mobile design

This episode features an interview with Alexie Harper and Ori Ratner. Alexie is the Chief Product Officer and Ori is the Chief Technology Officer at the Quantic School of Business and Technology. And they are also both Co-Founders. In this episode, Alexie and Ori talk about keys to designing an engaging UX, challenging learners with real-world scenarios, and how to leave students feeling like they’ve made meaningful progress in their studies.

Quotes

*”At the time the buzzword was ‘The Attention Economy.’ When we were identifying what was missing in education, we quickly zeroed in on the fact that motivation is a big part of it. And to solve that motivation problem, you're competing with non-education products. In the early days, when folks would ask us about our competitors, we would joke that Facebook and Twitter were our primary competitors, not the schools. So we just recognized that mobile is where students were living at that point. And so we had to be there, too.” - Ori Ratner

*”When you're designing an [educational] experience, you have to get out of the learner's way as much as possible. And anything you do that adds a little bit of cognitive load or unnecessary cognitive load, the learners feel it, and you'll see that in the churn.” - Ori Ratner

*”We create standard learning lessons that walk the learners through the material. They're very interactive experiences, so every eight seconds, the students should be interacting with the software in some way. And then we quiz them on the material we want them to learn at the end. And the lessons are designed to be story-based, focusing on what does it really look like to be working as a data analyst or someone in finance?” - Alexie Harper

Time Stamps

*[0:08] The Case of the Move to Mobile

*[0:38] Introducing Alexie Harper and Ori Ratner, Chief Product Officer and Chief Technology Officer at the Quantic School of Business and Technology

*[8:53] Evidence #1: Format of material is outdated

*[20:40] Evidence #2: Visual design is clunky and cumbersome

*[27:05] Evidence #3: No incentive to motivate users

*[37:27] Debrief

*[38:30] HGS Pub

Bio

Alexie Harper is the Chief Product Officer and Ori Ratner is the Chief Technology Officer at the Quantic School of Business and Technology. They are also both Co-Founders. Alexie was previously Director of R&D and a senior researcher at Rosetta Stone, and a travel writer and editor for Let's Go Inc. And Ori was previously a director of software development and the software architect at Rosetta Stone.

Thank you to our friends

This podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.

Links:

Connect with Alexie on LinkedIn

Connect with Ori on LinkedIn

Check out the Quantic School of Business and Technology

Connect with Lyssa on LinkedIn

Check out HGS

Harris rejoins the team and we talk to the Infinite Red designers about the challenges and aspects of designing for React Native apps.

This episode brought to you by Infinite Red! Infinite Red is a premier React Native design and development agency located in the USA. With five years of React Native experience and deep roots in the React Native community (hosts of Chain React and the React Native Newsletter), Infinite Red is the best choice for your next React Native app.

Helpful Links:

1. Sketch
2. A great blog post from InVision on design systems

Connect With Us!

1. React Native Radio: @ReactNativeRdio
2. Infinite Red Designers: Twitter, Dribbble, Instagram
3. Harris - @nomadicspoon
4. Jamon - @jamonholmgren
5. Jon Major - @jonmajorc
6. Robin - @robin_heinze

So, you’re a great designer - but do you know how to listen, drive a conversation, and build consensus with your clients, company, or teams? Ryan Rumsey, the Director of Experience Design at Electronic Arts IT, hops in the Funsize studio to share his knowledge and experiences in persuasion and building consensus with stakeholders in the enterprise world.

1:00
Ryan discussing his role as Director of Experience Design at Electronic Arts IT and his expertise in Enterprise User Experience Design. He also gives us an overview of some of the things he did in his previous role at Apple.

3:15
Apple’s hush hush culture. It’s easy designing software for Apple employees because everyone at Apple only uses Apple products.

5:40
Rick talks about his experience working on enterprise design projects. Ryan discusses some of the dynamics of working in an enterprise environment and the art of selling your design work to your internal stakeholders.

7:00
We discuss Ryan’s new article “Influence and Design Success - The art of letting others have your way”. As a design leader, it’s rare to be able to take credit for the pixel level work. Your job is to motivate and inspire your team to push the envelope and produce great outcomes. Sometimes when you know you have the right answer you just can’t push it. You have to be the muse and let other believe the idea was theirs. Ryan gives us an example about a project where he struggled with the stakeholder. It’s hard to tell a client no or that they are wrong, especially when there’s data to support it.

9:10
Ryan teaches us an old improv technique from his former life as a professional actor called “Yes, and?”. The scenario is that you accept what anyone said and simply add to it so you can help drive a conversation. When a stakeholder provides a comment in the heat of the moment that you don’t agree with or know is wrong, it’s always best to let them know that you heard them and that you will take some time to consider it. When you come back to the table, remind them of the conversation they brought up and elaborate on how it inspired you to think about the problem deeper and in devising the solution to meet the need. “With your inspiration I was able to create this!”

12:00
It’s not a design exercise, it’s about understanding your team or stakeholders personality or character so you can can build consensus and get designs approved.

14:30
We aren’t using these tactics for bad or for personal best interests. It’s for the good of helping our clients and stakeholders achieve desired business outcomes and ultimately success with products people love.

“Knowing the users and having empathy for them isn’t always going to
resonate with them.”

16:00
Defending your work properly. Many of the people that tell you “no” or that you're wrong are highly successful individuals that get shit done. If you can help them get a win, then all of a sudden they will become a massive advocate. Your gut reaction is many times right but don’t just react or build. Take time to process. Learn to shut up and let things go. Let people know you heard and listened and that you’ll consider it. Instead of design lingo learn to use persuasive business words that business people understand.

18:30
How design teams can leverage these principles to build vision, consensus, plans, and designs that everyone can believe in. Use design thinking practices! Use principles and values to ensure you’re on the same page. If you don’t have any structure or framework it can be hard to know where to apply your creativity, and that makes for very dispersed shotgun approaches - and can end up focusing on things that actually might not need creativity. Hence, design language and UI frameworks. Creativity lives within structure. When things stop working, it’s time to look at your principles.

“Principles are uncovered, not necessarily developed.”

23:00
Rick and Anthony discuss how we onboard new clients to introduce our new Client Partners to Funsize, our principles, process, and our company culture.

28:00
We couldn’t find that Staind video so please tweet us if you find it!

29:00
A sidebar conversation reminiscing about a punk rock era.

31:00
Hustle Podcast Season 1 conclusion and announcement of Season 2.

Links

• Ryan Rumsey's Website
• Ryan Rumsey's Twitter

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Brandon Breitenbach is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pare Booking, a kick ass digital product that’s changing the way musicians and artists book shows and get paid. Recently, Brandon stopped by the studio while visiting Funsize to discuss the history of our working relationship, how we made decisions, the process and tools we used and what the ideal client and design agency relationship can look and feel like.

2:00
Introduction to the Pare Booking's product and user experience. Pare Booking modernizes the process for musicians and artists to book shows, manage contracts, and get paid.

4:00
Brandon’s share's his music and music booking industry background.

4:47
How Funsize met Pare Booking. Brandon and Anthony talk about the history of how Pare Booking and Funsize found each other and how quickly we were able to get started.

6:25
Why Pare Booking chose to work with Funsize. Brandon talks about what it feels like to hire a design and development vendors. Joel Beukelman recommended they work with Funsize and Brandon trusted his friend and moved forward. You can usually tell at the first conversation if there’s a match between a client and an agency. You gotta follow your gut!

8:20
Phi talks about how awesome it is to be held accountable but also to have the breathing room and trust to move forward in making design decisions.

9:00
Brandon discusses his experience working relationship with Funsize. Phi shares how we used Sketch and Marvel, two completely new tools on this project, to maximize our effort and time, and how we crafted a unique design process to be able to design the MVP app in a very short period of time.

10:50
Clients are subject matter experts. Sometimes designers don’t always know “what’s best”.

11:40
A dream client is one that that has good taste.

12:30
We discuss conceptual design, atomic design, and how they were applied in the Pare Booking project. For Pare Booking, Funsize presented multiple concepts as screen designs supplemented with mood boards/style tiles to expand on the concepts voice, feel, and visual language. This is a good way to explore and create the personality of the brand or product, outside of just focusing on what it can look like. For Pare, this lets them see the scope of the “why” behind each concept.

15:19
“We didn’t have a brand or identity when we started this project...”

16:09
Brandon mentioned that 3 concepts was just the right amount. If we had delivered any more it would have been overwhelming for him. Brandon was playing golf (and left at the 16th hole!) when he reviewed our concepts for the first time.

17:10
Brandon and Anthony talk about what’s it’s like working together in an agile design engagement. What worked was the amount of communication and transparency Pare and Funsize had throughout the project. This resulted in a high amount of trust. Both companies did their part in getting each other what the other needed to be successful.

19:45
How Funsize uses [Pivotal Tracker to manage design sprints and transparency with our team, clients, and stakeholders. Keeping your team's best interest in mind while estimating design sprint stories will help create the best work possible. Pare has now adopted Pivotal Tracker as their internal product management tool. We recall [Hustle Season 1, Episode 7: "Death to Time Tracking", where we talked about how Funsize stopped time tracking and how Pivotal Tracker has been critical in allowing the client and agency relationship to flourish.

22:50
Pare Booking was the first project in which Funsize used Sketch 100% through the duration of the project from wireframes to finished design. Phi talks about the advantages of Sketch and how it helped meet our project objectives and save time.

25:00
Whether you use Photoshop or Sketch, having a system in place to dynamically design empowers the designer to make a change in the overall design without having to worry about accumulating unnecessary design debt.

26:19
“I will use Funsize as long as I possibly can.”

26:30
Pare’s iPhone app is launching in the Apple App store between August and September 2015. If you’re a touring musician, artist, or speaker, please check out www.parebooking.com and sign up for early access!

27:00
Check out Funsize's Pare Booking Dribble Collection to see what the Pare Booking design will look like. Also feel free to demo the Pare Marvel Prototype for a hands-on experience with the app's design and user experience.

27:40
Rick announces the wrap-up of Season 1 of the Hustle Podcast and what to expect in the upcoming second season of the podcast.

Links

• Pare Booking's Web Site
• Pare Booking's Twitter
• Funsize's Pare Booking Dribbble Collection
• Funsize's Clickable Marvel Prototype
• Sketch for Screen Designers
• Photoshop now has multiple canvases!
• Marvel App for Prototyping
• Pivotal Tracker
• Thanks Joel Beukelman!

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Show Notes:

• 0:55 Rick is back from paternity leave. His new son is awesome.
• 1:11 Joining us on this episode is the Senior Director of Design at Jawbone, friend of Funsize, and a hugely inspirational designer, Mr. Peter Merholz.
• 1:30 Anthony chronicles Peter's background with the international consulting firm, Adaptive Path, which is perhaps best known for championing "User Experience."
• 1:50 Fun Peter Merholz facts: Peter hired Funsize while at Groupon and was Funsize's first client. Thanks, Peter! He also coined the term 'blog'.
• 3:44 Fun fact about the new Up4 from Jawbone is that it can do NFC payments!
• 4:00 The theme for this episode was conceived following Peter's blog post "There's no such thing as UX design."
• 5:20 Don Norman, credited with the coining the term User Experience in the early 90s, created the User Experience Architect's office at Apple.
• 6:25 Initially, Adaptive Path considered themselves a user experience consultancy because no one else was talking about user experience at the time. The term "design" was an avoided term because designers were not involved in product strategy, often reduced to pixel pushers and production workers.
• 8:40 "User experience is an outcome, not a practice." - Peter Merholz. There are many contributing factors to good or bad user experience, but design is only one part of the whole.
• 9:32 User experience designers were actually interaction designers, information architects, or other designers cloaking themselves with the phrase because it sounded good.
• 11:11 Picking apart the concept of the "User Experience Designer." A litmus test for the viability of the "User Experience Designer" career path: How would one grow as a UX designer? What's that path or evolution look like?
• 14:20 The thing that we call "User Experience design" may fit in two buckets: 1) Product Management & 2) Design Execution.
• 15:00 A historic lapse in balanced Product Management may have generated "User Experience Design."
• 17:00 Product designers began to create a set of user research & persona development practices in order to ensure product strategy would not forget to acknowledge the user.
• 18:20 Strategically-minded designers can lead products as well as strategically-minded engineers or business persons.
• 21:55 If we do call "User Experience Designer" a profession, it would be best compared to a film director.
• 25:00 Anyone who tells you they've figured out how the formula for the perfect product team is lying to you.
• 25:50 Peter eventually left consulting because he found the relationship they had with clients wasn't leveraging his agency enough impact on final products. Peter effortlessly flips the interview around on Funsize to discuss how we ensure impact with clients and products.
• 28:00 Funsize discusses our team structures and project pacing.
• 29:25 We share about a tactical program we run called Special Ops, in which designers may do work that can help steer the product in the direction we believe it should go. Special Ops often strengthens our impact within the client organization.
• 32:00 We discuss pairing design teams with clients and the importance spreading out designer's velocity across more than one project at a time. No designer works alone!
• 33:45 We talk about the problems with in-house designers at product companies and how to avoid driving designers insane.
• 35:00 Peter discusses tactical hiring decisions and team formation at Groupon, to which he gives credit for stronger impact of designers and decisions.
• 38:30 We recall our discussion with our friends at Adobe, where we learned that there's two designers to 60+ engineers at Photoshop.
• 39:00 Peter recalls hiring outside design support while at Groupon.
• 42:15 We note how, for consultancies, it's becoming just as important to help the people and companies you work with hiring internal teams as it is to help them with needed design work.
• 43:00 Design teams in an organization are very different from other types of teams, and they shouldn't be structured or managed as though they were just another flavor of engineer, lest you want frustrated designers.
• 45:45 We're excited to meet up at Front Conference in Utah, coming up this summer.

###Links:

• There's no such thing as UX design" by Peter Merholz
• Peter on Twitter
• Peter's Blog

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Material Design

• Elevation
• Animations
• Adaptive Color Bar in chrome

Lock screen notifications

• Compared to iOS notifications

Android Wear

• Google Glass
• Watches
• Interactions with other devices and wearables
• favorite features

Conclusion

• Now's a good time to switch to Android if you've been thinking about
  making the switch to iOS.

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• 00:00 Introduction
• 02:15 The Designer Developer Relationship Today
• 06:51 Both Sides Of The Fence
• 12:29 Code & Color: An Example Of The Disconnect
• 15:37 Build An Experience Together, Not Apart
• 20:17 Tool Time: Design Tools For Developement
• 22:07 Geography Matters
• 25:01 Style Guide Problems And Some Solutions
• 27:52 Front End Developers For Native, Is There Such A Thing?
• 33:00 Changes In The Baseline
• 35:20 More On The Dirt

The Dirt Links

• The Dirt Twitter: @thedirtshow
• Tim Twitter: @csskarma
• Mark Twitter: @markgrambau
• Fresh Tilled Soil

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• 0:00 Intro and News
• 11:31 Getting Into The flow
• 22.41 Design Tips and Resources
• 29:53 Sketch and The Missing Link
• 43:15 A Word On Organization

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This episode covers the process product designers go through from getting a product started to scoping it, designing it, and managing it. Here's the outline:

• 00:00 News
• 12:00 Overview
• 19:11 Product strategy and UX
• 28:10 Conceptual design and visual design
• 36:14 Design management
• 39:23 Product mangagement vs project management
• 48:52 Conclusion and what's next for this podcast

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Pricing is a tricky subject. So many of us have found our way along in the dark, without much help. In episode 3, we discuss pricing models as well as our own approach. We also talk about things we've learned from some very smart people who are experts on the subject.

Show Notes

• 00:46 Yes, I Love Technology: News about new tech and how it relates
  to the mobiles.
• 11:51 Pricing: Not first date conversation.
• 13:41 Fixed Pricing
• 16:25 Value Based Pricing
• 26:08 Hourly Rate
• 35:10 Retainer Based Pricing 37:33 Pricing Resources 42:00 Funsize's Approach To Pricing
• 50:24 Common Pricing Questions

Links

• Value Pricing with Dan Mall and Jason Blumer on the businessology
  show podcast
• Design is a Job by Mike Monteiro
• Q: How much does a mobile app cost? A: About as much as a car
• The Harvest Guide to Pricing by Harvest

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The Evolution of a Mobile Product Designer

• Jobs pre-iPhone era
• The product designer craze
• Dribbble web to ui evolution

A Product Designer Today

• It is a war finding good product designers
• "Acqu-hire" a product designer
• Finding your way into product design in the small start-up world
• Mobile Product Designers translate business goals into interactive designs
• A little about working in an agile environment. "Show early and often".
• The Might "M.V.P.", iteration on actual user feedback
• Agile products evolve with the times
• UX design is interaction design, User Experience is the end product

Careers in Product Design

• Type of jobs: What kind of design do you want to do? Native or responsive, in-house or client services?
• What Funsize looks for in a Product Designer
• Take risks and learn how fail the right way.

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