This is specifically true when it comes to organizing an agile and productive design team. In the design world we are usually tasked with faced paced deliverables, limited staff, and the expectation of flawless quality.

So how do we achieve success in such an unsteady environment?

The solution is simple, we take a page out of history and do as the great explorers who settled the west; we circle the wagons. By creating an organization that is based upon establishing a fixed exterior with a flexible core, a design organization can tackle any amount of work with a consistent degree of quality and success.

This type of structure will work with any type of design organization, from a small design boutique to an internal corporate design studio. So let’s break down the organization chart.

The exterior of the structure is the Business/Clients. This is origination of all the inflowing tasks and deliverables.  By aligning dedicated leads, one visual and on user experience, to each of these areas, the team creates direct points of contacts for all related projects. The leads thus become trusted partners with the business/clients as well as broaden their subject knowledge over time to become experts.  Within the leads lies a dedicated team of designers. This is the point in which the structure becomes very versatile. In the instance where one area draws more need than the others, the center resources can shift priority leaving the dedicated leads to manage the daily flow, and the greater team to tackle the larger projects in a quick and responsive fashion.

At the core of a structured team is the need for a Project Management component. This is essentially the “traffic cop” for all design. The Project Management is responsible for helping to identify and assemble the teams based on scale and priority. This role is critical in helping the team rally around large asks while maintaining the consistent support to every other project.

The effectiveness of this structure will enable a team to be agile at times of need while remaining consistent day-to-day. There is also a level of grouped knowledge that can be shared, which will enable more defined global deliverables and shared lesions learned that can be applied to a multitude of projects.

Although the team is still encompassed by a single design lead, the individual tasks are all lead by dedicated resources. This creates a unified team and places creative emphasis on the team. It allows for less bottlenecks in approvals and quality control by empowering a strong team.

Although this structure was conceived for a small design team, it has great potential across many different organizations including development, sales, marketing, etc.

Share/Bookmark

For those of you not so familiar with the illusive SEO, let me give a quick highlight to this astonishing and mysterious creature we all seem to be chasing.

SEO is…

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web page (such as a blog) from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) which may deal with paid inclusion. The theory is that the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.” ¹

So what’s the problem?

The problem stems from creating a balance in content saturation and user experience. The fine line of treating users poorly in order to super-serve the SEO algorithms into believing your site is the best place in the universe for whatever information you are providing. SEO offers many techniques that suggest placement and density of content as a means of gaining value in a search algorithm. There is often times where these suggestions are counter productive to the users experience of gathering information or absorbing your content in a consumable way.

For example, using labels to over index on terms becomes redundant to users. If a person is on a site about a specific topic, they don’t expect every label on the page to reiterate the topic. Also placing body copy that is filled with topic density or high search phrase combination maybe valuable to the SEO effect, yet you could be placing erroneous information before critical information a user is trying to find.

So what’s the solution?

There is more to a successful web site than driving in new users, you have to keep them there and you have to get them to come back. SEO is a great means of attracting new people to your content or products, but the balance in content and experience should be considered. Using the proper SEO techniques for giving information the appropriate hierarchy in your site structure is important. Placing the proper information in the most relevant positions is also critical to a successful SEO strategy. Be sure to follow the guidelines for Headline tags and the amount of links you offer per page. There is nothing worse than being penalized for over exaggeration of your content.

In the end, user experience can be enhance by quality SEO methods, but the content itself should supersede these “rules” in the best interest of a user. Search engines have become very powerful tools for increasing engagement and spreading the word, yet in the end it comes down to offering a good experience that keeps users coming back. This type of experience makes people talk about your sites, which is more powerful than any search.

Share/Bookmark

BEST DESIGN OF A WEBSITE, OVER 1 MILLION MONTHLY VISITORS
DailyFinance, Aol.

For a complete list of winners visit Editor & Publisher.

This is the first design award for the news and information sites at AOL and I am very happy at how the site came together. My role as the creative director for DailyFinance consisted of concepting the entire user experience and art directing the final design with my team of three talented visual designers. I am pleased to have won this award for DailyFinance and it goes to show how the brand work and innovative thinking on DailyFinance have come to a more global recognition.

Share/Bookmark

I was tasked with reinventing this useful site with a more up-to-date aesthetic and of course more engaging user experience. Alongside an enthusiastic and driven editorial team, we were able to take some great new editorial concepts and completely turn AOL Small Business into something new and refreshing. The goal of establishing core content areas that were focused, led to an interface that highlighted these areas as well as capturing a users attention to entice them to dive deeper.

Some of the key special features, like the Board of Directors with big names like of Richard Branson of Virgin, Rob Dyrdek and Bob Parsons of GoDaddy, as well as the original Ask Rod video franchise, were highlighted to users as new and innovative content in the space.

Alongside a talented set of designers we established a brand identity that remained simple yet allowed for a great continuous expression throughout the site. As a result the site has reinvigorated its core audience as well as begun attracting a new audience.

Keep a look out for evolutions and expansions on this site as it grows. Check out AOL Small Business today. http://smallbusiness.aol.com/

Share/Bookmark

As a experience designer, the desire to push preconceptions and influence change is always a driving factor. As the experience creative lead and user interface designer / information architect for DailyFinance, I was tasked with creating a new experience for a web site that had a trusted user base and long-time dedicated followers or the original AOL Money & Finance. The culmination of strong curated editorial content with active market data needed to sit well together with an equal emphasis on each other.

I approached the site, which was accustomed to the typical “blog” format, as a true editorial platform in need of displaying content in a strong editorial context. This was then enhanced with strong presence of data supporting the daily financial content.

As AOL Money & Finance the site served up two independent displays, one for content and one for securities data; the greatest challenge was to unify these areas and weave them together for a seamless approach to information across the board.

The resulting product combined a sophisticated web application of securities data, interactive charting and intense structured data, with a robust daily source of financial content along side each other. User can easily migrate through the site and consume every bit of information in this comprehensive one-stop web site.

The site which launched February 10, 2009 was recently nominated for an EPpy for Best Design of a Web Site with over 1 million unique monthly visitors. This site has proven to be a great win for usabilty, data and content.

You can visit DailyFinance at www.dailyfinance.com

Share/Bookmark

A persona is the development of an archetypal user type. Personas identify a users motivations, expectations and goals behind their expected behavior. This fictitious user is brought to life by giving them a name, personality and often a photo.

There are key areas to focus on when developing personas. These areas will help define the characteristics and personality of the user:

• Persona Identification
• User Name
• Age
• Education
• Income
• Biography
• User Goals (based upon your need for the persona)
• Align Development Features (based upon your need for the persona)
• Define a Scenario (based upon your need for the persona)

Download the User Persona Templte – Editable PDF

The use of a persona template enables user interface designers to develop consistent and usable personas. Each project may require specific data you want to leverage, so any template may need to be adjusted based upon a specific project.

The use of personas offers a multitude of benefits. Personas enable you to personalize your user and focus on their needs instead of creating arbitrary goals based upon convenience. By thinking about the needs of a specific user, designers are better equipped to solve realistic problems. This information is valuable in every stage of a project from the initial brainstorming, to defining a specific use case and finally defining the product features.

Personas are also critical in helping to prevent “self referential design.” This method of designing using your own mental models skews the reality of a true target audience, and many times leads to a lack of understanding of a true user / user group.

Personas offer valuable benefits such as:

• Creating a specific and consistent understanding of a user / user group across design and development teams.
• Enable guided solutions based on realistic expectations of a user.
• Creating a human “face” in need of having realistic problems solved.

Although they do require up-front research and an investment of time, user personas provide a clear guide for the duration of a project. They align entire teams to the same goals and enable a focused approach to a project from brainstorming to completion.

Share/Bookmark

As a designer this saying should resonate within you every time you create anything. Everything has details, and every detail can be designed.

I spotted a great example of this when i was in NYC buying some peanuts for a late night snack. I picked up a package that was functional and simple, yet one thing struck me as great design. One of the most important details on a package is the barcode. The barcode is the means to purchase and track an item, however, it’s usually an after-thought, placed in a position of commonality to suffice the utilitarian need for it to be present on a package. So why not design it?

The details of the barcode became the focus of the packaging design. The barcode was translated into a simplified skyline of New York City. Functional and well designed.

Of course, I purchased the peanuts. Design everything.

Share/Bookmark

The iPhone / iPod Touch has been at the forefront of the mobile application revolution, although, currently being greatly challenged with Android, so it was the most likely choice to introduce DailyFinance. The strategy behind the application was two fold. Build an amazing financial application for traders and market followers, as well build a new brand via an application and viral marketing.

The complex interface design started out of a ground-roots project with fellow UI Designer Jeff Mielke and myself. The challenge was creating detailed data displays with complex charting capabilities, based upon the offerings of the existing Aol Money & Finance web application. There was also a need to integrate the Portfolio capabilities of the web site allowing users to set things up from home and access them when mobile.

Following Jeff’s initial concept lead, we were able to fully concept and create a solid user interface with a signature user experience that set the financial application space on its edge. Since the release, I have been successfully managing and building upon the original application with iterative new releases including a fully Chinese language version.

Even if you are not a finance follower, the elegance of the functionality and the visual appeal of the presentation will be something to check out. Download the DailyFinance iPhone application today!

“The amount of information available in DailyFinance is simply staggering. However, what makes DailyFinance amazing is the organized way in which that information is presented, and the interface for navigating through the sea of data. ” – MacWorld 06/09/2009

Share/Bookmark

Share/Bookmark

GraySparks will become an all-inclusive home for great user centered design content as it grows. Feel free to request topics of interest and templates you feel would benefit a larger audience of user interface designers.

Become a fan today http://www.facebook.com/pages/FracturedMind/219264893528?ref=ts

Share/Bookmark