notes from the zen kitchen

Posted via email from Thinking Out Loud

Over the last few years, I've woken up almost every day with insane neck pain. I've tried a bunch of different solutions for this: yoga, chiropractic, massage, and so many new pillows (some quite expensive) that my fiancé Nick frequently jokes about my “pillow quiver” - the two Tempurpedic pillows that I switch through every night depending on what position I'm in.

For those who don't remember the Sobikawa pillow, it is a Japanese pillow that is filled with buckwheat husks. The idea is similar to memory foam, but with one key exception: the husks actually conform to your shape and stay there, making sure that your neck is completely in alignment all night. I had one years ago that I'd bought for $20 at a Walgreens, and I always regretted getting rid of it. But apparently, you can still get them pretty cheaply at target.com.

Cost: around $50, including shipping and tax. Result? The best week of sleep I've had in years, and while my neck still has some tightness, the pain that I used to wake up with has already started to go away. The super-expensive Tempurpedic pillows that I've been sleeping on for the last couple of years are now sitting in a closet. This simple pillow, filled with organic stuff that would have been thrown away anyway, was what I needed all along.

This experience exemplifies an important component of good design. Sometimes when we decide that we need a new marketing campaign, website, etc. it's very easy to get caught up in the technology, or in the physical components that we're looking to create. But often, when this happens, we lose sight of the most important goal of truly effective design: solving a specific business problem.

I see this most frequently in website RFPs. The RFP will list a wide array of technical features that the client wants on the site, but it won't mention anything about the reason those features are important to them, or what the site itself is meant to accomplish. When we speak with the client contact prior to crafting the proposal (we don't answer RFPs without having at least one conversation with the client contact to confirm goals and scope), you often find that the client doesn't actually have a specific reason for that feature; they included it because they thought it was interesting, or because their competitors are using something similar.

For any design project to actually do the work you want it to, it has to start by identifying the real problem that you're trying to solve. It's extremely rare that your problem is not having enough technical whiz-bangery or Flash on your site. Much more often, the problem comes down to this:

your website doesn't communicate your brand in a way that is meaningful and authentic to the people you want to connect with.

That's it. That's all. Really.

This is why things like user experience, audience testing and discovery are such a large part of good website design. It's also why, if you haven't taken the time to properly think through what you genuinely provide for your customers and craft a brand that properly reflects that, it's useless to worry about creating a website.

Unless you can approach your project with this level of awareness around who your customers really are, and what they really want/need to hear from you, interactivity and fancy widgets become nothing more than meaningless decoration. Extremely expensive meaningless decoration. Fancy pillows gathering dust in a closet.

Does this mean that you shouldn't add interactivity or technical features to your site? Not at all.

But every feature on your site, just like every image, shape, type or color choice in a printed piece, must be there for a specific reason.

It must serve a specific need that your customers have. And, most importantly, it must be presented in a way that inspires trust, confidence and an interest in exploring further.

This is the benefit of iterative design, and of open source systems such as Drupal that allow you to evolve your site as your customers' needs evolve. These approaches allow you to do something very important: start simple. Figure out the basics. Who are your customers? What do they get from you that they can't get elsewhere? What is their reason for being at your site? What do they need to accomplish there?

For most businesses, there are certain common things that users need. They need a phone number where they can contact someone if they have a question, or if something goes horribly wrong. They need to get a quick overview of what you do, and how it might benefit them. If you're a retailer, they need to know that they can find what they want at your site easily, they need to trust that their credit card information is safe in your hands, and they need to feel that they're buying something from a business that is credible. For a food company, they need to know where they can buy your product in their local store, or how to get it for their store, and it would be great if they could buy it online. More importantly, they need to be able to imagine what the product actually tastes like, and that imagining should make them want to try it enough to add it to their cart.

In both of these cases, the last need is the most important. And unfortunately, it's the one that's most often overlooked in favor of the technology required to meet the first few needs.

Posted via email from Thinking Out Loud

This is the first in what will become a series I'm calling "Getting it together" for lack of a better immediate title.

Recently, I decided on a whim to pick up The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin at my local bookstore. In it, the writer, a journalist by trade, decides to spend a year of her life in a systematic approach to increase her general happiness. What I loved about her approach was that it combined a really solid amount of navel-gazing (a personal obsession of mine) with a set of really practical tools that actually make it feel like a *project.* There's nothing flowery or New-Agey about it - it entails creating a set of Personal Commandments that guide the process, choosing one particular focus for each month, and then creating a Resolutions chart with 5-10 things that you're going to use to achieve your focus for the month - and ticking off each day that you succeed, and tallying up at the end of the month how well you did. 

As someone who requires an equal balance of conceptual and analytical, this approach seems to be just what I needed. After establishing my "personal commandments," I've decided to tackle the issue of productivity.

Lately, with the growth of the zen kitchen and all the exciting new stuff that's been going on (which, of course, we've had no real time to talk about - but we will. Soon. We promise.), I've been noticing odd shifts in my productivity. I'm procrastinating more, finding it harder to focus, realizing at 6:30 that I've only managed about three things on my to-do list. For years I've dealt with a mind that shifts from one thing to another constantly and found ways of managing that, but this was something different. Something that was actively preventing me from getting anything done, let alone the work that we need to do for clients.

At first, I responded to this by getting frustrated, and even starting to beat myself up. I started reading productivity blogs all over the place talking about how to "get things done" and organizing books on how to set up environments to be as productive as you can be. I tried a bunch of things, including rearranging my office (which I do with enough frequency that my fiancé Nick just laughs at me when I tell him "Look! I rearranged my office!"). I tried going for something sparse. I tried cluttered. I tried elaborate organizational systems, and multiple journals, online and offline software resources, just about everything you could think of. Nothing worked well enough to keep me effective for more than about a week. Something would shift, and I'd be back in "I can't work" mode.

Not all work is the same

What I realized as I started paying close attention to how I really did things, is that most productivity systems handle "work" as this generic, homogenous thing; the tools they recommend behave as if everything that you do during the day can fall into one framework. What I realized during my examination of my own workstyle was that most of what I do falls into four distinct categories:

• Thought Work: this is the work of coming up with concepts and strategies for clients, of writing articles and doing research. About 50% of the work I do falls into this category on most weeks - and it's been the hardest one to find the right environment for.
• Business Development: This is the work of meeting new prospects, talking them through their project's challenges and writing proposals, closing sales, etc. The big challenge to this one is that the environment needs to be flexible; it can happen from anywhere.
• Media Consumption and Online Networking: This is the time I'm spending building relationships online, reading articles that people point me to, and managing my and the studio's presence online. This is a significant portion of the work I do, and how we market the studio and stay current on what's happening in the industries that we're involved with.
• Production Work: This is the actual work of making things. Writing code, making logos and print documents, extending clients' brands across multiple channels. This is actually only about 25-35% of what I'm doing in an average week; most of the work that goes into an effective design actually happens in the Thought Work side of things.

The challenge with this is that each of these types of work has a unique set of requirements, and a unique mindset. I realized that what I'd been considering "procrastination" was actually Media Consumption - an essential piece of the work that I do to build the business, maintain relationships and keep myself current. But, I found that I would often find myself ending up in Media Consumption mode in the middle of Production Work - when most of the production work happens in the same browser, it's incredibly easy for your fingers to start sending you to twitter and clicking on interesting looking links that your friends are posting. By the time you've gotten your head out of the latest interesting article on HTML5, almost an hour has gone by and you still have all that production work staring you in the face.

Separate Media Consumption from Production Work

The first strategy I tried, a while back when I first started realizing the issue, was installing Leechblock on Firefox and blocking Facebook and Twitter from opening at all during the workday. If I wanted to visit those sites, I would have to use Safari, which I hid in the Applications folder. This ended up not working for three reasons:

1. I was viewing the work I did online as "wasting time," and not realizing its value;
2. if, as I often did, I found myself needing an immediate answer to a pressing question and posted it on twitter (which also updates my Facebook status), I wouldn't be able to check the links that friends would send me as answers to the problem, because Facebook was blocked;
3. I was approaching it from an angle of punishing myself for being "bad." Have you ever responded well to someone telling you you're doing something horribly wrong? Didn't think so.

This time, I decided to honor the value that Media Consumption brings to my life and my business, but accept that, in order to maintain my focus, I needed to create a distinct environment for web surfing that was separate from the environment that I use for production work. So, taking a tip from my previous experience, I installed Google Chrome on my Macbook (honestly, I hate Safari - sorry, I do), and put it directly under the Firefox icon in my dock. When I'm in production mode (building websites, updating projects in Basecamp, etc.), I'm using Firefox; when I want to surf the web or check out an interesting link, I use Chrome, and I close out of the browser when I'm done. 

It sounds like an odd and rather obvious thing to do, but I have to say that in only three days of trying this, I've felt less stressed out, and felt more accomplished at the end of every single day. Plus - and this is a great bonus - I have been getting more joy out of my work than I can honestly say I've felt in months. 

It's amazing what a simple shift in perspective can accomplish.

Posted via web from Thinking Out Loud