackEvent() upon completion. 

While I don’t use events as goals, I use events elsewhere to see how well a video play aids to conversion. This not only helps me justify the additional spend on creating video content, but also quickly highlights which videos are underperforming as sales tools.



What a visitor can tell you


Now you have some proper goals set up, we can start to see how changes in content (on-site and external) affect those goals. 

Ultimately, when a visitor comes to your site, they bring information with them:


	where they came from (a search engine – including: keyword searched for; a referral; direct; affiliate; or ad campaign)
	demographics (country; whether they’re new or returning, within thirty days)
	technical information (browser; screen size; device; bandwidth)
	site-specific information (landing page; next click; previous values assigned to them as custom variables*)


 * A note about custom variables. There’s no hope in hell that I can cover custom variables in this article. Go research them. Custom variables are the single best way to hack Google Analytics and bend it to your will. Custom variables allow you to record anything you want about a visitor, which that visitor will then carry around with them between visits. It’s also great for plugging other services into Google Analytics (as shown by the marvelous way Visual Website Optimizer allows you to track and segment tests within the GA interface). Just make sure not to breach the terms of service, eh?

CSI your website

Police procedural TV shows are all the same: the investigators are called to a crime and come across a clue; there’s then an autopsy; new evidence leads them to a new location; they find a new clue; they put two and two together; they solve the mystery.

This is your life now. Exciting!

So, now you’re gathering a wealth of information about what sort of people visit your site, what they do when they’re there, and what eventually gets them to drive value to you. It’s now your job to investigate all these little clues to see which types of people drive the most value, and what you can change to improve it.

Maybe not that exciting.

However, Google Analytics comes pre-armed with extensive reports for you to delve into. As an e-commerce guy (as opposed to a page goal guy) my day pretty much follows the pattern below.


	Look at e-commerce conversion rate by traffic source compared to the same day in the previous week and previous month. As ours is an e-commerce site, we have weekly and monthly trends. A big spike on Sundays and Mondays, and payday towards the end of the month is always good; on the third week of a month there tends to be a lull. Spend time letting your Google Analytics data brew, understand your own trends and patterns, and you’ll start to get a feel for when something isn’t quite right.
	
		Traffic Sources → Sources → All Traffic
	
	Look at the conversion rate by landing page for any traffic source that feels significantly different to what’s expected. Check bounce rates, drill down to likely landing pages and check search keyword or referral site to see if it’s a particular subset of visitor. You can do this by clicking Secondary Dimension and choosing Keyword or Source. If it’s direct, choose Visitor Type to break down by new or returning visitor.
	
		Content → Site Content → Landing Pages
	
	I then tend to flip into Content Drilldown to see what the next clicks were from those landing pages, and whether they changed significantly to the date I’m comparing with. If they have, that’s usually an indicator of changed content (or its relevancy). Remember, if a bunch of people have found their way to your page via a method you’re not expecting (such as a mention on a Spanish radio station – this actually happened to me once), while the content hasn’t changed, the relevancy of it to the audience may have.
	
		Content → Site Content → Content Drilldown
	
	Once I have an idea of what content was consumed, and whether it was relevant to the user, I then look at the visitor specifics, such as browser or demographic data, to see again whether the change was limited to a specific subset. Site speed, for example, is normally a good factor towards bounce rate, so compare that with previous data as well.


Now, to be investigating at this level you still need a serious amount of data, in order to tell what’s a significant change or not. If you’re struggling with a small number of visitors, you might find reporting on a weekly or fortnightly basis more appropriate. 

However, once you’ve looked into the basics of why changes happen to the value of your site, you’ll soon find yourself limited by the reports offered in Standard Reporting. So, it’s time to build your own. Hooray!

Custom reporting

Google Analytics provides the tools to build reports specific to the types of investigations you frequently perform. 



Welcome to my world.

Custom reports are quite simple to build: first, you determine the metric you want the report to cover (number of visitors, bounce rate, conversion rate, and so on), then choose a set of dimensions that you’d like to segment the report by (say, the source of the traffic, and whether they were new or returning users). You can filter the report, including or excluding particular dimension values, and you can assign the report to any of the profiles you created earlier. 

In the example below, I’ve created a report that shows me visits and conversion rate for any Google traffic that landed directly only on a product page. I can then drill down on each product page to see the complete phrases use to search. I can use this information in two ways:


	I can see which products aren’t converting, which shows me where I need to work harder on merchandising.
	I can give this information to my content team, showing them the actual phrases visitors used to reach our product content, helping them write better targeted product descriptions.




The possibilities here are nearly endless, but here are a few examples of reports I find useful:


	Non-brand inbound search
By creating a report that shows inbound search traffic which doesn’t include your brand, you can see more clearly the behaviour of visitors most likely to be unfamiliar with your site and brand values, without having to rely on the clumsy new or returning demographic date.
	Traffic/conversion/sales by hour
This is pure stats porn, but actually more useful than real-time data. By seeing this data broken down at an hourly level, you can not only compare the current day to previous days, but also see the best performing times for email broadcasts and tweets.
	Visits, load time, conversion and sales by page and browser
Page speed can often kill conversion rates, but it’s difficult to prove the value of focusing on speed in monetary terms. Having this report to hand helps me drive Operation Greenbelt, our effort to get into the sub-1.5 second band in Google Webmaster Tools.


Useful things you can’t do in custom reporting

If you have a search function on your website, then Conversion Rate and Products Bought by Site Search Term is an incredibly useful report that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your site’s search engine at returning products and content related to the search term used. By including the products actually bought by visitors who searched for each term, you can use this information to better searchandise these results, escalating high propensity and high value products to the top of the results.

However, it’s not possible to get this information out of new Google Analytics. 

Try it, select the following in the report builder:


	Metrics: total unique searches; e-commerce or goal conversion rate
	Dimensions: search term; product


You’ll see that the data returned is a little nonsensical, though a 2,000% conversion rate would be nice. However, you can get more accurate information using advanced segments. By creating individual segments to define users who have searched for a particular term, you can run the sales performance and product performance reports as normal. It’s laborious, but it teaches a good lesson: data that seems inaccessible can normally be found another way!

Reporting infrastructure

Now that you have a series of reports that you can refer to on a daily or weekly basis, it’s time to put together a regular reporting infrastructure. 

Even if you’re not reporting to someone, having a set of key performance indicators that you can use to see how your performance is improving over time allows you to set yourself business goals on a monthly and annual basis.

For my own reporting, I take some high-level metrics (such as visitors, conversion rate and average order value), and segment them by traffic source and, separately, landing page. These statistics I record weekly and report:


	current week compared with previous week
	same week previous year (if available)
	4 week average
	13 week average
	52 week average (if available)


This takes into account weekly, monthly, seasonal and annual trends, and gives you a much clearer view of your performance.

Getting data in other ways

If you’re using Google Analytics frequently, with any large site you’ll come to a couple of conclusions:


	Doing any kind of practical comparative analysis is unwieldy.
	Boy, Google Analytics is slow!


As you work with bigger datasets and put together more complex queries, you’ll see the loading graphic more than you’ll see actual data. So when you reach that level, there are ways to completely bypass the Google Analytics interface altogether, and get data into your own spreadsheet application for manipulation.

Data Feed Query Explorer

If you just want to pull down some quick statistics but still use complex filters and exotic metric and dimension combinations, the Data Feed Query Explorer is the quickest way of doing so. Authenticate with your Google Analytics account, select a profile, and you can start selecting metrics and dimensions to be generated in a handy, selectable tabulated format.

Google Analytics API

If you’re feeling clever, you can bypass having to copy and paste data by pulling in directly into Excel, Google Docs or your own application using the Google Analytics API. There are several scripts and plugins available to do this. I use Automate Analytics Google Docs code (there’s also a paid version that simplifies setup and creates some handy reports for you).

New shiny things

Well, now that that’s over, I can show you some cool stuff. Well, at least it’s cool to me. Google Analytics is being constantly improved and new functionality is introduced nearly every month. Here are a couple of my favourites.

Multichannel attribution

Not every visitor converts on your site on the first visit. They may not even do so on the second visit, or third. If they convert on the fourth visit, but each time they visit they do so via a different channel (for example, Search PPC, Search Organic, Direct, Email), which channel do you attribute the conversion to? The last channel, or the first? Dilemma!  

Google now has a Multichannel Attribution report, available in the Conversion category, which shows how each channel assists in converting, the overlap between channels, and where in the process that channel was important. 



For example, you may have analysed your blog traffic from Twitter and become disheartened that not many people were subscribing after visiting from Twitter links, but instead your high-value subscribers were coming from natural search. On the face of it, you’d spend less time tweeting, but a multichannel report may tell you that visitors first arrived via a Twitter link and didn’t subscribe, but then came back later after searching for your blog name on Google, after which they did. Don’t pack Twitter in yet!

Visitor and goal flow

Visitor and goal flow are amazing reports that help you visualize the flow of traffic through your site and, ultimately, into your checkout funnel or similar goal path. Flow reports are perfect for understanding drop-off points in your process, as well as what the big draws are on each page. 



Previously, if you wanted to visualize this data you had to set up several abstracted microgoals and chain them together in custom reports. Frankly, it was a pain in the arse and burned through your precious and limited goal allocation.

Visitor flow bypasses all that and produces the report in an interactive flow diagram. While it doesn’t show you the holy grail of conversion likelihood by each path, you can segment visitor flow so that you can see very specifically how different segments of your visitor base behave.

Go play with it now!",2011,Matt Curry,mattcurry,2011-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/getting-the-most-out-of-google-analytics/,business
187,A New Year's Resolution,"The end of 2009 is fast approaching.  Yet another year has passed in a split second. Our Web Designing careers are one year older and it’s time to reflect on the highs and lows of 2009. What was your greatest achievement and what could you have done better? Perhaps, even more importantly, what are your goals for 2010?

Something that I noticed in 2009 is that being a web designer 24/7; it’s easy to get consumed by the web. It’s easy to get caught up in the blog posts, CSS galleries, web trends and Twitter!  Living in this bubble can lead to one’s work becoming stale, boring and basically like everyone else’s work on the web. No designer wants this.

So, I say on 1st January 2010 let’s make it our New Year’s resolution to create something different, something special or even ground-breaking! Make it your goal to break the mold of current web design trends and light the way for your fellow web designer comrades!

Of course I wouldn’t let you embark on the New Year empty handed. To help you on your way I’ve compiled a few thoughts and ideas to get your brains ticking!

Don’t design for the web, just design

A key factor in creating something original and fresh for the web is to stop thinking in terms of web design. The first thing we need to do is forget the notion of headers, footers, side bars etc. A website doesn’t necessarily need any of these, so even before we’ve started we’ve already limited our design possibilities by thinking in these very conventional and generally accepted web terms. The browser window is a 2D canvas like any other and we can do with it what we like. 

With this in mind we can approach web design from a fresh perspective. We can take inspiration for web design from editorial design, packaging design, comics, poster design, album artwork, motion design, street signage and anything else you can think of. Web design is way more than the just the web and by taking this more wide angled view of what web design is and can be you’ll find there are a thousand more exiting design possibilities.

Note: Try leaving the wire framing till after you’ve gone to town with some initial design concepts. You might find it helps keep your head out of that ‘web space’ a little bit longer, thus enabling you to think more freely about your design. Really go crazy with these as you can always pull it back into line later. The key is to think big initially and then work backwards. There’s no point restricting your creativity early on because your technical knowledge can foresee problems down the line. You can always sort these problems out later on… let your creative juices flow!

 Inspiration can come from anywhere! (Photo: modomatic)

Try something new!

Progress in web design or in any design discipline is a sort of evolution. Design trends and solutions merge and mutate to create new design trends and hopefully better solutions. This is fine but the real leaps are made when someone has the guts to do something different. 

Don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo. To create truly original work you have to be prepared to get it wrong and that’s hard to do. When you’re faced with this challenge just remind yourself that in web design there is rarely a ‘best way to do something’, or why would we ever do it any other way? 

If you do this and get it right the pay off can be immense. Not only will you work stand out from the crowd by a mile, you will have become a trend setter as opposed to a trend follower.

Tell a story with your design

Great web design is way more than just the aesthetics, functionality or usability. Great web design goes beyond the pixels on the screen. For your website to make a real impact on it’s users it has to connect with them emotionally. So, whether your website is promoting your own company or selling cheese it needs to move people. You need to weave a story into your design. It’s this story that your users will connect with. 

To do this the main ingredients of your design need to be strongly connected. In my head those main ingredients are Copy, Graphic Design, Typography, imagery and colour. 

Copy

Strong meaningful copy is the backbone to most great web design work. Pay special attention to strap lines and headlines as these are often the sparks that start the fire. All the other elements can be inspired by this backbone of strong copy.

Graphic Design

Use the copy to influence how you treat the page with your graphic design. Let the design echo the words.

Typography

What really excites me about typography isn’t the general text presentation on a page, most half decent web designer have a grasp of this already. What excites me is the potential there is to base a whole design on words and letters. Using the strong copy you already have, one has the opportunity the customise, distort, build and arrange words and letters to create beautiful and powerful compositions that can be the basis for an entire site design.

 Get creative with Typography (Photo: Pam Sattler)

Imagery and Colour

With clever use of imagery (photographs or illustrations) and colour you further have the chance to deepen the story you are weaving into your design. The key is to use meaningful imagery, don’t to insert generic imagery for the sake of filling space… it’s just a wasted opportunity.

Remember, the main elements of your design combined are greater than the sum of their parts. Whatever design decisions you make on a page, make them for a good reason. It’s not good enough to try and seduce your users with slick and shiny web pages. For your site to leave a lasting impression on the user you need to make that emotional connection.

 Telling the Story (Advertising Agency: Tita, Milano, Italy, Art Director: Emanuele Basso)

Go one step further

So you’ve almost finished your latest website design. You’ve fulfilled the brief, you’re happy with the result and you’re pretty sure your client will be too. It’s at this point we should ask ourselves “Can I push this further”? What touches could you add to the site that’ll take it beyond what was required and into something exceptional? The truth is, to produce exceptional work we need to do more than is required of us. We need to answer the brief and then some!

Go back through your site and make a note of what enhancements could be made to make the site not just good but outstanding. It might be revisiting a couple of pages that were neglected in the design process, it might be adding some CSS 3 gloss for the users that can benefit from it or it might just be adding some clever little easter eggs to show that you care. These touches will soon add up and make a massive difference to the finished product.

So, go one step further… take it further than you anyone else will. Then your work will stand out for sure.

Parting message

I love being a designer for many of reasons but the main one being that with every new project we embark on we have the chance to express ourselves. We have the chance to create something special, something that people will talk about. It’s this chance that drives us onwards day after day, year after year. So in 2010 shout louder than you ever have before, take chances, try something new and above all design your socks off!",2009,Mike Kus,mikekus,2009-12-10T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/a-new-years-resolution/,business
228,The Great Unveiling,"The moment of unveiling our designs should be among our proudest, but it never seems to work out that way. Instead of a chance to show how we can bring our clients’ visions to life, critique can be a tense, worrying ordeal. And yes, the stakes are high: a superb design is only superb if it goes live. Mismanage the feedback process and your research, creativity and hard work can be wasted, and your client may wonder whether you’ve been worth the investment.

The great unveiling is a pivotal part of the design process, but it needn’t be a negative one. Just as usability testing teaches us whether our designs meet user needs, presenting our work to clients tells us whether we’ve met important business goals. So how can we turn the tide to make presenting designs a constructive experience, and to give good designs a chance to shine through?

Timing is everything

First, consider when you should seek others’ opinions. Your personal style will influence whether you show early sketches or wait to demonstrate something more complete. Some designers thrive at low fidelity, sketching out ideas that, despite their rudimentary nature, easily spark debate. Other designers take time to create more fully-realised versions. Some even argue that the great unveiling should be eliminated altogether by working directly alongside the client throughout, collaborating on the design to reach its full potential. 

Whatever your individual preference, you’ll rarely have the chance to do it entirely your own way. Contracts, clients, and deadlines will affect how early and often you share your work. However, try to avoid the trap of presenting too late and at too high fidelity. My experience has taught me that skilled designers tend to present their work earlier and allow longer for iteration than novices do. More aware of the potential flaws in their solutions, these designers cling less tightly to their initial efforts. Working roughly and seeking early feedback gives you the flexibility to respond more fully to nuances you may have missed until now.

Planning design reviews

Present design ideas face-to-face, or at least via video conference. Asynchronous methods like e-mail and Basecamp are slow, easily ignored, and deny you the opportunity to guide your colleagues through your work. In person, you profit from both the well-known benefits of non-verbal communication, and the chance to immediately respond to questions and elaborate on rationale.

Be sure to watch the numbers at your design review sessions, however. Any more than a handful of attendees and the meeting could quickly spiral into fruitless debate. Ask your project sponsor to appoint a representative to speak on behalf of each business function, rather than inviting too many cooks.

Where possible, show your work in its native format. Photocopy hand-drawn sketches to reinforce their disposability (the defining quality of a sketch) and encourage others to scribble their own thoughts on top. Show digital deliverables – wireframes, design concepts, rich interactions – on screen. The experience of a design is very different on screen than on paper. A monitor has appropriate dimensions and viewport size, presenting an accurate picture of the design’s visual hierarchy, and putting interactive elements in the right context. On paper, a link is merely underlined text. On screen, it is another step along the user’s journey.

Don’t waste time presenting multiple concepts. Not only is it costly to work up multiple concepts to the level required for fair appraisal, but the practice demonstrates a sorry abdication of responsibility. Designers should be custodians of design. Asking for feedback on multiple designs turns the critique process into a beauty pageant, relinquishing a designer’s authority. Instead of rational choices that meet genuine user and business needs, you may be stuck with a Frankensteinian monstrosity, assembled from incompatible parts: “This header plus the whizzy bit from Version C”.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t explore lots of ideas yourself. Divergent thinking early in the design process is the only way to break free of the clichéd patterns and fads that so often litter mediocre sites. But you must act as a design curator, choosing the best of your work and explaining its rationale clearly and succinctly. Attitude, then, is central to successful critique. It can be difficult to tread the fine line between the harmful extremes of doormat passivity and prima donna arrogance. Remember that you are the professional, but be mindful that even experts make mistakes, particularly when – as with all design projects – they don’t possess all the relevant information in advance. Present your case with open-minded confidence, while accepting that positive critique will make your design (and ultimately your skills) stronger.

The courage of your convictions

Ultimately, your success in the feedback process, and indeed in the entire design process, hinges upon the rationale you provide for your work. Ideally, you should be able to refer to your research – personas, usability test findings, analytics – to support your decisions. To keep this evidence in mind, print it out to share at the design review, or include it in your presentation. Explain the rationale behind the most important decisions before showing the design, so that you can be sure of the full attention of your audience.

Once you’ve covered these points, display your design and walk through the specific features of the page. A little honesty goes a long way here: state your case as strongly as your rationale demands. Sure of your reasoning? Be strong. Speculating an approach based on a hunch? Say so, and encourage your colleagues to explore the idea with you and see where it leads.

Of course, none of these approaches should be sacrosanct. A proficient designer must be able to bend his or her way of working to suit the situation at hand. So sometimes you’ll want to ignore these rules of thumb and explore your own hunches as required. More power to you. As long as you think as clearly about the feedback process as you have about the design itself, you’ll be able to enjoy the great unveiling as a moment to be savoured, not feared.",2010,Cennydd Bowles,cennyddbowles,2010-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/the-great-unveiling/,business
328,Swooshy Curly Quotes Without Images,"The problem

Take a quote and render it within blockquote tags, applying big, funky and stylish curly quotes both at the beginning and the end without using any images – at all.

The traditional way

Feint background images under the text, or an image in the markup housed in a little float. Often designers only use the opening curly quote as it’s just too difficult to float a closing one.

Why is the traditional way bad?

Well, for a start there are no actual curly quotes in the text (unless you’re doing some nifty image replacement). Thus with CSS disabled you’ll only have default blockquote styling to fall back on. Secondly, images don’t resize, so scaling text will have no affect on your graphic curlies.

The solution

Use really big text. Then it can be resized by the browser, resized using CSS, and even be restyled with a new font style if you fancy it. It’ll also make sense when CSS is unavailable.

The problem

Creating “Drop Caps” with CSS has been around for a while (Big Dan Cederholm discusses a neat solution in that first book of his), but drop caps are normal characters – the A to Z or 1 to 10 – and these can all be pulled into a set space and do not serve up a ton of whitespace, unlike punctuation characters.

Curly quotes aren’t like traditional characters. Like full stops, commas and hashes they float within the character space and leave lots of dead white space, making it bloody difficult to manipulate them with CSS. Styles generally fit around text, so cutting into that character is tricky indeed. Also, all that extra white space is going to push into the quote text and make it look pretty uneven. This grab highlights the actual character space:



See how this is emphasized when we add a normal alphabetical character within the span. This is what we’re dealing with here:



Then, there’s size. Call in a curly quote at less than 300% font-size and it ain’t gonna look very big. The white space it creates will be big enough, but the curlies will be way too small. We need more like 700% (as in this example) to make an impression, but that sure makes for a big character space.

Prepare the curlies

Firstly, remove the opening “ from the quote. Replace it with the opening curly quote character entity “. Then replace the closing “ with the entity reference for that, which is ”. Now at least the curlies will look nice and swooshy.

Add the hooks

Two reasons why we aren’t using :first-letter pseudo class to manipulate the curlies. Firstly, only CSS2-friendly browsers would get what we’re doing, and secondly we need to affect the last “letter” of our text also – the closing curly quote.

So, add a span around the opening curly, and a second span around the closing curly, giving complete control of the characters:

<blockquote><span class=""bqstart"">“</span>Speech marks. Curly quotes. That annoying thing cool people do with their fingers to emphasize a buzzword, shortly before you hit them.<span class=""bqend"">”</span></blockquote>

So far nothing will look any different, aside form the curlies looking a bit nicer. I know we’ve just added extra markup, but the benefits as far as accessibility are concerned are good enough for me, and of course there are no images to download.

The CSS

OK, easy stuff first. Our first rule .bqstart floats the span left, changes the color, and whacks the font-size up to an exuberant 700%. Our second rule .bqend does the same tricks aside from floating the curly to the right.

.bqstart {
     float: left;
     font-size: 700%;
     color: #FF0000;
 }

 .bqend {
     float: right;
     font-size: 700%;
     color: #FF0000;
 }

That gives us this, which is rubbish. I’ve highlighted the actual span area with outlines:



Note that the curlies don’t even fit inside the span! At this stage on IE 6 PC you won’t even see the quotes, as it only places focus on what it thinks is in the div. Also, the quote text is getting all spangled.

Fiddle with margin and padding

Think of that span outline box as a window, and that you need to position the curlies within that window in order to see them. By adding some small adjustments to the margin and padding it’s possible to position the curlies exactly where you want them, and remove the excess white space by defining a height:

.bqstart {
     float: left;
     height: 45px;
     margin-top: -20px;
     padding-top: 45px;
     margin-bottom: -50px;
     font-size: 700%;
     color: #FF0000;
 }

 .bqend {
     float: right;
     height: 25px;
     margin-top: 0px;
     padding-top: 45px;
     font-size: 700%;
     color: #FF0000;
 }

I wanted the blocks of my curlies to align with the quote text, whereas you may want them to dig in or stick out more. Be aware however that my positioning works for IE PC and Mac, Firefox and Safari. Too much tweaking seems to break the magic in various browsers at various times. Now things are fitting beautifully:

I must admit that the heights, margins and spacing don’t make a lot of sense if you analyze them. This was a real trial and error job. Get it working on Safari, and IE would fail. Sort IE, and Firefox would go weird.

Finished

The final thing looks ace, can be resized, looks cool without styles, and can be edited with CSS at any time. Here’s a real example (note that I’m specifying Lucida Grande and then Verdana for my curlies):

 “Speech marks. Curly quotes. That annoying thing cool people do with their fingers to emphasize a buzzword, shortly before you hit them.”

Browsers happy

As I said, too much tweaking of margins and padding can break the effect in some browsers. Even now, Firefox insists on dropping the closing curly by approximately 6 or 7 pixels, and if I adjust the padding for that, it’ll crush it into the text on Safari or IE. Weird. Still, as I close now it seems solid through resizing tests on Safari, Firefox, Camino, Opera and IE PC and Mac. Lovely.

It’s probably not perfect, but together we can beat the evil typographic limitations of the web and walk together towards a brighter, more aligned world. Merry Christmas.",2005,Simon Collison,simoncollison,2005-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2005/swooshy-curly-quotes-without-images/,business
113,What Your Turkey Can Teach You About Project Management,"The problem with project management is that everyone thinks it’s boring. Well, that’s not really the problem. The problem is that everyone thinks it’s boring but it’s still really important. Project management is what lets you deliver your art – whether that be design or development. 

In the same way, a Christmas dinner cooked by a brilliant chef with no organizational skills is disastrous – courses arrive in the wrong order, some things are cold whilst others are raw and generally it’s a trip to the ER waiting to happen. Continuing the Christmas dinner theme, here are my top tips for successful projects, wrapped up in a nice little festive analogy. Enjoy!

Tip 1: Know What You’re Aiming For

(Turkey? Ham? Both??)

The underlying cause for the failure of so many projects is mismatched expectations. Christmas dinner cannot be a success if you serve glazed ham and your guests view turkey as the essential Christmas dinner ingredient. It doesn’t matter how delicious and well executed your glazed ham is, it’s still fundamentally just not turkey. You might win one or two adventurous souls over, but the rest will go home disappointed.

Add to the mix the fact that most web design projects are nowhere near as emotive as Christmas dinner (trust me, a ham vs turkey debate will rage much longer than a fixed vs fluid debate in normal human circles) and the problem is compounded. In particular, as technologists, we forget that our ability to precisely imagine the outcome of a project, be it a website, a piece of software, or similar, is much more keenly developed than the average customer of such projects. 

So what’s the solution? Get very clear, from the very beginning, on exactly what the project is about. What are you trying to achieve? How will you measure success? Is the presence of turkey a critical success factor?

Summarize all this information in some form of document (in PM-speak, it’s called a Project Initiation Document typically). Ideally, get the people who are the real decision makers to sign their agreement to that summary in their own blood. Well, you get the picture, I suppose actual blood is not strictly necessary, but a bit of gothic music to set the tone can be useful!

Tip 2: Plan at the Right Level of Detail

Hugely detailed and useless Gantt charts are a personal bugbear of mine. For any project, you should plan at the appropriate level of detail (and in an appropriate format) for the project itself. In our Christmas dinner example, it may be perfectly fine to have a list of tasks for the preparation work, but for the intricate interplay of oven availability and cooking times, something more complex is usually due. Having cooked roast dinners for fourteen in a student house where only the top oven and two of the rings on the hob actually worked, I can attest to the need for sequence diagrams in some of these situations!

The mistake many small teams make is to end up with a project plan that is really the amalgamation of their individual todo lists. What is needed is a project plan that will:


	reflect reality
	be easy to update
	help to track progress (i.e. are we on track or not?)


A good approach is to break your project into stages (each representing something tangible) and then into deliverables (again, something tangible for each milestone, else you’ll never know if you’ve hit it or not!). 

My personal rule of thumb is that the level of granularity needed on most projects is 2-3 days – i.e. we should never be more than two to three days from a definitive milestone which will either be complete or not. The added advantage of this approach is that if find yourself off track, you can only be two to three days off track… much easier to make up than if you went weeks or even months working hard but not actually delivering what was needed!

In our Christmas dinner example, there are a number of critical milestones – a tick list of questions. Do we have all the ingredients? Check. Has the turkey been basted? Check. On the actual day, the sequencing and timing will mean more specific questions: It’s 12pm. Are the Brussels sprouts cooked to death yet? Check. (Allowing for the extra hour of boiling to go from soft and green to mushy and brown… Yeuch!) 

Tip 3: Actively Manage Risks and Issues

A risk is something that could go wrong. An issue is something that has already gone wrong. Risks and issues are where project management superstars are born. Anyone can manage things when everything is going according to plan; it’s what you do when Cousin Jim refuses to eat anything but strawberry jam sandwiches that sorts the men from the boys. 

The key with a Christmas dinner, as with any project, is to have contingency plans for the most likely and most damaging risks. These depend on your own particular situation, but some examples might be:

 
		
			RISK
			CONTINGENCY PLAN
		
		
			Cousin Jim is a picky eater.
			Have strawberry jam and sliced white bread on hand to placate.
		
		
			Prime organic turkey might not be available at Waitrose on Christmas eve.
			Shop in advance!
		
		
			You live somewhere remote that seems to lose power around Christmas on a disturbingly regular basis.
			(number of options here depending on how far you want to go…)

					Buy a backup generator.

					Invent a new cooking method using only candles.

					Stock up on “Christmas dinner in a tin”.
		
		
			Your mother in law is likely to be annoying.
			Bottle of sherry at the ready (whether it’s for you or her, you can decide!).
		
 


The point of planning in advance is so that most of your issues don’t blindside you – you can spring into action with the contingency plan immediately. This leaves you with plenty of ingenuity and ability to cope in reserve for those truly unexpected events. 

Back in your regular projects, you should have a risk management plan (developed at the beginning of the project and regularly reviewed) as well as an issue list, tracking open, in progress and closed issues. Importantly, your issue list should be separate from any kind of bug list – issues are at a project level, bugs are at a technical level.

Tip 4: Have a Project Board

A project board consists of the overall sponsor of your project (often, but not always, the guy with the cheque book) and typically a business expert and a technical expert to help advise the sponsor. The project board is the entity that is meant to make the big, critical decisions. As a project manager, your role is to prepare a recommendation, but leave the actual decision up to the board. 

Admittedly this is where our Christmas dinner analogy has to stretch the most, but if you imagine that instead of just cooking for your family you are the caterer preparing a Christmas feast for a company. In this case, you obviously want to please the diners who will be eating the food, but key decisions are likely to be taken by whoever is organizing the event. They, in turn, will involve the boss if there are really big decisions that would affect the project drastically – for instance, having to move it to January, or it exceeding the set budget by a significant amount.

Most projects suffer from not having a project board to consult for these major decisions, or from having the wrong people selected. The first ailment is eased by ensuring that you have a functioning project board, with whom you either meet regularly to update on status, or where there is a special process for convening the board if they are needed. The second problem is a little more subtle. Key questions to ask yourself are:


	Who is funding this project?
	Who has the authority to stop the project if it was the right thing to do?
	Who are the right business and technical advisors?
	Who are the folks who don’t look like they are powerful on the org chart, but in fact might scupper this project? (e.g. administrators, tech support, personal assistants…)


Tip 5: Finish Unequivocably and Well

No one is ever uncertain as to when Christmas dinner ends. Once the flaming pudding has been consumed and the cheese tray picked at, the end of the dinner is heralded by groaning and everyone collapsing in their chairs. Different households have different rituals, so you might only open your presents after Christmas dinner (unlikely if you have small children!), or you might round off the afternoon watching the Queen’s speech (in Britland, certainly) or if you live in warmer climes you might round off Christmas dinner with a swim (which was our tradition in Cape Town – after 30 mins of food settling so you didn’t get cramp, of course!). 

The problem with projects is that they are one time efforts and so nowhere near as ritualized. Unless you have been incredibly lucky, you’ve probably worked on a project where you thought you were finished but seemed unable to lose your “zombie customers” – those folks who just didn’t realise it was over and kept coming back with more and more requests. You might even have fallen prey to this yourself, believing that the website going live was the end of the project and not realising that a number of things still needed to be wrapped up.

The essence of this final tip is to inject some of that end-of-Christmas finality ritual into your projects. Find your own ritual for closing down projects – more than just sending the customer the invoice and archiving the files. Consider things like documentation, support structure handover and training to make sure that those zombies are going to the right people (hopefully not you!). 

So, to summarise:


	Make sure you start your projects well – with an agreed (written) vision of what you’re trying to achieve.
	Plan your projects at the right level of detail and in an appropriate format – never be more than a few days away from knowing for sure whether you’re on track or not.
	Plan for likely and important risks and make sure you track and resolve those you actually encounter.
	Institute a project board, made up of the people with the real power over your project.
	Create rituals for closing projects well – don’t leave anyone in doubt that the project has been delivered, or of who they should go to for further help.",2008,Meri Williams,meriwilliams,2008-12-16T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/what-your-turkey-can-teach-you-about-project-management/,business
114,How To Create Rockband'ism,"There are mysteries happening in the world of business these days. We want something else by now. The business of business has to become more than business. We want to be able to identify ourselves with the brands we purchase and we want them to do good things. We want to feel cool because we buy stuff, and we don’t just want a shopping experience – we want an engagement with a company we can relate to.

Let me get back to “feeling cool” – if we want to feel cool, we might get the companies we buy from to support that. That’s why I am on a mission to make companies into rockbands.

Now when I say rockbands – I don’t mean the puke-y, drunky, nasty stuff that some people would highlight is also a part of rockbands. Therefore I have created my own word “rockband’ism”. This word is the definition of a childhood dream version of being in a rockband – the feeling of being more respected and loved and cool, than a cockroach or a suit on the floor of a company.

Rockband’ism

Rockband’ism is what we aspire to, to feel cool and happy.

So basically what I am arguing is that companies should look upon themselves as rockbands. Because the world has changed, so business needs to change as well.

I have listed a couple of things you could do today to become a rockband, as a person or as a company.

1 – Give your support to companies that make a difference to their surroundings – if you are buying electronics look up what the electronic producers are doing of good in the world (check out the Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics).

2 – Implement good karma in your everyday life (and do well by doing good). What you give out you get back at some point in some shape – this can also be implemented for business.

3 – WWRD? – “what would a rockband do”? or if you are into Kenny Rogers – what would he do in any given situation? This will also show yourself where your business or personal integrity lies because you actually act as a person or a rockband you admire.

4 – Start leading instead of managing – If we can measure stuff why should we manage it? Leadership is key here instead of management. When you lead you tell people how to reach the stars, when you manage you keep them on the ground.

5 – Respect and confide in, that people are the best at what they do. If they aren’t, they won’t be around for long. If they are and you keep on buggin’ them, they won’t be around for long either.

6 – Don’t be arrogant – Because audiences can’t stand it – talk to people as a person not as a company.

7 – Focus on your return on involvement – know that you get a return on, what you involve yourself in. No matter if it’s bingo, communities, talks, ornithology or un-conferences.

8 – Find out where you can make a difference and do it. Don’t leave it up to everybody else to save the world.

9 – Find out what you can do to become an authentic, trustworthy and remarkable company. Maybe you could even think about this a lot and make these thoughts into an actionplan.

10 – Last but not least – if you’re not happy – do something else, become another type of rockband, maybe a soloist of a sort, or an orchestra.

No more business as usual

This really isn’t time for more business as usual, our environment (digital, natural, work or any other kind of environment) is changing. You are going to have to change too.

This article actually sprang from a talk I did at the Shift08 conference in Lisbon in October. In addition to this article for 24 ways I have turned the talk into an eBook that you can get on Toothless Tiger Press for free.

May you all have a sustainable and great Christmas full of great moments with your loved ones. December is a month for gratitude, enjoyment and love.",2008,Henriette Weber,henrietteweber,2008-12-07T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/how-to-create-rockbandism/,business
156,Mobile 2.0,"Thinking 2.0

As web geeks, we have a thick skin towards jargon. We all know that “Web 2.0” has been done to death. At Blue Flavor we even have a jargon bucket to penalize those who utter such painfully overused jargon with a cash deposit. But Web 2.0 is a term that has lodged itself into the conscience of the masses. This is actually a good thing.

The 2.0 suffix was able to succinctly summarize all that was wrong with the Web during the dot-com era as well as the next evolution of an evolving media. While the core technologies actually stayed basically the same, the principles, concepts, interactions and contexts were radically different.

With that in mind, this Christmas I want to introduce to you the concept of Mobile 2.0. While not exactly a new concept in the mobile community, it is relatively unknown in the web community. And since the foundation of Mobile 2.0 is the web, I figured it was about time for you to get to know each other.

It’s the Carriers’ world. We just live in it.

Before getting into Mobile 2.0, I thought first I should introduce you to its older brother. You know the kind, the kid with emotional problems that likes to beat up on you and your friends for absolutely no reason. That is the mobile of today.

The mobile ecosystem is a very complicated space often and incorrectly compared to the Web. If the Web was a freewheeling hippie — believing in freedom of information and the unity of man through communities — then Mobile is the cutthroat capitalist — out to pillage and plunder for the sake of the almighty dollar. Where the Web is relatively easy to publish to and ultimately make a buck, Mobile is wrought with layers of complexity, politics and obstacles. 

I can think of no better way to summarize these challenges than the testimony of Jason Devitt to the United States Congress in what is now being referred to as the “iPhone Hearing.” Jason is the co-founder and CEO of SkyDeck a new wireless startup and former CEO of Vindigo an early pioneer in mobile content.



As Jason points out, the mobile ecosystem is a closed door environment controlled by the carriers, forcing the independent publisher to compete or succumb to the will of corporate behemoths.

But that is all about to change.

Introducing Mobile 2.0

Mobile 2.0 is term used by the mobile community to describe the current revolution happening in mobile. It describes the convergence of mobile and web services, adding portability, ubiquitous connectivity and location-aware services to add physical context to information found on the Web.

It’s an important term that looks toward the future. Allowing us to imagine the possibilities that mobile technology has long promised but has yet to deliver. It imagines a world where developers can publish mobile content without the current constraints of the mobile ecosystem.

Like the transition from Web 1.0 to 2.0, it signifies the shift away from corporate or brand-centered experiences to user-centered experiences. A focus on richer interactions, driven by user goals. Moving away from proprietary technologies to more open and standard ones, more akin to the Web. And most importantly (from our perspective as web geeks) a shift away from kludgy one-off mobile applications toward using the Web as a platform for content and services.

This means the world of the Web and the world of Mobile are coming together faster than you can say ARPU (Average Revenue Per User, a staple mobile term to you webbies). And this couldn’t come at a better time. The importance of understanding and addressing user context is quickly becoming a crucial consideration to every interactive experience as the number of ways we access information on the Web increases.

Mobile enables the power of the Web, the collective information of millions of people, inherit payment channels and access to just about every other mass media to literally be overlaid on top of the physical world, in context to the person viewing it. 

Anyone who can’t imagine how the influence of mobile technology can’t transform how we perform even the simplest of daily tasks needs to get away from their desktop and see the new evolution of information.

The Instigators

But what will make Mobile 2.0 move from idillic concept to a hardened market reality in 2008 will be four key technologies. Its my guess that you know each them already.

1. Opera

Opera is like the little train that could. They have been a driving force on moving the Web as we know it on to mobile handsets. Opera technology has proven itself to be highly adaptable, finding itself preloaded on over 40 million handsets, available on televisions sets through Nintendo Wii or via the Nintendo DS.

2. WebKit

Many were surprised when Apple chose to use KHTML instead of Gecko (the guts of Firefox) to power their Safari rendering engine. But WebKit has quickly evolved to be a powerful and flexible browser in the mobile context. WebKit has been in Nokia smartphones for a few years now, is the technology behind Mobile Safari in the iPhone and the iPod Touch and is the default web technology in Google’s open mobile platform effort, Android.

3. The iPhone

The iPhone has finally brought the concepts and principles of Mobile 2.0 into the forefront of consumers minds and therefore developers’ minds as well. Over 500 web applications have been written specifically for the iPhone since its launch. It’s completely unheard of to see so many applications built for the mobile context in such a short period of time.

4. CSS & Javascript

Web 2.0 could not exist without the rich interactions offered by CSS and Javascript, and Mobile 2.0 is no different. CSS and Javascript support across multiple phones historically has been, well… to put it positively… utter crap.

Javascript finally allows developers to create interesting interactions that support user goals and the mobile context. Specially, AJAX allows us to finally shed the days of bloated Java applications and focus on portable and flexible web applications. While CSS — namely CSS3 — allows us to create designs that are as beautiful as they are economical with bandwidth and load times.

With Leaflets, a collection of iPhone optimized web apps we created, we heavily relied on CSS3 to cache and reuse design elements over and over, minimizing download times while providing an elegant and user-centered design.



In Conclusion

It is the combination of all these instigators that is significantly decreasing the bar to mobile publishing. The market as Jason Devitt describes it, will begin to fade into the background. And maybe the world of mobile will finally start looking more like the Web that we all know and love.

So after the merriment and celebration of the holiday is over and you look toward the new year to refresh and renew, I hope that you take a seriously consider the mobile medium. 

By this time next year, it is predicted that one-third of humanity will be using mobile devices to access the Web.",2007,Brian Fling,brianfling,2007-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/mobile-2-0/,business
189,Ignorance Is Bliss,"This is a true story.

Meet Mike 

Mike’s a smart guy. He knows a great browser when he sees one. He uses Firefox on his Windows PC at work and Safari on his Mac at home. Mike asked us to design a Web site for his business. So we did.

We wanted to make the best Web site for Mike that we could, so we used all of the CSS tools that are available today. That meant using RGBa colour to layer elements, border-radius to add subtle rounded corners and (possibly most experimental of all new CSS), generated gradients.

 The home page Mike sees in Safari on his Mac

Mike loves what he sees.

Meet Sam

Sam works with Mike. She uses Internet Explorer 7 because it came on the Windows laptop that the company bought her when she joined. 

 The home page Sam sees in Internet Explorer 7 on her PC

Sam loves the new Web site too.

How could both of them be happy when they experienced the Web site differently?

The new WYSIWYG

When I first presented my designs to Mike and Sam, I showed them a Web page made with HTML and CSS in their respective browsers and not a picture of a Web page. By showing neither a static image of my design, I set none of the false expectations that, by definition, a static Photoshop or Fireworks visual would have established.

Mike saw rounded corners and subtle shadows in Firefox and Safari. Sam saw something equally as nice, just a little different, in Internet Explorer. Both were very happy because they saw something that they liked.

Neither knew, or needed to know, about the subtle differences between browsers. Their users don’t need to know either.

That’s because in the real world, people using the Web don’t find a Web site that they like, then open up another browser to check that it looks they same. They simply buy what they came to buy, read what what they came to read, do what they came to do, then get on with their lives in blissful ignorance of what they might be seeing in another browser.

Often when I talk or write about using progressive CSS, people ask me, “How do you convince clients to let you work that way? What’s your secret?” Secret? I tell them what they need to know, on a need-to-know basis.

Epilogue

Sam has a new iPhone that Mike bought for her as a reward for achieving her sales targets. She loves her iPhone and was surprised at just how fast and good-looking the company Web site appears on that. So she asked,


	“Andy, I didn’t know you optimised our site for mobile. I don’t remember seeing an invoice for that.”


I smiled.


	“That one was on the house.”",2009,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2009-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/ignorance-is-bliss/,business
44,Taglines and Truisms,"To bring her good luck, “white rabbits” was the first thing that my grandmother said out loud on the first day of every month. We all need a little luck, but we shouldn’t rely on it, especially when it comes to attracting new clients.

The first thing we say to a prospective client when they visit our website for the first time helps them to understand not only what we do but why we do it. We can also help them understand why they should choose to work with us over one of our competitors.

Take a minute or two to look at your competitors’ websites. What’s the first thing that they say about themselves? Do they say that they “design delightful digital experiences,” “craft beautiful experiences” or “create remarkable digital experiences?”

It’s easy to find companies who introduce themselves with what they do, their proposition, but what a company does is only part of their story. Their beliefs and values, what they stand for why they do what they do are also important. 

When someone visits our websites for the first time, we have only a brief moment to help them understand us. To help us we can learn from the advertising industry, where the job of a tagline is to communicate a concept, deliver a message and sell a product, often using only a few words.

When an advertising campaign is effective, its tagline stays with you, sometimes long after that campaign is over. For example, can you remember which company or brand these taglines help to sell? (Answers at the bottom of the article:)


The Ultimate Driving Machine
Just Do It
Don’t Leave Home Without It


A clever tagline isn’t just a play on words, although it can include one. A tagline does far more than help make your company memorable. Used well, it brings together notions of what makes your company and what you offer special. Then it expresses those notions in a few words or possibly a short sentence. 

I’m sure that everyone can find examples of company slogans written in the type of language that should stay within the walls of a marketing department. We can also find taglines where the meaning is buried so deep that the tag itself becomes effectively meaningless.

A meaningful tagline supports our ideas about who we are and what we offer, and provides a platform for different executions of them, sometimes over a period of time. For a tagline to work well, it must allow for current and future ideas about a brand.

It must also be meaningful to our brand and describe a truism, a truth that need not be a fact or statistic, but something that’s true about us, who we are, what we do and why that’s distinctive. It can be obvious, funny, serious or specific but above all it must be true. It should also be difficult to argue with, making your messages difficult to argue with too.

I doubt that I need remind you who this tagline belongs to:


	There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else there’s MasterCard.


That tagline was launched in 1997 by McCann-Erickson along with the “Priceless” campaign and it helped establish MasterCard as a friendlier credit card company, one with a sense of humour. 

MasterCard’s truism is that the things which really matter in life can’t be bought. They are worth more than anything that a monetary value can be applied to. In expressing that truism through the tagline, MasterCard’s advertising tells people to use not just any credit card, but their MasterCard, to pay for everything they buy.

“Guinness is good for you” may have been a stretch, but “Good things come to those who wait” builds on the truism that patience is a virtue and therefore a good pint of Guinness takes time to pour (119.5 seconds. I know you were wondering.)

The fact that British Airways flies to more destinations than any other airline is their truism, and led their advertisers to the now famous tagline, “The world’s favourite airline.”



At my company, Stuff & Nonsense, we’ve been thinking about taglines as we think about our position within an industry that seems full of companies who “design”, “craft”, and “create” “delightful”, “beautiful”, “remarkable digital experiences”.

Much of what made us different has changed along with the type of work we’re interested in doing. Our work’s expanded beyond websites and now includes design for mobile and other media. It’s true we can’t know how or where it will be seen. The ways that we make it are flexible too as we’re careful not to become tied to particular tools or approaches. 

It’s also true that we’re a small team. One that’s flexible enough to travel around the world to work alongside our clients. We join their in-house teams and we collaborate with them in ways that other agencies often find more difficult. We know that our clients appreciate our flexibility and have derived enormous value from it. We know that we’ve won business because of it and that it’s now a big part of our proposition.

Our truism is that we’re flexible, “Fabulously flexible” as our tagline now expresses. And although we know that there may be other agencies who can be similarly flexible – after all, being flexible is not a unique selling proposition – only we do it so fabulously.



As the old year rolls into the new, how will your company describe what you do in 2015? More importantly, how will you tell prospective clients why you do it, what matters to you and why they should work with you?

Start by writing a list of truisms about your company. Write as many as you can, but then whittle that list down to just one, the most important truth. Work on that truism to create a tagline that’s meaningful, difficult to be argue with and, above all, uniquely yours.

Answers


The Ultimate Driving Machine (BMW)
Just Do It (Nike)
Don’t Leave Home Without It (American Express)",2014,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2014-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/taglines-and-truisms/,business
208,All That Glisters,"Tradition has it that at this time of year, families gather together, sit, eat and share stories. It’s an opportunity for the wisdom of the elders to be passed down to the younger members of the tribe. Tradition also has it that we should chase cheese downhill and dunk the nice lady to prove she’s a witch, so maybe let’s not put too much stock in that.
I’ve been building things on the web professionally for about twenty years, and although the web has changed immeasurably, it’s probably not changed as much as I have. While I can happily say I’m not the young (always right, always arrogant) developer that I once was, unfortunately I’m now an approaching-middle-age developer who thinks he’s always right and on top of it is extremely pompous. What can you do? Nature has devised this system with the distinct advantage of allowing us to always be right, and only ever wrong in the future or in the past. So let’s roll with it.
Increasingly, there seems to be a sense of fatigue within our industry. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on whatever the latest tool or technology is, something new comes out to replace it. Suddenly you find that you’ve invested precious time learning something new and it’s already old hat. The pace of change is so rapid, that new developers don’t know where to start, and experienced developers don’t know where it ends. With that in mind, here’s some fireside thoughts from a pompous old developer, that I hope might bring some Christmas comfort.
Reliable and boring beats shiny and new
There are so many new tools, frameworks, techniques, styles and libraries to learn. You know what? You don’t have to use them. You’re not a bad developer if you use Grunt even though others have switched to Gulp or Brunch or Webpack or Banana Sandwich. It’s probably misguided to spend lots of project time messing around with build tool fashions when your so last year build tool is already doing what you need.
Just a little reminder that it’s about 100 times more important what you build than how you build it.— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) December 10, 2017

I think it helps if we understand why so many new solutions exist. Most developers are predisposed to enjoy creating new things more than improving established systems. It’s natural, because it’s actually much easier and more exciting to create something new that works exactly how you think it should be than to improve an existing, imperfect solution. Improving and refactoring a system is hard, and it takes real chops, much more than just building something new.
The consequence of this is that new tools appear all the time. A developer will get a fresh new idea of how to tackle a problem – usually out of dissatisfaction with an existing solution, and figure the best way to implement that idea is to build something new around it. Often, that something new will do the same job as something old that already exists; it will just do it in a different way. Sometimes in a better way. Sometimes, just different.
xkcd: Standards
That’s not to say new tools are bad, and it’s not bad that they exist. We shouldn’t be crushing new ideas, and it’s not wrong to adopt a new solution over an old one, but you know what? There’s no imperative to switch right away. The next time you hit a pain point with your current solution, or have time to re-evaluate, check out what’s new and see how the latest generation of tools and technologies can help. There’s no prize for solving problems you don’t have yet, and heading further into the desert in search of water is a survival tactic, not an aspiration.
New is better, but also worse
Software, much like people, is born with a whole lot of potential and not much utility. Newborns — both digital and meaty — are exciting and cute but they also lead to sleepless nights and pools of vomit.
New technology contains lots of useful new features, but it’s also more likely to contain bugs and be subject to more rapid change. Jumping on a new framework is great, right until there are API changes and you need to refactor your entire project to be able to update. More mature solutions have a higher weight of existing projects on their shoulders, and so the need to maintain backward compatibility is stronger. Things still move forward, but in a more controlled way.
So how do we balance the need to move technology forward with the need to provide mature and stable solutions for the projects we work on? I think there’s a couple of good ways to do that.
Get personal
Use all the new shiny tools on your side-projects, personal projects, seasonal throw-aways and anywhere where the stakes are low. If you know you can patch around problems without much consequence, go for it. Build your personal blog on a CMS that stores data in the woven bark of a silver birch. Find where it breaks. Find where it excels. Find yourself if you like. When it comes to high-stakes projects, you’ll hopefully have enough experience to know what you’re getting into.
Focus on the unique problem
That’s not to say you should never risk using a new technology for ‘real’ work. Instead, distinguish the areas of your project where a new technology solves a specifically identified, measurable business objective, verses those where it won’t. 
A brand new web application framework might be fun to use, but are you in the business of solving a web application framework problem?  That new web server made of taffeta might increase static file throughput slightly, but are you in the business of serving static assets, or would it be better to just run up nginx and never have to think about that problem again. (Clue: it’s the nginx one.)
But when it comes to building that live sports interface for keeping fans up to date with the blow-by-blow of the big game, that’s where it might make sense to take a risk on an amazing-looking new JavaScript realtime interface framework. That’s the time to run up a breakthrough new message queue server that can deliver jobs to workers via extrasensory perception and keep the score updates flowing instantaneously. 
Those are the risks worth taking, as those new technologies have the potential to help you solve your core problems in a markedly improved way. Unproven technology is worth the risk if it solves a specific business objective. If it doesn’t, don’t make work for yourself - use something mature and stable.
Pick the right tools
Our job as developers is to solve problems using code, and do so in an effective and responsible way. You’ve been hired to use your expertise in picking the right tools for the job, and a big part of that is weighing up the risk verse the reward of each part of the system. The best tools for the job might be something cutting edge, but ‘best’ can also mean most stable, reliable or easy-to-hire-for.
Go out and learn (and create!) new tools and experiment with them. Understand what problems they solve and what the pitfalls are. Use them in production for low-stakes projects to get real experience, and then once you really know their character, then think about using them when the stakes are higher.
The rest of the time? The tools you’re using now are solid and proven and you know their capabilities and pitfalls well. They might not always be the fashionable candidate, but they often make for a very solid choice.",2017,Drew McLellan,drewmclellan,2017-12-24T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/all-that-glisters/,business
224,Go Forth and Make Awesomeness,"We’ve all dreamed of being a superhero: maybe that’s why we’ve ended up on the web—a place where we can do good deeds and celebrate them on a daily basis. 

Wear your dreams

At age four, I wore my Wonder Woman Underoos around my house, my grandparents’ house, our neighbor’s house, and even around the yard. I wanted to be a superhero when I grew up. I was crushed to learn that there is no school for superheroes—no place to earn a degree in how to save the world from looming evil. Instead, I—like everyone else—was destined to go to ordinary school to focus on ABCs and 123s. Even still, I want to save the world.

Intend your goodness

Random acts of kindness make a difference. Books, films, and advertising campaigns tout random acts of kindness and the positive influence they can have on the world. But why do acts of kindness have to be so random? Why can’t we intend to be kind? A true superhero wakes each morning intending to perform selfless acts for the community. Why can’t we do the same thing?

As a child, my mother taught me to plan to do at least three good deeds each day. And even now, years later, I put on my invisible cape looking for ways to do good.

Here are some examples:

	slowing down to allow another driver in before me from the highway on-ramp
	bringing a co-worker their favorite kind of coffee or tea
	sharing my umbrella on a rainy day
	holding a door open for someone with full hands
	listening intently when someone shares a story
	complimenting someone on a job well done
	thanking someone for a job well done
	leaving a constructive, or even supportive comment on someone’s blog


As you can see, these acts are simple. Doing good and being kind is partially about being aware—aware of the words we speak and the actions we take. Like superheroes, we create our own code of conduct to live by. Hopefully, we choose to put the community before ourselves (within reason) and to do our best not to damage it as we move through our lives.

Take a bite out of the Apple

With some thought, we can weave this type of thinking and action into our business choices. We can take the simple acts of kindness concept and amplify it a bit. With this amplification, we can be a new kind of superhero.

In 1997, during a presentation, Steve Jobs stated Apple’s core value in a simple, yet powerful, sentence:


	We believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.


Apple fan or not, those are powerful words.

Define your core

Every organization must define its core values. Core values help us to frame, recognize, and understand the principles our organization embodies and practices. It doesn’t matter if you’re starting a new organization or you want to define values within an existing organization. Even if you’re a freelancer, defining core values will help guide your decisions and actions.

If you can, work as a team to define core values. Gather the people who are your support system—your business partners, your colleagues, and maybe even a trusted client—this is now your core value creation team. Have a brainstorming session with your team. Let ideas flow. Give equal weight to the things people say. You may not hear everything you thought you might hear—that’s OK. You want the session to be free-flowing and honest. Ask yourself and your team questions like:


	What do you think my/our/your core values are?
	What do you think my/our/your priorities are?
	What do you think my/our/your core values should be?
	What do you think my/our/your priorities should be?
	How do you think I/we should treat customers, clients, and each other?
	How do we want others to treat us?
	What are my/our/your success stories?
	What has defined these experiences as successful?


From this brainstorming session, you will craft your superhero code of conduct. You will decide what you will and will not do. You will determine how you will and will not act. You’re setting the standards that you will live and work by—so don’t take this exercise lightly. Take your time. Use the exercise as a way to open a discussion about values. Find out what you and your team believe in. Set these values and keep them in place. Write them down and share these with your team and with the world. By sharing your core values, you hold yourself more accountable to them. You also send a strong message to the rest of the world about what type of organization you are and what you believe in. Other organizations and people may decide to align or not to align themselves with you because of your core values. This is good. Chances are, you’ll be happier and more profitable if you work with other organizations and people who share similar core values.

 Photo: Laura Winn

During your brainstorming session, list keywords. Don’t edit. Allow things to take their course. Some examples of keywords might be:

Ability · Achievement · Adventure · Ambition · Altruism · Awareness · Balance · Caring · Charity · Citizenship · Collaboration · Commitment · Community · Compassion · Consideration · Cooperation · Courage · Courtesy · Creativity · Democracy · Dignity · Diplomacy · Discipline · Diversity · Education · Efficiency · Energy · Equality · Excellence · Excitement · Fairness · Family · Freedom · Fun · Goodness · Gratefulness · Growth · Happiness · Harmony · Helping · Honor · Hope · Humility · Humor · Imagination · Individuality · Innovation · Integrity · Intelligence · Joy · Justice · Kindness · Knowledge · Leadership · Learning · Loyalty · Meaning · Mindfulness · Moderation · Modesty · Nurture · Openness · Organization · Passion · Patience · Peace · Planning · Principles · Productivity · Purpose · Quality · Reliability · Respectfulness · Responsibility · Security · Sensitivity · Service · Sharing · Simplicity · Stability · Tolerance · Transparency · Trust · Truthfulness · Understanding · Unity · Variety · Vision · Wisdom

After you have a list of keywords, create your core values statement using the themes from your brainstorming session. There are no rules: while above, Steve Jobs summed up Apple’s core values in one sentence, Zappos has ten core values:


	Deliver WOW Through Service
	Embrace and Drive Change
	Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
	Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
	Pursue Growth and Learning
	Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
	Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
	Do More With Less
	Be Passionate and Determined
	Be Humble


To see how Zappos’ employees embrace these core values, watch the video they created and posted on their website.

Dog food is yummy

Although I find merit in every keyword listed, I’ve distilled my core values to their simplest form:

Make awesomeness. Do good.

How do you make awesomeness and do good? You need ambition, balance, collaboration, commitment, fun, and you need every keyword listed to support these actions. Again, there are no rules: your core values can be one sentence or a bulleted list. What matters is being true to yourself and creating core values that others can understand.  Before I start any project I ask myself: is there a way to make awesomeness and to do good? If the answer is “yes,” I embrace the endeavor because it aligns with my core values. If the answer is “no,” I move on to a project that supports my core values.

Unleash your powers

Although every organization will craft different core values, I imagine that you want to be a superhero and that you will define “doing good” (or something similar) as one of your core values. Whether you work by yourself or with a team, you can use the web as a tool to help do good. It can be as simple as giving a free hug, or something a little more complex to help others and help your organization meet the bottom line. Some interesting initiatives that use the web to do good are:


	Yahoo!: How Good Grows
	Desigual: Happy Hunters
	Edge Shave Gel: Anti-irritation campaign




Knowing your underlying desire to return to your Underoos-and-cape-sporting childhood and knowing that you don’t always have the opportunity to develop an entire initiative to “do good,” remember that as writers, designers, and developers, we can perform superhero acts on a daily basis by making content, design, and development accessible to the greatest number of people. By considering other people’s needs, we are intentionally performing acts of kindness—we’re doing good. There are many ways to write, design, and develop websites—many of which will be discussed in other 24ways.org articles. As we make content, design, and development decisions—as we develop campaigns and initiatives—we need to keep our core values in mind. It’s easy to make a positive difference in the world. Just be the superhero you’ve always wanted to be. Go forth and make awesomeness.

If you would like to do good today, support The United Nations Children’s Fund, an organization that works for children’s rights, their survival, development and protection, by purchasing this year’s 24 ways Annual 2010 created by Five Simple Steps. All proceeds go to UNICEF.",2010,Leslie Jensen-Inman,lesliejenseninman,2010-12-04T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/go-forth-and-make-awesomeness/,business
176,What makes a website successful? It might not be what you expect!,"What makes some sites succeed and others fail? Put another way, when you are asked to redesign an existing website, what problems are you looking out for and where do you concentrate your efforts?

I would argue that as web designers we spend too much time looking at the wrong kind of problem.

I recently ran a free open door consultancy clinic to celebrate the launch of my new book (yes I know, two shameless plugs in one sentence). This involved various website owners volunteering their sites for review. Both myself and the audience then provided feedback.

What quickly became apparent is that the feedback being given by the audience was biased towards design and development.

Although their comments were excellent it focused almost exclusively on the quality of code, site aesthetics and usability. To address these issues in isolation is similar to treating symptoms and ignoring the underlying illness.

Cure the illness not the symptoms

Poor design, bad usability and terribly written code are symptoms of bigger problems. Often when we endeavour to address these symptoms, we meet resistance from our clients and become frustrated. This is because our clients are still struggling with fundamental concepts we take for granted.

Before we can address issues of aesthetics, usability and code, we need to tackle business objectives, calls to action and user tasks. Without dealing with these fundamental principles our clients’ website will fail.

Let me address each in turn:

Understand the business objectives

Do you ask your clients why they have a website? It feels like an obvious question. However, it is surprising how many clients do not have an answer.

Without having a clear idea of the siteʼs business objectives, the client has no way to know whether it is succeeding. This means they have no justification for further investment and that leads to quibbling over every penny.

However most importantly, without clearly defined business aims they have no standard against which to base their decisions. Everything becomes subjective and that will inevitably lead to problems.

Before we start discussing design, usability and development, we need to focus our clients on establishing concrete business objectives. This will provide a framework for decision making during the development phase.

This will not only help the client make decisions, it will also focus them on the business and away from micro managing the design.

Establish clear calls to action

Once business objectives have been set this opens up the possibility to establish clear calls to action.

I am amazed at how few website owners can name their calls to action. However, I am even more staggered at how few web designers ask about them.

Calls to action are not just limited to ecommerce sites. Whether you are asking people to sign up for a newsletter or complete a contact us form, every site should have a desired objective for users.

What is more, each page of a site should have micro calls to action that always draw users on and never leave them at a dead end.

Without clearly defined calls to action you cannot successfully design a site, structure the user experience or measure its success. They bring focus to the site and encourage the client to concentrate their efforts on helping people reach those goals.

Of course in order to know if a call to action is going to work, it is necessary to do some user testing.

Test against the right tasks

As web designers we all like to boast about being ʻuser centricʼ whatever that means! However, in reality I think many of us are paying lip service to the subject.

Sure, we ask our clients about who their users are and maybe even do some usability testing. However, usability testing is no good if we are not asking the right questions.

Again we find ourselves working on a superficial level rather than tackling the deeper issues.

Clients find it relatively easy to tell you who their target audience is. Admittedly the list they come back with is often overly long and contains a lot of edge cases. However, where they begin to struggle is articulating what these users will want to achieve on the website. They know who they want to reach. However, they cannot always tell you why those people would be interested in the site.

These user tasks are another fundamental building block for any successful website. Although it is important for a website owner to understand what their objectives are and what they want users to do, it is even more important that they understand the users objectives as well.

Again, this provides context for the decisions they are making about design, usability and functionality. Without it the site will become self serving, largely ignoring the needs of users.

User tasks help to focus the clientʼs mind on the needs of their user, rather than what they can get out of them.

So am I claiming that design, usability and code do not matter? Well the shocking truth is that to some extent I am!

The shocking truth

Whether we like it or not there is significant evidence that you can create a successful website with bad design, terrible code and without ever running a usability test session.

You only need to look at the design of Craigslist or the code of Amazon to see that this is true.

However, I do not believe it is possible to build a successful website without business objectives, calls to action and a clear idea of user tasks.

Do not misunderstand me. I do believe design, usability and code matters. I just believe that they only matter if the fundamentals are already in place. These things improve a solid foundation but are no use in their own right.

As web designers it is our responsibility to ensure fundamental questions are being asked, before we start exploring other issues. If we do not, our websites will look great, be well coded and have gone through endless usability tests, however it will not be truly successful.",2009,Paul Boag,paulboag,2009-12-04T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2009/what-makes-a-website-successful/,business
254,What I Learned in Six Years at GDS,"When I joined the Government Digital Service in April 2012, GOV.UK was just going into public beta. GDS was a completely new organisation, part of the Cabinet Office, with a mission to stop wasting government money on over-complicated and underperforming big IT projects and instead deliver simple, useful services for the public.
Lots of people who were experts in their fields were drawn in by this inspiring mission, and I learned loads from working with some true leaders. Here are three of the main things I learned.
1. What is the user need?

The main discipline I learned from my time at GDS was to always ask ‘what is the user need?’ It’s very easy to build something that seems like a good idea, but until you’ve identified what problem you are solving for the user, you can’t be sure that you are building something that is going to help solve an actual problem.
A really good example of this is GOV.UK Notify. This service was originally conceived of as a status tracker; a “where’s my stuff” for government services. For example, if you apply for a passport online, it can take up to six weeks to arrive. After a few weeks, you might feel anxious and phone the Home Office to ask what’s happening. The idea of the status tracker was to allow you to get this information online, saving your time and saving government money on call centres.
The project started, as all GDS projects do, with a discovery. The main purpose of a discovery is to identify the users’ needs. At the end of this discovery, the team realised that a status tracker wasn’t the way to address the problem. As they wrote in this blog post: 

Status tracking tools are often just ‘channel shift’ for anxiety. They solve the symptom and not the problem. They do make it more convenient for people to reduce their anxiety, but they still require them to get anxious enough to request an update in the first place.

What would actually address the user need would be to give you the information before you get anxious about where your passport is. For example, when your application is received, email you to let you know when to expect it, and perhaps text you at various points in the process to let you know how it’s going. So instead of a status tracker, the team built GOV.UK Notify, to make it easy for government services to incorporate text, email and even letter notifications into their processes.
Making sure you know your user
At GDS user needs were taken very seriously. We had a user research lab on site and everyone was required to spend two hours observing user research every six weeks. Ideally you’d observe users working with things you’d built, but even if they weren’t, it was an incredibly valuable experience, and something you should seek out if you are able to.
Even if we think we understand our users very well, it is very enlightening to see how users actually use your stuff. Partly because in technology we tend to be power users and the average user doesn’t use technology the same way we do. But even if you are building things for other developers, someone who is unfamiliar with it will interact with it in a way that may be very different to what you have envisaged.
User needs is not just about building things
Asking the question “what is the user need?” really helps focus on why you are doing what you are doing. It keeps things on track, and helps the team think about what the actual desired end goal is (and should be). 
Thinking about user needs has helped me with lots of things, not just building services. For example, you are raising a pull request. What’s the user need? The reviewer needs to be able to easily understand what the change you are proposing is, why you are proposing that change and any areas you need particular help on with the review. 
Or you are writing an email to a colleague. What’s the user need? What are you hoping the reader will learn, understand or do as a result of your email?
2. Make things open: it makes things better
The second important thing I learned at GDS was ‘make things open: it makes things better’. This works on many levels: being open about your strategy, blogging about what you are doing and what you’ve learned (including mistakes), and – the part that I got most involved in – coding in the open.
Talking about your work helps clarify it
One thing we did really well at GDS was blogging – a lot – about what we were working on. Blogging about what you are working on is is really valuable for the writer because it forces you to think logically about what you are doing in order to tell a good story. If you are blogging about upcoming work, it makes you think clearly about why you’re doing it; and it also means that people can comment on the blog post. Often people had really useful suggestions or clarifying questions.
It’s also really valuable to blog about what you’ve learned, especially if you’ve made a mistake. It makes sure you’ve learned the lesson and helps others avoid making the same mistakes. As well as blogging about lessons learned, GOV.UK also publishes incident reports when there is an outage or service degradation. Being open about things like this really engenders an atmosphere of trust and safe learning; which helps make things better.
Coding in the open has a lot of benefits
In my last year at GDS I was the Open Source Lead, and one of the things I focused on was the requirement that all new government source code should be open. From the start, GDS coded in the open (the GitHub organisation still has the non-intuitive name alphagov, because it was created by the team doing the original Alpha of GOV.UK, before GDS was even formed).
When I first joined GDS I was a little nervous about the fact that anyone could see my code. I worried about people seeing my mistakes, or receiving critical code reviews. (Setting people’s mind at rest about these things is why it’s crucial to have good standards around communication and positive behaviour - even a critical code review should be considerately given). 
But I quickly realised there were huge advantages to coding in the open. In the same way as blogging your decisions makes you think carefully about whether they are good ones and what evidence you have, the fact that anyone in the world could see your code (even if, in practice, they probably won’t be looking) makes everyone raise their game slightly. The very fact that you know it’s open, makes you make it a bit better.
It helps with lots of other things as well, for example it makes it easier to collaborate with people and share your work. And now that I’ve left GDS, it’s so useful to be able to look back at code I worked on to remember how things worked.
Share what you learn
It’s sometimes hard to know where to start with being open about things, but it gets easier and becomes more natural as you practice. It helps you clarify your thoughts and follow through on what you’ve decided to do. Working at GDS when this was a very important principle really helped me learn how to do this well.
3. Do the hard work to make it simple (tech edition)
‘Start with user needs’ and ‘Make things open: it makes things better’ are two of the excellent government design principles. They are all good, but the third thing that I want to talk about is number 4: ‘Do the hard work to make it simple’, and specifically, how this manifests itself in the way we build technology.
At GDS, we worked very hard to do the hard work to make the code, systems and technology we built simple for those who came after us. For example, writing good commit messages is taken very seriously. There is commit message guidance, and it was not unusual for a pull request review to ask for a commit message to be rewritten to make a commit message clearer.
We worked very hard on making pull requests good, keeping the reviewer in mind and making it clear to the user how best to review it.
Reviewing others’ pull requests is the highest priority so that no-one is blocked, and teams have screens showing the status of open pull requests (using fourth wall) and we even had a ‘pull request seal’, a bot that publishes pull requests to Slack and gets angry if they are uncommented on for more than two days.
Making it easier for developers to support the site
Another example of doing the hard work to make it simple was the opsmanual. I spent two years on the web operations team on GOV.UK, and one of the things I loved about that team was the huge efforts everyone went to to be open and inclusive to developers.
The team had some people who were really expert in web ops, but they were all incredibly helpful when bringing me on board as a developer with no previous experience of web ops, and also patiently explaining things whenever other devs in similar positions came with questions. 
The main artefact of this was the opsmanual, which contained write-ups of how to do lots of things. One of the best things was that every alert that might lead to someone being woken up in the middle of the night had a link to documentation on the opsmanual which detailed what the alert meant and some suggested actions that could be taken to address it.
This was important because most of the devs on GOV.UK were on the on-call rota, so if they were woken at 3am by an alert they’d never seen before, the opsmanual information might give them everything they needed to solve it, without the years of web ops training and the deep familiarity with the GOV.UK infrastructure that came with working on it every day.
Developers are users too
Doing the hard work to make it simple means that users can do what they need to do, and this applies even when the users are your developer peers. At GDS I really learned how to focus on simplicity for the user, and how much better this makes things work.
These three principles help us make great things
I learned so much more in my six years at GDS. For example, the civil service has a very fair way of interviewing. I learned about the importance of good comms, working late, responsibly and the value of content design.
And the real heart of what I learned, the guiding principles that help us deliver great products, is encapsulated by the three things I’ve talked about here: think about the user need, make things open, and do the hard work to make it simple.",2018,Anna Shipman,annashipman,2018-12-08T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2018/what-i-learned-in-six-years-at-gds/,business
105,Contract Killer,"When times get tough, it can often feel like there are no good people left in the world, only people who haven’t yet turned bad. These bad people will go back on their word, welch on a deal, put themselves first. You owe it to yourself to stay on top. You owe it to yourself to ensure that no matter how bad things get, you’ll come away clean. You owe it yourself and your business not to be the guy lying bleeding in an alley with a slug in your gut.

But you’re a professional, right? Nothing bad is going to happen to you.

You’re a good guy. You do good work for good people.

Think again chump.

Maybe you’re a gun for hire, a one man army with your back to the wall and nothing standing between you and the line at a soup kitchen but your wits. Maybe you work for the agency, or like me you run one of your own. Either way, when times get tough and people get nasty, you’ll need more than a killer smile to save you. You’ll need a killer contract too.

It was exactly ten years ago today that I first opened my doors for business. In that time I’ve thumbed through enough contracts to fill a filing cabinet. I’ve signed more contracts than I can remember, many so complicated that I should have hired a lawyer (or detective) to make sense of their complicated jargon and solve their cross-reference puzzles. These documents had not been written to be understood on first reading but to spin me around enough times so as to give the other player the upper-hand.


If signing a contract I didn’t fully understand made me a stupid son-of-a-bitch, not asking my customers to sign one just makes me plain dumb. I’ve not always been so careful about asking my customers to sign contracts with me as I am now. Somehow in the past I felt that insisting on a contract went against the friendly, trusting relationship that I like to build with my customers. Most of the time the game went my way. On rare the occasions when a fight broke out, I ended up bruised and bloodied. I learned that asking my customers to sign a contract matters to both sides, but what also matters to me is that these contracts should be more meaningful, understandable and less complicated than any of those that I have ever autographed.


Writing a killer contract

If you are writing a contract between you and your customers it doesn’t have to conform to the seemingly standard format of jargon and complicated legalese. You can be creative. A killer contract will clarify what is expected of both sides and it can also help you to communicate your approach to doing business. It will back-up your brand values and help you to build a great relationship between you and your customers. In other words, a creative contract can be a killer contract.


Your killer contract should cover:


	A simple overview of who is hiring who, what they are being hired to do, when and for how much
	What both parties agree to do and what their respective responsibilities are
	The specifics of the deal and what is or isn’t included in the scope
	What happens when people change their minds (as they almost always do)
	A simple overview of liabilities and other legal matters
	You might even include a few jokes


To help you along, I will illustrate those bullet points by pointing both barrels at the contract that I wrote and have been using at Stiffs & Nonsense for the past year. My contract has been worth its weight in lead and you are welcome to take all or any part of it to use for yourself. It’s packing a creative-commons attribution share-a-like license. That means you are free to re-distribute it, translate it and otherwise re-use it in ways I never considered. In return I only ask you mention my name and link back to this article. As I am only an amateur detective, you should have it examined thoroughly by your own, trusted legal people if you use it.

NB: The specific details of this killer contract work for me and my customers. That doesn’t mean that they will work for you and yours. The ways that I handle design revisions, testing, copyright ownership and other specifics are not the main focus of this article. That you handle each of them carefully when you write your own killer contract is.

Kiss Me, Deadly

Setting a tone and laying foundations for agreement

The first few paragraphs of a killer contract are the most important. Just like a well thought-out web page, these first few words should be simple, concise and include the key points in your contract. As this is the part of the contract that people absorb most easily, it is important that you make it count. Start by setting the overall tone and explaining how your killer contract is structured and why it is different.



	We will always do our best to fulfill your needs and meet your goals, but sometimes it is best to have a few simple things written down so that we both know what is what, who should do what and what happens if stuff goes wrong. In this contract you won’t find complicated legal terms or large passages of unreadable text. We have no desire to trick you into signing something that you might later regret. We do want what’s best for the safety of both parties, now and in the future.

	In short

	You ([customer name]) are hiring us ([company name]) located at [address] to [design and develop a web site] for the estimated total price of [total] as outlined in our previous correspondence. Of course it’s a little more complicated, but we’ll get to that.


The Big Kill

What both parties agree to do

Have you ever done work on a project in good faith for a junior member of a customer’s team, only to find out later that their spending hadn’t been authorized? To make damn sure that does not happen to you,  you should ask your customer to confirm that not only are they authorized to enter into your contract but that they will fulfill all of their obligations to help you meet yours. This will help you to avoid any gunfire if, as deadline day approaches, you have fulfilled your side of the bargain but your customer has not come up with the goods.



	As our customer, you have the power and ability to enter into this contract on behalf of your company or organization. You agree to provide us with everything that we need to complete the project including text, images and other information as and when we need it, and in the format that we ask for. You agree to review our work, provide feedback and sign-off approval in a timely manner too. Deadlines work two ways and you will also be bound by any dates that we set together. You also agree to stick to the payment schedule set out at the end of this contract.

	We have the experience and ability to perform the services you need from us and we will carry them out in a professional and timely manner. Along the way we will endeavor to meet all the deadlines set but we can’t be responsible for a missed launch date or a deadline if you have been late in supplying materials or have not approved or signed off our work on-time at any stage. On top of this we will also maintain the confidentiality of any information that you give us.


My Gun Is Quick

Getting down to the nitty gritty

What appear at first to be a straight-forward projects can sometimes turn long and complicated and unless you play it straight from the beginning your relationship with your customer can suffer under the strain. Customers do, and should have the opportunity to, change their minds and give you new assignments. After-all, projects should be flexible and few customers know from the get-go exactly what they want to see. If you handle this well from the beginning you will help to keep yourself and your customers from becoming frustrated. You will also help yourself to dodge bullets in the event of a fire-fight.



	We will create designs for the look-and-feel, layout and functionality of your web site. This contract includes one main design plus the opportunity for you to make up to two rounds of revisions. If you’re not happy with the designs at this stage, you will pay us in full for all of the work that we have produced until that point and you may either cancel this contract or continue to commission us to make further design revisions at the daily rate set out in our original estimate.

	We know from plenty of experience that fixed-price contracts are rarely beneficial to you, as they often limit you to your first idea about how something should look, or how it might work. We don’t want to limit  either your options or your opportunities to change your mind.

	The estimate/quotation prices at the beginning of this document are based on the number of days that we estimate we’ll need to accomplish everything that you have told us you want to achieve. If you do want to change your mind, add extra pages or templates or even add new functionality, that won’t be a problem. You will be charged the daily rate set out in the estimate we gave you. Along the way we might ask you to put requests in writing so we can keep track of changes.


As I like to push my luck when it comes to CSS, it never hurts to head off the potential issue of progressive enrichment right from the start. You should do this too. But don’t forget that when it comes to technical matters your customers may have different expectations or understanding, so be clear about what you will and won’t do.



	If the project includes XHTML or HTML markup and CSS templates, we will develop these using valid XHTML 1.0 Strict markup and CSS2.1 + 3 for styling. We will test all our markup and CSS in current versions of all major browsers including those made by Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera. We will also test to ensure that pages will display visually in a ‘similar’, albeit not necessarily an identical way, in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 for Windows as this browser is now past it’s sell-by date.

	We will not test these templates in old or abandoned browsers, for example Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or 5.5 for Windows or Mac, previous versions of Apple’s Safari, Mozilla Firefox or Opera unless otherwise specified. If you need to show the same or similar visual design to visitors using these older browsers, we will charge you at the daily rate set out in our original estimate for any necessary additional code and its testing.


The Twisted Thing

It is not unheard of for customers to pass off stolen goods as their own. If this happens, make sure that you are not the one left holding the baby. You should also make it clear who owns the work that you make as customers often believe that because they pay for your time, that they own everything that you produce.


Copyrights


	You guarantee to us that any elements of text, graphics, photos, designs, trademarks, or other artwork that you provide us for inclusion in the web site are either owned by your good selfs, or that you have permission to use them. When we receive your final payment, copyright is automatically assigned as follows:

	You own the graphics and other visual elements that we create for you for this project. We will give you a copy of all files and you should store them really safely as we are not required to keep them or provide any native source files that we used in making them.

	You also own text content, photographs and other data you provided, unless someone else owns them. We own the XHTML markup, CSS and other code and we license it to you for use on only this project.


Vengeance Is Mine!

The fine print

Unless your work is pro-bono, you should make sure that your customers keep you in shoe leather. It is important that your customers know from the outset that they must pay you on time if they want to stay on good terms.


	We are sure you understand how important it is as a small business that you pay the invoices that we send you promptly.  As we’re also sure you’ll want to stay friends, you agree to stick tight to the following payment schedule.

	[Payment schedule]


No killer contract would be complete without you making sure that you are watching your own back. Before you ask your customers to sign, make it clear-cut what your obligations are and what will happen if any part of your killer contract finds itself laying face down in the dirt.



	We can’t guarantee that the functions contained in any web page templates or in a completed web site will always be error-free and so we can’t be liable to you or any third party for damages, including lost profits, lost savings or other incidental, consequential or special damages arising out of the operation of or inability to operate this web site and any other web pages, even if you have advised us of the possibilities of such damages.

	Just like a parking ticket, you cannot transfer this contract to anyone else without our permission. This contract stays in place and need not be renewed.  If any provision of this agreement shall be unlawful, void, or for any reason unenforceable, then that provision shall be deemed severable from this agreement and shall not affect the validity and enforceability of any remaining provisions.

	Phew.

	Although the language is simple, the intentions are serious and this contract is a legal document under exclusive jurisdiction of [English] courts. Oh and don’t forget those men with big dogs.


Survival… Zero!

Take it from me, packing a killer contract will help to keep you safe when times get tough, but you must still keep your wits about you and stay on the right side of the law.

Don’t be a turkey this Christmas.

Be a contract killer.

Update, May 2010: For a follow-on to this article see Contract Killer: The Next Hit",2008,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2008-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/contract-killer/,business
60,What’s Ahead for Your Data in 2016?,"Who owns your data? Who decides what can you do with it? Where can you store it? What guarantee do you have over your data’s privacy? Where can you publish your work? Can you adapt software to accommodate your disability? Is your tiny agency subject to corporate regulation? Does another country have rights over your intellectual property?
If you aren’t the kind of person who is interested in international politics, I hate to break it to you: in 2016 the legal foundations which underpin our work on the web are being revisited in not one but three major international political agreements, and every single one of those questions is up for grabs. These agreements – the draft EU Data Protection Regulation (EUDPR), the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the draft Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – stand poised to have a major impact on your data, your workflows, and your digital rights. While some proposed changes could protect the open web for the future, other provisions would set the internet back several decades.
In this article we will review the issues you need to be aware of as a digital professional. While each of these agreements covers dozens of topics ranging from climate change to food safety, we will focus solely on the aspects which pertain to the work we do on the web.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a free trade agreement between the US, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru – a bloc comprising 40% of the world’s economy. The agreement is expected to be signed by all parties, and thereby to come into effect, in 2016. This agreement is ostensibly about the bloc and its members working together for their common interests. However, the latest draft text of the TPP, which was formulated entirely in secret, has only been made publicly available on a Medium blog published by the U.S. Trade Representative which features a patriotic banner at the top proclaiming “TPP: Made in America.” The message sent about who holds the balance of power in this agreement, and whose interests it will benefit, is clear.
By far the most controversial area of the TPP has centred around the provisions on intellectual property. These include copyright terms of up to 120 years, mandatory takedowns of allegedly infringing content in response to just one complaint regardless of that complaint’s validity, heavy and disproportionate penalties for alleged violations, and – most frightening of all – government seizures of equipment allegedly used for copyright violations. All of these provisions have been raised without regard for the fact that a trade agreement is not the appropriate venue to negotiate intellectual property law.
Other draft TPP provisions would restrict the digital rights of people with disabilities by banning the workarounds they use every day. These include no exemptions for the adaptations of copywritten works for use in accessible technology (such as text-to-speech in ebook readers), a ban on circumventing DRM or digital locks in order to convert a file to an accessible format, and requiring the takedown of adapted works, such as a video with added subtitles, even if that adaptation would normally have fallen under the definition of fair use.
The e-commerce provisions would prohibit data localisation, the practice of requiring data to be physically stored on servers within a country’s borders. Data localisation is growing in popularity following the Snowden revelations, and some of your own personal data may have been recently “localised” in response to the Safe Harbor verdict. Prohibiting data localisation through the TPP would address the symptom but not the cause.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published an excellent summary of the digital rights issues raised by the agreement along with suggested actions American readers can take to speak out.
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
TTIP stands for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a draft free trade agreement between the United States and the EU. The plan has been hugely controversial and divisive, and the internet and digital provisions of the draft form just a small part of that contention.
The most striking digital provision of TTIP is an attempt to circumvent and override European data protection law. As EDRI, a European digital rights organisation, noted:

“the US proposal would authorise the transfer of EU citizens’ personal data to any country, trumping the EU data protection framework, which ensures that this data can only be transferred in clearly defined circumstances. For years, the US has been trying to bypass the default requirement for storage of personal data in the EU. It is therefore not surprising to see such a proposal being {introduced} in the context of the trade negotiations.”

This draft provision was written before the Safe Harbor data protection agreement between the EU and US was invalidated by the Court of Justice of the European Union. In other words, there is no longer any protective agreement in place, and our data is as vulnerable as this political situation. However, data protection is a matter of its own law, the acting Data Protection Directive and the draft EU Data Protection Reform. A trade agreement, be it the TTIP or the TPP, is not the appropriate place to revamp a law on data protection.
Other digital law issues raised by TTIP include the possibility of renegotiating standards on encryption (which in practice means lowering them) and renegotiating intellectual property rights such as copyright. The spectre of net neutrality has even put in an appearance, with an attempt to introduce rules on access to the internet itself being introduced as provisions.
TTIP is still under discussion, and this month the EU trade representative said that “we agreed to further intensify our work during 2016 to help negotiations move forward rapidly.” This has been cleverly worded: this means the agreement has little chance of being passed or coming into effect in 2016, which buys civil society more precious time to speak out.
The EU Data Protection Regulation
On 15 December 2015 the European Commission announced their agreement on the text of the draft General Data Protection Regulation. This law will replace its predecessor, the EU Data Protection Regulation of 1995, which has done a remarkable job of protecting data privacy across the continent throughout two decades of constant internet evolution.
The goal of the reform process has been to return power over data, and its uses, to citizens. Users will have more control over what data is captured about them, how it is used, how it is retained, and how it can be deleted. Businesses and digital professionals, in turn, will have to restructure their relationships with client and customer data. Compliance obligations will increase, and difficult choices will have to be made. However, this time should be seen as an opportunity to rethink our relationship with data. After Snowden, Schrems, and Safe Harbor, it is clear that we cannot go back to the way things were before. In an era of where every one of our heartbeats is recorded on a wearable device and uploaded to a surveilled data centre in another country, the need for reform has never been more acute.
While texts of the draft GDPR are available, there is not enough mulled wine in the world that will help you get through them. Instead, the law firm Fieldfisher Waterhouse has produced this helpful infographic which will give you a good idea of the changes we can expect to see (view full size):

The most surprising outcome announced on 15 December was the new regulation’s teeth. Under the new law, companies that fail to heed the updated data protection rules will face fines of up to 4% of their global turnover. Additionally, the law expands the liability for data protection to both the controller (the company hosting the data) and the data processor (the company using the data). The new law will also introduce a one-stop shop for resolving concerns over data misuse. Companies will no longer be able to headquarter their European operations in countries which are perceived to have relatively light-touch data protection enforcement (that means you, Ireland) as a means of automatically rejecting any complaints filed by citizens outside that country.
For digital professionals, the most immediate concern is analytics. In fact, I am going to make a prediction: in 2016 we will begin to see the same misguided war on analytics that we saw on cookies. By increasing the legal liabilities for both data processors and controllers – in other words, the company providing the analytics as well as the site administrator studying them – the new regulation risks creating disproportionate burdens as well as the same “guilt by association” risks we saw in 2012. There have already been statements made by some within the privacy community that analytics are tracking, and tracking is surveillance, therefore analytics are evil. Yet “just don’t use analytics,” as was suggested by one advocate, is simply not an option. European regulators should consult with the web community to gain a clear understanding of why analytics are vital to everyday site administrators, and must find a happy medium that protects users’ data without criminalising every website by default. No one wants a repeat of the crisis of consent, as well as the scaremongering, caused by the cookie law.
Assuming the text is adopted in 2016, the new EU Data Protection Regulation would not come into effect until 2018. We have a considerable challenge ahead, but we also have plenty of time to get it right.",2015,Heather Burns,heatherburns,2015-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2015/whats-ahead-for-your-data-in-2016/,business
90,Monkey Business,"“Too expensive.” “Over-priced.” “A bit rich.”

They all mean the same thing.

When you say that something’s too expensive, you’re doing much more than commenting on a price. You’re questioning the explicit or implicit value of a product or a service. You’re asking, “Will I get out of it what you want me to pay for it?” You’re questioning the competency, judgement and possibly even integrity of the individual or company that gave you that price, even though you don’t realise it. You might not be saying it explicitly, but what you’re implying is, “Have you made a mistake?”, “Am I getting the best deal?”, “Are you being honest with me?”, “Could I get this cheaper?”

Finally, you’re being dishonest, because deep down you know all too well that there’s no such thing as too expensive. 

Why? 

It doesn’t matter what you’re questioning the price of. It could be a product, a service or the cost of an hour, day or week of someone’s time. Whatever you’re buying, too expensive is always an excuse. Saying it shifts acceptability of a price back to the person who gave it. What you should say, but are too afraid to admit, is:


	“It’s more money than I wanted to pay.”
	“It’s more than I estimated it would cost.”
	“It’s more than I can afford.”


Everyone who’s given a price for a product or service will have been told at some point that it’s too expensive. It’s never comfortable to hear that. Thoughts come thick and fast: “What do I do?” “How do I react?” “Do I really want the business?” “Am I prepared to negotiate?” “How much am I willing to compromise?”

It’s easy to be defensive when someone questions a price, but before you react, stay calm and remember that if someone says what you’re offering is too expensive, they’re saying more about themselves and their situation than they are about your price. Learn to read that situation and how to follow up with the right questions.

Imagine you’ve quoted someone for a week of your time. “That’s too expensive,” they respond. How should you handle that? Think about what they might otherwise be saying.



“It’s more money than I want to pay” may mean that they don’t understand the value of your service. How could you respond?

Start by asking what similar projects they’ve worked on and the type of people they worked with. Find out what they paid and what they got for their money, because it’s possible what you offer is different from what they had before. Ask if they saw a return on that previous investment. Maybe their problem isn’t with your headline price, but the value they think they’ll receive. Put the emphasis on value and shift the conversation to what they’ll gain, rather than what they’ll spend.

It’s also possible they can’t distinguish your service from those of your competitors, so now would be a great time to explain the differences. Do you work faster? Explain how that could help them launch faster, get customers faster, make money faster. Do you include more? Emphasise that, and how unique the experience of working with you will be.



“It’s more than I estimated it would cost” could mean that your customer hasn’t done their research properly. You’d never suggest that to them, of course, but you should ask how they’ve arrived at their estimate. Did they base it on work they’ve purchased previously? How long ago was that? Does it come from comparable work or from a different sector?

Help your customer by explaining how you arrived at your estimate. Break down each element and while you’re doing that, emphasise the parts of your process that you know will appeal to them. If you know that they’ve had difficulty with something in the past, explain how your approach will benefit them. People almost always value a positive experience more than the money they’ll save.



“It’s more than I can afford” could mean they can’t afford what you offer at all, but it could also mean they can’t afford it right now or all at once. So ask if they could afford what you’re asking if they spread payment over a longer period? Ask, “Would that mean you’ll give me the business?”

It’s possible they’re asking for too much for what they can afford to pay. Will they compromise? Can you reach an agreement on something less? Ask, “If we can agree what’s in and what’s out, will you give me the business?”

What can they afford? When you know, you’re in a good position to decide if the deal makes good business sense, for both of you. Ask, “If I can match that price, will you give me the business?”

There’s no such thing as “a bit rich”, only ways for you to get to know your customer better. There’s no such thing as “over-priced”, only opportunities for you to explain yourself better. You should relish those opportunities. There’s really also no such thing as “too expensive”, just ways to set the tone for your relationship and help you develop that relationship to a point where money will be less of a deciding factor.

Unfinished Business

Join me and my co-host Anna Debenham next year for Unfinished Business, a new discussion show about the business end of working in web, design and creative industries.",2012,Andy Clarke,andyclarke,2012-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2012/monkey-business/,business