Our Lead Experience Researcher, Stacey Birkett shares her thoughts about design as a verb.

Many designers work on creating products and services that will improve our lives and make day-to-day tasks easier.

We often relate to design via the physical output we interact with. However, to really address design, I believe we need to explore the meaning.

Design as a verb refers to the action or process of design (design process), to mean the generation of ideas, judgements, actions, and behaviours. With this definition I believe that we are all capable of design. It is a skill that is more refined and developed by professional designers, but a skill that is accessible by all of us. It is the action that drives us to make the ‘transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones.’ (Simon, 1969)

In this sense, we all make deliberate design decisions about our lives, from the way we dress to how we style our homes. We design our lives. Design plays a pivotal role throughout our life, regardless of our expertise in the field.

Behind the physical products we consume is the process of design. It is this aspect of design that, I personally find, is just as interesting as the output. Exploring the design process enables us to appreciate the means to an end, not just an end – the physical product.

During my PhD studies I explored decision-making in the design process. During this time I was able to observe footage of design meetings and the number of decisions that can go into designing physical outputs. When we see the final artifact, the physical form can overshadow the process, we don’t always appreciate the journey and thinking that has taken place.

One of the most interesting pieces of footage I observed came from the work of Peter Lloyd – my PhD supervisor. His architectural design footage, of a crematorium, captured a range of design considerations including; aesthetics, space and layout, and the impact of the design on human behaviour.

As any designer knows, decision-making and trade-offs are common practice in design. Without them, solutions would never be generated. This is of course not new information. Therefore, I think anyone interested in design would appreciate the process. I would like to share some of these interesting snapshots that were captured in that footage when design discussion was taking place between colleagues;

“people … arrive and … keep in their little groups, they don’t want to mix with other people”. A larger space would allow people to keep themselves separate from one another. Anna suggests that the space should have a: “feeling of keeping [people] segregated”

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‘As services at the crematorium take place throughout the day, often one after another, there needs to be a waiting area where people can gather before their service begins, and while the previous service ends’

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‘The consequences of not providing a space with a ‘feeling of keeping people segregated’ are made explicit, as Anna continues, countering her own intuition that “you’d think [a funeral] would bring [families] together” with the comment that not keeping people separated: “can  escalate to sort of violence at times”. This is extreme behaviour, but Anna is implicitly making a link here between the nature of a space and its potential to create, in this case, violence.’

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In my opinion, this unseen process is as creative and beautiful as any physical form of design. After all, as Charles Eames said; ‘the details are not the details. They make the design’.

I love beautiful products, buildings and experiences. However, beauty is subjective, this is why art is so controversial. I see design as something different. Something more than a physical form, more than the thing we see. Of course, it comprises of aesthetics, but that is just one element. It also encompasses, ethics, science, engineering, anthropology, psychology, business, you get the idea. It is a complex subject. However, design is often judged on it’s visual outputs and people can underestimate the value it can have. Not only on their business, but more importantly on their lives. Design is everywhere and it is much more than the colour and the shape. It is something that we engage with throughout our lives. It is hugely valuable to our society.

Our Visual Designer, Mat Skitt, headed back to his old University in Teeside to deliver a talk to their students about his experiences since leaving and the work he is currently undertaking at Great Fridays. He shares his thoughts with us below.

“Think back to your experience of university. The first year was probably full of too many adventures, in the second year you looked to atone for your misdemeanors and in the final year panic sets in as you realise come summertime you are about to be thrown into the big wide world, to find employment in what has become a very competitive landscape. I had that panic attack just under two years ago when it became time to draft those covering emails and design my CV. Starting the journey into an industry that can be quite harsh and rewarding at the same time, I learnt a few lessons myself along the way before arriving at Great Fridays.

These little tidbits of knowledge are something that I have wanted to share for a little while. So when my lecturer, Mike from Teesside University, got in touch to ask me about talking to the current third year students, I leapt at the opportunity. Within Great Fridays, a culture of sharing opinions and experiences of anything design related has manifested itself. We like to talk about our work, get other people’s insights and be asked questions that delve into the nucleus of an idea. To describe to young designers how this culture has allowed us to become a Design Authority that works with established international brands, and help the students realise how attainable a fulfilling career can be when effort is put in, was something that I couldn’t miss.

When organising and drafting the presentation I became more aware of getting that same panic feeling from that final year of university, albeit scaled down. The prospect of standing in front of up to sixty students to talk about projects I have been involved in became, well slightly terrifying. That amount of people all being in the room to see what you have to say adds a bit pressure despite my confidence in the content of the presentation. Even as I write this blog post, a certain apprehension is growing about how it will be received. I assume that this can be put down to human nature.

I quickly realised however that this fear of talking about your work is part and parcel of being a designer. On a daily basis we present our ideas, justify our thinking to others and take on board constructive criticisms, this is how a project develops after all. We essentially put ourselves in the firing line for our work, whether it is in front of a client or a colleague. The first real life exposure a designer has to this situation, is upon their first job interview. It can be a nerve-wracking time, and one that not many people could say that they enjoy, when you’re talking to someone and waiting for a response. I expressed my feelings about this to a few colleagues and to Mike, who amusingly assured me that “they are more afraid of you than you are of them”. With this mentality I was confident that I would be able to deliver a well informed and engaging presentation.

Before I knew it I was back in my old studio space with forty-or-so students with pens and notepads at the ready. Showtime. I set the tone for the presentation by telling them why I was stood in front of them and how I hoped the presentation would benefit them. I stressed that I was only two years ahead of them in my career as they were liberated-life-loving first year students when I was in my final year stressing over dissertations and final major projects. By encouraging questions and answering honestly, conversations soon came to fruition. This wasn’t a formal presentation, more a discussion about seeking employment and the first few years of working in the industry.

Giving an honest account of my experiences in my short career, the students were able to see that at a basic level there are not many differences for a designer regardless of how experienced they are. We still hold a deep connection with whatever work we produce, we are constantly driven for self improvement technically and conceptually, and the never-dwindling passion for design remains with us. One of the key themes I spoke about was not to get disheartened by the inevitable rejections that occur with job hunting. This industry is very subjective and can be quite confusing, I for one was labelled as being too conceptual and not conceptual enough at the same time. The key is to keep ploughing through and eventually a door will open.

For me that open door had the name Great Fridays above it. I felt immensely proud in being an advocate for the team when talking to the students and showing projects that displayed the talents that Great Fridays has at its disposal. The students began to understand how we strike the right balance to deliver products of lasting value. For them to see it is possible to work with brands such as PayPal and Thomson Reuters within two years of leaving education, would turn out to be the creative catalyst needed for the final few months of university.

A key parallel became apparent between the students and the team at Great Fridays which could be summed up as “making your own luck”. As a student, effort is needed to succeed in getting a degree and ultimately employment. Without that drive to do the many all-nighters and work through stressful deadline days, graduates will find it hard to succeed in entering the industry. Great Fridays still makes its own luck. There is the constant pushing of our thinking to ensure that the work produced for clients, is the absolute best it can be.

I left Teesside University that day with a quiet satisfaction that I was able to make a positive impact on the development of those students. As a business, our products harmonise with business frameworks to deliver results of lasting value. It was good to think that on a personal level, my presentation could have some lasting value on those students. Experience is a powerful tool, and one that should be shared with those who are yet to benefit from it. Having built bridges with Teesside and those students, I hope to continue to help others by giving honest accounts of my experience and inspire other designers to do the same.

As a final note, both myself and the students learnt something new in that presentation; sometimes it’s good to stress, it can make us better designers.”

Our Visual Designer, John Atkinson, shares his thoughts on skeuomorphism and flat design.

If you have been paying attention to user interface design in the last year or so, you will have noticed that things appear to be changing. Not so long ago we were all revelling in the awesome realism of the iOS interface: “wow, it actually looks like real leather!” I was probably heard saying at the time. Now that we’ve all had a bit of time to calm down, these textures and visual effects have started to look a little bit kitsch and dare I say, tacky. More recently there has been a move away from realism in UI design, with designers embracing a much more minimal and flat design style.

As visual designers, there are many considerations we must make before deciding upon the appropriate design direction for a project. Factors for consideration include: target user, purpose, platform, as well as considerations surrounding usability, functionality and responsiveness. Once we have considered these factors, the appropriate direction should present itself to us.

Skeuomorphism

Skeuomorphism and realism in UI design refers to a visual style that attempts to recreate and mimic real-world objects within a digital environment. In recent years this approach has become ubiquitous in interface design, influenced in no small part by Apple’s heavily textured iOS design style. Strictly speaking, skeuomorphism does not refer purely to visual effects but rather references features borrowed from a past real-world incarnation. An example of this being a calculator that imitates the layout of a physical calculator, regardless of whether the buttons of that calculator are flat or bevelled.

The argument for this approach is that it presents the user with a paradigm that they are already familiar with and so already understand. When done well, this approach should create strong associations with real-world counterparts. But therein lies a problem: when you become reliant on real-world objects, you also become bound by the legacy of their implicit physical limitations. In purely visual terms this style also allows for a level of playfulness that may or may not always be fit for purpose.

Flat/Minimal

More recently there has been a move away from skeuomorphism, with digital designers opting instead for a more minimal, graphic and predominantly flat visual approach. Strangely, this design revolution gained real momentum thanks to a mainstream push from a previously unfashionable source; Microsoft. Not to say that this is a new approach, minimalism has its roots in Swiss graphic design and has long been utilised by print designers. Although it has to be said, minimalism is less about a style and more about a way of thinking and approaching design problems: as the old adage goes, “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”.

The argument in favour of this approach is that it removes unnecessary bevels, shadows and gradients that only serve to clutter and muddy the interface. In doing this we create cleaner, more functional, content-focused interfaces that retain what is essential and remove what is extraneous and ultimately distracting. The innate minimalism of this approach also forces us to focus on design fundamentals such as typography and layout, something that web designers have been guilty of neglecting in the past. Not to say that a flat aesthetic is without its issues. Creating totally flat designs can cause problems with usability; without subtle effects and visual hints (such as inner-shadows within form fields), everything suddenly appears to be on the same level, which can become confusing to the user.

The right approach

So what is the right approach? Well, that depends. The “right” approach is not necessarily flat or skeuomorphic. It is whatever approach is appropriate to the project you are working on. It may be that what you are designing requires a level of realism, in which case skeuomorphism might be exactly what the job calls for. In turn, you may be creating something that requires a much more flat and minimal design style. The problem with design trends is that many designers are all too quick to jump on the bandwagon, without actually stopping to think why they are doing what they are doing. It is obvious why this style might appeal to designers though, specifically those with a love of minimalist concepts but this is still not a good enough reason to “go flat”. Design decisions should never be based on personal taste, or whatever aesthetic is popular at the time. They should be made with the person/people the design has been created for in mind. In short, the decisions you make need to be rooted in good design thinking, and nothing else.

Our Founder, Matt Farrar, shares his thoughts about the importance of design in business.

I have just got back from another great trip to California, which often inspires me to write a little.  It is a real shame we can’t bottle the enthusiasm, and weather from the West Coast.  We could do with both in the UK at the moment.

I’ve been in the digital industry for 18 years and qualified as an industrial designer all the way back in 1995, before setting up my own business at 23 years old. It was 11 years ago, at Internet World 2002, when I met an extremely passionate CEO from Lightmaker, who goes by the name of Rob Noble.

Today Rob is my business partner, and has been for the four and a half years since the start of the exciting journey that became Great Fridays. Over those years we’ve challenged each other’s thinking and battled to create the proposition that exists now at Great Fridays. Being comfortable around reframing our thinking and on occasion shouting at each other through the heat of a good discussion, has been a great foundation for our business. But the Great Fridays proposition certainly didn’t appear overnight. It has taken a number of years, lots of iterations and experiments,  failure, success, and a clear understanding of the need to reevaluate our position in the market to arrive where we are now.

The great thing about being a smaller, nimble agency of sixty or so people, is our ability to reinvent ourselves and to react to market needs. One thing we’ve never lost during this proposition evolution is our razor sharp focus to be a global Design business. We want to be the recognised not just in Manchester, not just in London or the UK, but in the entire world. After all, when you have the kind of amazing, talented people that we have at Great Fridays, why wouldn’t you want to take on the world’s best.  I have long admired the work of established global agencies including IDEO, and Frog.  It was a very sad day last year when Bill Moggridge passed away.  Bill’s work and ethos at IDEO, has been one of the foundations of my passion for Design.  It has also been satisfying to see a truly Great Brit, have such an impact on the global design industry.

At Great Fridays we want to be regarded as highly as IDEO, so we have set about the long term journey with this in mind.  It was hard for the first few years not to focus on provincial awards, and to join the local crowd, but we just couldn’t see the value in it and it certainly wasn’t a measure of how we’d been performing against our vision to be amongst the best Product & Service Design agencies in the world. We measure that evolution and focus by transforming the Design thinking of clients like Thomson Reuters, Vodafone, Pearson, Imagination Technology, PayPal, and Gucci.

Clients come to Great Fridays for our brilliant Design talent and for our ability to deliver against challenges across global business sectors in both emerging markets and those closer to home. Any challenge can be facilitated using Design. That’s not to say that Design can necessarily solve any challenge, but rather that we can use it cleverly – brilliantly even – to simplify and understand the thinking needed to find that solution. My personal crusade is to challenge businesses on the true importance of Design, and the untapped value it can deliver, by connecting like-minded innovators, entrepreneurs, thinkers, technologists, advocates, business leaders and customers.  I want to see a Chief Design Officer (CDO) on the board of every major global brands, and start-up.  This is what get’s me up in the morning, this is what drives me.  Design is a business tool, and directly impacts revenue, profit and value.  I want to share my knowledge and experience to help organisations create a Design Authority within their business.  This is just the start…

The last 30 years have seen the world embrace technology in an entirely new and all consuming way. Infatuated by its efficiency, its business potential, and its global connectivity:

• Technology leaders have become CTOs with a voice on the boards of the world’s biggest companies
• Technology budgets have suddenly eclipsed others
• The business enabler has become the business leader
• Organisations have proudly added ‘we are a technology company’ to their existing propositions
• Design has been pushed to one side – left on the shelf.

I believe we’re now in a transitional phase where it’s at last dawning on large enterprise businesses that while they’ve been preaching about technology, their customers have slowly had their heads turned by the new kids on the block actually practising it.  Design needs to be a part of their philosophy, or they could fail.

It’s very easy to use Apple as a great example of a global company that puts Design at the centre of its business. Yes Apple sells us technology, but this isn’t the brilliance of Apple’s strategy and it certainly isn’t the essence of its business. Apple’s genius comes from its ability to own significant parts of our lives by creating a perfect service offering delivered across all channels, so we are seamlessly and inevitably connected to its world. Great Design is hidden in plain sight: it’s everywhere, across the entire service, rather than just a manifestation of a visual user interface. Apple is one of the main drivers of the Design revolution – and yes, it is a revolution!

Definition by Design

Design has a very important connection to the innovation of product, service and business models. For Great Fridays, Design isn’t what or how, it’s why. We live and breathe the thinking necessary to reframe traditional ideologies and turn Design into a business tool. Through great Design we create not only beautiful products and services but also smart new business practices that deliver lasting value.

In today’s world of digital products and services, Design is revenue; Design is profit. Done well, Design drives rapid innovation, faster user adoption and longterm customer loyalty. Done well, Design also creates product development efficiencies that increase profit.

Great Fridays recently opened an office in San Francisco, and for very good reason: my team and I spend a lot of time in the US and around 60 per cent of our business revenue comes from across the pond. Reason enough for strengthening our presence there you may think, but it isn’t the primary motivation. For years Design has been a catalyst for America’s changing business culture, and its epicentre is firmly rooted in the West Coast – something that became abundantly clear to me following a recent visit.

In my last blog I offered a snapshot of the great speakers I had the privilege of hearing at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Design event at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. The event proved that Design was very much an integral component of both new and existing business. Whether it was the brilliance of Tony Fadell’s NEST thermostat, Greg Heard’s fascinating presentation on the evolution of Product & Service Design at AT&T, or Brian Chesky’s comment that venture capitalists wouldn’t invest in startup business today unless Design was represented at board level.  Design was definitely embedded in a new era of business thinking throughout American enterprise.

Great Fridays work with some brilliant clients globally, some of whom are headquartered in the UK.  Real industry pioneers (especially in the technology, banking, and mobile communication sectors) who talk our language and understand that investing in exceptional connected Product & Service Design is the only way to put the customer first, and lead their respective markets.

One of the biggest problems in the UK is that a significant amount of past Design experience is deeply rooted in marketing and campaign-based legacy. Talking about putting the customer first to a marketing head normally means driving acquisition through campaign-based reactive thinking: ‘How do we sell more products?’ or ‘How do we build a campaign that creates differentiation?’ The other problem is based around budget structure. Traditional marketing-led businesses are structured around silos of activity and budget led by product managers and product marketers. I’m not saying that this approach isn’t valuable, but it is fundamentally different to thinking about how to provide a better service to existing customers.

The key challenge with this marketing led legacy approach is the way in which budgets are structured and understanding how to develop the culture required to shift British enterprise from existing methodologies to newer, Design-led thinking. Apple for instance is not afraid of failure. Failure is perfectly fine and accepted, as long as we learn from why we failed. Product development is iterative: think, make, show and repeat – a process that requires budgets more like those invested by venture capital companies not afraid of failure nine times out of ten (calculated risk). This iterative approach is based on learning while we go, and not trying to over-deliver to the end customer at the first attempt. The marketing approach is very different: ‘We need to do this now, with this amount of money’. Failure is not an option!

This approach for the development of product and service is fundamentally flawed. It means that if the first iteration fails then the entire project fails, as there are never sufficient funds available to learn and iterate.

We’ve witnessed firsthand the way in which some large European brands (think high street banks, utility companies, retailers) are approaching Product & Service Design in the same way they’ve historically approached marketing-led projects. Even worse than their approach is the way in which some marketeers pretend to understand the complexities of Product & Service Design and Design Strategy.

So how can Design impact on and provide real business value?

Two years ago I had very little anecdotal evidence to offer when asked, “What is the value of Design?” User Experience professionals have always focused on providing a tailored user experience, so a happy customer should technically spend more money, right? For me, it’s always been more fundamental than this. UX is only a small twinkling star in the overarching galaxy of Design Strategy.

I’m constantly fascinated by the impact Design has on business and get to see its importance first hand in developing relationships with our clients. And let me tell you, the jury is no longer out! At an executive level we can confidently stand up in front of key business leaders and predict the impact Design-led strategy will have on their business – not just at a product UX level, but also at an enterprise-wide level. A top down and a bottom up approach.  Here are a few examples of this anecdotal evidence:

Efficiency in Design

We can measure Design’s most important impact on larger enterprise through better efficiency and continuous improvement.

When we first meet most of our clients they’ve only just begun their Design Journey. They may have more than 300 digital products and channels (mobile-web, native, web), but they’re developed by individual product teams around the world who’ve taken it upon themselves to reinvent the brand experience for their own particular need. So that’s more than 300, potentially different, single brand digital experiences. This head down approach to Design pays no attention to its wider impact on the brand’s global business – why should they care if the product looks slightly different to the one being developed by the team in, say, California? It’s tough to blame them for thinking this way as they’re measured on the success of their specific product rather than the wider impact on the value of the brand.

During our Great Fridays tenure so far we’ve calculated that this ‘reinvent’ Design process can in some cases take as much as 50 per cent of each product budget. The maths speaks for itself:

50% of the budget x 300 products under the same brand = mass inefficiency

One of our clients (I can’t say which) is now almost 70 per cent more efficient thanks to Great Fridays implementing a centralised Design strategy and significantly reducing the agency roster (twenty three to four), with a bottom line impact in the millions of pounds. We took a Design challenge and facilitated a solution by working as an extension to the client’s internal team. I use the word facilitate rather than solve not because we wave a ‘magic Design wand’ to fix things, but rather we use Design as a way to start the problem solving process and better position teams to create solutions on their own to reframe legacy thinking. Design brings real value to enterprise.

Not only did our client become infinitely more efficient, but they also now give more attention to their commercial product and service offering, focusing energy on features needed by the customer and the resulting commercial impact that has.

This is very much a top down methodology requiring a business that’s committed to enterprise level change. Boiling the ocean is not always the right approach.

Solving an existing Product & Service problem with Design

Clients also come to Great Fridays with a very different problem: ‘how do we solve an existing Product & Service related issue?’

“You’re the guys that make things look pretty.” It’s a perception some clients have of the Design industry that creates an immediate challenge for our relationship. “We think our product needs an updated UI to make it more user friendly”, the client claims at our first meeting. “We think that a slicker UI will be the platform to increase customer conversion rates” or, “We think that UI will make the product more appealing to our customers.”

Roughly translated, this means, “We aren’t going to change the functionality, or even consider what our customers want. We just want you guys to add a little lipstick to the pig to make her more attractive.” This approach will fail nine times out of ten.

In 2012, we worked with a client that initially talked to us this way. “Our workflow software needs a UI overhaul,” they proudly announced before walking my team through two hours of legacy administration tools that had evolved over the last 10 years. “We think it needs reorganising and a little colour adding to buttons.”

Did we agree to this brief? No. We challenged their perception and presented anecdotal evidence that the problems they had were less about gloss and more about a lack of understanding of their customer needs. It took several months, but after convincing them to let us interview 20 of their key users in the US and Europe the results of our deeper dive became apparent. We uncovered several frustrations and significant user breaking points – with one in particular a return on investment. No brainer.

We discovered that various customers around the world used one element of our client’s software 72,000 times a month. But this one element was misleading, even for a ‘power user’, and often led to this field being competed incorrectly, which resulted in incomplete data entry. We calculated that a staggering 40% of the 72,000 attempts at filling in this particular element needed inputting again (by employees) at an average time cost of 15 minutes per job. That’s an average of 240 days per month wasted by inefficient use of employee time (using the system). At an average employee earning rate of $200 per day that’s a whopping $48,000 per month, or $576,000 a year leaking from one small component of the system. This user block, in addition to others we found amounted to $1.2m per year lost by a poorly planned application. Suddenly (and unsurprisingly) the executives and product managers understood the power of insight and Design application. We urged a series of simple user-focused Service Design fixes to the system, and now the haemorrhaging components have been stemmed.

When a product manager says, “I have a budget to add some UI cosmetics to an existing product”, we challenge and ask them, “Why? What do you hope to achieve? What are your customer frustrations? How can we make sure that we’re accountable, and how do we measure success?” We reframe their requirements to make sure that what we deliver adds real value for that product manager and his business case.

Design-led innovation

I talked earlier about Design efficiency, which has a significant impact on product innovation. Simply by affording product teams more time to think about every project rather than just redesign it means, by its very nature, that they will release better products to market, and faster.

Design also plays another important role in product innovation – the ability to visualise and prototype lean products quickly and get them in front of actual customers as part of the process. You will have heard, and possibly read a lot about the ‘lean startup’ ideology, a concept written by Eric Ries and well publicised over the last 12 months.  His ideology underpins our approach to Design-led innovation.

Getting rapid product acceptance and feedback early in the development cycle is something we’ve been actively involved in over the last 18 months with various global clients. Workshops involving customers, stakeholders (executives), engineers, and UX teams are a great way to conceptualise, create, test and iterate ideas. We can quickly turn thinking into real, on device and even physical products in a short period of time, with no limitations. We can throw away the ideas that don’t work and focus on the features that do.

These intense workshops quickly provide enough insight to steer product or service direction. As everybody involved has something to say, entire teams are engaged from the beginning so it’s much easier to create an internal business case for budget allocation. Without Design as a conduit to manifest ideas, each team or individual could construe concepts differently even if the perception is that everyone is on the same page. Creating real, tangible Design-led outcomes that users can touch and interact with clarifies the focus on what works and what doesn’t. The investment is upfront, saving significant budget later in the product cycle, and the features released to market are already tried and tested on the target user.

Product to market is thus more considered, relevant and efficient.

Why is Great Fridays well positioned?

We’re often asked about our approach. This is a technical question that engenders expected answers: “we’re agile”, or “we use a waterfall approach”.

The truth is that Design even plays a role in how we shape the structure of the delivery. Every client has a different dynamic, different needs and understanding, multiple locations and even budgets, so we never try to force fit a process/methodology. We listen to and understand the challenges of each individual client and project need, and then start by designing an approach that’s relevant. We have enough experience to know that sometimes the worst process is a forced process.

Great Fridays is about great people solving real Design problems. We understand that Design can facilitate all manner of business challenges, and more importantly deliver real measurable value to a business’s bottom line profit.

/M

Our Insights team share their thoughts on the idea of The Connected Home.

When considering the connected home my first thought is about how can this make my life easier and then my mind slightly wanders and makes me think about how lazy I will get if this actually becomes a reality.

In an ideal world I want to wake up, walk to the kitchen and have the coffee pot already boiled and ready to drink, I can then have the shower already running and the tv in the kitchen switched on with that day’s personalised news headlines ready for viewing or even read out to me. This could be extended to my social streams or even real life updates as to my commute to work that day. All done, obviously, whilst having my home at the optimum temperature as no-one likes getting out of bed when it’s freezing cold. Just think how much of a positive effect this could have on people’s moods if this was to become a reality; the world would be a better place.

The idea of the connected home has been around for years but it has never truly been embraced on a wide scale, which seems strange as the key to this idea is that it helps people to balance their lives better. There have been numerous products which have tried, with varying success, but in essence the idea hasn’t taken off just yet. By all accounts this is changing and changing fast. Just look at the most recent CES event and the amount of products on show based around this idea and you can see why 2013 could be the year of ‘The Connected Home’.

There is a plethora of concepts on the horizon and it is going to be fascinating to see how they are going to be implemented into a seamless and simple service that the mass consumer will be excited to adopt.

However, the challenge that I see at the moment is precisely that. How are the amount of products currently in the marketplace (and the many more I can only imagine are in development) going to be adopted by the consumer when the whole experience currently seems very disjointed? Everyone is trying to grab a slice of the latest cake and no-one seems to have considered how a customer is going to interact with a number of these individual services. In my opinion, the winner will be someone who doesn’t offer a single service but someone who considers the whole experience and brings in feeds from all devices. For example, being able to remotely change the temperature of your NEST thermostat within the same app as you can record the latest TV show on your Sky+ box.

Lets have a brief look at some of the most important services which are currently out there. The product which has been seen as the catalyst for the re-emergence of the connected home idea has been NEST, the thermostat which learns your day to day habits and can be controlled from anywhere via a smartphone app. The fact that they were able to choose an area of the home nobody seemed to be interested in and developed a product which instantly created an affinity with consumers, opened others’ eyes to the possibilities available within this sector. The NEST thermostat is brilliantly simple whilst at the same time providing a tangible saving for those using the device. You could even go as far as saying that it is close to the perfect service.

Whilst NEST are doing interesting things with thermostats, AT&T are the company at the forefront of this sector through their Digital Life promotion which they outlined in more detail at this year’s CES show. If you go to about 11 minutes into this keynote speech there is a quite brilliant promotional video showcasing a top level view of how AT&T see, not only the connected home, but how this can be merged with other devices such as the car. The services include starting your vehicle, switching off the lights in your house and activating your alarm system, all done remotely through the devices you own. For more information on AT&T’s Digital Life initiative check out this home monitoring video or have a look at this real life demonstration of some of their products.

Building upon this, Openarch have taken the idea of the connected home to the next level by using elements within the house such as the walls and floor and hooking them up to the internet. These projected devices can be controlled by the movements of the human body and this concept video is well worth a watch just to get your creative juices flowing about the endless possibilities available when the home and technology collide.

SmartThings are another company making big strides within this industry by developing numerous products to enhance the connected home experience from security devices to moisture detectors. TechCrunch met SmartThings’ CEO, Alex Hawkinson during this years CES where the company kitted out a Villa to show off their products in a real life environment.

The connected home is an enormous opportunity for a variety of companies and if you consider each section of the house, it won’t be too difficult to find a product or service which is being developed to make that little section of your life easier.

For example, look at the television sector. BSkyB were one of the first companies, especially in the UK, to investigate the possibilities of changing the way television was consumed. With the release of their Sky+ box they did just that which has led to viewing habits being drastically altered. Research has shown that whilst live TV is still the dominant force, more and more TV is being consumed via catch up services (Sky+, Virgin’s V+ Box, BBC iPlayer etc). I could go on about television services and start to include information about the devices people now watch programmes on, the introduction of streaming services like Netflix and LoveFilm as well as people ‘duel screening’ during programmes but that could be saved for another day. In the end all of these things add up to the connected home.

Electronic companies LG and Samsung have also taken this idea and have developed connected appliances for use throughout the home. Their vision seems to be getting every home appliance to work together. LG for example are championing the idea of smart appliances such as fridges, cookers and washing machines for example. At CES 2013 they outlined their strategy which allowed consumers to link these devices together via NFC technology as well as giving users the option to download recipes and check what is in their fridge whilst out shopping. Another more novelty item from LG is their HOM-BOT which is a hoover which can be controlled via a smartphone app, quite a cool concept hoovering from your sofa.

Phillips have also followed suit by entering the connected home space with the introduction of HUE, an LED lighting system which can be controlled by a tablet or smartphone application. Even though it requires quite a bit of installation work before the full experience can be consumed, some of the features are noteworthy. For example, you can set the lighting to re-live a special moment or to gradually wake you up in the morning.

As with every ‘buzz’ idea there is always going to be a couple of ‘off the cuff’ products which will gain attention; I have seen numerous examples of external pet feeding devices, light bulbs which stream music as well as Lokitron, whose product allows you to keylessly open your front door via your smartphone.

As an interesting side note, this video from 1967 shows Walter Cronkite walking his viewers through a futuristic home of 2001 in which he predicts video communication, remote working and daily checking of the news whilst at home. Not too bad of a prediction there.

Finally, the connected home debate wouldn’t be complete without a futuristic video from Microsoft. They believe that whole house integration will become mainstream along with the implementation of being able to freely transfer data from one device to another.

So, as you can see the amount of products and services available in relation to the connected home is vast and will only increase as the year goes on. The catalyst for this has been the increased adoption of smart phones and tablets by consumers around the globe. At the close of 2012, 83 million people in the UK owned a mobile phone with 36 million of those smart phones  and research shows that the market will continue to shift to greater acception of smart phones over feature phones. Whilst 13% of the UK’s population own a tablet device, with this number set to grow and grow.

This increase in the use of smart phones and tablets has allowed for the idea of the connected home to actually become a reality. They will become the life and soul of the connected home;  You will be able to control the three main aspects of your home life from these devices: your appliances, the entertainment you want to consume and the environment in which you are living.

The problem arises with the fragmentation of services and how these services are going to be controlled. Do consumers really want multiple apps on their devices to control their home environment? Or will they become disinterested because it is too complicated to manage? Will the idea be adopted on a large scale or will it only be for the rich minority? Who will win the race? Whatever happens it is going to be fascinating to follow.

Our Experience Designer, Tom Noon, thinks about walls differently and the possibilities that they create.

Barriers in Berlin. 13,170 miles of protection in China. What are walls to you? Warmth, safety, obstruction. All three?

Something more?

We live with them. Could we live without them?

Forever the witness. Silent parents. Guardians of structural integrity.

They’re a constant fixture of our existence. We grow up with them. Our hours, time spent amongst their company.

They’ve watched us evolve and we’ve had a hand in theirs.

It’s likely they’ll outlast us all. Reason enough that they bear so many of our memories: hand – made mistakes made by innocent hands, lines chart the pursuit of puberty, slowly fading into adolescence and often burdened by the weight of knowledge: ideas old and new. Thoughts of yesterdays tomorrows.

On the outside, secrets remain silenced and a different conversation takes place. The walls now serve as billboards. An urban canvas. Graffiti and ghosted messages of consumerism. It’s taken more than a mile a year along the greatest of the walls to reach this point. A point where we’re using them less to make a statement for sake or sway the score.

We have walls here.

The walls are white and are somewhere between 8 and 9 meters in length at their longest. A wide band of “idea paint” dissects each, sitting somewhere between half way from the middle. On some there are thermostats. On others there are presentation slides. On one there hangs a black flat screen panel.

We lean on them. They take our weight. We gather round them. They huddle. We talk. They listen. We discuss. They settle. We evangelise. They advertise. We rationalise and they justify.

We share knowledge.

KegWorks spent their free time over a period of 2 months putting 60,000 bottle caps onto 459 square feet of wall.

Facebook has a wall in it’s head quarters. White like the ones here at GF, the wall is entitled “The Facebook Wall” with the simple instruction below: “Write Something…”

Without further instruction, it’s interesting that as opposed to using the wall to share knowledge – instead – the wall displays endless signatures and scribbles. The wall serves as a reminder. A reminder to visitors and staff, that Facebook is about the individual. This is an opportunity to honour their brand, their company. To let people leave their mark, their stamp.

At Great Fridays, Nick, Stacey, Pierre and Nicola had the idea that the “idea paint” could be used to display interesting things.

Things of interest.

Things that day to day – in light of our unique disciplines – we take for granted that others may not know and benefit from knowing.

I think this is an interesting concept.

In the past piece I wrote for the blog, I discussed the notion of creativity, its likely source and what allows us to be creative individuals. I proposed that arriving at a creative solution to a problem is about connecting seemingly unrelated facts and information. Some of the information you may know beforehand, others you’ll pick up along the way.

You have to be prepared to go looking.

In the article, the entire process was referred to as: connecting the dots.

The dots being information. Facts.

Information as “interesting things”?

I think so.

I’d like to suggest, that the wall not be limited to simply interesting things related to our disciplines but rather, I’d like to see the wall showcase interesting things that each of us uncover during the course of the various projects taking place within the studio day to day.

The last time I used the wall was a few days ago. It still shows the work. A reminder of a discussion over the future of Google Glass.

When I reflect on the work I’ve been involved in I am reminded of the hover parent phenomenon: parents micromanaging and being over – protective of their children.

I’m reminded that 93% of people browsing the internet use a mobile phone when at home and those who drive professionally need a valid Certification of Professional Competence (CPC). I recall the Dentate gyrus, a part of the brain thought to affect the formation of new memories.

These are some of the things I’ve collected along the way.

You collect. You save. You store. You, we, often forget.

Will we remember with the help of the wall?

How long was the great one again…?

Last month our Director of Operations, Bryan Sayle, flew over to America to get Great Fridays set-up Stateside!

The following is his account of his time over there. This may not be a 100% timestamp accurate, but the names and events are not fictional….Not your usual GF blog but a great read all the same.

15.02.13 – 07.03.13 – MAN – LDN – SFO – EWR ( delay ) – YHZ – JFK – LDN – MAN.

The result of this trip? A fully functional office in Mill Valley, California, a delayed mini break at home with my folks in Nova Scotia, a stop in the Big Apple to see east coast operations, have a New York slice of pie with Aidan and back in Manchester on 08.03.13.

15.02.13 1145 GMT – ‘By the time you read this the signed lease will be in your inbox…..’ A conversation a week earlier is now a reality. Grab your bag….game on.

The challenge…..It’s Friday, you have 10 days to open an office in California. Where do you start?

• Call ‘lovely’ wife

  • cancel dinner reservation

  • plan to pick up a Malbec and chocolates on the way home

  • mentally prepare to watch a penalty rom-com on Netflix that night. nb: not all relationship structures will respond similarly

• Brain dump – mindnode is the perfect tool for this

• Talk to yourself – ask questions out loud – hope that you can answer them

  If you fail to plan, you plan to fail – Winston Churchill

• Crink the neck – jump into Google Apps and start to network. It may be Friday night in Manchester, but it’s Friday morning in SF.

Where would we be if Steve Jobs had decided to be a carpenter? The Apple business team in Manchester are the definition of service. One call and they have me connected to 3 locations of my choosing in the Bay area, company details are sent, and by Saturday morning I have 3 x emails from all locations with personal contact details, phone numbers and the most important thing…an offer of assistance. Wherever you go, Apple staff are happy, friendly, knowledgeable, helpful people.

It’s so simple, but so many companies get it wrong.

I found a great tool for California Broadband availability. Out of the gate, I know that I’m limited to AT&T and Comcast. Flip the coin, it lands on Comcast, they get first shot at our business. Note, I haven’t had the best experience with UK based telephone and bandwidth providers…@BT – take note. It shouldn’t take 7 months and counting to install and set up a…. telephone system.

I get connected with jacquelyn_thompson@cable.comcast.com. I put it out there. ‘Jackie, I’m opening an office in California next week and need telephones and bandwidth before I leave on February 27th. Within a minute I know Jackie is going to sort me out. There’s no bullshit, no pre-scripted response, we’re doing business. 45 minutes later my phone cuts out. Another genius experience from the Ludittes @BT. For 7 months every SIP calls drops at the 45 minute mark. That @BT will ‘hopefully’ complete an order in 90 days. Rant over. I call Jackie back, we speak for another 5 minutes she advises me it’s going to be tough but she’ll stick with me and we’ll get it done. Going against my Grandmother’s advice, my eggs are all in one basket, I have no choice but I feel confident that I am going to get 2 x fully featured telephone lines and bandwidth before I leave SF.

So that’s hardware, internet and telephones sorted. Feeling good. Decide to drop one more email on a chance that I can get my chair needs sorted. If you want a great chair experience, whether for personal or professional use, go see Marcin at Back2 in London.  Marcin sorted us with the Herman Miller SAYL chair ( easy sell to me ) for London and Manchester. Maybe, just maybe, he can help again in SF and yet again he didn’t disappoint. On Saturday, I get an email from Serge, Internal Sales Manager for Herman Miller introducing me to Anne at CRi in SF. Chairs sorted.

Contrary to @RobNoble’s theory, it’s not wise to go on an all nighter in London, courtesy of the UFC and @No1shaygiven, on the Saturday night before a 11:15 flight to SFO on Sunday. Especially not wise when on the day you think your flight is at 13:15, and pair that with the fact it’s @RobNoble’s 44th birthday party.

17.02.13 0930 GMT LHR – I’m covering one eye trying to focus enough to read the menu in the lounge. I’m usually the one eyeing people up in the lounge, thinking, please don’t let that guy be sitting beside me. In this case I’m thinking that everyone in the lounge is thinking, please don’t let that guy be on my flight! Not to worry I’ve got 2 x Advil PM’s, which I’ll wash down with a rum once on board. 10 minutes into Argo and I’m down like Will Ferrell in Old School.

17.02.13 1445 PST SFO – landed and on a straight tact to the hotel. Lights out.

18.02.13 – Presidents day, time to organize, grab a ZIP Car, meet up with Matt Whiteley @matty6800 and get the lay of the land. ZIP car – a brilliant product and service delivery. For those of you who haven’t tried it, you should. Feel free to reach out to me for an invite. I’ll split 50 miles with you.

19.02.13 – Time to meet Doug the Commercial agent daigle@ccareynkf.com and Bob, the Landlord. Bob, Marc, Gigi, Elyse & Sung. A big thanks for all the help.

The office needs an overhaul. What was formerly the decor for a title search agency needs to be transformed into a Product and Service Design agency, in what is now 8 days. Where’s Carole Smiley?

News to me, but carpet guys don’t like paint guys. Baseboards are a sticky wicket. No fear, nothing me and a stanley knife can’t fix. We’re on a tight timeline and the carpet needs to be pulled back from the baseboards, de-construct (smash) the partition and prep for painting.

Walk off the space, measure and draw out floor plans. Need to get furniture in here.

IKEA – no time for meatballs, although @matty6800 devours 2 what look like hotdogs. I’m not so sure (athlete).

If you walk to Winston’s beat, and plan ahead of time, you need not see an escalator in IKEA. You can go straight to the warehouse and be out of there in limited time. That evening I plan the IKEA visit with SAS precision. Maybe subconsciously I took something away from the Argo audio?

20.02.13 0800 – Get the Van – ZIP car does vans. 1st task, back a Ford E150 cargo van into oncoming traffic on Columbus Ave.

Arrive at the office, meet Hugo the painter, he and his guys get underway. I talk him through the IDEAPAINT and where we want it. He knows what he’s doing, leave him to it. We head to IKEA.

As we’re pushing the 5 x trolleys through the checkout a random asks ‘Start-up?’ Not uncommon in these parts.

Furniture is scheduled to arrive 22.02.13 between 1200 – 1600 PST. Carpet install starts at 0930. Ride my ‘bad’ luck and hope that it’s going to be closer to 1600.

In SF, if you time it right, you can be back across the Bay bridge before rush hour traffic meltdown. Unfortunately, it’s a crap shoot. There’s no logic to traffic in California. I’m sure that  many a relationship has been pushed to the limit after a visit to the Emeryville IKEA paired with the Bay bridge traffic. We’re lucky, on this day we are winners.

The front cab of the E150 also doubles as office space for the rest of the day.

21.02.13 – It’s time for the Best Buy/Staples trip. In California, like all states where you find one, the other is usually in a direct line of sight. 2 birds, one stone.

I need everything from a TV and a fridge to Sharpies and staplers. Who’d of thought there could be so many options when it comes to attaching two sheets of paper together. Close eyes, reach, grab, stapler found.

Customer service is non-existent in both stores. No wonder Staples has closed operations in the UK. Again, it’s not complicated. If a person walks through the door of either of these places at 1100, chances are good that they are looking to buy something. Approach them, be nice. Maybe even ask if you can help them, offer advice. You can stock the batteries later.

Getting marginally worried, I haven’t secured install time for telephones and bandwidth. Been talking to Jackie everyday, she’s on it. She won’t let me down. Egg basket looking fragile.

1600 Jackie, out of nowhere calls to confirm she’s secured an engineer for the next day between 1200 -1600.

22.02.13 – Carpet guys arrive. I thought I was SAS like. These guys are machines. Then there’s Mike. He’s got the scalpel skills of a Vascular surgeon. Have you ever seen carpet installers work around columns and door frames. It’s something else. Design in it’s own right.

Comcast arrive at 1400. 2 hours and they’re done. I have phones and bandwidth. @BT what are you playing at?

Today is a good day. Some might say a Great Friday!

IKEA delivery arrives at 1550. Carpet is down and finished at 1600.

1900 We’re in the pub. And not any pub, my mate Paul’s bar, Kells. If you’re in SF do yourself a favour and settle in for a Friday night here.

23.02.13 – Write off

24.02.13 – Re-organise. Quick game a of golf. I can’t come all this way and not get 18 in.

25.02.13 – We (me) forgot the frames for the desks. Have to make an emergency trip to IKEA. Traffic gods are not on our side today. Time is slipping away…the drama.

On the road I call Torv, our Apple business specialist. Torv, we’re running late, need some help. No problem. We get to the store, we‘re in and out in 30 minutes, truck packed and on the road. Can’t say enough.

Spend the day setting up the office, building IKEA bits.

26.02.13 – Final day. The troops are arriving from the UK, Guy Jenkins @jenco, Dean Evans @seen_it, Darren ‘Dazz’ Hewitson @solvedigital.

We find out all is not rosy with IKEA delivery. 2 x desk legs are unusable. The lads save the day and pick them up on their way from SFO.

And that’s it. We’re in and operational.

27.02.13 0845 PST SFO – start journey to Halifax, YHZ with United. If you want to take years off your life, travel with United.

28.02.13 0400 YHZ – I arrive, no bags, no apologies and a moment of red mist that almost ends me up in airport jail. That’s a story for another day.

06.03.13 – Great day in NYC with @AidanButler. 1800 LHR flight with Virgin watch Argo. Great film. When it hits the fan you can count on the Canadians!

07.03.13 0730 LHR – @British_Airways ticket counter. me: ‘I would like to buy a seat on the 0855 to MAN please.’ Ticket counter: ‘there’s a £15 ticket surcharge to buy it at the counter’. me: ‘So if I buy it online, on my phone while I stand here, there’s no surcharge?’ Ticket counter: ‘Yes’ me: ‘so it’s your job, to tell me that it’s cheaper to buy the ticket online’ Ticket counter: ‘…..’ I have walked away.

This week’s Great Fridays blog comes from Tom Noon. He discusses the process of creativity and proposes the approaches we knowingly, or unknowingly, undertake in an attempt to arrive at creative conclusions.

I’ve decided to wonder. I’ve decided to wonder about a raccoon hat which – I’m sure we can agree – is a very distinctive, if not a fetching addition to a rural ensemble. My wondering isn’t concerned however with its visual merits, nor why or how the raccoon was considered to be a willing and appropriately – sized mammal to place on the head but rather the hat is the first of two completely random, albeit, arbitrary objects I’ve decided to discuss for the purpose of this blog. The latter will be…a pencil…without exegesis.

Why on earth, would I wonder about two such objects and why should they ever occupy the same whitespace. Why not? To defy convention? No. To make a point or statement? No.

For the sake of creativity.

I’m curious about creativity. Where does it comes from? The eureka moments that strike others all too often and others too few is little to do with chance and luck and seemingly something the result of an altogether more ordered and – dare I say – more mechanical and ultimately repeatable pattern than we’d likely expect.

To a great number of people – and rightfully so – the creatives amongst a crowd are without question lorded. They are held aloft and praised for their overwhelming contribution to our ever evolving society, their sweat, tears and ichor the genesis of the original idea but we’re all people standing in the same queue. So what makes this handful of people able to step outside the line with conviction?

Enter the racoon hat and the pencil. Let me ask you this, what do you know about the two objects? I’d wager you know more about one than the other and half as less about both than you’d think. But why should you? Moreover, do you want to know. Or do you simply not care?

Far too often it seems a large number of us are guilty for not caring nor feeling we need to know the answer. Why, the association, history or indeed the relevance of a hat or pencil is going to serve little use if we’re literal about things but then a literal existence is the wall. I’d argue, this mindset and approach to learning is – in some ways – the difference in existing and existing to live.

At a high level, being creative – a creative – is largely the result of how we as individuals connect facts to one another. It’s where it starts and ends, but how can facts be connected if we don’t know of their existence in the first instance?

The manner in which we relate, a fact, one piece of information to another and how – when mixed together – they behave is the first step to being creative. The resulting combination will lead to one or more perceptible solutions. The way in which we respond to changing circumstances or indeed facts – as and when we discover them – is what we refer to as innovation and being innovative beings.

To be creative therefore, we must be knowledgeable. The manner in which we attain this knowledge can be the result of a research exercise conducted online or it can be from firsthand experiences out in the real world waiting ‘in the line’.

To be creative we must strive to know and experience more this world has to offer.  We should ask the questions of ourselves and of others. Only then – when we’re armed with knowledge concerning hats or pencils – can we begin to connect the facts and begin to think and devise inside a space surrounded by the stars we need to illuminate the darkness.

“The only source of knowledge is experience” Albert Einstein

The experience begins with knowing. The experience – in this industry – is to be conducted by the experience designer; the wearer of multiple hats.

Raccoon hat included.

Don’t put it in the box just yet.

Connecting ‘the dots’ becomes thinking in patterns.

Finding in patterns requires thinking in circles.

The late philosopher and he ‘man’ in management –  Peter Drucker – was and is still widely recognised as being able to find patterns in seemingly unconnected disciplines. Questioned on one occasion over how he was able to emerge with a seemingly alien or unexpected thought he responded with “I learn only through listening…to myself”. In some ways, this quotation tends to run counter to the point of view emerging in this post but I would argue for a man such as Drucker, he was in no small part a man – fast becoming – a graduate of the world and as such a collector of facts. A person connecting the dot’s using patterns to navigate his way through the mire.

I believe we are all creative because we all have a capacity to learn and retain information it’s just our imagination has likely spent time ignored since we traded in the Lego for a Latte.

60′s Ad Man George Lois – the man behind the line “When you got it, flaunt it” believes in taking trips to the museum because he believes in knowing “what went on before”. Spending an hour every morning reading the New York times, he’s in essence researching and learning something new every day. For me these are two clear cut examples of an individual who has continued to remain curious to stay creative.

For me also, I find his advice to take a trip to the museum poignant in the context of this post, for a museum is a catalogue of works, curiosities and objects seemingly unrelated, bound only by time and an arcane veneer which exist in close proximity. To that end they are all connected. The historian would know how and why.

A museum is a place to disconnect, to be reflective, to learn and begin to add and amend the joins between the dots.

A museum is a place to walk.

Bill Moggridge, Steve Jobs were walkers. Mark Zuckerberg is a walker.

Walking simply for the pleasure is a rite of passage for the student of the world. The creative individual is a student of the world. The creative individual is a flâneur. Baudelaire for the Painters mes amis.

Curious?

5 steps you could take, if you want to…

1) Learn something new everyday.
2) Connect the dots. Explore how the subjects in the ‘matter’ are connected.
3) Write and keep lists. Express a design or an idea as words. This will inform all aspects of the design.
4) Remain open and receptive to other ideas as and when they emerge.
5) Be the broad church.

Adobe have released a new tool for designers called Edge Reflow. Its purpose is to make the process of designing for multiple screen sizes within one workspace much more simple and time-effective.

This is my experience in using Adobe Edge Reflow for the first time, and these are my findings on how Edge Reflow can be a useful tool for visual designers with limited CSS experience and what can be achieved from it.

Designing a responsive website is hard with current and past processes. Different processes are having to emerge to make this time and cost effective. Examples of this include Style Guides and Component Sheets which we have used in previous projects. It has always been challenging to find a way of effectively visualising the responsive design to clients as discussed in our blog post, Prototyping – beyond desktop and mobile, last week .

Edge Reflow aims to bridge the gap between flat comps designed in an image editor such as Photoshop or Fireworks, and a built website by producing one design built on HTML, that takes all viewports into consideration — a “high-fidelity web design” according to Adobe. This therefore presents the web better than a ream of PSDs or wireframes, allowing more effective communication of an entire design to a client. It also exposes design flaws quicker and forces further consideration before the build stage. Effectively it serves as a responsive prototyping tool, that doesn’t necessarily require the skills of an experienced developer.

It does however require a little familiarity with HTML, CSS and responsive design concepts, therefore presenting a moderate learning curve for designers without this knowledge.

As a visual designer with no experience in HTML or CSS, the world of coding is a scary place. Margins, padding and floats aren’t terms I am used to in my specific role in creating designs for web. With a little introduction into the basics of web development, I picked up this programme without any problem. It has very simple construction tools that any designer used to working within the Adobe Creative Suite will be comfortable with.

There are two basic regions within the interface; the design canvas for WYSIWYG layout and the property inspector, for styling individual elements. This is pretty simple and each serves to do what you would expect from it. Three types of elements can be added to your workspace: boxes, text and images.

New sets of layout styles can be added for different screen resolutions by creating breakpoints, these start new media query regions that can be easily flicked between. Going into these different media queries allows you to tweak the properties of each element, change font sizes, edit box sizes and such.

A key feature in this is that you can live test during the process of design, which isn’t something I am used to. It makes the process simple and saves a lot of time flicking through windows or uploading files. It is essentially a browser within the programme. A handle at the edge of the design canvas is used to change the size of the canvas, flicking through the media query regions, demonstrating how the layout will respond. Using this handle exposes layout flaws in between your breakpoints, giving you a quick and easy way to resolve said problems.

I set myself the task of recreating the Great Fridays holding page, as it is a fairly basic layout and works well on mobile and desktop. This was a useful exercise and helped me understand CSS positioning concepts and the importance of ordering elements. It makes it easier to digest as it is presented in a visual manner. This is obviously a massive advantage for someone like me, who prefers to work with visual based tools. Once I grasped this, it was a simple task of inspecting the existing Great Fridays holding page and matching the values to the layout and styling in Reflow.

At first I was a little confused as to why the margins and padding took different settings across the various media query regions. This was because I was trying to use the programme as if it was Photoshop. Care must be taken when dragging the elements into place, you will notice inconsistencies across the different media query regions as working in only the design canvas is imprecise. The main thing to consider is the ordering of elements in the ‘default’ media query, once this has been laid down correctly it is a case of tweaking the layout in the different media queries as desired. Once I grasped the rules of the layout tools, it was pretty straight forward from there.

Styling the elements comes as second nature to me, and the options presented work very similarly to most visual design applications. The text styling is similar to that of Photoshop, whereby you can modify the colour, size, line height and so on. Styling boxes and images allow you to add rounded corners, drop shadows and everything else you’d expect.

Reflow helped give me a better understanding of CSS rules, and how a design works from a developer’s point of view, and this can only improve my skills as a visual designer as well as my working relationship with the development team. Seeing the designs transition from a desktop-sized resolution to a small-screen resolution is quite satisfying for someone used to working with flat graphics, and I was impressed by the relative ease of prototyping this design.

A great feature of this tool is that it allows designers to prototype working responsive sites without the input of any developers. The ability to extract the CSS from this design is also a plus. It is reasonably accurate and can be used elsewhere making it a great time saving asset in the process.

Edge Reflow is intended to be used for creating visual designs, but would be great for UX prototyping and quick mockups as well. It’s a mesh between a layout editor and code editor, creating an interesting tool for those who are more visually-minded. It is not meant to replace any tool in the design process, but rather add to it.

I believe it will eventually become a staple of Adobe Create Suite as it grows. The ability to change the ordering of elements in a similar way to that of Photoshop layers, and introducing some interactive functions would go a long way to address any grievances I’ve had with it so far. Reflow is the best way that I have seen to prototype responsive web designs from a visual designer’s perspective. It won’t replace software such as Photoshop or a code editor, but it will sit harmoniously alongside them as a tool focused on prototyping responsive layouts.

If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud membership, Edge Reflow is available to try out for yourself.

This is the second part to the blog post I wrote earlier in the year, where I talked about prototyping an experience for a TV set top box. Part 2 is all about my journey and thoughts using some of the tools available for prototyping. The blog post is by no means a review of the tools.

In the summer of 2012  I had experimented with using Proto.io which at the time I’d been really impressed with. I worked with a team of mobile developers and between us, we wanted to get something together to show the stakeholders. Having something to touch and interact with, such as a smartphone allowed us to spark an emotive response as well as soliciting feedback from users.

Proto.io pitch their product as “Silly fast mobile prototyping – That includes smart TVs, gaming devices, refrigerators, alarm clocks, cars and any other interface you can think of.”

It’s an attractive statement, especially the point about Smart TV.

Proto.io’s really easy to use and comes with a range of realistic UI components and tools that give you the ability to rapidly get something onto the canvas.

There’s also the option to skin your prototype, this means that you can frame it to mirror the look and feel of the device you’re prototyping for.

For our prototype we wanted to take the URL that Proto.io generated and be able to browse it via our set top box and interact with it, either with a keyboard using arrow keys, or other keyboard keys to mirror coloured hard keys on a remote control and a keyboard key for making a selection.

I set the canvas up to mirror one of the sketches we’d completed that explored how a user could navigate a simple dashboard interface. Remember we want to design and build this quickly to fail fast and learn from it.

The user should be able to navigate to a particular place holder panel with complete freedom, and when the focus is set on one of the panels, the user can then navigate between the smaller placeholders located in the lower part of the screen.

When the focus is set on one of the smaller placeholders, the user can move back and forth across the 5 smaller placeholders whilst the parent placeholder above is highlighted as ‘selected’.

The user must be able to move the focus back to the first set of larger place holders and move horizontally back and forth. Each time the focus is set on one of the larger placeholders, a different set of smaller placeholders load below the larger placeholder.

We want the user to follow our navigational model with the use of arrow keys for moving between placeholders. This allows them the freedom to move up/ down/ left/ right, mirroring d-pad interactions on a remote control.

If you’re familiar with online prototyping tools, you’ll be aware that you can usually set or add interactions to most elements on the canvas. In this case, Proto.io allows you to set an event to a keypress. For example, I can trigger an event by binding it to a keypress.

With my placeholders set up, I started to bind events to key presses, in this example, I created an event to set the focus on one of the larger placeholders to the right of where the current focus was set when the right arrow key was pressed. Proto.io makes all this really easy and it didn’t take long to mirror the sketch.

I continued to set up events and after getting to the last placeholder, it became apparent that as a user I was losing the freedom of being able to move up / down / left / right using arrow keys and the ability to mirror a d-pad on a remote control.

Brick wall. Hit. There was no way of moving between all the placeholders and the prototype remembering the last location of the cursor or remembering a selection.

I decided to email Proto.io support and ask for some help, I was convinced after seeing some of the cool stuff they’d made that I was either missing something or they’d point me in the right direction.

A few hours later I received a reply that hinted at what I was trying to do was possible with some limitations. I employed the logic that was suggested however the limitations pointed towards simulating the movements between placeholders, rather than our test users having 100% freedom when navigating around the UI.

I decided to press on and fired up Axure. I’ve seen some pretty cool stuff done with Axure and there’s lots of clever people out there making it do all kinds of interactive stuff. I was pretty confident I could try and get it to emulate the example above with the placeholders.

Following the same exercise as above my prototype started to take shape and included using dynamic panels and cases. Axure is a powerhouse when it comes to building complex cases and page interactions. More placeholders were added to the canvas and I started to look at how I could bind the arrow keys to events and allow the user to navigate freely around the screen. The prototype started to follow the same pattern of limitations that I’d experienced with the earlier tools.

I headed for the support forums and also researched some of the really informative tutorials and examples. Then I found this thread: Arrow keys for navigation.

Axure made my list of ‘non-accessible’ prototypes.

Along the way I’d noticed a recommendation for Justinmind, I saw the product mentioned on other blog posts though didn’t have any first hand experiences of using it.  Justininmind pitch themselves as:

The best platform to define web and mobile apps with rich interactive wireframes.

Whilst there was no mention of TV, gaming consoles or even refrigerators, I thought I’d try it out and see if I could replicate what I was trying to do with both Proto.io and Axure.

Justinmind was fairly powerful in allowing me to create interactions on the canvas, however once again I ran into the same problems as earlier in relation to using the keys to navigate or remembering the cursor location.

I browsed the help section and couldn’t pinpoint anything that would help me get back on track. With the clock ticking I fired an email to support. I received a pretty good response that again indicated that I’d be able to use arrow keys to navigate between different page elements plus the suggestion of using dynamic panels to show and hide content. Again the limitations, of moving freely between elements on the canvas started to slow me down.

Running out of time and after more experimentation with Justinmind, I decided to move on and considered using  HTML, CSS and jQuery instead. Hang on. I had an idea! Adobe Fireworks.

Fireworks claims to offer rapid prototyping and optimization of interactive designs for use on websites or in apps for tablets. No mention of TV though if we’re building something for the browser, maybe I can replicate the navigational model where the other products haven’t been so successful?

I wired out the dashboard and started to export when I realised that the support for pages, states and hotspots, which are powerful for building web apps and mobile sites, don’t offer any accessible solution from what I can make out, that allows you to use keyboard keys out of the box to navigate. I reviewed the export options and had a quick look through the forums, however as with all the previous attempts at building an accessible prototype, I couldn’t get Fireworks to hit the mark.

I shared my findings with the team and decided on our next move.

So how did we do it? We decided to build our own framework that was close to production level code. We built a single page framework that pulled in real data using JSON. We planned out the data structure in advance to save time which allowed the front end development work to work in parallel to the back-end work happening in Drupal.

The single page framework allowed the user to navigate a series of screens and pages with complete freedom and remember their last location. Mapping keys to the remote control was fairly simple as well as their corresponding actions when using a regular desktop keyboard and using the arrow keys to navigate. Other keys were mapped to simulate hard keys, such as the coloured buttons on the remote control.

What would I do differently next time? Sketch and head straight for the HTML / CSS / jQuery tool box and start to put something together that’s rapid and we can learn from fast. Why would I do this? At the time of writing, and reader please correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t believe there are rapid prototyping tools available to quickly produce an accessible prototype that will work across a range of devices and platforms such as TV.

How do we make it better for designers who don’t have coding skills and don’t want to open Pandora’s box? For desktop and mobile, I think that space is more than covered, there’s some great products and tools out there, however as we start to use other devices and platforms, there needs to be a shift in the offering or an improvement in making existing tools more accessible, and by that I mean allow complete freedom when navigating a prototype that doesn’t require a pre-defined navigational pattern or the requirement of a mouse or trackpad for example. Alternatively the ability to include use of a screen reader, remote control or other devices such as Leap Motion would be advantageous.

Our products and applications will always be better if we prototype sooner rather than later and faster, as well as getting the prototype to work on as many devices as we can or as required and make them accessible for all. It’s not just going to be screen size or browser that we’ll be talking about, the interface landscape is changing constantly and the requirement for the way we provide input, the environment and products we use to do that and how we connect with the web, changes with it. That means the tools we use have to change too and right now, the offering is vast though potentially limited in capability with the focus being applied to desktop and mobile and poor support for accessibility.

I’ll continue to explore this space with the work we do here at Great Fridays, and will look to share and expand on these initial blog posts discussing prototyping beyond desktop and mobile in the future.