Just hiring is not nearly enough

I've been thinking how our company has been evolving design-wise. Zemanta has not been the most design-oriented company in the world—we've only had a full time dedicated visual designer for about half a year now. Things have gotten better, but I'm still not happy about how our vision is communicated outward. So I was thinking about finding out what the outside perception of our company as an organization is?

I know! Let's look at what kind of emails we get to our jobs list when we're not publicly hiring. Right, it's 98% engineers and one designer that writes every three months. I'd say this is actually a pretty good measure. By looking at a website and judging it, a designer can pretty much figure out the company culture regarding design. And our shows that we care enough to hire designers, but not give them time to execute their skills to the maximum. You're not sure what I mean. Here is my pain: you can hire a thousand designers, but if you don't account engineering time for making the designer's idea a reality, you're probably wasting money. Either the designers have to code their own stuff, or you have to dedicate time for making those things perfect. It's the little 3px imbalances that completely fuck up the experience.

I love how Branden Kowitz summed the experience up in his great blog post "Why you should move that button 3px to the left"

I really screwed up the first time I tried to keep quality high as we were building features. It always started fine: an engineer and I would agree to a design, I’d send him a few mockups, and the next day he’d show me the progress. What I saw: a sloppy version of my design. Ugh.

So yes, I understand we are on a very tight schedule of shipping software as fast as we can, but I believe it has to be as polished on the outside equally or more than it is on the inside. Every time we account time for inside fixes, we should dedicate time for fixing visual issues too. As Branden proposes, this is the least I want to change in the coming sprints: I want one developer, one day per week. Believe me. I will have a list of things to move for 3px.

Common courtesy

You're walking between the stalls on Ljubljana's amazing Saturday's open vegetable market. There's a big crowd and in a lot of cases you have to move out of the way of faster walking individuals. I tend to always be the first to move because I'm never in a hurry and it feels great to let people be on their way. I feel as if I'm allowing them to move on with their day, when I could be obstructing them (as a lot of people sometimes obstruct me). Meanwhile I set this as a standard for myself. But it seems to be awfully high.

I do other small things that make me feel better about myself. At the coffee shop, I always clean after myself and bring the cups down with me to save a trip for the people who work there. Makes me feel great.

I'll always move out of the way first when meeting another cyclist in a narrow section. There's more small pointless things I can't remember right now, but the point is they make me feel good. Where it gets awkward is when I start expecting same from everyone else. 

Recently my flatmate got a girlfriend and she's been staying at our place a lot. It's been incredibly hard for me to adapt to a new person living here. I found a million little things that made me so mad, simply because I expected someone to live up to my expectations.

For example, I only couchsurfed once (hosted way more) and when I did, I made sure that when I was staying at the house I was nearly invisible and when I was out, my shit was out of the way.   I wanted to make sure I wasn't obstructing the people living there. Just because this is the minimum acceptable practice for me, I felt incredibly weird finding my flatmate's girlfriend's shampoo in the place where I normally put mine. I still think it's not nice. But if I try to switch mental models a bit, I see how it can be perfectly normal to people to do that.

It's just that I won't think much of them because they don't have the perspective of how their actions might affect other people. And I think this is a huge, huge problem on a societal level. It's like the loud table in the otherwise peaceful bar that is laughing so loud.

Your existence affects other people in so many ways you can't imagine, while I don't want you to go batshit crazy trying to think of every single possible way, I want you to give a second worth of thought when you do something that might relate to anything other but you. It'll make us all better.

Death by usertesting

The ten minutes of video I watch after submitting something new we made to usertesting.com are some of the most painful & joyful minutes of my being. In the ten minutes, hope and frustration and anger and aspiration and regret and sorrow all mix in a smoothie of death of spirit. We think, plan, invent, think over, iterate, repeat, talk to our friends, dream, wake up with the problem in mind, poke at it from all directions and in the end the user thinks what we do is some kind of blogging platform. What. The. Fuck. Open Trello, prepare new stories, poke at the dead body again and implement the new flow and pray that you've thought the right thoughts when you were planning the interaction. Repeat, repeat, wake up at night. Fix more bumps.

Now it's week three and you realize what you've been doing doesn't matter since the people you're testing with are not the people who you want to use your goddamn "blogging platform". You've wasted weeks of work polishing a turd no one wants. Back to the drawing board.

Now it's month two and your product is adopted well by exactly the people you want in your shitty Google Docs spreadsheet titled "user_signups". It's bringing in money. The company is a success. You feel great. Your soul resembles a well managed Trello board.

And now it's one of those days when you question your being more than you question anything and if that's not enough you come across this quote:

“Some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems. Obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention.” —Jack Schulze

You can't agree more and you apply this idea to your own work and life and you realize you've done nothing. You contribute to nothing but spam, advertising, money schemes. You solved problems, beautiful, intriguing problems, but this only soothes the soul for about 90% of the month. This doesn't get you through the year. Your soul feels like a corrupted git repository.

So what do you do? It's simple. Day by day, you live in denial by writing a blog that makes you feel more special because you're trying to be honest about your work. You read about visionary designers that invent cultural artifacts of tomorrow and you're inspired to place pieces of these ideas reimagined and implement them on a micro-level. And for the time being, it works. Your soul feels like an organized .psd.

The first of the Classics

Awhile ago Jernej said Bine and him had an idea about doing a series of rides that would "emulate" the real, long classic rides of the giants in cycling. Just a few days later I helped build a Tumblr site and we announced the events soon after. The local cycling scene really needed a push since there is a number of us who do ride semi-regularly, but there hasn't been a chance yet to do a proper group ride. Until today. 

Ten of us gathered at Stozice Stadion at 9am and took off to do the first ride in the series, "Strade Bianche". We gained one more rider after a few meters and lost one after the first 30km. The terrain wasn't hard but it wasn't easy either. The weather snuggled somewhere between dark cloudy and occasionally sunny fluctuating somewhere between 0 and 5 degrees. It felt great to ride in a group of friends since so many of us had only followed each other's rides online. Recently I learned this kind of meeting is called "Dunbarrasment", coined by Matt Jones at Berg. He says:

Dunbarrasment is what I call the emerging condition of meeting people in real-life who know all about you – but you’ve never met before.

I believe this series of events is a much needed outcome of the time we spend on the web. Our actions transcend into the real and we're able to create a community based on shared views and interests. And even if it's just a cycling group, it's people coming together, and that's empowering.