1. Give us a bit of background on who you are, and what you do at Imulus.
Hello world! I am the Graphic Designer at Imulus. I get to create all day long, drink coffee, speak with my Bosnian accent, and sometimes play Halo. You should hear my non-sense jokes…yet everyone finds a way to cry their tears out. So yes, I was born in Bosnia and moved to Colorado in 1995. I graduated with a Fine Arts degree in Multimedia from University of Colorado at Denver and love the work that I get to do everyday. I am a graphic designer because I am a problem-solver, thinker, maker, and believe that the world always needs progress.

2. Describe the most exciting thing you think is going on today in our industry (service, trend, idea, etc).
Web apps, iPhone, Twitter, social media.

3. Who is your favorite designer, and why?
I don’t usually favor anything. It’s just a thing I have, but I do have a few designers that I admire. They are all great designers with passion, ambition, and dedication for the love of their work. Ellen Lupton, Stefan Sagmeister, , Paul Rand, Hillman Curtis, Milton Glaser. That’s my short list.

4. If you could change one thing about people’s attitude towards the online world what would it be?
I would ask them to dump their IE 6 browser and move on to a modern browser. Life at that point would be so much easier for designers and developers.

5. What’s the number one design mistake you see made now days?
I would say bad typographic choices. Also, a redesign of some brand logos that look worse than what they already were.

6. If you were forced to carry a medieval weapon with you at all times what would it be?
A dagger.

7. If you were allowed to only use one computer program the rest of your life what would it be?
For the rest of my life…I feel violated! I think it would be a browser. Definitely not IE. I would prefer Safari / Firefox. With a browser I can do anything and I am not completely restricted. I can e-mail, design, develop, and communicate.

8. Regarding fruit. What is your favorite kind?
Strawberry and Figs

9. What song or artist have you been listening to the most recently?
James Blunt and Letu Stuke <--bosnian group

10. Where do you look in your life to get design inspiration?
Everything around me is design. To be a great designer it’s important to observe the outside world, away from my desk and a computer. When I am aware of my surroundings and observations that’s when I get the inspiration. On the other hand, I also get inspired with the talented team of people at Imulus, turning pages of annuals, reading essays on graphic design, collecting ideas from compelling work.

11. If Imulus were a person, what kind of personality would (s)he have?
If Imulus were a person…The type of personality that Imulus would have–well see answer to question 14.

12. You have to choose between being blinded or losing both arms, what would you choose?
Ouch! Hopefully this loss of my abilities would not include torture. I wouldn’t want to lose either, but I would rather choose to lose both of my arms rather than being blind. Since my profession is heavily based on visual, I guess I can learn my way around things. Type & move the mouse around with my feet and toes.

13. What’s your most used keyboard shortcut when working?
Command+Z to undo. Command+S to save.

14. Thanks for your time, to finish can you give me one word to describe each of your Imulus co-workers?
Scott – understanding
George – determined
John – passionate
Steph – wonderful
Mario – intriguing
Kat – amusing
Bruce – ambitious
Taylor – kind
Corey – entertaining

As I wrote these words down, one word is not enough, but rather all these words and many more could describe each one of us and that’s what really makes us great. We are one great team, but above all we are a family.

Card sorting is a user-centered design method for defining the information architecture of a Web site. It is a method used by IA professionals and Web designers everywhere. The basics involve bringing in a small group of target users of the site and giving them index cards with the names of content pages written on them. The participants are then asked to divide the cards into appropriate groups of related content that make sense to them. In an open card sort there are no predefined headings for the groups and the participants are asked to name the groups. In a closed sort, the participants are given group names and asked to place the content under those predefined headings. That is the basic structure of a card sort. If you want more information this site has a very extensive description. After you have collected the data from all the users then comes the process of compiling and analyzing the data to arrive at a IA that agrees with what most users would expect, based on the results of the card sorts.

There are a number of advantages to card sorts:

• They are simple and easy to do
• Cheap
• Provide a lot of data

There are also some disadvantages:

• Results can vary widely
• It can be difficult to make the data useful in complex sites
• They don’t take user tasks into account
• They put users in an unnatural scenario

While card sorts are an industry standard and very well accepted I question their usefulness for the same reason that all focus group testing should be questioned. It puts users in an unnatural situation. You aren’t learning what a real user would do, or if a real user would find what they are looking for, you are learning how a person who is given a pile of cards would organize them. These are two very different things and certainly calls into question the usefulness of the data.

I remember a talk I once attended where a former Sapient team member that had worked on the United Airlines Web site back during the dot-com boom had spent a ton of time and a ton of United’s money doing lots of focus group tests to assure that users could find and book flights as easily as possible. The result was a design that lasted only a few months before they had to redesign it based on real user data.

While I believe in some circumstances cards sorts and focus groups can be useful, they are not a silver bullet to perfect usability. There is much more to be gained from careful analysis of real world user data and making adjustments in IA based on this data. While card sorts can provide a starting point, it has to be seen as just that, not the final.

Give us a brief introduction to what you do here at Imulus, and maybe why you are fondly referred to as ‘The crusher of hopes and dreams’
I am one of the owners and the Creative Director. I work with clients to solve their design, branding, marketing, and interface problems in creative ways. Internally I oversee the design team and push them to create better solutions. That’s where the “crusher” nickname came from. Sometimes one of our designers will think they have a great solution, and it is my role to say, “But did you think about this? What if the user does that?” And in doing so I “crush their hopes and dreams.”

You are a co-founder of Imulus. Since Imulus has been around for awhile and is doing great, what advice would you give to would-be entrepreneurs out there?
I really think you need to create a business out of doing what you love to do. If you are just in it to make money you’re going to be unhappy and burn out quickly. Starting a business takes a lot of dedication and time, so if you aren’t spending all those hours doing something you enjoy, it’s not worth it.

What one/few things would you boil down Imulus’ success to?
I think the three owners skills are a great fit for the work that we do and our personalities mix very well. While we have different strengths and weaknesses we all share a desire to constantly improve and are always asking, “How can we do that better?”

What do you like most about your job?
I love solving problems and I get to do that on a daily basis. I also really enjoy everyone I work with. Well . . . almost everyone ; )

Least?
Lack of time is always a challenge. There are so many cool ideas that would be great to pursue, but we can only do so much.

What is your dream car?
Do I have to pick just one? I think my current favorite car has to be the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione It is such an incredible mix of classic sports car lines with modern details. It is truly a piece of automotive art.

What do you think is your most valuable skill?
When you are designing you really need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the target audience. I feel like I do a good job of looking at the design through their eyes and not getting to emotionally attached to anything if it doesn’t seem to work from the target users point of view.

You are quiet a lot. Tell us what is going on in Scott’s head when he is quiet.
You know, it’s the quiet ones you have to worry about. Actually I have always been one to think things through before I form or state an opinion. I believe that words are very powerful and that they should be carefully chosen if you care about their outcome.

If someone offered to buy Imulus tomorrow for 59.2 billion dollars tomorrow and you decided to sell, what would you do for the rest of your life?
See question 6. After buying that and a few other cars I think I would play for a few years. Travel the world, race cars, run, learn to scuba dive, play tennis etc. Once I got that out of my system I would figure out what kind of business I would like to start.

Who is the most influential person on your work and why?
I don’t know if I can pick a single person, but I would say that the Bauhaus movement and the Swiss Style have had the most influence on my as a designer. I have always felt that the simplest solutions are always the best and that the best designs get out of the users way and let them what they want.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

You used to be anti-twitter, and then you hopped on the bandwagon. Thoughts on tweeting after being through both phases?
I was very hesitant to get involved with Twitter because I am not what you would call a “self promoter.” I figure no one cares what I am doing on a daily basis. I think Twitter has an amazing ability to allow someone to broadcast to a worldwide audience very easily. For business it offers a great way for a company to broadcast directly to their customers and also for customers to interact with a brand. For me, I get a lot of inspiration from seeing what Lance Armstrong and Bernard Legat did for their workout today. I will sometimes post my workouts as well. Maybe someone will get inspiration from me, who knows.

Have any good designer jokes?
1st Designer: “Wow, you always have so many fonts, where do you get them from?”

2nd Designer: “Oh they come from Monaco, Geneva, Chicago, New York… I get them delivered at various Times throughout the day…”

1st Designer: “By who?”

2nd Designer: “A Courier!”

Your favorite piece of art
I don’t have a particular favorite, but I would love to have a Rothko on my wall.

If someone told you that you had to author a book and really be into it or the world would blow up, what would you write about?
I would write a book about the best running trails and the best driving roads around the world. It would obviously take a lot of research ; )

If you could choose to be in a movie, which movie would it be and who character would you be?
James bond in Dr. No

Since November we’ve had well over 400 users interested in the Stacks beta program. Imulus isn’t exactly a well-known interactive agency, yet we’ve been able to generate a good amount of interest in little time and with little effort. The interest in Stacks is primarily generated from our success with our Support Details product.

Support Detail is a free web-tech support application that we launched in April of 2009. It was a tool that sat on our back-burner for over 6 years, but it took less then 1 week to develop. We launched it to solve a recurring problem that we had with clients not technically familiar enough to give us the browser’s technical specifications. Within weeks of it’s launch, Support Details was featured in LifeHacker, SitePoint, StumbleUpon and MaximumPC. That early success drove visitor count up to 40k per month. With that much traffic coming to the site we decided to advertise our own products using Support Details as the advertising outlet. Our logic, if you like what we’ve done with Support Details, then maybe you’ll like our other products. Hopefully Stacks is equally as exciting as Support Details. We believe it is and we’ll work hard keep it useful without becoming cumbersome.

We’ve snowballed the success of one product into another. This method can be seen all over the web. Most notably by 37Signals. They’ve managed to build BaseCamp, snowball success into Ruby on Rails, then to the SVN Blog, then to the Job Board, etc… Now they have an entire suite of products, most of which are very successful. They are selling by snowballing their success from product to product. This creates a community of supporters and users that grow with you over time.

I don’t think this methodology is difficult to replicate. Focus on solving a problem within your industry. It doesn’t need to be sexy, or feature rich. Stop yourself the next time you get frustrated with an aspect of your daily routine. Think about an easy way to solve that problem then execute on it. Just don’t wait 6 years to pull the trigger.

Recently here at Imulus we had a production server go down, meaning all of our clients’ websites on that box were unreachable.  Thankfully, we had the proper precautions taken and backups were restored in hours.  Yet it was a very stressful time for all of us and it led me to wonder what else was out there and how much better we could have responded in an emergency.

After a bit of research I found Microsoft’s Web Deployment Tool, also sometimes referred to as MSDeploy.  Of course it only applies to Windows Servers with IIS, so if you are looking for another OS/web server solution this article is not for you.

I was somewhat skeptical at first because, well, I’m skeptical of everything.  They even call me the skeptic here at work.  It also seemed a lot of people that were writing about it were fanboys and it was a very new product (I started testing when this product was still a release candidate).  After reading about it thought I should give it a shot since it sounded very powerful.  Here is a short version of what we were looking for:

• Able to take all manual steps out of recovery
• Backup all files and code that made up the website
• Include all settings, SSL Certificates, Bindings etc.

After playing with it and doing some tests I was very impressed.  The tool does deployment/backups per site, so if you host multiple sites on a server and want to customize depending on site you are able to do that.  You can view code dependencies, backup databases – do almost anything you want.  You can choose to use the GUI from IIS Manager or go command line.  You can choose to export the package to another server immediately or create a folder with an archive of all necessary files for restoration later.

If you are interested in using it for deploying, go get it,  check out this overview page or visit their forums.

If you are interested in seeing how we created a fully automated solution, read on.

Since we wanted something that had little or no human interaction, and therefore not error prone with a high degree of reliability, I came up with a solution that took all human involvement out of the backup and recovery process.  The solution we came up with is broken into 3 parts.

1) Backups of all sites in IIS needs to occur in case of a server failure.

2) Replicate backups to other available live servers as well as offsite automatically.

3) The ability to recover our site(s) needs to be easily and quickly available with fewest manual steps as possible.

To address all these I wrote a small, simple program to help the Web Deployment Tool with this process.  The program has two purposes and can easily be scheduled through the task manager in order to create a repetitive and up-to-date solution.  The program writes two files.  The first .bat file should be run nightly, or however often you want, and contains commands for msdeploy that create an archive backup for each site in IIS.  The second bat file contains all commands for msdeploy to install/restore each website that has been archived.  This second file should only be run if a server goes down and you need to restore sites on your standby server.

To take care of our first step we must schedule an execution of our custom application to generate our archival and restore bat files.  We must also schedule an execution of the archival .bat file our program generates to be run afterwards.  The bat file execution results in the creation of an archive for each site.

Now that all sites are backed up with step #1, we need to take care of step #2.  To do this, just use your favorite sync tool to copy all necessary files to other server(s) and offsite.  If you don’t know what I am talking about, check out Super Flexible File Synchronizer or Microsoft’s Sync Toy.  Using a program to move files on an automatic basis allows us to be ready to execute step three if we ever need to.

Step #3 is the only manual step in this whole process and is quite easy.  First, bind the new server you are recovering to with all necessary IPs, or do whatever network voodoo you need to.  Secondly, run the recovery .bat file.  The file will install your site(s), application pool, certs and restore all settings.  One click recovery?  Yes please!

If you think this code could be used in your environment you may grab a generic version here – I hope it helps.  Obviously, I make no warranty about any of this process or code.  If you do use the code, please read the readme as well as the code comments.  The code is a Visual Studio 2008 C# solution licensed under GPL.  Use your heads and do your testing people!

If you come up with anything different feel free to comment and let us know how you have improved upon the process.  If you modify the code please send me what you have done.  Enjoy!