Make Money Online

Well, so there’s a book that I recommend. It’s by are we live right now? Are we doing it? We’re always doing it. That’s not a euphemism. We’re just talking. It’s just. You’re all disgusting! Disgusting! Get off my podcast, listener. Go home, unless you are home, in which case go outside.

It’s been a week and I’ve missed it. Make money online withdrawal. To answer your question, yes, this is absolutely live right now. I put it on Periscope. I don’t know what is Periscope anyway. I just joked up. I’m not sure. I think it’s submersible. I don’t know.

UI slash UX, what the heck should you read? I’m changing this. This actually said what the heck you should you read, but it’s censored. It put the second the second letter was an asterisk. What the fuck should you read? All right. This is Make Money Online. There are no rules. So UI and UX are actually different disciplines, and I can’t believe I actually had to say that. User interface is what the interface is, and user experience is more like what you think of when you think of the word product. It’s the actual functionality of the thing, the layout and the behavior of the thing. UI is more like graphic design and layout, and UX is more like I asked a user to do this. And then it was a miserable failure, and now we have to do a different thing. I’m more of a UX designer. I figure out layout and behavior of software for a living. So, with that in mind, here’s what the fuck you should read. We’re going to start from incredibly imposing tome and work our way down to a nice digestible thing. If you want to take a class in user experience design and know basically everything that there is to know, the best resource for that is called Designing for the Digital Age by Kim Goodwin. She was a designer at Cooper. I’m about to recommend one of Alan Cooper’s books. And they’re a UX-focused firm in San Francisco. And this book is over a thousand pages long. It is An entire master class in user experience design. And when you’re done, you’ll know what the fuck to do. It is an astonishing achievement. It’s really, really comprehensive. It summarizes a great deal. If you want a little bit more digestible and opinionated, Alan Cooper himself wrote a book called About Face. And it’s like been get the latest edition. There’s been like eight editions of it. It’s been out forever. He invented a little thing called Visual Basic, and it’s very much more the like neck beardy side of things with that. If you want to go deep on individual topics, your best option is to go to the library of a publisher called Rosenfeld Media. They make user experience design books that are basically the authoritative text on X. So if you want 300 pages on how to run a card sorting exercise, Go there and buy card sorting. I have met the author of card sorting in New Zealand. She’s great. If you want to learn a really, really great book on web form design that’s literally how to make your forms less Byzantine and Miserable, Luke Robluski wrote a book called Web form design. It’s about web form design. And it’s like 300-page deep dive on that. After that, Don’t Make Me Think is one of the classic test texts, and it’s basically about usability testing. It’s written by Steve Krug. In I think like 1998 or 1999, it’s a very Web 1. 0 book. It’s been updated. And then he wrote a second book called Rocket Surgery Made Easy. And all of those books are exceptional. They’re really, really great. So that’s worth keeping in mind as far as an authoritative text. Beyond that, this one curly-haired Shmo wrote a book called Cadence and Slaying that I guess is vaguely useful. The end

I’m going to get really like touchy-feely when I answer this question. It’s a fantastic question, because where to start is difficult, right? There is a There’s an acronym that UX designers started coming up with in like, oh gosh, like the 80s, like as long as personal computing has existed basically, called DTDT. Which stands for defining the damn thing, people have a very difficult job of defining what user experience design is, right? So But you can do a very good job defining the activities of user experience design. But what’s the Venn diagram that overlaps that versus user interface design versus product versus graphic design, whatever? It doesn’t fucking matter. It doesn’t. What matters is the skills that you’re able to bring your practice and the value that they bring to an organization. So I think that the one-on-one thing is Understand what the component parts are of design as a broad practice. And the thinking that informs all of those things, and the process that underpins all of those things. And that, if you have no idea about design, gives you a better sense of how to communicate with other designers. think like a designer and develop a framework for carving out your own design practice. Because my design practice is not all of design, right? And I call myself a designer. But I do very, very little typography. I do very, very little illustration. Hardly any, really. I don’t do a whole lot of extremely high fidelity mock-ups. And you have to convey that to your clients. I have to be like, no, I don’t do these things. Here’s what I do. And they’re like, so what is it that you do here? In that little skitten office space, right? Like you don’t, it’s hard to understand that. But if you have a very clear understanding of what what lights your fire when it comes to design, then you can go deeper on these other topics. Figure that out as quickly as humanly possible. That is the 200 level thing, right? So you’re kind of auditing what the landscape is, the texture is of being a designer. And then you dive into the things that make more sense for you. So maybe you are really big on ethnography. Good on you. I’m not. I glossed it horribly in my stupid book. But there are a billion resources specifically about that topic that will be tremendously valuable for you. So I think that answers the 100 and 200 levels.

Can I reframe the question and see if I got it right? Yeah, yeah, please. It it sounds to me more like it’s like, how do I promote the value of design in an organization? Or am I just too surface on it? No, I think that’s a fine way to take it. Okay. So I mean, there’s this is a big axe that I’ve been grinding lately, but like how you prove the economic impact of design? Well, measurement is a big one. You have a before and an after and a design decision. Okay, the design decision is altering the course of a product. Maybe the product didn’t exist before. Well, measure what it’s performing like, right? So that seems to make a lot of sense. And designers are very allergic to that, like culturally. They don’t want to They don’t want to mix their profession with the bean counters, even though someone else is usually doing that for them. Right, so my big recommendation is like how you promote the economic impact of design is Show some case studies that promote the economic impact of design. They’re all over the internet. Any conversion-based blog will talk to you about them. Jared Spool is a terrific resource about all of this. If you want to go to uie. com, I believe, it’s user interface engineering. He has been around since the Crimean War. like the first one. And he is very, very good at promoting these case studies. Baymart Institute is very good at promoting the case studies of better quality design. And I think recognizing in your mindset that design has a corresponding business ramification. Because designers hate telling you that. They all came out of art school and they don’t want to bother. I’m tarring with a really wide brush right now, so I’m sorry if you don’t fall into this bucket, dear designer listener. But most of them that I talk to, they don’t bother controlling the conversation around that. And you always have an opportunity to do that before it is wrested away from you.

Yeah. I mean, you’re more likely to get fired, right? Like, they’re buying you, right? They’re paying for you as a designer. And what do you think you’re so special that they get to pay for you for free? Like, no. Like this isn’t the NEA. You know? You’re not getting a grant from somebody. You’re getting hired for a job. And so you’re bringing more value to the organization than you take out. Right. Own that conversation. Prove your seat. I have to do it as a consultant every day.

I mean, 95% of the time it’s revenue, right? Like, that’s the closer you can get to the money, the better. Like, with A-B testing, I’m very, very close to the money, and I’m measuring revenue as a key metric, and that allows me to promote my value very well in an organization. And it also gives me one goal to focus on. So that’s really, really nice. And you can do that as a designer. Throw some annotations in Google Analytics around your revenue goals. And when you launch a new design, put an annotation in and say this happened. And if it step functions up, congratulations, you won. But I’ll give one example. So in 2013, right before DraftRevise launched, I ran a project For an arts nonprofit called New Music USA. They’re a modern classical, basically, nonprofit, and they give out a couple million in grants every year. They’re great. It was one of my favorite projects I’ve ever done. And they wanted to go from a literal paper-based grant-making application system to like you like mailed in a demo tape like that level. To something that was on the Internet, and you put together a project, and so the system was meant to allow Composers and musicians to submit a project, claim that they were collaborators on that project, and then it allowed peers or people at the organization to Judge those projects, rate those projects, collaborate among them, determine where the money should go and how much should go, award that money, and then promote that to the public and celebrate it to say that these projects got this grant. So a lot of user roles and a lot of interesting data cases to be keeping in mind, which is just catnip for Nick D. Like I love thinking about weird Thorny web application-y type stuff, which I don’t talk about very often in my design practice anymore, but still catnip for me, always great. So I did this, and well, the goal isn’t We make more money off of that. They’re a nonprofit. They’re giving away money. The goal is to get rid of money. It’s the opposite of what I normally do. But we had applications go up by 500%. Seems like a good KPI. Seems like a nice win. Pretty decent, right? So if you 5X the visibility that you have among other composers and the ability for more composers to apply. That means theoretically you’re able to choose from a larger pool of people that are submitting all of this. You’re probably going to get better quality projects to fund. And from what I know over the past four years that they’ve had this system, that has been very much the case, and they’ve been very, very pleased with it. Or at least the guy who I keep going out with every time I find myself in New York seems to enjoy it. So, like, you know, he hasn’t stopped talking to me yet.

Yeah, I think figuring out what the activities are in design is what matters. Not like, what is design? Because you get these books. Okay, I’m going to cite a few and I’m going to throw them under the bus, and I’m so sorry because I love these people and I. I love their work. But there’s one book that tries to indicate what design is in a very lofty way. And the first line is: what is design? It moves. And I looked at that line and I was like, that doesn’t tell me anything. What? Is it about like an interaction? Is it about like a. And I thought it was just this very lofty speech, and it was very confusing to me. Second thing: there’s a book by Tim Brown, who’s the CEO of Ideo. Ideo is the company that put me on the road to becoming a designer, right? Tim Brown is their CEO, but he wrote a book called Thinking by Design or Change by Design, something like that. And he outlined, he coined the term design thinking to describe basically ideos process. And I don’t anyone can have design thinking. I know this because I pull clients in the room who are weird SQL engineers, and if you had somebody post-it notes, and markers and have them play for a little while in a focused and directed way, they’re gonna love it and do really interesting things. I firmly believe that because I’ve seen it dozens of times in my career. And so I don’t think that it’s this like. This rarefied or even specific discipline. I can have, you know, I can take literally anyone walking in front of my apartment right now. and ask them to do a design exercise. In fact, I would love to do that. Just like haul someone off the street and pay them for their time and just cover a wall with post-it notes. I believe anyone, anyone can do it. And so, towards that end, you are simultaneously promoting yourself as an expert in the practice of doing it because you’re a little bit of an educator around it, but also democratizing the process. I want more people to be designers. I want more people to understand what the fuck it is I do. Or at least to commit acts of design and recognize that they’re doing so for at least part of their living, right? So many people do design without realizing it. Well, probably most people listening in this podcast have done design without realizing it. If you’ve ever thrown up a marketing page using the default WordPress template, you’ve done design. Congratulations.

Yeah, you’re making a decision that affects communication. And I don’t, and if you are, you can’t. Even a non-decision is still a decision, right? Even deciding to do Microsoft Courier in Microsoft Word. And then print it out and thumbtack it to a corkboard. That is a design decision. Changing the font to Calibri is a design decision. Hiring me is a design decision. You know, like. And people don’t cop to that. They don’t cop to the broadness of it. And I think that’s what kind of throws me about it. Does that make sense?

I’ll talk about it really subjectively because I don’t think the industry is in agreement about it at all. But what usually happens among like the more I mean, I come from a background like Ideo or Gravity Tank or Cooper, where it’s like a more They call them innovation consultancies, and they’re doing design. It’s fine, it’s what it is. But it’s basically you are, it comes with a like heavy brainstorming component. So you bring a bunch of people in a room and you start asking a bunch of questions about how the product should be, right? So let’s say we’re making something brand new. One of the big classic case studies in design research is the shopping cart that IDEO designed for I believe Target. And they instead of looking at their crappy wireframe shopping cart that they that every grocery store has that sucks and, you know, hurts your foot and runs into the aisle, whatever, they Blue sky thinking thought. How we have we need to carry groceries through the store, right? And we need to do it in a way that uses the wheel in some capacity, probably. How should that be? Right? And they settled on something approximating what the shopping cart is in Target now, which is amazing. It’s stackable, collapsible, plastic. It has a generous kid’s seat, as a generous undercarriage. The grip is molded to a huge, like typical human hand. And all of these things. And they thought about, and they basically covered a wall with Post-it notes and thought, let’s do this, let’s do this. And it wasn’t off the table when like weird, gobsmackingly terrible ideas were not off the table. And the consequence of that is it feels like play because you’re all of a sudden thinking without constraint. And you’re sketching a shopping cart from the beginning. And so you end up with this kind of, for lack of a better term, kind of childlike naivete about the whole process, even though you might be like a high-ranking stakeholder at Target or the shopping cart manufacturer or whatever. And then you start to think about how these things can be combined. And then you kind of move into, if you’re making a physical product, such as in this case. You would start making prototypes of the shopping cart and then maybe a trial run where you launch a bunch of shopping carts in one location of Target and see how people go, and then you interview them and figure that out. So it’s this constant process that kind of goes over and over of play and inquiry and synthesis and action. And then once you’ve acted, you kind of go back to like, okay, well, now that we have this. What does the inquiry look like? Okay, well, how are people actually using it? Is it good? Do we need to adapt it? Do we need to be changing this shopping cart later? And while I’m obviously citing a physical product for a massive multinational corporation, you can do the same thing for your website, right? Okay. How should a marketing page be? When you start to think about that, well, there should be a level of familiarity with it. So you might start with some like classical conversion-y type things. But you end up going a little bit further afield when you realize where you can kind of punch at the boundaries of it. And when you do that, it gives you a little bit of character and engenders a certain amount of curiosity. And I mean, if you want a like clear description of how drafts marketing page works and the way that it does, I just handed it to you. It’s the typical consultancy’s marketing page, but I messed with it in ways that I know won’t destroy my business and will make me flag as a vaguely more interesting person that resonates more with my own values. And I did that by kind of putting on my design hat and being like, well, I can do anything with this, you know? Why is the shopping cart the way that it is? Why does it have to be? And you start thinking about ways to do things that are new. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah. It is healthy and highly encouraged in your profession to question the precepts of that profession because it is what makes you interesting. Right. And I think this goes back to make money online. It’s a little being a little bit contrarian and questioning about the way that the profession operates. And if you’re not, and the way that I do that, because I’m a designer, everything looks like a design problem, right? Everything looks like a nail to a designer. So you, and you have to redesign the nail. So you, you know, I go at it from, right. And you go at it from that perspective, right? Like, how many, I mean, I think I’m going to. I’m going to butcher this joke, and it’s the stupidest fucking joke, but it’s real in this situation. How many designers does it take to change a light bulb? How many? Well, okay, so. Does it have to be a light bulb? Like, do we. Can we think about other ways to get light in here? Why are we putting light here and not over there? Can we maybe put a skylight in, or like. Maybe utilize some solar power or something like that. Why is it a bulb? Could we put in like maybe some sort of LED panel now that we have that or prototype? Can we get that other department over there to prototype an LED panel for us for a moment and just put it no To the right, to the right. No, that’s too far to the left. That’s horrible. Just get rid of the LED panel, throw it away. Okay, so. And you get the idea. Like, you just don’t shut up about this for like six weeks, right? Like, does it have to be a light bulb? Is basically the answer to how many designers does it take to change a light bulb? Because Maybe it doesn’t, you know, like you can do fucking anything you want with the world. Like, that’s kind of liberating and terrifying.

Yeah, I think you’re hitting on something really important here about the consulting process, where it’s like, um You’re digging in and questioning what the motivations were behind this certain thing. And I don’t know if I agree fully that the client knows exactly what the overall strategy should be. Because you should come in and Nothing is off the table. You should be questioning what that strategy is. So I have, you know, I’ve had a client in the past that like wouldn’t stop introducing new products on their core product line. And like it was kind of diluting everything, and they should have probably put together a separate brand for it. And at some point, I came in and I was like, this is happening. It might be hurting your business. And it’s the honest is on me to actually bring that up. Right. So, you know, part of the does it have to be a light bulb is also, why are we putting light here? You know, why are we changing this light bulb and not ripping out the ceiling? And maybe that is the answer. But you come in as an expert to question why that is the way it is. And that allows you to. I don’t know. You become more empowered that the world is malleable in a way from that. But it also allows you to kind of gain a C-level seat at the table. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

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