You can read an excerpt of the book in Jan’s latest article for Fast Company: What’s The Secret To Design Innovation? Extreme Immersion.

“We spend a fair amount of effort making sense of all this data at every step of the process, and by the end of our time in a city the live-work space feels like Mission Control, with every inch of wall space covered in maps of the city, participants’ profiles, and hundreds if not thousands of observations, quotes, and insights. In and among it all are the gems that can lead to the Next Big Thing.”

Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow’s Customers (9780062125699) by Jan Chipchase and Simon Steinhardt. Published on April 16, 2013 by HarperBusiness, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

I have also started to wear Moka’s Nike FuelBand, so I’m particularly aware (of my lack) of physical activity. Not pleased with my Fuel score at noon, I tweeted this after my second BBQ lunch of the day.
 

My @nikefuel is not measuring bbq. Major flaw. twitter.com/grignani/statu…

— Raphael Grignani (@grignani) April 6, 2013

 
The next day the most amazing customer support person at @NikeSupport tweeted back at me.
 

@grignani Your FuelBand uses arm movement to calculate daily activity. BBQ to mouth or in some cases, mouth to BBQ, should earn NikeFuel.

— Nike Support (@NikeSupport) April 7, 2013

 
As Alissa said, this has to be one the best support response ever.
 

@nikesupport @grignani Okay, maybe best support response ever.

— Alissa Walker (@gelatobaby) April 7, 2013

 
Well done @NikeSupport!

One of our biggest challenge in the past three years has been the IT infrastructure – content management system, hosting, entry submission and judging system. When we started thinking about the web presence of the Awards and the technology requirements, we were faced with two options: build our own or try to integrate with IxDA’s already frailing one. We decided to integrate with IxDA’s although none of us had any experience with Drupal and no one could really support us. We were all familiar with WordPress and other CMSs, how hard could it really be? And the benefits of integrating were objectively much greater: we could leverage the large existing user base and provide single-sign-on, reduce hosting costs, simplify development, and eventually merge the two codebase into one. Unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be that easy.

The center piece of the Awards infrastructure is/was the online submission and judging system – the website were people submit entries and where the peer reviewers and judge score submissions. With several hundred of submissions from all over the world submitted at the eleventh hour, the requirements for the submission system are pretty stringent. The submission form had disambiguate professional status and region to select the right fee, it had to support very large multimedia files, the checkout system had to work with credit/debit cards from all around the world, the system had to accomodate a massive load in the last 24 hours, etc.

With that we started investigating our options.

Drupal

We got in touch with an independent Drupal developer to see if we could use Drupal as a submission/payment and judging system. The conversation was supported with an initial product requirement document which was simply a laundry list of features. When we actually presented wireframes and visual comps a few weeks later what was “easy and doable”, wasn’t anymore. With Drupal, you have to do it the Drupal way or do it the Drupal way. And the Drupal way is pretty assbackward. Our developer built a working prototype that “did” most of things we needed, but absolutely not in the right way because it was modules patched together, each with their own quirkiness. So you can probably make it work, but you have to accept Drupal’s limitations. Overall I would not recommend it. I actually wouldn’t recommend Drupal for anything!

Building your Own

If you can afford to build your own system from scratch to your needs, this is obviously the best option. Unfortunately it was not available to us at the time. It was maybe a good thing. This option became more viable in the recent months since you can leverage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, what have you for authentication and Paypal + Stripe for payments. Stripe is great for North America and Europe, and Paypal is okay for the rest of world. It’s worth noting that the workflows for submission, judging, ratings are relatively complex and it can quickly get out of hand. If you have money and expertise, do it and licence the platform later on!

mBlast

This is the solution we selected for the 2012 Interaction Awards. It turns out that awards submission and judging systems function like most entreprise software, meaning you have to schedule demo over the phone/Webex to learn about the product and its pricing. There’s a reason for that. Most of these systems cost several thousands of dollars. In this instance, mBlast was $7990 for a 1-year subscription. You could run as many competitions as you wanted.

The demo was a bit smoother than the competitors we evaluated, their marketing website was web 2.0 slick, and while we could see that the admin section was a bit confusing and  it looked like an excel spreadsheet, we were told that we could customize it. The WTF moment came when they announced the price for a 1 year subscription: $7990. I never encountered until then a web service that cost that much. Flickr costs $25!

Unfortunately we ran out of time and had to pick an vendor. We selected mBlast, signed the papers, wired the money and received credentials. We started poking around and were immediately faced with incredible poor workflows, confusing interactions, modern browsers limitations (that’s right!), etc. When we tried to customize the registration and submission flows, we were told we could only change the colors and part of the copy. We ultimately managed to customize the visual appearance thanks to a very ugly workaround (i.e. hosting a CSS file on our server and pushing via JS. Uh Uh.) Needless to say that the end user experience was terrible and we received endless complains.

Based on the cost and their website, we were under the impression that mBlast was a mid-size company with support staff, engineers, etc. After a few interactions with them, we uncovered that it was a 2-person company which eventually had a lot of impact on our program – no 24/7 helpdesk, slow implementation and communication, etc.

From our experience, I would strongly recommend to stay away from this service.

WizeHive

A year later, WizeHive was recommended to us by the Editor in Chief at HOW magazine. It’s the service they use for the HOW Awards and the competitions they run throughout the year. They were happy with them and didn’t raise any red flags. We got in touch with them and got the same “schedule a demo and we’ll give you the quote” line. During the demo, the service looked pretty simple and they could support all our requirements (which turned out not to be true), and the quote was $4000 for 5 months.

While WizeHive has a much better user experience than any other services we’ve seen or tried, it has its own limitations and frustrations. The admin section has a strange Folder mental model where you move submissions to folders, instead of moving submissions in a linear axis based on judging stages or gates – for exemple, draft > paid/submitted > peer reviewed > finalist > winner. Even after several months of using it, I’m not quite sure what is the ideal workflow.

On the landing page of the admin section, you’ll find a series of tabs(Workspaces, All Activity Stream, All Reports, All Tasks, All People, All Calendar, All Files) and a list or your workspace. What’s interesting is that I don’t have any work, I have an Award program, a competition, etc. but not a workspace. Glossing over the terminology, which I assume is legacy from Wizehive previous team collaboration product, selecting your workspace takes you to a dashboard with an activity stream with a series of tabs - Dashboard, Cart, Reports, Activity Stream, Tasks, Calendar, Files, People, Interaction Awards, Actions, Assignments, v2, Workflow, More ↓. As you can see the menu is a bit more complicated and confusing than it needs to be, but it contains what you need. The submissions are under the name of your workspace, in our case, Interaction Awards.

Also I have no idea which language they have used but if you refresh the page you it brings you back to the start. It wouldn’t be a big deal if their service wouldn’t hang that frequently. That being said, you’ll do ok after a bit of wrestling and their tech support is really responsive, knowledgeable, and friendly.

On the entrant facing side, the submission website is very simple. The entrant needs to register to wizehive (no social login or SSO), they are given the option to create a new entry or resume a draft. The entry form is just a long form with whatever fields/questions you have decided upon. The entrant can save as draft or final and then pay using Authorize.net or your preferred payment gateway. It’s pretty straight forward and a few entrants emailed us praising how easy the system was compare to other awards systems they used.

Wizehive has a lot of room for improvement but it works. And that’s the most important thing.

 
All in all, the landscape is really grim and outrageously expensive. Wizehive is the only service I would currently recommend, but I sincerely hope that someone somewhere will decide to disrupt the market with an affordable easy to use service!

Jauntful is based in San Francisco which gives us plenty of choice – from traditional consumer banks with business offerings like Wells Fargo, Bank Of America, Chase, HSBC, etc. to private and business banks such as First Republic Bank, New Resource Bank, etc. to venture banks like Silicon Valley Bank and Square 1 Financial.

I started our research by asking Colin Owen of Sparse to give me some pointers since he just completed this process a few months ago. He directed me to this July 2012 blog post (Comparison of Basic Business Checking Accounts Bank of America vs. JP Morgan Chase vs. Wells Fargo vs. HSBC vs. Citibank), which summarizes account features and fees  from major high street banks. The writer ends up recommending HSBC based on fees and geographical presence especially in China. Jauntful doesn’t do any business abroad, yet; but we will very soon and having an international network is quite important to us. Back to HSBC. It turns out that HSBC has only two branches in San Francisco, both with abysmal reviews on Yelp. That’s that.

This little jaunt to Yelp reminded that our main criterions to select a bank weren’t account features or fees structure, but the bank and banker experience working with very early stage startups and established companies, its understanding of our business, and its motivation to work with us.

Next I decided to visit First Republic Bank and New Resource Bank, in person. First Republic has been a client of Method for some time, and I knew that they put a lot of effort in building personalized relationships with their clients. Unfortunately the banker I talked to was very nice, but she had no idea of what I was talking about. That’s that too. Down a few blocks, next to the BlackRock building, I met with one of the two bankers at New Resource Bank. The bank has glowing reviews online, but my short conversation with them was truly disappointing – the banker was apathetic and uninterested.  That’s that there too.

I turned back to the internet to check out SVB and Square1 but I immediately got the impression that they weren’t quite the right fit for us. And I didn’t follow through and didn’t speak to anyone there. I did speak to a couple of friends who are current customers and their feedback didn’t change my first impression.

I returned to Quora to do another search, and in one of the threads, I found an answer from Samir Kaji of First Republic Bank. I messaged him, and he replied within minutes. We scheduled a short call the same week. During the call, he explained his background, his role at FRB, and the mission of his team at the Sand Hill Rd branch. He asked about Jauntful, our business, our banking needs, our timeline to raising money, etc. It was a straight forward conversation with someone who knew his stuff. Samir put us in touch with his colleague Nancy Williams to get the paperwork started. Our experience thus far has been great, and while there’ll be some bumps down the road as there always is, I’m confident that Samir and Nancy will be great to work with.

We’re obsessive with every aspect of what we do, and therefore we consider our partners, our banker, our accountant, every do work with, as an extension of our team. We apply the same rigor in selecting and working with them as we do with our team and products.

Three years ago in the lobby bar of the Andaz hotel in Savannah, Jennifer Bove and I thought it would be a great idea to start an awards program solely dedicated to the discipline and practice of interaction design. It was about 2am; Mike Kruzeniski, Andrew Crow, Bill DeRouchey, Samantha Soma were not too far.

While I don’t recall the exact conversation at the Andaz, the gist of it was that:

• there wasn’t anything recognizing and celebrating works of excellence in interaction design, besides the IxDA conference once a year.
• interaction design was being rapidly pigeon-holed as ”digital” or “apps” by other awards programs such as IDSA, AIGA, Webby, etc.
• the fast-paced evolution of the discipline was not being recorded. Only ACM was arguably documenting it partially.

A few weeks after returning to San Francisco, it still seemed like a good idea, so Jennifer and I created a one-page draft of a high-level timeline and milestones for getting the awards off the ground. We emailed it to Janna DeVylder, then President of the Interaction Design Association, on April 27, 2010 concluding that  it “seem[ed] pretty feasible”.

You’re crazy, but go ahead. Put together a pithy proposal I can bring to the Board.

Janna DeVylder, President of the Interaction Design Association

With that, we started drafting a plan on GoogleDocs. Four weeks later, we posted it to the IxDA Basecamp for the Board. The document included 9 sections: Mission Statement, Organizing Principles, Schedule, Timeline, Value Proposition, Budget, Potential Categories, Jury, Committee, Next Steps.

Here is a summarized, redacted  and annotated version of the plan.

1. Mission Statement

The IxDA Awards is an international competition which aims to:

1. Recognize, promote, and celebrate excellence in the discipline of Interaction Design.
2. Position IxDA as the premiere international Interaction Design association.
3. [Redacted].

2. Organizing Principles

The guiding principles for the Awards were based on IxDA’s mission.

• Globally inclusive
• Encourage plurality, not popularity
• Share, Learn and Discuss
• A point of reference and lighthouse to advance the discipline of interaction design

3.  Schedule

This section described the ideal schedule for the awards and how it would complement other initiatives from IxDA – conference, local chapters, etc.

4. Timeline

The timeline listed monthly activities with the goal to launch at Interaction12 in Dublin. We had things like: Pre-announce awards at Interaction11 conference, Open calls for entry (2 months), Select Finalists (3 weeks), Collect finalists’ materials / collateral for website (~3 weeks), etc.

4. Value Proposition

The value proposition contained our assumptions of the tangible and intangible benefits for participants, winners, sponsors, and partners. The core of it the revolved around recognition, celebration, publicity, and exposure which drives most awards programs.

5. Budget

The budget section included three things: ballpark costs, entry fees, and break even point.

Without going into too much details, we calculated our “ballpark costs” with the following six line items: IxDA Conference (winners’ comps, awards ceremony), Prizes, Printing, Jury Travel, Jury incentives, and Miscellaneous.

The entry fees only differentiated students and professionals and was based on an average of other awards programs. We later changed the fee structure to be more affordable overall, and more inclusive of other parts of the world.

Needless to say that we were way off both in terms of number of line items to consider and projected costs. In the end, the budget of the first edition of the Interaction Awards ended up being three times more than this initial back of the envelop estimation. In retrospect, I don’t think we would have continued if we knew how much it would really cost… and how much work it would consequently be.

6. Categories & Awards Structure

While we knew it wasn’t “right”, our initial working assumption was to investigate medium-focused (mobile, desktop, product, etc.) and/or context-focused (healthcare, education, etc.) categories. We also devised the awards winners structure and defined the number of winners based on the number of categories, percentage of winners vs. participants, budget, entry types, and entrant status.

7. Jury

In this section, we defined the role of IxDA and the Awards committee in the selection of the 7-person jury and jurying session. It was paramount for us to have an unbiased jury of experts to judge the awards, so we agreed upon the following rules.

1. The Awards co-chairs will nominate the jury chair.
2. The Awards co-chairs and jury chair will select the remaining members of the jury.
3. IxDA President will nominate one IxDA Board members to join the jury.
4. All together we will ensure an equal gender and regional split.
5. All together we will strive for a broad diversity of thoughts and experiences.
6. All together we will ensure a balanced representation between academia, corporations, agencies, independent contrators, and thinkers.
7. The Awards co-chairs will ensure complete integrity and independence of the jury.

8. Committee

The award committee will develop and launch the first two editions of the awards.

Jennifer Bove Co-Chair
Raphael Grignani Co-Chair
Advisory board member
Advisory board member
Advisory board member

I’m not sure what we were thinking at the time but it became clear that a two-person team and three advisors wouldn’t be able to pull it off.

8. Next steps

Our next steps were to recruit an advisory board, determine the categories, define the entry process and judging criteria.

This first draft outlined most of the areas you have to consider while running an award program, but it did it rather superficially. Thankfully the Board was able to read past the omissions and showed a lot of enthousiam and support.

I’m really happy with the initiative as it has been outlined, and excited to be able to host the first awards ceremony at Interaction 12

Steve Baty, Interaction12 Chair

Jenn and Raphael, there is definite support for this. The Board has definite support for the idea, and agree to move forward.

Janna DeVylder, President of the Interaction Design Association

I agree – this looks really great.

Nick Gould, Interaction Design Association Board Member

So, this is how the IxDA Interaction Awards started.

In that capacity, I had the pleasure to participate to a panel titled Design Led Startups with Ben Fullerton, Todd Silverstein, Josh Seiden and Suzanne El-Moursi at Interaction13 in Toronto. We discussed the role, impact, and value of design and designers at various stages of a startup, and why as a designer you’d want to work in such environment. What we didn’t address however is what it’s like to be a design founder and CEO. So that’s what I’m going to try to do here.

And while there has been numerous successful designer-led startups – Threadless, Wantful, Pinterest, Push Pop Press, AirBnB, Gengo, etc. there’s very few firsthand accounts of what it’s like to be in the thick of it. In the spirit of Weeknotes and Robert Laing’s very helpful posts, I will share, somewhat regularly, our learnings, processes, screw-ups, tools, and progress.

In the meantime, go reserve your spot for Jauntful!