Not sure what the world will be doing in 2010, but Vancouver (our home-town) is ready for 2010. And zooming in even closer, DesignStamp is set to forge ahead into the new year as well. Here are the top 5 things that have us excited right now in broad sketchy details, just so that we can remain open to the possibilities that present themselves to us after the Holidays.

We, at DesignStamp are particularly excited about 2010 because:

1. Coming Soon. Yup, without displaying the ever-popular construction man animated icon, we will soon launch a new site for ourselves that will better reflect what we do and who we are. (You say: Soon is not a date. I say: I know, but as we tell our clients, don’t make promises of dates and things, unless you can be sure to stick to them. So we’re taking our time, between client projects to get this done. We want to do this right).
2. Team. What bites about the current site is that it gives you no sense of who we are. That will be more transparent in 2010.
3. Partnerships. As we grow as a team, we have also been working closely with some great companies. We will release collaborative work in 2010 that will help us build on shared strengths and leverage each others specialties.
4. Clients. We have been very proud to work with premier non-profit organizations that are affecting real change across the globe. We are also equally proud to help large brands communicate effectively. We will launch 3 new projects in the first quarter of 2010.
5. Blogging. For reals. This has been inactive, sorry excuse for an Opinion for way too long. We are going to use our site, and our social networks more regularly and be better contributors to conversations in 2010. For now, follow us on Twitter. While we work with clients to help them get social, we have not done the same for ourselves consciously. “If you don’t have the bandwidth, and not sure of how you are going to participate: Don’t!”. That said, our presentation on getting social on SlideShare has been the most tweeted presentation, twice in 2009!

We wish you and yours a peaceful holiday season. Look forward to working, tweeting, sharing with you in the days ahead!

Flash forward, and we have more choice than we could ever need. Do we really need 285 varieties of cookies, 75 of iced tea, 230 soups, 175 salad dressings? We define happiness as having choices, and yet give us too many choices and we get stressed and would rather walk away and not make a decision than put in the effort required to make an informed choice. This is the subject of the book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less” by Barry Schwartz.

Happiness is when we feel like we have the time, the knowledge and the choice required to make the best possible decision. We need filters to help us make these decisions and live in that yellow zone. The Happiness Zone.

As a brand, you have to help people wade through choices and find you. You also have the following related problems to solve:

1. People don’t trust nameless corporations and advertising messages anymore (if they ever really did).
2. People are looking for ways to simplify life, and often make their buying decisions by tapping into trusted sources. According to Forrester Research, “83% of online consumers trust the opinion of a friend or acquaintance who has used a product or service”
3. Your brand is not special to your customer. It’s not the center of their life, as it is to you.

So what should brands do? How do you sell products and have your brand heard over the constant drone of your competitor’s messages? How do you cut through the noise and connect with your customer and have them ‘hear’ you.

Traditionally, brands have done some user and market research, built a product, advertised it’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and repeated the process to keep the product fresh and relevant in the market. This is a throwback to the industrial revolution and no longer relevant. In this world of flux and speed, the touch points with the customer need to be more natural, immediate and constant. Your brand needs to meet your customer where they are most comfortable, and truly engage with them.

Introducing social media. Social Media is the big broad term that takes many forms, from Facebook to a white label wiki. From media sharing sites such as YouTube, LastFM or Flickr, to life-sharing sites such as Twitter or MySpace. Forget stale forums where people post questions and no one relies, GetSatisfaction delivers the promise of community, by allowing companies and their customers to have lively exchange about products.

As brands grapple with the concept of social media, some view it as just another channel to advertise. But that’s one very thin slice of the possibility pie and dates back to thinking from a 100 years ago. Yes, you can create brand awareness, but how do you actually get your customer to care about you, and make you their preferred choice? Instead of using ad-copy, social media allows you to have a more real, meaningful engagement with your customer. You can now discuss things with your customer. And use language that is more natural and accessible to your customer about every subject that matters. To you and your customer.

The wide, wild, undefined world of social media is in it’s infancy. And brands that ‘get it’ are starting to see it’s true potential. It holds promise for creating deeper relationship between organizations and the people they serve, whether that organization is an online company, a bank, or a non-profit organization. If you have something to promote, and communicate about, social media will be a vital part of your communication strategy going forward.

The concept is simple, really. Don’t look at social media as an advertising vehicle. Instead thinks of it like a party. Your customers are attending this party. You are attending the party too. You are not the host, you are just a participant, as are they. Conversation is lively, noisy and on various subjects. How will you join in? How will you introduce yourself to others? How will you mingle in this party, get people to get to know you, appreciate your presence and really want to keep in touch with you, even outside of this party? In short, how will you become the life of the party?

Guido doesn’t get far anymore. People see through the greasy sheen of falseness. Here’s a suggestion: be authentic, and useful. Be(come) the nice guy. The brand that is helpful, and confident. Knowledgeable in what you do, and not arrogant. Proud not full-of-yourself. Communicative not sale-sy. Marriott has joined Twitter and won kudos for creating great conversations with travelers around the world. Even this hot dog vendor in Vancouver has leveraged their geek central location, to talk to their customers on Twitter with great success.

Before you jump into the social media pond, consider how best you will join in the conversation and what do you have to offer.

Here are a few questions to ask, that will help you humanize your brand, and make authentic decisions on his/her behalf:

1. What would your brand be like at the party? (E.g. The clown, the shy one, the chatty kathy)
2. Where would your brand hang out? What online communities would she or he be drawn to?
3. Who are your brand’s best friends? Who trusts your brand and loves them?
4. What are brands that your brand would buy? (Example: Starbucks or the local neighborhood cafe?)
5. What will your brand do or say at the party, that is typical of her/him, that will make people remember her (in a good way)?

On a somewhat related note, you will find DesignStamp on Twitter, but you won’t find us on Facebook. We haven’t figured out why/how we, as a design studio need to be there. And we refuse to attend the party unless we know that we’d look good going in. So we are talking about it internally, dressing for success (a new website is in the works) and making sure we are drinking the Kool-aid we serve. Be authentic, be useful.

We encourage you to contact us and let’s get to work on your social media strategy!

happy prosumer

1. The eBay seller who put up the camera for sale, listing it’s features, putting up photos of the camera, to get me to bid on that camera.
2. Me: I had a ability to take that photo of my dog, and then add meta data to that photo in Flickr by adding the photo to a set, submit it to a dog-lovers group, and add comments to the pic.

The Good: Power to the People

We can celebrate the power of being able to share content instantaneously. Tragic events such as the London Bombings are instantly found on various sites through “citizen journalism” around the world with cell-phone videos, podcasts, blogs and photos from every angle. Unedited or censored.

And let’s acknowledge that it is kinda cool to skip traditional distribution channels (and the tax-man?) by being able to buy and trade things even wholesale products from each other in easier ways than ever before.

The ability to create and distribute content has shifted power of content creation from the few (read media mogul Rupert Murdoch who interestingly enough owns MySpace, a cluttered example of user-generated content) to the many (at least to those that have the access to increasingly cheap technology). Get free web space, spit out your message and you have just created content for all to consume. You could have the attention of millions. No censorship , no barriers. You are now a publisher, a distributor and you could even surround your content with ways to monetize on your new found powers. If you are a musician, you are finding ways to get famous without the help of record companies. And you can even gain celebrity status for yourself by just picking on famous people. Just find your niche and create content for them. And they will consume it.

The Bad: (The Reason why user generated content…umm…sucks?)

The problem with this whole scenario is this. No one stopped me sharing that photo in the scenario above.
I might suck at taking photos but no one stopped me from adding that blurry photo to the trash heap that is the internet today.

Let’s talk about YouTube: how many videos are actually worth the bandwidth that was spent uploading them and then serving them up to unsuspecting bored explorers? And sites that accept user-submitted content realize this problem, so every user generated piece of content must offer features such as ratings, reviews. Tell the system if the piece of content is good, tell the system if it is miserably useless. Help us bury it or float it to the top. And even then fake content or hoaxes ends up tarnishing the credibility of good websites.

And while bad content rarely ever makes it up the ranks, it still leaves someone, somewhere having to take the time to watch the content to censor or celebrate it. And time is precious. The world is melting, we have crazy weather outside and frogs are going extinct at an alarming rate. But we are spending our time flagging content that should never have been made in the first place. Worse yet, we are provided more and more choices everyday to showcase our small lives in duplicate ways. And no one is asking why.

The Inevitable J.Lo Syndrome

Luckily, the system has a way of correcting itself. It’s called the the J.Lo syndrome. Remember when we couldn’t get enough of J.Lo’s well-endowed behind, her bling and her men? Well at some point we got bored and we turned away. She went into hiding, came out made a couple of movies but has not generated the same tabloid frenzy again. User-generated content is here to stay, don’t get me wrong (just like J.Lo’s behind). But we are going through the dreaded “Ben Affleck engagement” phase of the J.Lo syndrome at the moment. Over-hype and over-saturation. We have been provided too many ways to share pointless content.

At it’s best user-generated content gives us incredible, unprecedented power to share, contribute to a collective intelligence and find new ways to communicate with each other. But it is the emphasis on quantity (with ways to weed through the abysmal, to get to the average) that has to shift. We all want good content, not millions of ways to submit and access bad content.

Once the saturation point hits and websites with identical business models that live off or leverage user-generated content start to cannabalize each other and starve each other of investment dollars, we will gravitate back to sites that offer us good content, whether that content is created by one or many. Good content always wins. The author can be a “user”, a “pro” or a prosumer, it don’t really matter! What matters is that the focus will be back on quality and not the aggregation of masses of content submitted by the masses. And no more talk about seeding and weeding a gigantic compost heap of content.

It was a typical interaction design project, testing initial assumptions, validating business logic with a user-centric philosophy and asking simple questions like “why” and “how”.

However, looking back at the project and the path it has taken over the last few months, it has been anything but typical.

It is my pleasure to introduce you to Rouxbe.

Rouxbe helps people to cook simple recipes using video. Gone are the days of printing off complicated recipes and guessing what those fancy French words mean, and not being sure just how to get to that all important end-result. You can now have a chef walk you through the process without the camera attempting to make the chef the celebrity. Right now, you have subscriptions to magazines that show beautiful food. Now see how that food is made, and you control your viewing experience. No ads to skip through. Just lots of videos recipes. Amazingly shot and served. You don’t need to follow along. Just watch, learn and then go make.

Rouxbe was different for DesignStamp for a lot of reasons. Our commitment to Rouxbe is ongoing and our involvement is much more collaborative and immersive than the consultative role that we usually play. We have been involved in the building of Rouxbe, it’s online presence and technical development from ground up. From building the proprietary Flash player, to creating a complete website including e-commerce components, we are working with Rouxbe to take the user through a smooth, hassle-free experience. Nothing should come between the new user and the food recipes that they can sample.

One of the other key things that makes Rouxbe different is it’s commitment to a cause much higher than profit. To feed starving kids around the world. Having worked in the field for years, one can get a bit jaded and just about everyone you talk to has the next big Web 2.0 idea that they want to bring to market and get bought by Google. One of my first meetings with Joe Girard, the CEO of Rouxbe was not about the financial promise that Rouxbe held, but about Rouxbe for Life. A good cause that is whole heartedly supported and believed in by all of us that are working to build the Rouxbe brand. In fact, we all contribute money towards the cause each time we eat a meal together (working at Rouxbe means that there are a LOT of delicious meals before, after and during every meeting!)

In the next few months, I hope to be able to share details about our design process and the development of Rouxbe as a trusted brand. Till then, I invite you to try Rouxbe and give us your feedback. After all, the proof is in the pudding. Or more precisely, in the Crème Brulée!

So do you think that you are a private person who has managed to protect your privacy in an increasingly un-private world? Consider this:

1. Google knows when you are bad and when you are good. Think about all the things, pleasures, treatments, fun-things-to-do, people, secrets that you have shared with Google simple by typing into that innocuous search box. Everything starts there, and they keep records.
2. And that search engine you use (Google or not) can not only point to all your search queries in the last few years, but heck, it can show people where you live. Give them directions to, and a picture of, your house (I am going to pretend that I still hold a vestige of privacy close to my heart, and instead of showing you my house, I invite you to look at yours from space by going to Google Maps or flying over your neighbourhood by downloading Google Earth)
3. Most websites are unscrupulous about sharing your personal information even when they cut and paste a good looking privacy policy from their competitor’s website. Take a look at some of the complaints about this on this website. I continue to receive emails from Dell even after trying many times to "unsubscribe" from their newsletters (which I never signed up for in the first place). Serves me right for giving my real email address just to buy a computer or two!
4. The average Brit is photographed some 300 times each day by surveillance cameras. North America is not far behind.

So what does privacy amount to today? A lot of revenue for some companies for one. They trade, sell, buy, coerce and steal the private information of the average joe blow, just to sell them the right things at the right time. A qualified customer is a customer that is easier to seduce. If a company knows what you like, they can offer things to you that will more likely meet your needs and tastes. Amazon can attribute this concept of personalized results to much of it’s success. Gmail spiders through emails to provide freakishly topical advertisements that relate to a particular email’s content.

And what we are feeling about privacy right about now? We are being a bit schizophrenic it seems. While we are getting more paranoid about our own privacy, we are also more willingly to give away parts of it in exchange for things that purport to improve our lives somehow.

Privacy is up for grabs.

You too, are OK with giving away your privacy if you got something ‘nice’ in return. Prove value to you, and you will give away information about yourself willingly. Some pieces you hold more dearly, some you don’t. What can be worrying is when people give away privacy unwittingly (careful) or without even being aware of doing so.

I try consciously to choose wisely about how and where I am becoming less private about my life. Why be un-private at all? Because I have realized to get some, I need to give some. If my privacy is worth something to someone else, I may sell it to them. While using fake email addresses and aliases for getting me some things I need to be me, Gagan Diesh from Vancouver BC not Jh from La, Ca, 90210, to get true value.

So who has me? Has me= My personal info in some form that they could use to learn more about me?

• Google grid has me. Whether it is spreadsheets, documents, Gmail or calendar. I am addicted. They all connect so seamlessly and in ways that Microsoft is still trying to work out for their products. My personalized Google page gives me rapid access to my world which Google now controls. I can invite others to collaborate with the real me, and in turn they too become part of Google’s ever expanding world. By the way, you have to watch this video to understand what Google Grid is (and can be) all about.
• Flickr has me. It lets me share my photos with the world. I still keep lots of private photos on Flickr to share with a select few, but every now and then submit to the urge to share photos with strangers.
• Del.icio.us has me. It saves my favorite links from around the world, and allows me to share links with my students and everyone else.
• Paypal has me because I can’t trust making financial transactions with eBay buyers using fake names. So they have access to my bank account and my real name and email address.
• Amazon has me because they offer lovely services like wish lists and easy ways to recommend good books. They also offer cheap books and I don’t have to suffer Vancouver rain to trudge down to my local bookstore. I can order my favorite books from the comfort of my un-private computer desk.
• Skype has me because I use it to talk to clients internationally. Heck when I am lazy I even chat with people on Skype if my phone is in the other room!
• LinkedIn has me because it helps me network professionally and protects me from spam very well.
• My local grocery store has me so I can scan my card and get discounts. They also get to share this info with my AirMiles provider. Suddenly I become a blip on someone’s computer screen each time I buy a family pack of athlete’s foot cream (ewww!).
• Oh my, this list is getting scary… Even my local sandwich deli has me, I keep my "buy 6, get one free" card with my name over there. Heck, did I even enter that draw to win a lunch for my entire office, by giving them my business card? Did I also leave a business card on the bulletin board at my Gym? Networking or privacy risk? Did I also sign up for that gas swipe card so I could pay a zillion dollars for gas more quickly at the pump?

Note to self: Maybe I am just a privacy slut trading my privacy for cheap trinkets?

Ok, I still have boundaries. Kinda.

• I hate Plaxo and all that it purports to do for (to) people. I don’t trust it and with good reason.
• I am wary of registering my software even when I have bought it and not downloaded it. I see no reason to. I have never got better service by doing so.
• I still use email aliases when posting on newsgroups because I can’t stand cluttering searches for my name on Google with outdated screams for tech help or recruiting people.
• I don’t forward jokes. I chastise people for sending out thought viruses (emails that tell you to forward them to others to warn them, bless them, or reward them!)
• I am selective about who I give my email address to, I set up rules to deal with junk and know better than to even open the most amazingly imaginative subject lines (Viagra is so yesterday, spammers are now using a haiku of business talk in the subject line like the one I got today: “Brand motivated faculty”. I almost opened the email, but Gmail protected me by moving it to the spam box automatically)

So maybe I am not so bad. Maybe I still have a vestige of privacy left. Maybe I’ll be ok after all. Maybe I will win a Free iPod if I just answer a few simple questions.

We frequently work with companies that in the process of establishing, building or redefining their brand.

On the key exercises that I like to emphasize when building a brand from the ground up or focusing an existing brand is the importance of a brand voice.

Here’s how I see it.

Problem: We want to speak to our customer, but there are a lot of other voices that are screaming the same message to our customer. We have something unique to sell to our customer, but we are afraid that they will not be able to hear us over the din of our competitors.

1. Also called Step ZERO. Let’s forget about the competitors for a minute. You have obviously made it this far based on the assumption that you have a unique product or service offering. Or you were able to prove that there is enough room in the market for you. Hence you were able to raise the capital needed to be in existence. So, you and I both know that you have something to offer your customer. But what is it? Before we attempt to speak with “them”, let’s make sure we know WHAT we want to say to our target market. What makes our product/service worthy of their time and why should they care to keep us in business. How are we helping them?
2. Let’s talk about HOW we want to speak to them. What is our brand voice (that being the reason for this article). Country music or Country Grammar? When they exclaim “that’s hot”; do they mean the temperature of something is uncomfortably high, or do they mean that sh** is phat? Knowing your target audience’s brand voice, tells you the style and tone that your brand must have to be accessible to its market. Brand voice is not just a vocabulary; it is how successful brands clearly express their membership (or leadership) to their tribe. A brand’s voice communicates its values, principles and just who they are, to their market.

When a brand communicates clearly, it has a voice. And a brand with voice has power. Because then it can do a multitude of things and yet always find a way to communicate its brand message clearly in everything it does.

Brand voice must resonate with its target market to be successful.

Trying to fake your brand voice to make it accessible to its target audience is as offensive to your target audience as Ted Danson doing black face. Your brand shouldn’t just speak in the voice that you define, it must become it.

Defining a brand’s voice, means bringing a brand to life. Get rid of big brand standards documents that teach you how to use that logo. Instead think about making your brand into a real person. Think about who your brand is. Where do they hang out. What parties do they go to? Would you invite them over to your house? And if so, would your personal style, appeal to them or hurt their sensibilities? How will they sit at a party? In the middle of a young crowd or huddled with the small group of suits discussing the benefits of investing in tech stocks?

Knowing your brand voice means that you now know not only what you want to say, but how you want to say it.

Looking at a few 404 Error messages online, it becomes clear that even errors can speak volumes about a brand’s voice and how it communicates to it’s users.

Consider the following error messages: Basecamp, a project management tool, is both authoritative in its error messages and calm. Flickr is like your buddy, irreverent yet cool. Apple knows text lists will bore you while Windows is geekier. Google has the manner of a guy who has one piece of furniture in his one-room apartment which also houses 5 computers!

Marcus Graham takes the concept of brand voice one step further. He takes the concept of brand voice very literally. He researched 100 brand voices by recording the official automated phone greetings. So if you go to Top 100 voice brands you can actually compare what say Starbucks voice sounds like, to that of Microsoft, Apple or Charles Schwab. While I am not sure if every company has the budget to hire the best voice talent to record their company’s automated systems, the study speak to the importance NOT being seen as gruff, robotic and un-human. It’s more impactful to be personal, trust-worthy and human.

Finding your brand voice is making the definitive statement about who your brand is, and who it is not. And it is also proof that the brand really “gets” its target audience. That it doesn’t wait to speak to its market through focus groups and feedback forms. It also lives in the world that its target audience inhabits.

A brand with a clear voice manages to have enviable shorthand with its core market. Sometimes it leads the tribe, sometimes it is just one of the tribe, but whatever its position, it is identifiable, tangible and ultimately very human.

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Hi I’m Gagan Diesh and I am one of the instructors that tormented and tortured your loved ones over the last few months.

DD04 like every class before them has gone through hell and back in 48 short weeks. Their days have blended into nights; their weeks have been a whirlwind of assignments, deliverables and designs. So on behalf of DD04, I would like to thank the mums and dads, boyfriends and girlfriends, friends and for allowing [names withheld to respect privacy], to disappear for the last year. So thank you family, thank you friends.

The point is that the Digital Design program is a lot of hard work and you have survived it, so congrats. You have made it to the finish line!

When I heard that I was invited to speak at tonight’s grad, I really had to think about what I had left to say to you guys. I just hosted that Freelancing workshop last week and had shared my advice about work and ethics then. And I got the opportunity to work with each of you individually and collectively throughout the year, so what was left to say?

So… instead of just my words to you, I thought I would use the words of some mighty people that inspire me and keep me going.

I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn’t like it.
— Samuel Goldwyn

“The details are not the details. They make the design.”
—Charles Eames

“Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.”
—Paul Rand

Dare to be naive.
— R. Buckminster Fuller

…it’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.
— Jonathan Ive

Common sense is not so common.
— Voltaire

If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.
— Red Adair

Why am I telling you all this?

I just to remind you of the responsibility that sits on your shoulders. You now have the power to change the world that we live in.

We have entered the age of design where everyone has the tools available to them to design things. Whether it is a webpage or the architecture of a house. Everyone can design if they choose to do so. Design is now the property and prerogative of everyone. Design is now in the hand of the masses and in that lays great opportunity and danger. We see the world becoming a homogenous mass of sameness. The culture of Wal-Mart and the Gap leads to the horrible blandness of dressing the same, listening to the same music, on the same mp3 player and holding the same idols up as our heroes. Sure everyone can self-publish their life but they are choosing to tell their life through mass produced generic templates. Everyone can take millions of photos but do people think about what they want to say before they take a photo anymore? Everyone can exercise their right to vote and choose their leaders but are they really thinking about their choices or choosing the one that says the things that are easiest to understand.

You are the expert and you can make this world a better place to live in. We have given up on politician and celebrities to affect change. You are the chosen ones who can make things work; You can design things that are incredibly simple or beautiful. You have to help people find things they don’t even know they need, yet. Invent and Innovate.

So as you step in the real world just remember that it is full of choices. You had only a few choices at VFS and there was only one main highway that lead you to this place today. But life is not like that. You have many forks and decision points ahead of you. You have a few battles ahead, and success is not graded equally for all. You need to define your own futures and decide what success will mean to you personally. But don’t wait to make the right decision, to take the right path—just don’t wait. Just do. Really, action is better than waiting. You have prepared for 48 weeks and you are now ready to take flight.

I just hope that whatever you do, you will do with your own individual style. Don’t look to fit in but create your own niche. Don’t obey but shout out your point of view. Don’t go to the big design party that everyone is going to, but throw your own.

I fear sameness as much as I do beige. Imitation is a great start but that’s not where you want to end up. And if you imitate, I hope you’d look to imitate the work of giants who came before you, not the person who is sitting to the right or left of you. If your work is to be informed by things that you know, you should probably be on a quest to know more, learn more. Be curious, be inquisitive, and be darn right nosy. You can become one of many or you can be one of the few. The choice is yours.

All this said, I hope you are inspired by your own abilities and I want you to know that I am looking forward to continuing to work with most of you. Welcome to world of being a professional designer. Before I let you off to go and change the world I would like you to stand up and take the designer oath with me. Face the audience, they are part of the big group of people you will design for in the future. So speak to them directly and say after me…

The Designer Oath:

I will design for you. I will use my powers for good. I will be your advocate. I will make work that matters. I will try and improve our lives. I will have the courage to lead. And I will have the flexibility to follow. I will listen to both my heart and mind. In short, I will kick ass! Peace out.

1. Business owners looking to design or redesign their business websites or
2. Potential practitioners looking to either enter the web design field as newbies or gain some technical know-how on refining their current skillset.

My email inbox continues to have a steady influx of people looking to either ask for additional advice or enquire about how DesignStamp can help them with their redesign efforts.

Most small business owners have a limited budget to spend on their web efforts and sometimes are not even sure why and how a website should be part of their marketing mix. Some start out by hunting for deals, cheap resources that will help get an online identity for their business. The driving logic is “Why should I spend a huge hunk out of a limited kitty if I am not even sure why I am spending this money in the first place”. I will go into those reasons in another article but for now I need to address a more burning issue. That of ethics.

Being an ethical designer and more importantly hiring an ethical designer. Ethical designers may not be the cheapest designer in town and clients who search by price can sometimes fall prey to unethical designers. I write this article to people who may have asked “how much” before asking anything else. I also address this to fellow designers and hope that we are all respecting what we do, and how we do it.

Clients who respect the value of ethics are our favorite clients. Most of our clients grow to value our process and input and understand that we don’t just push pixels for a living. We don’t shove our ethics down our clients throat because we believe it is important that everyone’s collective attention remain on the product being designed not on our philosophies or professional belief system. However, sometimes it becomes important to steer conversations towards our principles.

Our guiding principles focus on the word Respect. Respect for our client. Respect for our product and respect for ourselves.

Indicators that the designer you have hired is ethical.

1. They are able to prove value. A designer should not only make things that look good but also be able to help explain the value of what they design in a larger context. They can help you answers questions such as: Why is a website important to your business? How can you distinguish yourself from your competition? How can you prove benefit to your target audience?
2. They do not work for free. Hard to believe it but some designers will actually create mockups for free. These designers tend to be self-taught armchair designers who are unclear of the value of their own work and will give away generic work in the hopes of generating a portfolio or getting clients who can’t afford professional designers. A designer should not pitch work for free. You, as a client, may expect a proposal of features and benefits for free but you should not expect proposed designs for free. More at no-spec.com.
3. They cannot design in a vacuum. Beware of designers who are able to promise that they can make you a good looking website without even talking to you first. Chances are they are providing you with a template design that may look good but does not speak to your specific needs (both from a business or audience perspective)
4. They are unable to steal. Simply put they will be inspired by the work of others but will never blatantly steal code or images to create identical work for you. Its one thing to copy functionality if you believe that something work’s well. Competition is healthy but stealing is not.
5. They will not undercut. Good designers know the value of their own skills and input into a project and will not wait to find out what a competitors charges to undercut prices and steal business.
6. They offer tangible and intangible products. Good designers are able to prove value for both their intangible and tangible products and processes. An ethical designer follows a tried and true design process and can bring value at any stage of that process, not just at the end when they deliver a physical interface or design. You should look for designers who offer consultancy services for intangible processes such as uncovering needs, market research, competitive analysis, design research, usability reviews etc.
7. They give back. Every business has a responsibility to give back to the community in which they live. Ethical designers believe in creating strong design communities and will share resources, tips and techniques with other designers.
8. They listen. Designers who realize that they have an enormous responsibility of representing the end-user and aligning business goals to user objectives cannot help but be good listeners. They will pay special heed to understanding the context in which they are designing and ask lots of good questions to help educate themselves.
9. They love what they do. This is a bit subjective but in my experience there is a direct correlation in a designer who truly loves what he/she does for a living and how they conduct themselves in a professional manner. Designers who appreciate their role and revel in the power and responsibility of design will function as consummate professionals.
10. They will work for projects they can stand behind. This is a toughie. Everyone has differing views on what is right and what is wrong. Some designers will never work for Nike because they have heard of Nike’s dealings with alleged slave labor. Others will have no qualms of working with Nike even though they know of this issue but do not condone Nike’s behavior. To me, as long as I can justify my work, my involvement and am able to include a piece of work in my portfolio and have pride in claiming it as my own, I will work for that client. Everyone should have an informed point of view and be able to stand behind their work, whatever their stand on the issue.

Here are a few things that I believe are worth focusing upon. Whether your business serves up a service or a product. Whether your customer is the end-consumer or another business. 

Before I continue on, I am going to mainly use the words product and user. Replace product with service, if that’ what your company serves up. Replace the word user with customer, consumer, vendor, purchasing company, enterprise…whoever ends up paying your bills by buying what you sell.

I suggest we need to consider two major elements to focus on when it comes to creating successful businesses

Context and the User. This month’ article will focus on context. We will move our attention to the user in next month’ article.

Context.

How and where will it your product be important to your user?

When will it be used? Studying the context of your product’ usage can bring back some unexpected gems. Someone recognized that this was a problem: Every time someone uses a spoon to stir pasta sauce they are making, they end up making a mess when they put their spoon down. The folks over at http://www.woodspoon.com/ improved upon the existing experience.The lazy spoon, has been celebrated on the Oprah show and raved on and on by famed cook Rachael Ray.

So what do you need to learn from messy/clean sauce spoons? It’ all about context? You need to know the environment that surrounds your relationship with your customer. Some examples of why studying up on context is good:

1. Context highlights the little things

   How is your product used? Where is it used? What are the key benefits associated with your service? Software that is used in noisy environments should probably not rely on audio cues. Daycare facilities should hire people who genuinely like kids (even the Janitor). Dental receptionists should have nice teeth and bank tellers should not tell you how bad they are at math (I have actually had that happen). Consider the wide circular halo that surrounds each of the perceived benefits that your product aims to offers your users. Even the smallest omission within this circle can spell death for your business or at the very least reduce some of that magic brand glow you were aiming to spread. Provide your product’ benefits everywhere. If you offer a service that relies on speed as one of its key benefits, it is probably crucial that your website servers never fail and have high bandwidth to serve pages at blazing fast speed even though your business is not directly web related. If you provide software product that features ease of use, your office layout should feature that same attention to ergonomics.

2. The Market has answers (some you don’t want to hear)

   What makes your user’ mouth water?

   What are some of the other products your customer will probably want to use? Doing a moodboard research about what turns your user’s crank could lead to some interesting alliances. The Four Seasons hotel in Vancouver lets its preferred guests park their cars in front of the hotel, bypassing the need to use the valet, a much cherished benefit for their customer. What does the hotel get out of this? Chances are that their prominent clients drive high-end luxury cars. Having passerbys and other guests see the high-end cars parked right in front of the hotel adds to the brand promise of the otherwise aging hotel building.

   Drink in your competition’ Kool Aid and then spit it out.

   Don’t make your own website, your browser’ home page. Instead try and focus in on your competition. Where is their message clear and where are the opportunities for you to make that message clearer on your own marketing and technical material? The better you know about them, the more authority you have in your voice when you clarify why you are better.

   Help your users do their market research.

   Your customer will shop around. Don’t pretend that your competition does not exist. SurveyMonkey is lists their competitors Urls right on their pricing page and tells you why SurveyMonkey is better. Easy projects™ provides their potential customers with a form they can use to compare performance of other project management tools. The Pricing page on most product and service selling websites is a top exit page. People come to do the research and leave if they don’t find a compelling reason to stay. What are you doing to help them research and in turn make up their mind to use you over your competition?

3. Street Cred & New Marketing Channels

   What are your user’ watering holes for information?

   Stop thinking narrowly in terms of traditional methods of banners and print ads to reach out to your potential users. Find places that they still believe in. Using trusted sources where people turn to find information leads to focused marketing efforts such as tryvertising. Consider what P&G is doing with the ‘mum’ market. It is giving mothers free products so they will refer other mums to try it themselves. It makes their marketing channel authentic and believable for that target user. A marketing channel inner circle if you will. The Ya-Ya is telling the sisterhood what to buy.

   What are they saying that you aren’t telling them?

   Besides the marketing message that you put out, how does your customer find out about you? In other words, what is the word on the street about you and your product, outside of your direct marketing efforts? Check out news groups and bulletin boards. Also be ready to find out things you didn’t want to know. People can use public forums to rant or to express love, but it’ the ranters that are more vocal. We found that out when researching VFS’ street cred in newsgroups. Smart companies from Adobe to the many 2 person tech companies in Vancouver have paid employees and well-wishers (read volunteers) troll news groups and quell negative talk by stating facts and solving problems.

   Some like it hot. Some like it cold.

   How do you serve up information? What information is best served cold? If your user is busy and multi-tasking when they come across your site, for example, they might be looking for snapshot information (hot information). More detailed information such as technical specs may be best served as downloadable PDFs to be referred to later (cold information)?

   The importance of consistency and inconsistency.

   What is the user going to be feeling when they call your sales hotline? What will they feel when they call the support hotline? What are commonalities and differences required in how you serve that customer, in those two instances? I would suggest a wait period in answering either of those calls is not going to help matters. Your website should be a good place to provide both pre-sales and after-sales support. Your brand should stand for something. And that message should be reinforced, no matter why your customer is reaching out to talk to you.

Recognising that people don’t access products in a vacuum and actually finding out the true context of how your product is used, helps make them more meaningful to your user. If you fit in well into people’ lives, they will thank you for it, by telling their friends about you.

technorati tags: business, ux, branding

Whether you are building a product or even a campaign to sell it, read this article, consider its impact on how you have traditionally thought about things, and then ensure that your company is working responsibly (and hiring responsible designers). Pre-thought, planning and good judgement are your most powerful allies and secret weapons for survival in this increasingly complex, fast moving economy.

Lets’ assume you goal is to make a ‘good’ product. What will define this goodness? Is it:

• The feature list?
• Launching in time for (insert your choice of event here). Or
• Making your investors happy?

I can assure you, that if you answered yes to any or all of the above, you are not alone. Most businesses tend to start to stare at their belly buttons at one time or another. It’s natural and it’s a reaction to concentrating on the known instead of dealing with the unknown. While it is good to look inward at times, there is a danger off being blindsided by the real changes that are occuring in the marketplace everyday. Navel gazing is comfortable and offers an addictive sense of control. You can bully your developer into producing the feature list you desire, and working crazy hours will produce a broken alpha product ready for your targeted launch date. You can present a bouncy PowerPoint presentation to your investors and their eyes will glisten with the promise of what you put forth as a future release.

But the global market is littered with the ghosts of companies, big and small, that died from the effects of navel gazing. To stare at your collective navel as a company leads any one or all to the following phenomenon. (Consider the following to be the ‘what not to do’ part of the article’s title.)

1. Amnesia (Simple questions such as: What are we doing? Who are we? Why are we in business, remain unanswered)
2. Blindness (Our competition is way too far behind us for us to care)
3. Paranoia (Make our NDA longer, with more legal clauses than the next prenup Anna Nicole Smith would have to sign…they are out to steal our idea)
4. Temporal Megalomania (We control time. We lead the industry and have the best product. The market only changes when we are ready for that change)
5. Self-Inflating egos (We will always be better than them. We know best)
6. Manic Mood Swings (We have the world’s best product, we have the world’s worst red-tape, we have competent management, we have incompetent workers)
7. Self Mutilation (Fire, lay off and basically chop off limbs in an effort to fix the unknown problem)
8. Suicidal Tendencies (Work on the basis of a fixed burn rate. Spend the money today, we may not have a tomorrow to look forward to)
9. Prostitution (We are building a cool product because we want a company like Yahoo! Or Google to buy us. We don’t need to ship to market, we just need to build the bloody thing, so we don’t need to prove worth)
10. Inertia (The inability to react to anything due to all of the above)

So who’s thinking about your end-user? No one. The user is, for all intents and purposes, dead. They have been sacrificed for a quick turnaround and a bloated piece of technology. In next month article we will delve into the elements to focus on instead of that navel.

Companies that have thought about these elements have always prospered. Whether it is huge success such as that enjoyed by companies like Google or Apple, or the small resounding success of your neighborhood ‘no-brand’ coffee shop. They all share something in common.

Till next time…!