Know what you like and tell your team

We recently hired our third designer at @carezoneteam, Scott, and to get him into the team and get started working together we did something I have not done before but which turned out to work really well. We spend some structured time discussing what we find beautiful and well designed. Personally rather than professionally.

Walter, Brittany, Scott, and I started with pepper grinders and then moved on to houses, guitars, and all kinds of other products. Take for instance the Oxo measuring cup, is it a brilliant new solution to an age old problem or is it a break with tradition that messes with what a measuring cup should be? What makes a guitar? The shape, the materials, the sound? Is the Parker Fly a well designed guitar despite being made from composite materials rather than wood? And the Steinberger, Obviously still a guitar but has it lost its beauty or maybe surpassed more traditional guitars? If you lived in a house from early 1900 would you decorate it as the appropriate for that time period or would you tear everything out and modernize it? Can a modern kitchen be beautiful in an old house? Do you like minimalism? What about change? Are historical things inherently good?

You know this and we know this: we are not designing for ourselves. But as designers we are interpreting data and creating solutions and regardless of how hard we try we cannot ever be objective, our point of view will always play into how we solve problems. That is in my book an asset and not a liability, it’s what makes my designs different from yours. But if you have to work together it helps to know where everyone else in the room is coming from, it helps appreciate their interpretations and solutions.

I love the design of the Oxo measuring cup. It does not require any new knowledge or any new behaviour. It just solves a problem better than any of the previous thousands of solutions for that challenge and it shows that regardless how much people have worked on a problem there is usually still room for improvement. That is why month view in the carezone calendar let you see two full weeks of the next month. That way you can always see three weeks out into the future, something that most other calendars I have seen does not let you do. I will always try to look for a better solution even to problems that have standard solutions like signing in, form validation, etc. This means I will often introduce something new. That is not always the right thing to do but now that the people I work with know where I am coming from and understand what I value they will be able to help me see when the change is not a good idea rather than think I am introducing change for the sake of change. And hopefully also appreciate when the change really is needed and good.

Get it out in the open

Whenever we start a project I like to spend the first session with the team listing our solution ideas. Before there is data, before we quite know what we are actually designing, I like to do a little brainstorm with the team to get all our preconceived ideas for solutions out in the open and up on the walls.

I find that if we spend a little time up front getting all of our ideas off our chest and keep it around for everyone to see everyone gets more open to everyone elses ideas and not least to the data as we learn more about the people we are designing for and their needs.

We all have ideas, products we really like, certain designs we really dislike, and some vague idea of what the right solution for the task at hand might be. We are experienced professionals so of course we have a library of solutions ready to go.

The idea here is that when your idea is out in the open and up on the wall it is safe. You feel heard and if you want to get back to the idea you can easily do that, just point at the wall.

I find that when we do a little ‘purging’ up front we often do not return to those original ideas. They are usually just reflex solutions and not really appropriate for the task at hand. On the other hand I began this process after having been through a couple of projects where we kept returning the original first ideas even if they were not the right ones.

Cold brewed coffee in sparkling water. Update: Let it sit for 12 hours. Tasted the extract and there was a faint hint of bubbles. Made some sparkling water and boiled it. Poured a cup of 1/4th extract and 3/4 almost boiling sparkling water. Sparkles in the pour but none left to taste so the verdict is don’t bother. It tastes good but no different form regular cold brewed coffee. 
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Cold brewed coffee in sparkling water.

Update: Let it sit for 12 hours. Tasted the extract and there was a faint hint of bubbles. Made some sparkling water and boiled it. Poured a cup of 1/4th extract and 3/4 almost boiling sparkling water. Sparkles in the pour but none left to taste so the verdict is don’t bother. It tastes good but no different form regular cold brewed coffee. 

The hippest blog

You can’t be cult without a cult following and you cannot be little known unless you are at least known a little.

If you write for only yourself this has no bearing. You can write a diary and be done, and if you write to get famous, get invited to do keynote talks at all the hip conferences, and get laid like a rock’n’rolla then you are better off not reading any further, but if your innermost dream is to write and accidentally be discovered, dug out of obscurity, and hailed for your undiscovered genius then you ought to pick your publishing platform with care.

May I suggest you stay off wordpress, blogger, tumblr, posterous, and any other blogging platform. I don’t even have to mention the FTG+ triumvirat, do I? Instead, use google docs. Write your posts there, change the permissions to public, and enjoy your freedom. If anybody finds anything you have written it’s their own damn fault for looking. You have published your thoughts but since no one is seeing your posts in some RSS feed or in some cacophony of tags you are free to write whatever you like. No self censuring to curate your own brand. Just you and  the remains of a blank canvas, figuratively left on the table as you walk away, to be picked up by the whirlwind of the internet search engines and they alone will determine its notoriety.

Here the other day Peyman, one of our folks at @CareZoneTeam, said something to the effect of “we need a process, I am not a process person, I really am not, but we need a process.” That got me thinking, because most of us tell ourselves that we are not process people but on the other hand we like some amount of order and predictability. It also got me wondering why so called process people have such a bad reputation.  I think there is another axis at play; how rigid do you adhere to processes?  Processes are rules and you can debate how many rules you want but you can also debate how strictly you want to adhere to those rules. Some people would say that you should not have rules unless you follow them and others would say that rules are just guidelines.  Personally, I am in the 4th quadrant. I like processes. I especially like them written down so we as a team can have a common language, but I am pretty lenient in how we follow them. Hope this helps you think about the good and bad of being a so-called process person :-)  
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Here the other day Peyman, one of our folks at @CareZoneTeam, said something to the effect of “we need a process, I am not a process person, I really am not, but we need a process.” That got me thinking, because most of us tell ourselves that we are not process people but on the other hand we like some amount of order and predictability. It also got me wondering why so called process people have such a bad reputation. 

I think there is another axis at play; how rigid do you adhere to processes?  Processes are rules and you can debate how many rules you want but you can also debate how strictly you want to adhere to those rules. Some people would say that you should not have rules unless you follow them and others would say that rules are just guidelines. 

Personally, I am in the 4th quadrant. I like processes. I especially like them written down so we as a team can have a common language, but I am pretty lenient in how we follow them. Hope this helps you think about the good and bad of being a so-called process person :-)  

3 Phone Screens

I screwed up. Majorly. I had just started at CareZone, posted a job for a visual designer, gotten a resume that was a lot better than the previous 10 and fell in love. I called up the candidate and he sounded good so I scheduled a full day of interview. In my head I had already hired him. I had already found a visual designer after two weeks and for someone who is afraid of failing and love to exceed expectations this sounded great. Alas it was not to be. The day came. I managed it poorly and the only good thing I did that day was man up and cut the day short after lunch. I felt terrible but I am sure I didn’t feel as bad as the candidate.

I did a poor phone screen and only I did a phone screen. We needed to change the process so now we make three phone screens. Actually we do more than that. Chi-Kai our product manager takes a first pass at candidates and whomever he thinks is worthwhile comes over to me. I schedule phone screens with the people who seem promising and if that goes well we do two additional phone screen. One with Brittany, our visual designer, and one with someone else, typically Kristina or Chi-Kai to get a broader sense of the candidate. For skills and company fit.

At this point we have winnowed the amount of people down quite a bit. And then it’s on to the real interview. Another post, another day.

It may seem excessive to do three phone screens but I think it makes sense. At Microsoft one of the Vice Presidents (manager of about 1200 people at the time) asked his 5 General Managers to break down their recruiting funnel. Something stood out. One group only hired 1 out of 12 people they did full day interviews with and another hired 1 out of 3. The conclusion was that the latter group was not critical enough. That is until they looked into how many phone screens each group did. The latter did two to three phone screens per candidate while the former only did one. The group that only hired 1/12 interviewees were simply sloppy and wasting their own time, money, and not least the candidates’ time.

I re-learned that lesson quickly at CareZone so now we do more phone screens. And yes, it’s time consuming but a whole lot less than flying a candidate in for a full day of working together only to find out that it was not meant to be.

Thoughts on Hiring

Hire someone that scares you

When you are recruiting you get to read a lot of resumes and you probably end up browsing LinkedIn quite a bit and you see some impressive portfolios and read some impressive resumes. It can be quite intimidating. You can’t help but think about what will happen to you if you bring in these amazing people who are clearly so much better than you. I believe that is healthy and normal and that those are the people you want to bring in. These are the people who will stretch you and make you strive to be better.

I hired Brittany, our visual designer at CareZone because she, through her work, made me see how much I had to learn about visual design. More importantly though she made me think. She forced me to look at our product differently and she showed me how we could take the product in a different direction. I am currently reading up on graphic design and practicing. I have a lot of catching up to do.

Don’t hire a copy of yourself

Bill Buxton usually says that he never hires anyone who thinks and acts like him because he already has someone playing that role. This is another way to say you should probably not hire someone who scares you because they can do exactly the same things that you can do. Unless of course you are trying to find your replacement.

This is obvious but hard because after all you are really well suited to judge the kind of skills you bring to the table and you probably also value that skillset. It can be surprisingly hard to hire someone not like yourself.  

Unless it’s yes, it’s no

Everyone I have talked with about recruiting have said that unless it’s a clear “yes” it is a “no”. That can be really hard sometimes because occasionally you find really good candidates that you wish you could hire but just aren’t right for you at this point in time.

Ultimately it’s about what conversations you want to have. Everyone brings something to the table and will need help with other things. Everyone will see something you aren’t seeing yourself so you have to figure out what precisely they are going to see. I could hire a very technical designer and get some really good insight about scalability and responsive designs. And I am currently lacking that conversation but only because we do not have a frontend dev. Once we hire a frontend dev I expect that person to bring up those perspectives and then I would no longer need the technical designer. Or more precisely, with limited resources I would rather hire someone else that brings a different perspective because otherwise I will lack some other important conversations all together.

Design with Code

I am reading Graphic Design -The New Basics and got introduced to Processing. Processing is a programming language made for graphic designers. It is meant to make it really easy to explore graphic designs that change over time or are based on math or random elements. And it seems to be part of every graphic design curriculum nowadays. When I went to school something similar was just appearing but it had not taken off the way processing has. If you have programmed before it is pretty straightforward to get started. The tutorials are good and the documentation for the libraries are good. Well worth trying.

I wanted to experiment with some t-shirt designs and wanted them to be more random/organic than what I have the patience to do in illustrator so I played around with writing some black text on white and then wrote a small script for pointilizing that image and make the black text into colored bubbles. I use the word “wrote” loosely here. The final script is 44 lines of code of which all but 4 or 5 lines were either copied or trivial :)

I let the program run for several hours and saved a frame every 4 minutes or so. Here is a little movie of what that turned into. I don’t know if I want to make any of these into a t-shirt but I think it’s a good beginning to making designs a little more interesting.

Nonsense Brigade

Here is the code

PImage img;
int pointillize = 16;

void setup() {
  size(740,280);
  img = loadImage("529.jpg");
  background(0);
  smooth();
}

void draw() {
  // Pick a random point
  int x = int(random(img.width));
  int y = int(random(img.height));
  int loc = x + y*img.width;
  
  //add some spice
  float rspice = random(255);
  float gspice = random(255);
  float bspice = random(255);
  
  
  // Look up the RGB color in the source image
  loadPixels();
  float r = red(img.pixels[loc]) + rspice;
  float g = green(img.pixels[loc]) + gspice;
  float b = blue(img.pixels[loc]) + bspice;
  noStroke();
  
  // Draw an ellipse at that location with that color
  fill(r,g,b,100);
  ellipse(x,y,pointillize,pointillize);
}