Focus.

And it’s because focus works for everyone involved.

On the developer side it forces a laser sharp focus on what matters in terms of functionality and UI. Smaller scope, less fiddling, zero fluff, shorter projects, more results.

On the user side benefits include getting more done faster thanks to a focus on core functionality, delivered via a clean UI. And maybe even more importantly users get to focus, to take a break from multi tasking. Focus is calm. Focus leads to accomplishment. Accomplishment is a moment of triumph in the everyday hustle and bustle.

No wonder ‘mobile first’ is winning.

They don’t fall prey to technology hype, shouting and chest thumping. They know the value of clarity and accomplishment, and that sometimes paper actually beats digital. They simple have a more natural approach to things.

This (diverse) group of agencies include Deportivo, Noc and Honesty in Sweden. Tesch, Clearleft, Berg and Magnetic North in the UK. BeansBox in Hong Kong. Studio Antwork and WOW of Tokyo. Brand New School in Los Angeles and New York.

And Nansen.

Nansen is the Swedish/US agency I’m joining as Head of Creative. My role will be to lead the creative work of this internationally expanding agency and hire and partner with outstanding professionals to complement Nansen’s existing network. And of course to do so in a slightly… different way.

To do so requires a solid foundation and in Nansen’s case it is our dev team. A smarter, more skilled, driven yet humble team of developers is hard to find. Now Nansen is building on that foundation and thinking about client projects from a perspective of concept, strategy, function and creativity of the non dev kind. Essentially the things I’ve done at Huddle and for years before that under the Functional Creativity moniker:

Functional is easy to understand and helps us get things done. A function has value.
Creativity solves problems, involves and encourages.

The Nansen founders have a plan for how they want this next chapter to be written, and I’m honored to have been chosen to contribute to it.

I’ll continue to be based in San Francisco when I’m not at the Nansen offices in Chicago, New York or visiting the Stockholm HQ or… elsewhere.

Exciting times.

Update: More on Nansen.se

PS. We’re hiring. A Senior Art Director/Designer to join the core international creative team is up first (web, app and print experience, solid CSS/HTML/JS skills).

Here is my deck as a PDF: UX for humans

Here’s the opening spread off the story. More pics as soon as I get my hands on the actual printed mag.

Klout – Smart partnerships and a $8.5 million round of funding is proof the team have moved beyond their humble beginnings.

Chute – New startup from @gregarious. Photos and mobile, but done differently. The problem they solve is real and the alpha I’m testing looks promising. Worthy of the buzz.

Plancast – Talked about for a while now. Essentially, if it’s not on event hub Plancast it’s not happening. IMHO Plancast has replaced the official SXSWi site to keep track of all the shenanigans that kick off in Austin on Friday.
Update: Plancast just released their unofficial SXSW event guide.

Hashable – Connect with, remember and introduce people you meet. I’m guessing Hashable are hoping that maybe just maybe they’ll be this year’s Twitter. For that to happen the value proposition and initial experience needs improving.

Soundcloud San Francisco – Doing the free agent boot strapping thing full on with their new SF office located at a coffee shop in the Mission. Brilliant.

Skweal – Helping retailers receive negative feedback from people away from the eyes of other people. Doesn’t excite me at all.

Instagram – Yes, still. Not surprising as everybody uses it all of the time.

Spotify – Us Swedes get one in here too. Despite some ranting negativity about Spotify’s delayed US release there is no doubt that the American peoples are very excited about it.

What will we be talking about in a few weeks time? Probably a slightly different group of startups. Ah, the fickleness!

Here’s one I decided to finish up based on conversations I’d had earlier in the week. It tackles a problem companies of all sizes, and on both sides of the Atlantic, can suffer from.

This post might also make it in to a future revised version of Noded.

The two concepts of activity and accomplishment are polar opposites. Yet they are often confused with one another and companies suffer for it.

Activity

Activity is what people engage in when they want to look busy instead of actually accomplishing things. Activity is what a certain type of managers like to see, as in “I like to see people working”. The same managers tend to under-value true accomplishment.

Activity is what people who like to play office politics and power-play do. They use activity to own the mindshare of a department or company. They cause enough activity to force other people to react to it with activities of their own, usually to address something inconsequential.

If enough activity is generated, regardless of how ridiculous, some of it will become the companies new baseline simply because there is no time to address all issues the zero-value activities create. And thus slowly the company begins to die, thinking all the activity going on accomplishes something.

Accomplishment

Accomplishment solves challenges. It improves, elevates and moves a product or company forward. It inspires people, it makes today a heck of a lot better than yesterday. Accomplishment is what you want and need, it is the only thing that matters.

Conclusion

Just as it takes more words to explain the evils of activity, it is easy to understand and aspire to accomplish. Spread the word.

Thank you to my colleague @spencerchen for helping me make sense of my unarticulated thoughts on this subject by setting them in the context of ‘activity v. accomplishment’.

Scratching the itch
One of the things I’d been itching to tackle since joining Huddle was the UI. Now, Huddle’s UI wasn’t bad, it was just showing its age. It hadn’t changed much since the app launched 3+ years ago. During that time it had grown and changed, just like the web around it. It was still alright, but lots of people at Huddle agreed that we could do better. Especially since Art Director Hudson Maul and I had made sure that the brand identity and brand elements we created would translate to the app it self.

So we did. I assembled a team, pencilled in a few weeks worth of ring-fenced time in the calendar and set out to rework the way the Huddle web app looks, feels and works.

Step one was to take the app to fixed width. Done. Step two was… several steps:

1. Reworking the navigation with tabs on top for moving between sections, and dimples (the elliptical links) below to navigate within each section.

2. Combining the quick links menu with the main tabbed navigation and moving the copy to the (orange) tooltip.

3.Removing superfluous lines, gradients and other distracting design elements.

> New nav, old nav (the dual Huddle logos are place holders for customer and project logos)

The missing ingredient

For the UI project to be a success in the context of a larger app upgrade I was convinced we needed to show off this new approach to a clean and intuitive UI in something… new.

Pick a date, any date
The new dual date picker came to our rescue. In Huddle’s tasks section one had always been able to set a due date. Now our customers had asked for the ability to add a start date.

This is where we would do it!

We went through a massive amount of ideas, concepts, sketches and wireframes. I even built a really rubbish HTML prototype in my spare time that I didn’t show to anyone (the concept was crap, idea ditched, mission accomplished).

> One of my work in progress (but close to the final result) sketches of the date picker.

At each stage we tried to remove something, rethink the standard, find a better way. Ultimately we ended up with the approach you see below. It’s very intuitive and beats many other date pickers, especially in collaboration apps.

> A special point of pride is the subtle styling of the start and end dates. In user testing this won rave reviews. (Thank you to our testers!)

More
Needless to say creating a better user experience and reworking the UI on a live app, used by corporate and government clients all over the world on a daily basis was, and still is, a huge project. It’ll be a long time before everything we worked on (and are currently working on) is rolled out. But as far as second steps go we can be quite pleased with what we accomplished. We created a new plateau, a new baseline, from which to continue improving and growing Huddle from.

The next set of improvements, i.e. our next step, goes live in March.

Some of my brilliant team members:
Alex Brown, UI Developer
Ioulia Anastasiadou, QA and Test Automation
Neill Pearman, Senior Developer
James Cryer, UI Developer (Date picker)
Dawn Carvell, QA and Test Automation (Date picker)

Not so with Huddle Japan.

I’m very pleased with the work of our friends at Tokyo’s Cloud Gateway. They used the brand elements we created in San Francisco and London and built something in-house that is perfect for the Japanese market. On brand, functional, enticing… I couldn’t have asked for anything more. Take a peek.

For me it was an easy decision to advocate the change to fixed width as in my professional judgement it would be an improvement for our customers. Like in any organization with passionate people this wasn’t always an easy sell, but eventually the arguments for fixed width outweighed the (often very good) reasons to stick with the way things were. That, and I can be quite persuasive (or nagging, depending on your point of view…).

In the end the project got green lit and off we went.

These are the top three reasons I conveyed across our company for why fixed width was the
right way to go. They are also the reasons I think every product team should fix their app’s width:

Everything is always in the same place

Your users no longer need to go looking across their wide external desktop screens for that button that is front and center on their smaller laptop screens. Don’t underestimate the importance of this deceptively simple point. Huddle’s customers told us this was important and chances are yours will too.

It looks better, on a deeper level

Aesthetics aside, we humans relate better to information when it is consistently displayed and follows a few basic rules. Having text, navigation and controls show up in the same place on the screen is the most basic rule of all.

It takes a burden of the shoulders of designers, developers and testers

When there are less things to code, test and worry about the product team can focus on building a better product instead of second and triple guessing what the app may look and behave like under a myriad of circumstances. It is hard to gage the precise time savings, but it’s already paid dividend even for myself in my daily work.

Having said all that, what did our audience think? I can honestly, hand on heart, say that the feedback was 100% positive. We didn’t receive a single negative or even skeptic comment. On the contrary, the change to fixed width connected positively with our customers on many levels.

In just over a week we release the next round of improvements to Huddle. Post on that to follow.

Here’s how we introduced fixed width to our customers on the Huddle blog: Improving your Huddle