What is a Brand?

The human element makes the effect on ones “gut” much more pronounced. I might love the look of the store, but if the salesperson was rude to me, I’m unlikely to come back, yet if I had issues with the look of a store, but had a great experience from the staff, I am more apt to look past my initial concerns the next time. As people’s lives move increasingly online these interactive touch points have expanded to include websites, online chat, mobile apps, and social media. These new mediums all involve interactions, but in ways that are often less human.

Personality
In a world full of boring and cold interactions with websites and mobile apps a little personality goes a long way. Unless you are striving for a brand of, “boring and efficient” you might want to think a bit more about the personality of your sites and apps. What human qualities would you like to associate with your brand? Is your brand personality fun, adventurous, playful, smart, welcoming, crude? Whatever it may be, think about how you can incorporate this into your sites and apps.

Interactions that Feel Good
Beyond the visual design and the voice carried by the copyrighting is the realm of interaction design. Just as a person’s facial expressions, body language, tone, and inflections color the words we hear, the feel of the interactions within a digital interface affect  communication as well. Are transitions smooth or jerky? Do touch interactions feel natural or clunky? Are movements in the interface efficient or bouncy and fun? All of these design decisions effect the personality of the interface and thus the brand. In the Clear App below, the feel of the interactions plays a big role in the success of the app.

Do Your Interactive Assets Need to be Shown the Door?
If an employee was rude, difficult to talk to, and frustrating to customers would they keep their job very long? Unless you’re catering to customers who like being treated badly, not likely. Yet companies deliver interactive experiences every day that meet this exact description and think it’s acceptable.Consumers are coming to expect more from their digital experiences. It’s not enough to be functional with enough effort. If interacting with your brand online is frustrating or even uninteresting, there will be a competitor who sees this opportunity and creates an experience that is engaging and delights the user. The Zappos App is a great example of a delightful experience that further builds the Zappos brand.

UX Can Define the Brand
Interactive experiences in the digital space are increasingly defining brands. Virtually all touch points are digital for companies such as Foursquare, Facebook, and YouTube. The personality and feel of the user experience defines how people feel about them, and thus defines their brand. Whether these feelings are positive or negative they are then magnified by social media. Where years ago a bad customer experience might have spread to a few people, today that experience can spread to millions. So go beyond functionality and features and think about how your user experiences feel and the personality they convey. Are they in line with the brand you want to have?

Because our developers have been knee-deep in their version control system of Git and GitHub for sometime, they have suggested (or begged, nicely) for us to get our act together in design and implement some form of version control of our own. We explored a number of options, including Sparkleshare, Layer Vault, Subversion, Dropbox, and GitHub. Sparkleshare and Layervault are both good solutions to design-specific concerns around versioning. In fact, they also work pretty well among teams. The rest of the solutions were really created with developers and text files in mind, not the complex 20MB binary files that come out of Illustrator on any given day. This means that branching and merging are a lot less important to us… though it’s a very interesting proposition for someone to solve.

Given our needs, we settled on setting up an Subversion server, and using the MacOS Subversion client, Cornerstone. We came to this conclusion by considering the following:

Local storage space
Design files can be big. In my workflow, I like having local copies of the files that I need, and I’d prefer to not have many unnecessary files on my machine at any time (otherwise it leads to my files getting disorganized, and then I don’t put them where they belong, other designers can’t find them when I’m on vacation in Guadaloupe, I can’t help them… you know, the usual) This concept is something that Subversion handles very well. Layer Vault also seems to have some semblance of this, as I can be added to projects, but deleting files from my local machine and trying to add them back later doesn’t seem to be a smooth process.

Granularity
To add to the I-only-want-files-I-need conversation, I really like being able to get only the project that I need, or the folder within the project that I need right now, so I don’t have to download that large raw-video we saved up to that client folder last year. Subversion does this. As far as my limited research goes, the others do not (it’s not clear to me whether Dropbox for Business does this… anyone know?).

File Types
After spending some time with Layer Vault, there are a number of features that I loved. Unfortunately, one of the biggest drawbacks for me was the inability to have some pretty standard document types. Yes, they cover the design files, as well the general filetypes we use as deliverables. However, sometimes clients need a letterhead template created for them in Word or we’ll take notes in a plain text file. These files are not supported by Filevault, but they are by the other items.

Teamwork
Hoboy, this one is the doozy, and I think that this is one of the most important things outside of saving versions of our work for our office. We’d like to think we’re really good at putting our files on a shared server for everyone to access, but to be honest, we suck at it. This leads to some difficulty when we might be working remotely, oWe want to collaborate as a design team, and without access to each other’s files, it’s nigh impossible. All of our options here do a better job than what we currently have. Filevault, Sparkleshare, and Dropbox all do this syncing upon saving files. Git and Subversion require a manual action of committing, I see this as a benefit, but I think some could see this as a drawback.

Familiarity
Admittedly, my familiarity in working with another design team that used Subversion as their version control system plays a big role in why we went with this method. All things being equal, another option may have won out for us.

Portability
We’re new to this. We understand that what works for the goose (me) doesn’t always work for the gander (the rest of the office). We wanted to make sure that the solution we chose had the ability to be portable to another solution if this one doesn’t work out.

Price
Price matters. We already have some internal servers set up at the office, adding an additional subversion server was not horribly difficult or pricy aside from some extra hardware costs for the additional storage space. Setting up the server was also easy for our team (thanks, Bryce!). There’s a cost associated with the software client we use, but that’s relatively risk-free with a fairly long trial period. For the other services, we’d be paying for either the storage or the service on a monthly basis, so the internal server ended up having the lowest barrier for entry, and if it doesn’t work out, we have other options.

With all of this in mind, we have a ways to go before everyone is comfortable using the Subversion system; It’s all pretty new to our design workflow. At least in my experience, once it became a part of my daily routine, it served me very well. If it works out for us, chances are you won’t hear much of another peep. If it doesn’t, we’ll let you know where we go from here.

Many sucessful entrepreneurs have laser-like focus on their businesses, but in Tony’s case he is succeeding by focusing on Maximum Happiness and Community Engagement. In his presentation to our EO crew he mentioned his two important returns: Return on Community (ROC) and Return on Luck (ROL). Success in both of those areas will drive a long-term Return on Investment (ROI).

The Downtown Project and ROC
Having read “Delivering Happiness,” I was pretty familiar with Tony’s philosophies on corporate culture and community, but seeing it first-hand was impressive. Zappos’ culture has been covered in many other places but the community efforts of Tony Hsieh haven’t been as well publicized. The Downtown Project is Tony’s plan to revitalize Downtown Las Vegas. This year Zappos will be relocating their corporate offices in Henderson, NV, to the old Las Vegas City Hall building that is currently being renovated and remodeled. The surrounding area around Fremont street is being redeveloped to be an extension of the Zappos campus mixed with urban redevelopment projects. Tony has personally invested over $300 million of his own money on this project.

Below is the conceptual image of Container Park. It’s part of the Downtown Project. It’s a mixed-use development project that is part retail space, entertainment, restaurants, playground and train station…. meets Burning Man.

Container Park concept on East Fremont in Las Vegas

Aside from the Container Park, the Downtown Project is also about providing the life-blood of the community: events and projects like /USR/LIB and First Friday. If Boulder wasn’t such a kick-ass community already, I’d consider relocating Imulus to Vegas. For those who are looking to jumpstart their tech business, it’s worth looking into the Vegas Tech Fund. It’s a fund focusing on seed-stage funding for companies looking to solve huge problems.

The ideas for many of the projects have originated from the local community and employees at Zappos. Below is a photo from one of the walls in Tony’s apartment. Anything is game from pet sitting, to outdoor boxing, to a distillery. Each aspect of the Downtown Project is a purposeful attempt to create a vibrant downtown experience and creative culture. It’s Tony’s hope that the eclectic mix of people and interest will create “collisions.”

Post-it ideas for The Downtown Project from inside Tony’s apartment

Return on Luck: Collisions

A “collision” is any encounter with another person: bumping shoulders, grabbing coffee, taking walks, etc. Think about the potential offspring of ideas generated from breeding TED speakers, entrepreneurs, slam poets and education reformers. All of this is what Tony defines as “collisions.” It is purposely accelerating serendipity, or as he called it, Return on Luck. ROL is the value of a resident that is out in the community. Check out the slide below from Tony’s presentation.

Tony Hsieh’s mathematics of collisions

Tony admitted, “I have no idea what that (collisionable hours) even means,” but the concept is clear. We all have more to gain by interaction and connection with each other than staying siloed in our homes and offices.

Zappos and the work Tony is leading up in East Fremont is impressive. This is clearly going to be a fun experiment to watch over the next few years. If Tony can replicate the Zappos success story at a city / community level, then it’s going to be a model others will surely follow.

We are looking for entrepreneurs with businesses doing between $1 and $10 million in revenue. It’s an arbitrary range but it helps ensure that each forum is a group of peers. Here is what’s on the calendar for the next few weeks.

April 26th – Forum Test Drive
12:30 till 2:30 @ the Imulus office
We’re creating a forum-like environment to present a taster of what EO is like.

April 30th – Jared Polis
12:00 till 1:00 in Boulder
A small gathering of less than 50 people to have lunch with Rep. Polis.

May 20th – Boulder Forum #2 Launch
2 till 5:30 @ the Imulus office
We’re assembling the second group of entrepreneurs and limiting the group size to 8 people. It’s the best way to try out EO without committing to membership right away.

May 23rd – Forum Training
8 am till 4pm in Boulder
For potential members that feel they are ready to commit to EO and go through the required training.

We have a great group of entrepreneurs ready to go but we aren’t at critical mass just yet. If you are interested please hit me up at george.morris [ at ] imulus.com or over the Twitters at gmorris

Two years ago next month we embarked on a mission to improve the structure and organization of our front-end assets. This meant standardizing on app, lib and vendor folders for both CSS and JavaScript, and called for a means of tying everything together. Coyote was born.

What started as a home-grown experiment and, admittedly, the progeny of Not Invented Here syndrome, Coyote evolved over the course of a year and a half until it was a critical piece of our build process. It handled compiling, concatenating and compressing all of our JavaScript, CoffeeScript, CSS, LESS and Sass files, as well as watching and recompiling on the fly. We wrote it in Ruby because, as a language, it seemed like a perfect fit: a great balance of dynamic scripting and object-orientation, cross-platform, and solid libraries.

As the volume and variety of our front-end assets grew, so did Coyote’s responsibilities. It got more polished, but it also got slower. We introduced some clever in-process caching that helped speed while watching, but we soon realized we were paying for the start-up cost of Ruby itself on cold builds.

Purely out of curiosity, I prototyped a version of Coyote written in JavaScript. Having written and re-written Coyote several times, I knew the domain concepts inside and out, so converting the Ruby version to JavaScript was quick and easy. I was astonished at how much faster it was. I shared it with the team and we decided to move forward with a fully compatible rewrite of Coyote in JavaScript. Banshee was born.

Here’s a speed comparison of Banshee vs. Coyote building the JS assets for the same project:

$ time coyote assets/javascripts/application.coffee:js/application.js
06:55:13 Saved bundle to js/application.js [71 files] [0.0025 sec]
coyote 8.16s user 1.21s system 100% cpu 9.350 total

$ time banshee assets/javascripts/application.coffee:js/application.js
06:55:24 Saved bundle to js/application.js [71 files] [741KB]
banshee 0.72s user 0.06s system 100% cpu 0.786 total

9.350 seconds down to 0.786 seconds. That’s nearly a 12x improvement.

Beyond just pure speed, the rewrite has paid off in other areas as well. Given the CoffeeScript and LESS compilers are themselves written in JavaScript, depending on those libraries directly makes integration a joy. Making it play nice cross-platform is also easier, too, mostly because Node ships with a file-watching mechanism.

Banshee has been running solid for us for a few months now and has completely replaced Coyote as our front-end asset build tool. We plan to continue improving it, making it faster and easier to use, and we’ll be officially retiring Coyote in the coming weeks.

Someone will have to explain to me why, when communication is so important in today’s business life climate, people don’t utilize every opportunity to refine and improve their writing. I look at this practice no differently than any other activity.

Want to be great at coding? Practice writing good code.
Want to be good at giving public speeches? Practice talking in front of people.
Want to throw a tight spiral with a football? Throw a football 10,000 times.

What is it about a small screen or chat window that makes people communicate worse? I’m not saying every IM people send should be written like a thesis or revised ten times. But I am saying it should make sense, be concise, and grammatically correct — especially in regard to syntax. To this day I try to write everything as cleanly as possible. If I spell something wrong I force myself to rewrite it, if I miss a comma I picture how confusing it is for the other person and I work to avoid that mistake next time. It is possible to do these things while still having a conversational tone.

I believe this practice will make anyone better at writing: everyday emails will be on-point, meeting notes more insightful, and handwritten thank-yous crisp and meaningful.

For the sake of communication, I hope everyone steps up their grammar game.

• The economy will rise and fall, so aim to keep the company cash accounts at 40% of yearly revenue.
• Engage on a deeper level with everyone you come in contact with. Treat them with respect, appreciation and communicate with openness, sincerity and honesty.
• Bring ideas to the table, champion them and stand up for what you know to be right, backing that up with data and research. Our questions should say more about us than the answers we give.
• Creativity comes from inspiration, weirdness, letting loose and having a good time. Always encourage creativity. Invite everyone to participate in our weirdness.
• Our ideal rate of growth aims for a production team that is between 60% to 70% billable, 15% internally focused and 15% given for downtime.
• Happy employees and happy clients make for better experiences for all. When surveying this, never be satisfied with a score lower than an A.
• Keep admin staff to less than 20% of the company. Always do more with less.
• Interactions should be about the people and the experiences. Amazingly designed technology should fade to the background, and go unnoticed.
• Only align ourselves with companies and partners that have similar beliefs.

The purpose of brand guidelines is to maintain a consistent voice, personality, and overall look and feel for all marketing materials that represent the company. Problem is, if the company is too controlling about what all materials should look like, then designs become simple, boring and redundant. In order to execute a successful design that adheres to brand guidelines, you need three things:

1. Complete understanding of clear, well thought-out brand guidelines. If your client does not have brand guidelines established or is willing to refresh them, take the time to construct them with your client. What are your clients objectives? How do they want the public to see them as a company (professional and highly competent, or maybe passionate and approachable)? What makes them standout from their competitors? Once these questions are answered, come up with moodboards that set the tone for the overall look and feel of their site. Your final approved moodboard can serve as brand guidelines your client can use for future marketing materials
2. A client who has complete understanding of well thought-out brand guidelines. This step is one of the more crucial and possibly one of the most ignored. If your client or your client’s main point of contact doesn’t fully understand their brand guidelines, or worse, doesn’t know they exist, you end up designing for a moving target. Take the time to go through the brand guidelines with your client, ask questions, clarify concerns. How old are the brand guidelines? Are they strictly followed in your current marketing material? Has your company evolved but your brand guidelines have not? Not only will this establish that you and your client are on common ground, you can also work out any outdated or poorly designed kinks in the brand guidelines.
3. The power to establish yourself as the alpha designer. We all need to admit that we as designers have an ego. It’s actually a good thing in a lot of respects. We take pride in our work, we hone our design and sweat over it and nurture it till we are satisfied. Yes, we must put our ego aside when taking critique, but critique from another designer should be that outside eye that fixes your design onto the right track. Critique should help polish, refine, or if necessary, stop the designer from going down a dead end road by telling them to start over. Critique should not be the other designers personal preference or instilling their own style on the design. Unfortunately this type of critique often comes from the internal designer. Sometimes internal designers don’t appreciate the design reins being taken from their hands and given to an outside designer they don’t know. Too often what happens is they interject themselves into the project with conflicting design directions. This either leads to a confused patchwork design or the internal designer selling their own mockups that do not meet objectives to their team. The best way to combat this is either stipulate before the project starts that the internal designer may not be involved in the process at all, or bringing in the internal designer early in the project. If the designer feels heard and understood, they will have more trust in you and will feel like they had some voice in the final product.

First, as a tablet, it looks like a pretty nice piece of hardware. It is however a bit bulky compared to the competition because of the inclusion of the kickstand, and possibly some beefier hardware to run the Windows OS. This makes it heavier and harder to manipulate in your hands. There is also the issue of the lack of apps when compared to Android and iOS. This gap will likely narrow over time, but is an issue currently.

Second, as a laptop, it appears to work fairly well when placed on a table. However it is implied in the name, “laptop” that it works on your lap. The Surface is a bit challenged here because the keyboard is not rigid and the kickstand can collapse on you if you’re not careful.

Finally, there’s the Windows RT OS with the Metro interface. Personally I think the Metro interface is a great design concept and is a very original solution from Microsoft that doesn’t try to copy Apple, as Google did with Android. It also seems to scale pretty well to the tablet, from the phone. Time will tell, but I believe the issue that Microsoft will encounter is that their core market is resistant to change. If they were up for something new, they probably already went out and bought an iPad. The people who haven’t are the more entrenched Windows users, who like it when things stay the same. The Windows 8 interface is a big departure for Microsoft, so it will take time for users to get used to the idea of doing things differently.

Overall I think the Surface will not be very successful. The compromises of trying to be everything to everybody will be to much to support. It will be a mediocre tablet, and a bad laptop. If that’s what I wanted there are plenty of those on the market for a lot less money and they actually have apps to use.

Our Why

By clearly defining our Why it makes it much easier to make strategic decisions. The Why acts as a lens to view the world through. In any difficult decision we simply need to ask, “Does this fit with our Why?”

We believe in humanizing experiences.

Tagline: Making Digital Human

How

The second step is How we achieve our Why. There could be a thousand ways to achieve the why, but these are our hows. These are the principles and methods that we follow. They are not the exact things we do, just how we do them.

• By creating collaborative, engaging and personal client relationships.
• By testing and quantifying results.
• By having a strong focus on the user.
• By utilize our experience and expertise to guide clients to better solutions.
• By creating solutions that don’t just work, they bring joy to the user.
• By empathizing with our clients and their users.
• By showing pride in worksmanship
• By building a company that’s built to last, not to be acquired.
• By being creative, geeky, and willing to take calculated risks.
• By doing more with less.
• By encouraging creativity and self expression.
• By always looking for a better way.

What

The third step is What we do. These are the specific and tangible things that we do and say that are visible to the world.

• We create digital interfaces that build businesses and brands for our clients.
• We redesign websites
• We create applications
• We build interfaces
• We build mobile apps
• We create responsive sites
• We test user behavior
• We integrate with current and legacy systems
• We express our ideas in blog posts, speaking engagements and community events
• We create tools for community use
• We create products that improve Imulus and have a proven revenue model
• We partner with companies that align with our values and beliefs