Wurkit by Dan Ritzenthaler

Fixed-fee or Hourly?

2012-02-08T11:37:12-05:00

People can be extremely passionate about how they charge and why they think it’s the best way to get the most value out of their time. There are people on both sides with unshakable points of view. Unfortunately, there are enough pros and cons to each approach and enough variations in each project that it can still feel like a difficult decision.

Once you have the right billing method applied to the right project, you will seem more professional and put you in more control of your cash-flow. Also, as a really great side effect, it can alert you to what types of projects you should be seeking and avoiding. Getting it right is important.

Why you should care

Trust and respect are required to have a client feel comfortable paying you their hard-earned money. When your client feels like you’ve taken the time to understand their needs, the more professional you will seem. When you’re on the right path and making deliberate and meaningful choices, you will be followed.

Making money is great, but making consistent and predictable money is better. Once you’ve identified your value and how you intend to deliver it, the type of clients and projects you need to succeed will reveal themselves. If you’re having trouble, it should be an indicator that you might be working on projects that don’t fit your approach.

When to charge a fixed-fee

When you can see the predictable nature of a project, it should be a clear reason to charge for the entire project. Say, for example, a client has an understood problem with an understood solution and you have a rigid process is in place to accommodate it. There is little reason why a comprehensive estimate can’t be given with a guarantee it will be honored.

This may sound like a typical project, but don’t fool yourself! Getting all the required elements at the same time is more rare than you might think. Most projects have a fully understood problem without a fully understood solution, or the other way around. This will bring unpredictable elements into the picture and make it close to impossible to accurately estimate.

When to charge hourly

If you’re talking to a potential client about a project and it seems to become more and more unclear, you should consider charging hourly. Even if you can clearly define the deliverables and an appropriate timeline, you can’t guarantee that what you’re working on will be what the client wants without constant supervision. Regular communication is important, but after a certian point it’s counterproductive.

In this case above, the client may be looking for help identifying the problems that will inform the plan. This is where you’re deliverables become less valuable and your research, insights, and perspective take the spotlight. Even if you can predict the time and effort it takes to identify a problem, it doesn’t guarantee you’ve solved anything. It may just lead to another question. So don’t charge a fixed-fee for a solution until you know the problem and how to solve it.

Things to watch out for

One of the greatest feelings is getting “in the zone.” When charging hourly, you’re so productive it seems like you’re throwing money away. This is a very valid concern, but charging a fixed-fee will not solve this problem, it will only make the time you spend “out of the zone” the place where you throw away your money.

Another powerful urge, when charging hourly, is to say that what you are doing will “take as long as it takes.” Not knowing how much something will cost can be highly stressful for anyone making an investment. Take the time to estimate parts of the project and do your best to hit them. This will build trust and make it easier for clients to incorporate you into their plans and budgets.

If you or your client aren’t confident in the approach, it’s a good indicator one or both of you isn’t fully understanding the nature of the transaction. When a project is in the grey area between hourly or fixed-fee, take the time to understand what the client needs and, if necessary, split it into two independent projects. Also, if a project is obviously ideal for an hourly approach, but a fixed-fee is demanded (or the other way around), you should be cautious—it’s a sign you may be getting exploited.

Tips and tricks

Always do both. If you’re on a fixed-fee project keep track of your hours so that you can identify the valuable projects and, hopefully, learn how to get more of them. If you’re on an hourly project, estimate as much as possible so you can understand your strengths, use them more, and raise your rates.

No matter what, always try to set delivery dates or deadlines. It may seem obvious on a fixed-fee project, but don’t slack off on the hourly projects. When you can organize your time and effort to match the expectations of the client, you will build a reputation for always getting the job done. This is a great way to augment your value and be an easier choice for people writing the checks.

Always test your value by regularly increasing your rates. It’s not just about making more money, it’s also about learning and growing into new projects where you can make a bigger impact. There are clients who only value a website at $200, and others at $2 million. There are clients who only value a designer’s time at $10 an hour, and others at $250 an hour. Figure out what you want, then figure out how to get there.

Conclusion

In short, if the time you spend figuring things out is what creates the most value for your client, you should charge hourly. On the other hand, if what you’re delivering an understood solution for an understood problem, you should charge a fixed-fee. Anywhere in between is potentially risky business.

Regardless of the method you choose, when the value you deliver has a clear relationship to the nature of the project, you can strengthen your professional relationships while making more money. If you can always show your client that you’re giving more value than you’re charging, you will be seen a good investment and they will come back again and again and again.

Thanks to Josh Porter for editing help.

Planning and the Illusion of Solving

2011-11-23T18:19:54-05:00

One of the most difficult aspects of planning is staying focused on articulating the plan. Trying to solve a problem you identify while planning is always appealing and, in my experience, never really works out. A significant problem can’t be solved with past experience or historical data and requires a hypothesis that should be tested and validated.

A good plan needs to identify problems, contain the ways you intend to discover the solutions, and show which problems are dependent on other solutions. Even with just a few moving parts, this can quickly become unwieldy. Why add guessing to the mix?

A Quick Solution… It’s a Trap!

With experience comes the urge to use it. When problems pop up while planning, the knee-jerk reaction is to look to your past, find a reasonably similar scenario, and choose to use a similar or better solution. Once that solution has worked it’s way into the conversation, people will rely on it for all future solutions.

The margin of error for solutions based on past experiences should be small. Unfortunately, when you start working on a plan that relies on several layers of perceived solutions the margins of error can multiply and a lot of skill and good intentions will still blow up in your face. What’s worse, is that it can be really, really hard to know what piece of the puzzle caused the failure.

Even when you’re working with the smartest people in the world, alarms should be going off when people are solving problems on-the-fly and incorporating them into the plan.

Momentum is Better than Speed

Taking the time to challenge assumptions, test theories, and validate assumptions can be time consuming. Fortunately, once you’ve identified a problem and verified the solution, there’s less to consider for each following problem. Even a slow team that challenges itself and validates their assumptions will eventually be more productive than a fast team who skips that part.

Creating Intuitive Interfaces

2012-02-08T21:07:36-05:00

A hallmark of good design is when the people using your application feel like you’re reading their mind. As strange and unpredictable as people are, this isn’t hard to do. All you need to keep setting expectations and then delivering on those expectations.

Over time, hopefully within a few interfaces, you have to primed people to think that a certain type of thing will be in a certain place. As they’re browsing and working and managing all the distractions of their day, they will eventually need to do that thing again. Instinctually they will look towards the place they have come to expect that thing.

Is it there?

If it’s not, prepare for a lot of frustration and confusion. If it is, prepare for a lot of suprise and delight.

It’s that simple. No magic. No Unicorns. Just consistent and disciplined interfaces.

Setting Interface Expectations

Inside larger and more complex applications, a wide variety of interfaces will show up. It can become really, really hard to set consistent patters and always put the same things in the same places. In the spirit of progress over perfection, a “gaze” may be a more appropriate the a super-rigid set of interface rules.

Imagine being fully focused on a task inside an application. Once you’ve completed that task, realized another task that’s a higher priority, or just plain screwed up, where does your gaze wander to? There’s a good chance you’ll reacte and move towards what you consider the safest place.

Adding something might feel like it belongs somewhere on the upper left side of the screen.
Searching for something might feel like it belongs on the upper right side of the screen.
Digging in deeper might feel like it belongs on the left side of the screen.
Editing/deleting something might feel like it belongs on the right side of the screen.

The more you can consolidate these assumptions, set expectations, and deliver with consistency, the more people will find you accommodating and intutitive. They may even think you’re reading their minds!

The Power of Good Design

2011-11-18T07:50:48-05:00

Accountants to landscapers have a basic understanding of the power of marketing. They need to build an audience! They need more people to want their stuff!

Is design understood that specifically? Is it something that we want because we’re certain it will affect the bottom line in a significant way? Or is it something we need because we’ve seen our competition use it successfully and hope to do the same?

To pass that threshold of needing (and resenting) to wanting (and loving) design, you need to understand three core parts of design: making things useful, making things usable, and making things desirable.

Making Things Useful

Putting together a collection of features and functionality to help people accomplish a goal is just as much a part of design as choosing a color scheme. It’s far enough away from seeing a beautiful interface that it doesn’t feel like design. Just remember, no matter where you are in the project, design is happening.

It may be appealing to leave the designers out of this phase for budget or time constraints, but don’t let that happen. Some features are complex enough to influence the feeling of the application. If you’re going for a lightning fast and highly enjoyable application, a complex feature will interfere with that plan.

A good designer can spot these inconsistencies in complexity and help you build a more consistent set of features and functionality. This is a very important part of setting the right tone and building a good foundation for the project.

Making Things Usable

If we can’t get the value that has been promised quickly and efficiently we will probably get cranky. We are all prepared to work for the value we need, but if confusion is getting in our way it can become very hard to to see this product or service as an ally. Using something can be difficult without damaging perception, but when it gets confusing there has been a huge failure in design.

Getting down into the nitty-gritty details of properly labeling form elements, buttons, icons, headings, micro-copy, error-copy, alert messages, and links is what it takes to make people feel comfortable and confident in their actions. It can take a lot of time, but it’s worth it. Once you’re out of your audience’s way, they will become more effective and give you all the credit.

When you intuitively know how to get somewhere and then instantly know what to do when you get there, a sense of confidence emerges. After you feel as if you’ve have mastered the art of using a website or application it will be nearly impossible for the competition to break through and convince you to switch.

Making Things Desirable

Building something useful is worth celebrating. Making something useful become easy to use is also a huge accomplishment. Unfortunately, there are many companies, teams, and even individuals that can take a project this far. You need to make it feel personal and meaningful to keep your audience engaged.

Desire isn’t just a nice look. Visual appeal will get some temporary attention that will quickly drift into the next distraction. A personality that continuously challenges, excites, and delights the audience is required to make them want to use your product or service. Although most of the design is done at this point, inspiring desire can be the most difficult part.

A great designer can help translate a personality into a look and feel that will reinforce the perceptions you want to build in your audience. This perception will help your content make more sense and give it an extra level of credibility. It can also resonate with people on an even deeper level if it feels similar to how they feel about themselves.

The Multiplier Effect

Something useful is valuable. When it’s easy to use it’s 10 times more valuable. When it’s fun to use it’s another 10 times more valuable. This is the power of good design.

Thoughts on Iterative Design

2011-11-18T07:51:13-05:00

Short and sweet: It’s a waste of time designing complete experiences at the start of a project. From any point, only design what you’re confident will go unchanged. The final design may not reveal itself until you’re close to the end.

There’s a Foundation to Design

Now that design is getting broken down into smaller and smaller specialized skills, it’s important to know how everyone you’re working with is using the term design. Much of the design work may not be done by someone who would call themselves a designer. People are collecting and curating lists of features and functionality (identifying needs), organizing them into sets (information architecture), and even setting up a visual hierarchy (wireframes) without thinking of it as design.

Once the tasks above have been agreed on, it’s not uncommon for people to start mocking up a full visual design. You have everything you need in place, you just have to make it look good. Right?

In a small and highly predictable project, this is probably a safe approach. On more sophisticated projects with larger the teams, there’s a higher chance of more invasive design changes being made again and again. These invasive changes could potentially upset the every part of the design and require addition or removal of features, reorganizing the navigation, and changing the visual hierarchy.

Can you confidently create a full visual design under these circumstances? Is it a good use of time, energy and resources to work on something you know will drastically change? Until the project starts to settle down, it may be prudent to only concentrate on the basics and move into other areas as they solidify in your team.

Visual Design has a Strategic Purpose

There’s one part of design that’s thought of as organizational and structural, and the other part that’s thought of as visual and emotional. This seems to be where art and design collide for a lot people. Although artistic skills are used, this is still an area of the project that strategic choices are made.

Typography can immediately set the tone of a serious, structured, and regimented environment. Or it can be fun, random, and energetic.
Color can immediately set the tone of a seductive, inviting, and warm environment. Or it can be cold, robotic, and impersonal.
Texture can immediately set the tone of a rich, deep, and layered environment. Or it can be simple, flat, and one-dimensional.

These are all choices that create an understanding in the audience. They don’t require creativity. They aren’t magic. They make a big difference.

Getting to a Shared Understanding

A huge part of the design struggle is getting everyone on the same page. Breaking design down into understandable chunks and clarifying their value is a great approach to designing in a team setting. It gives everyone a chance to get involved and better understand what you’re doing and why it’s important.

It may feel slow and cumbersome. Designers want to design! Just remember, if you want people to care about design you need to give them the tools to discuss the problem and solution with you.

Designing for Survival

2011-11-18T07:52:37-05:00

Originally written for Drawar. The contributors area is no longer available. It’s old, but still relevant and interesting!

Lately I’ve been reading survival training books, blogs and just about anything else I can find. Most of the advice feels counterintuitive and strange until you understand the basic mechanics. Then it all comes together and you feel like an idiot for not getting it in the first place.

This is how I usually feel when I learn something new about design…

Now that I’ve built up a vocabulary and basic understanding of survival training, I can’t help but notice several design process similarities. Staying alive in a harsh environment is strangely familiar to completing a design project.

Awareness is Critical

In a survival situation think of the content as your tools while the client and their audience is the environment and weather conditions. It’s incredibly important to understand what’s going on and use everything you can to your advantage.

Respect Your Environment

Accepting that your situation (project) can kill you may open you up to the unwanted facts that can save your life. You should understand that most deaths in the wild happen while doing something routine. Remember that nature (the industry) never gets tired and doesn’t care about your safety.

Stay Calm

Emotions are useful, but should never be allowed to take control. It’s easy to convince yourself that your god (client) is out to prove you wrong, thinks you’re unworthy, or doesn’t care about you. Don’t fall for it—the worst person to argue with is yourself. Keep your focus on reaching the next goal.

A Simple Plan

You need a plan with enough information to avoid being caught by surprise and open enough to adapt as the world changes around you. Spend enough time planning to predict and prevent repeat offenders to your time and safety. Then revise your plan as you approach new obstacles (phases).

Progress is Everything

Now that you have a good idea of what’s going on and what you need to do, making it happen is the obvious next step. Unfortunately, this can be significantly harder than it sounds.

Take Decisive Action

Plans don’t start or finish anything—you do. Check your plan often, make sure you and others are doing the right thing, and ignore everything else. Anything that isn’t helping you survive (hit deadline) shouldn’t be given any of your attention.

Count Your Blessings

Regularly take time to evaluate what you have to work with and what you can do with it. You might be surprised by an idea or tool you can use in a way you never expected. Each time you reach a new obstacle there might be a shift in the story that brings in a previously unseen opportunity.

Play Around

High productivity requires using patterns and rhythm just like any game. Allowing yourself to play games can lead to a new techniques or strategies. Play can also make your journey a little more enjoyable.

Reality Check

The human brain is shockingly efficient at filling in gaps and manufacturing stories to support your guesses and assumptions. Don’t let your imagination hijack your real opportunities to walk away alive.

Find the Beauty

Looking for the beauty can keep you in a positive frame of mind and help you reduce the chances of taking ugly things personally. Once you become defensive you’re energy gets diverted to sabotaging others, and often yourself, as apposed to helping you stay safe and continue making progress.

Believe You’ll Succeed

There are probably going to be times when you’re confronted with the desire to give up. It’s difficult, but these are the times when you can reevaluate and plan most effectively. In these moments you see things for what they really are. Take advantage of this clarity and turn it into something of value.

Let Go of Your Fear of Dying

People often avoid dealing with death (getting fired or losing work) as a defense mechanism. As this conviction gets deeper the symptoms can often be denial and ignorance, which will ultimately cause what you hope to prevent. Confronting death will demonstrate you are aware of what’s going on and that you intend to change or challenge it.

The Final Steps

It’s never done when you think it is. There’s usually a few more steps. Getting to the light at the end of the tunnel (hitting deadline) doesn’t mean you’re safe (getting paid). Don’t drop your defenses just because you can see the finish line.

Celebrate Your Successes

Loosing hope is much easier than you think when the idea of death (a missed deadline) is quickly approaching. When you look back and see success, even small ones during long stretches of suffering, everything seems a little more bearable.

Do Whatever is Necessary

If you’re just waiting to be found, then you’re not really in trouble—you’re just lost. If you believe that and nobody can find you, then you’re going to die. Don’t stop working!

Never Give Up

There is always one more thing you can do. Keep a keen eye on new opportunities, be aware of what’s changing around you, accept what you can’t change, and don’t be ashamed to start the process all over again.

Design in the Open: Groups and Tasks

2012-02-08T21:16:54-05:00

For the last few months I’ve been working on three side-projects. I’m taking two of them very seriously as business opportunities, and using one as a personal experiment. While I’m working on my personal experiment (codename: Wurkin), I’ll try to share my thought process while making any significant changes.

The process of articulating what I’m doing will help me understand it on a deeper level. As a side-effect, I hope it starts great conversations where we can all learn a little more about creating great experiences.

Difficulty Adding Tasks

The last few times I’ve shown the main interface to someone they’ve had difficulty identifying how to add a task. For a task management system, that’s a problem. It’s something you only have to learn once and it’s not a stretch to guess the plus icon is where you do it.

Unfortunately, that part of the application is too critical to let people “just figure it out”. It needs to be punch-in-the-face obvious. Other, less important parts, can be figured out later without making a huge negative impact.

Words as an Interface

I’m a big believer that words are the most important part of an interface. A picture is worth a thousand words, but in an application the need for clarity usually trumps the need for a lot of information. Or, to say it another way:

“Nothing says Send Message, like the words “Send Message”. You can play with envelopes and arrows all you want.” – Des Traynor in The Language of Interfaces

So the knee-jerk reaction is to replace the plus icon with the phrase “add task” and you have instant clarity. Then you also have a button that says the same thing multiple times on the same page. With this approach we’ll have a lot of words on the page that don’t mean anything if you’re not adding a task. Too much noise!

The next thought is to have an “add task” and “add group” button in the header of the page. I’m hoping to keep this incredibly simple, so adding more high-level actions is something I don’t particularly like. It will also force people who add a task to choose a group for it out of context.

In a previous usability test, I noticed people liked to be in the group and see the related tasks before they felt good about adding more. This will probably become another blog post!

Using Get-There Pages

I usually avoid “get-there” pages in applications unless absolutely necessary. Get-there pages are only meant for getting somewhere else. These are some of the most important pages to get right in large content websites, but are evil time-sucking pages while trying to complete a specific task.

For the first time I’m considering a more typical approach that you see in many anything-management systems. The main page is a list of groups/clients/projects/etc that you tap to get to a page where can do something useful.

I hate this… Let’s do something else…

Can Anything be Consolidated?

I noticed that the “add group” page and the “add task” page have identical header areas.

Then I realized the two thought processes around adding things could be consolidated. A single “add” button could take you to a page listing all groups and a way to add groups. From there you can choose a group that will take you to that group of tasks with a way to add more tasks.

This makes the act of adding something the primary purpose and brings more utility to the child pages. We can also use this approach on the main page so people can jump right to the group and add tasks. Plus, since there’s a dedicated add button on the top, the right arrow icon is less critical for people to immediately understand.

Concern

After hitting the add button and seeing a list of groups and a way to add more groups, it may not occur to people that choosing a group will take them to a place where they can add tasks.

I’m liking this approach and feel like people are comfortable enough with get-there pages to know what’s up. We’ll see!

A Different Kind of Portfolio

2011-11-18T07:54:03-05:00

In the most vague possible sense of the word portfolio (collection of stuff to show skills), I believe that every designer should have one. Unfortunately, feel like the solution is still a very unclear and intimidating to a lot of young designers. I’ve tried several different approaches over the last 10 years, including not having one, and hope to bring some clarity to the issue.

Getting Started

One of my favorite Andies (people named Andy) recently posted up a provocative tweet:

“Is amazed by the number of UX people who don’t have a portfolio or other means of showing their work.” – @andybudd

About 5,000,000 tweets later, while trying to clarify what he meant, he said something profound:

“As a side note, good UX portfolios tend to contain examples of design artefacts with explanations and justifications, not pretty pictures.” – @andybudd

This really clarifies, from a seasoned pro, that a portfolio doesn’t need to be just pretty pictures. As obvious as that sounds, it took several years for that to occur to me. Realizing it didn’t need to be just an end result of a compete website was very liberating.

What Can I Show?

I tend to spend most of my time on whiteboards, rough sketches, jumping right into HTML prototypes, and integrating thoughts into live applications. I only work to the point of the team coming to a reasonable expectation, then it’s on the next problem. This doesn’t leave a lot of complete or clean deliverables. This leads me to believe the better UX designer I become, the less chances I’ll have to prove myself through a typical portfolio.

I’m definitely not disagreeing with Andy Budd. He runs a larger company and his clients need deliverables to take to their bosses and coworkers. Andy has a vested interest in his clients being able to use his deliverables as tools to be persuasive within their company. This is a very good reason to give them clean and polished wireframes, personas, mock-ups, etc.

I, typically, don’t have this problem. Most of the artefacts that fall out of my process are only legible to my team. And I’m certainly not proud enough to show them off.

Proving Your Competency

Even with more seasoned pros, like Andy Budd, it can still be difficult to create a portfolio that proves anything. While browsing around his company’s portfolio I see a lot of great looking websites and explanation of what their roles were, and what they executed. I still don’t see much proof of success, after-the-fact statistics, or know what differences it made for the client.

This is leading me to believe a lot of what differentiates the hungry from the fat is almost completely dependent on reputation and integrity. Your portfolio will only show people that you’re competent to do a particular task and your reputation will be what causes others to believe that you’ll be better than the next qualified designer. Competency is pretty low bar, in my opinion.

This low bar of competency is why I took down my portfolio for a couple years. Those ended up being the busiest years of my life. I’ve recently cut back my hours to work on side-projects and added a portfolio only because it was getting so annoying explaining to everyone why a designer doesn’t have a portfolio. Seriously, I was to the point of punching the next person who asked me that question.

Showing How You Think

Most of the value I deliver, in my opinion, is how I identify and approach problems while empathizing with the audience. Also, most of the projects I work on involve other designers and developers which makes me feel uncomfortable implying in any way that I’m responsible for the audience’s experience. The best option I’ve come up with to accommodate this situation is video explanations of how I think and work.

This probably has similar results to speaking engagements (or even blogging) in a smaller way. People can listen (or read) to develop a sense of expertise. Video-casts, podcasts, and blogs could potentially become something that replaces, or at least augments, a traditional portfolio.

In a recent article Playing UX Matchmaker, Andrew Maier builds a good case for designers prioritizing the “why” portion of a project the most. He also links to similar thoughts by Whitney Hess and Jeffery Zeldman.

So Ditch the Portfolio?

In short. No.

During my adventures without a portfolio I bumped into other designers that “specialized” to a point where they felt a portfolio wasn’t necessary. I was always skeptical of their skills until they could really nail a sophisticated interaction problem through conversation. I imagine that’s how a lot of people felt about me.

Or to put it like another one of my favorite Andies:

“Just because some designers lack breadth does NOT mean design is rightly chopped up into arbitrary “disciplines.” Inability != discipline.” – @andyrutledge

Ditching your portfolio too soon might make it hard for people to see your breadth.

Can You Explain Why?

To me, the ultimate goal is explaining why. Showing and demonstrating that something should be a certain way is a great start, but getting people to believe in that approach based on sound logic and reason is where you can really prove yourself as a designer. A decade into my design career, and I still struggle with this.

If you can do that on your site, you’ll be in good shape.

Interpreting the Situation

2011-11-18T07:54:30-05:00

IDEO put together a really interesting toolkit a few years ago. A small piece of it has stuck with me over the years and helped me unravel a lot of personal and professional problems.

First, if you’re interested in reading the whole toolkit, set aside an hour or two. It’s hefty.

Anyways, the piece in particular is a small framework that helps you better understand and appropriately respond to a situation. With just three short questions and taking the time to think through the answers you will avoid making a lot of poor assumptions that will lead to, potentially embarrassing, mistakes. It’s really simple, but having the discipline to do it during a moment of confusion is where it gets difficult.

1. What do you see happening?

Describe only what you see, don’t interpret anything yet.

2. What is the reason for this behavior?

List five different possible interpretations that might explain this person’s behavior.

3. How would you find out the real answer?

List five questions you could ask to determine which interpretation is correct (if any).

When in a hurry…

If you don’t have time to track down the correct interpretation, a good exercise would be to just compare the likelihood (as an educated guess) of each being correct. Even two extremely different interpretations could be equally plausible. This will prevent you from getting too attached to your original interpretation and basing any serious decisions on it.