Talk of a recession and the financial factors that lead to the real thing, are quicksand for business.
Stop to look, worry or slow down and you’ll likely get stuck. Success and failure are determined by action, or the lack thereof. Feeling paralyzed because sales channels change only leads to real slowdowns. Quick action to improve a product, service or relationship can keep you from sinking. Building new relationships while others stagnate or change can also bring success.
Just changing your mindset about slow times can keep you fast.
If a piece of work is not present or your business is awaiting a decision or deliverable, what can you be doing with that time to improve your business? Build new channels of revenue? Train and grow your team? What brilliant ideas have you been sitting on? Where have you been wanting to take your organization? Seize this opportunity.
What end results do you seek? How can a pause in business give you the window you need to move forward at your desired outcome? Maybe you will find that pauses allow you to accomplish what matters most.
Stay action-packed, with an eye on your end goals and business will stay strong or get stronger even in slower times. Bodies in motion, stay in motion. Innovate and strengthen your offering when things seem quiet.
Ever played a first-person shooter? You know who dies? The guy who isn’t moving. If you stay in one place everyone will know where to find you. You know who else dies? They guy who isn’t reloading when he’s not being shot at. Make sure you keep moving, keep your weapon loaded and seek an opportunity to fire.
When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
—R. Buckminster Fuller (via Involution and Forty)
What makes designing for the iPhone, or the mobile platform, any different than designing for the traditional web browser? We took two key factors into account when designing the iPhone version of the Drawbackwards website:
1. Context - It’s a smartphone. Let them email and call. Make that prominent.
2. Space - The screen size is limited. What is most valuable to a mobile user?
When a visitor uses their iPhone to visit us, we have 3 desired actions:
1. Contact us via an email or a call immediately.
2. Read our blog and learn about what we do and how we think.
3. Provide a high-level snapshot of some of our design work.
If the visitor wants to know about our services or how we can help with a specific challenge (our specialty), they have the ability to call or email at any moment. When we are out at a meeting, conference or event and hand out a business card; a quick hit to the Drawbackwards site on the iPhone shows them how to stay in touch, what we do and what it looks like.
If users want to add the Drawbackwards site to their home screen, we’ve designed a custom iPhone icon that becomes available. To stand out on the homescreen, we used the red version of our logo on the site and button since no default apps currently use red.
Ugly visual design has it’s place. I like it best when it’s contrasted with good design, to accentuate it’s ugliness..or to elevate what’s good. Good visual design has purpose, it’s aesthetically pleasing and is a technical blend of type, color, image, concept and layout.
You are probably already waiting to ask: but what is good and bad design really? And isn’t it in the eye of the beholder? It certainly is. And that’s where it’s power comes from. Check out the brilliant use of ugly visual design (UVD) at Facebook. Everything at Facebook is very well considered. Every icon is small, compact, relevant and easy to recognize and use. Except one very big, very obvious, very ugly one.
The default “?” avatar.
Had to protect the identity of the default icon user!
This beauty of an icon is terribly ugly. Yet, the design of the icon is strategic. You want to get rid of it. Your friends want you to get rid of it. The peer pressure is tremendous - they want out of their profile! Why? Because when you leave your icon in it’s default “?” state, you aren’t just making your profile look ugly, you are polluting your friend’s profiles.
What better way to encourage people to get a great image for themselves online than real-world peer pressure?
Want to rent a movie? How about an interface that only shows a selection of movies and allows you to move them around, sort them and rent for immediate playback? No descriptions or buttons to get in the way until you have selected what you want..the movies themselves are the buttons. With Apple’s software upgrade to AppleTV, the ease of the transaction has been stripped down almost to the promise of “frictionless commerce”. You don’t have to leave your home, you don’t need to leave your couch and you don’t need a computer. You don’t even need mail or envelopes anymore.
Need to sort these movies? Maybe you want to browse your photos, music or podcasts in the same way. A simple frame lays on top so people can gain context. Once a category is selected the “cards” below are dealt across the full-length of a wide-screen “table”, which happens to be your flat panel TV.
If it’s easy to find what you want and it doesn’t take any time, there’s a lot of value. In a consumer society where time is as much a currency as money, this user interface is the ultimate competitive advantage. Netflix, Blockbuster, and Amazon now have a tough act to follow.
If you need specialized legal advice you go to an expert lawyer on that specialty. When you need web design you go to a web designer or web design firm. If you need strategic thinking on a core competency not provided in-house or you need a new opinion, you outsource strategically.
Does outsourcing mean you have no confidence in your internal team? Not at all. Your decision means that you understand that ideas that arise outside the structure of your company also have tremendous value. Motives from the inside may be skewed, where promotions and lines of business may be at stake. Selective use of strategic outsourcing frees you from habits and lines of thinking that arise within the inside culture. You cannot be inside and outside all at once. When you combine the expertise and experience of your seasoned inside team with the free thinking and specialized knowledge of an outsourced strategic partner, both the inside and outside are elevated, and a new level of thinking in your organization can be acheived.
Want to reverse-engineer your success? Working backwards from your desired outcome to your starting point can be the answer to building an effective strategy.
One of your goals may be to increase sales leads through your website. To do that, you will need a few things: (1) a reason for someone to fill out a contact form, (2) a reason for someone to come to the site and (3) a marketing plan to get them to the site in the first place.
Taking a step further back, you will need a compelling offer or benefit for the person visiting to market. Working further back, you would need to coordinate this offer with services or product offerings; what is it that someone would want from you?
Finally, you will have stepped far enough away from your desire to increase sales leads to conclude you have many offerings and many segments of customers and potential customers to target. The end goal may then be redefined to increase sales leads, of qualified buyers, with a net worth of over 1M, for my office building project, in these zip codes. From there, you start working backwards again, determining what this refined outcome requires.
Working backwards, you find your desired outcome becomes a series of steps you can follow to reach it. Each step backwards helps you clarify your thinking and refine your strategy. Every step forward contributes to reaching your desired results.
The Drawbackwards Process is about working backwards to gain success in business in life, contact Ward Andrews at 480-522-1074 or ward@drawbackwards.com for more ideas.
The ways that you interact with information and services are changing quickly. Devices and websites are tailoring their design, layout and interaction for you. We are getting to a place where anything you interact with wants to take care of you and customize itself to present you with what is most useful and most relevant and eliminate all that is not. It’s been going on for a while, and things are just accelerating as we enter 2008.
Device Design
With an iPhone screen that can be manipulated 100% by software, Apple has has suggested that the lack of physical keys means the user interface is entirely flexible. The upcoming 1.1.3 iPhone update will make that even more apparent, with the ability to move your phone’s buttons around to suit your needs.
Where is this heading? Look at your universal remote. Buttons are crammed on to a large stick of plastic to cater to anyone and everyone’s different needs. The result is at best a steep learning curve with confusion and at worst a barrier too high for many older people to climb at all. A flexible interface could remedy this, with just the right buttons placed in the right place and the other unused, or unneeded functions hidden away, or moved to a second screen (see iPhone video below).
Web User Interface Design
In 2008, a majority of people are logging in to a website and getting a custom tailored experience. Whether it is Gmail, Amazon.com, a company intranet or a social site. Amazon presents you with what it knows you want and everyone’s Facebook page is different, once logged in.
With all this moving around, isn’t there room for consistency? We think so, but instead of static buttons, we believe static zones of space in an interface are the solution; where similar functions are chunked together. For example, in Facebook you see an area dedicated to your status, but that status is always changing. More flexibly, Facebook assigns areas for notifications and for commonly used applications, but that space can expand or contract, and be turned on or off for specific uses.
Below I have highlighted in yellow all the space on my Facebook profile that are flexible. The area or interaction zones of the screen are still static and dedicated to a specific function, but within this framework the content is entirely flexible based on what I want to do.
The Future
Looking for the next big static interface victim? You are typing on it.
The Optimus keyboard lets you assign the buttons. What’s next? No physical buttons…
As flexible user interfaces continue to gain acceptance, the possibilities for interaction and benefit increase. No longer are people tied to a device, site or keyboard that serve a static set of uses. Additionally, flexible interfaces allow for marketing and advertising uses to be considered. Not only can ads be shown to a person alongside an interaction, but the ad experience can be tailored to the individual.
Say for example, you typed in a grocery list. A smart interface could reveal coupons for you next to the buttons. Touching the coupon could give you a code to take shopping, or even order the item for you electronically at the discounted price.
The future of interface is about you. What you want, what’s in context of your needs and the ability to be flexible and change as your needs demand.
In the coming weeks we will provide a new version of the Drawbackwards site that is tailored for one of these new interfaces. We’ll talk about the design decisions we made and how user context drives the design process.
If you are interested in moving your project or marketing initiative into these new interface spaces, contact us for a consultation. Email ward@drawbackwards.com or call 480-522-1074.
Drawbackwards? A way of thinking to create success in life and business. A strategic design company based in Phoenix, Arizona delivering design, marketing and consulting for web and branding projects worldwide.
