Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.
The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.
Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.
Nototo – A Virtual Memory Palace of your Notes
Startup Colors – Killer Color Combos for your Internet Startup
The New Landing Page is to Have no Landing Page at all
Futuristic Patterns in Graphic Design
65 Best Creative Instagram Accounts for Design Inspiration
Improve your Sign-Up Form with Off-White Text Fields
PHP in 2020
OpenStudio – All-In-One Business Management Software
The Burnout List
My Favorite UX Research Mistake
My Personal Website – From Zero to Hero in 5 Years
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Sleeping Positions on a Plane
UX Design Process: A Simple (but Complete) Guide
Google Releases 3 New Experimental Apps to Help Cut Down your Phone Usage
7 Requirements of a Holistic Design System
Isotope · Filter and Sort Magical Layouts
Movie Poster — Figma Plugin
10 Practical Principles for Designing Better Experiences
An ‘Ultimate Guide’ to ‘Tab Hoarding’
Why Design Systems Fail and How to Make Them Work in 2020
How to Design Emails that People will Actually Read
How to Build a Design System in Abstract
LinkedIn for Freelancers and Small Business Owners
Radiohead Launches Digital ‘public Library’ of the Band’s Archive
How to Kill a Startup Idea with Google Keyword Planner and AdWords: A Case Study
Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.
Serverless functions are fairly straightforward. Put a bit of back-end language code, like Node, in the cloud and communicate with it via URL. But what if that URL didn’t run a back-end language, it ran an actual browser? Richard Young:
We can now do full stack development using just Web APIs. Need to read/write network resources? Use the fetch API. Need to cache some data? Use localStorage. Need to blur an image? Use a CSS filter on an img tag. Need to manage sessions? Use cookies. Need multi-threading? Use Web Workers. Need native compiled speed (or a language other than JavaScript)? Use WebAssembly.
Clever. Browsers are getting so capable it makes sense to leverage the things they are good at.
The end result of Eric Meyer’s tutorial on creating this row of slanted images is pretty classy. But it’s more about the journey than the destination (there isn’t even really an isolated demo for it). Eric does an amazing job at talking it through like a thought process.
We did that recently, only ours was sort of fake/generic which Eric’s was for a real-world design.
This is a row of boxes, so flexbox. Eric pondered if grid would have been as good or better of a choice since the widths are known and either can be made to accept more/less boxes without adjustment. I agree it’s a tough call here.
Since the image dimensions being manipulated, object-fit is a must, and the less-used object-position is used here to help with a focal point.
The captions are just pushed to the bottom of the boxes naturally by the images.
The slanting is done with clip-path, but it involves some trickery. The boxes need to be enlarged to clip without leaving blank space, then pulled together with negative margin. Percentages are used all around to keep things flexy.
Still more tweaks are needed to keep from clipping the captions, and then there is still opportunity for more clever design bits.
Sad that this is probably the last time I’ll link to 24 ways.
CRM stands for customer relationship management, which is any system or approach that helps a business organize and access its customers’ data. In this article we will take an in-depth look at what is CRM software, what are its different types and why it’s so relevant in 2020. We offer a fresh look at the biggest software market in the world. Let’s get started.
What is CRM Software?
Simply put, CRM software lets you organize and access data pertaining to your customers digitally. This includes customer information, sales interactions, activities, deal stages, metrics, uploaded files, product sales tracking, marketing and customer support interactions. Inherently, this is all of the information that your business knows about this particular customer. CRM software unites various departments of your company by digesting this data and displaying it in an accessible form all on the same platform. Far from being simply a tool for tracking and reaching your customers, CRM software provides invaluable insight into your own business. It helps build a meaningful relationship between your company, your product and your customers.
No longer only deployed by enterprises, CRM software is now widely used by small businesses and start-ups. The benefits are apparent – from increasing the customer satisfaction by offering personalized customer service to growing your business by engaging the right potential customers in the right way. Here are the 3 types of CRM software.
Best modern CRMs are momentum platforms focused on growing the business. The most important way this is done is by turning sales into building a relationship with the market
Types of CRM Software
There are 3 types of CRM software – operational, analytical and collaborative. Even though there are 3 distinct categories, most of the popular CRM solutions today cover all 3 or strive to be the all-in-one solution.
Operational CRM connects three main components – sales, marketing and service to streamline the business process of an organization. The most prominent of the 3 types, operational CRMs focus on all stages of the sales cycle. This means entering the contact information for a prospect or converting that prospect into an actual client (sales automation), automating repeated tasks like sending out marketing emails and posting on social media (marketing automation), and finally supporting customers through multiple channels such as phone, ticketing portals, email and FAQs (service automation).
Analytical CRMs systematically analyze and present collected customer data to help business managers and company owners make more informed decisions. The work of an analytical CRM happens behind the scenes. These platforms take the raw customer and market data and then use techniques such as pattern recognition, correlation and data mining to turn it into useful information. This information is vital in customizing the marketing, sales and support efforts for maximum efficiency.
Finally, collaborative CRMs focus on facilitating and promoting communication between your teams and departments, as well as external stakeholders such as vendors and suppliers. Sharing customer information across various teams helps you sell more effectively, improve customer retention and personalize the services offered.
It is fair to say that most competitive CRM solutions in 2020 strive to span all 3 categories and offer operational, analytical and collaborative capabilities on the same platform. Let’s take a broader look at what makes CRM platforms so relevant today and try to see 5+ years into the future.
CRM is quickly evolving into software which provides actionable insights into your own business
The Best CRM Software Features of 2020
In today’s world even a kid knows that using CRM software leads to higher customer satisfaction, more sales and bigger ROIs. And while simply tracking and analyzing the data is important, the best modern CRMs are momentum platforms focused on growing the business. Perhaps the most important way this is done is by turning sales into building a relationship with the market.
CRM software is quickly evolving from being the customer-facing and the customer-touching software into a platform which provides actionable insights into your own business. Data and interactions served across the platform are key in solving managerial challenges. This is the insight into your sales, marketing and support teams, this is the insight into your brand and the product of your hard work reaching the customer. No longer just for managing customer relationships, CRM helps manage relationships within your own company.
We have compared and researched a multitude of CRM options available today and analyzed the most recent trends of 2019. With AI and machine learning expected to make an even bigger impact on CRM functionality in the next 2 years, here is what you want your CRM to have under its hood in the near future.
The Future of CRM
As the uses of CRM continue to grow, there is an emergence of platforms which combine CRM and client portal together with task management, KPI and OKR tracking for complete all-in-one business management solutions. This makes sense: if the biggest player in your business is the customer, why not unite your customer data and your company data on the same platform?
Tracking deal stages and customer interactions is vital to building successful relationships, but wouldn’t setting and tracking your team and company objectives from the same portal also facilitate growth? What good is customer data if you can’t make it work towards helping you decide on the next objectives for your departments?
This is the way we see the future of CRM: there will be a move towards uniting the CRM and client portals with business management and planning tools for an all-in-one, AI-driven business operations portal. The whole company will execute sales, interact with clients, see yearly objectives and update weekly tasks in the same app.
Scalable. You want software that can anticipate your growth and be ready to offer features for a seamless transition from size S to M
Best CRM Software for Small Business
Growth and excellent brand and customer relations are the top priorities for small businesses. Let’s take a look at a few key points small businesses look for in CRM software:
Low budget. Small business owners and start-up founders are always looking for most value for the lowest price, and CRM software is not an exception. Some companies also offer pricing plans for completely free CRM software
Great customer support. With little time to spare for dealing with frustrating technical difficulties, knowledgeable and attentive customer support is key. Surprisingly, customer support has been the Achilles’ heel of many CRMs (not surprisingly)
Easy to learn and use. The software should be intuitive and easy to navigate, master and maintain without a dedicated IT team
Scalable. You want a platform that can anticipate your growth and be ready to offer the features you need for a seamless transition from size S to M
Integrations and customization. Being able to connect your favorite tools to your CRM is great. What’s even better is being able to tell your CRM which data to track and analyze so as not to flood your dashboard with useless metrics.
If the biggest player in your business is the customer, why not unite your customer data and your company data on the same platform?
Best CRM Software for Real Estate
We have just reviewed the top CRM software features for small businesses. Let’s take a look at a sector where CRM software is becoming increasingly popular – the real estate.
The need to be customer-centric is the lifeline of any real estate operation, whether commercial or residential. CRM software can help establish these critical customer relationships. As the relationships often last beyond the sale, it is important to pick a CRM solution which allows for multiple integrations (with your service desk, accounting and facilities management software) as well as for sharing of data across various teams. Look for cross-platform uniformity and mobility – you want the CRM to be accessible and manageable on both desktop and mobile platforms, as a lot of work with the CRM will be done in the field.
There are several CRM platforms which are specifically designed for real estate operations. However, it is also possible to use regular CRM configured for a real estate scenario.
So Microsoft launches a Node-based browser automation project called Playwright. It allows you to spin up a headless version of a browser and control it. Go here! Click something! Take a screenshot! That kind of stuff. Particularly useful for testing.
It’s just like Google’s Puppeteer, only instead of being Chrome-only, it also “works” in Firefox and Safari.
The drama started immediately.
The launch tweet from Andrey Lushnikov (who’s Twitter bio is “former TL @ Chrome Puppeteer, former eng @ Chrome DevTools”), is responded to by Sam Sneddon who questions the cross-browser compatibility. Apparently that compatibility comes via very large patches to those other browsers which some feel are a little house-of-cards-esque and will never actually land in those other browsers, especially since there are competing efforts like puppeteer-firefox.
It’s fairly obvious that the original team from Google behind Puppeteer kinda, uhhhh, made their way over to Microsoft and re-did the work over there. A little bird tells me Google is proper pissed about it.
I don’t have any other inside knowledge here, but it doesn’t seem to make Microsoft look very good here. For a company that has had so much success with an open-source strategy, hiring away a team to build a directly competing alternate open-source project without much cooperation from the other open-source projects it integrates with isn’t a great look. At the same time, having a working project that allows cross-browser headless control is pretty rad.
Feel free to enlighten me if I have it all wrong.
Related: As I understand it, Cypress doesn’t use either project, but has their own thing, and is close to Firefox support as well.
Performance advice from David Calhoun on how many scripts to load on a page for best performance:
[…] some of your vendor dependencies probably change slower than others. react and react-dom probably change the slowest, and their versions are always paired together, so they both form a logical chunk that can be kept separate from other faster-changing vendor code:
Funny how times haven’t changed that much! Me, in 2012, talking about how many CSS files need to be loaded on any given page: One, Two, or Three. I split it into global, section-specific, and-page-specific so it was less about third-party code, although that could certainly apply, too.
Some HTML elements accept width and height as attributes. Some do not. For example:
<!-- valid, works, is a good idea -->
<img width="500" height="400" src="..." alt="...">
<iframe width="600" height="400" src="..."></iframe>
<svg width="20" height="20"></svg>
<!-- not valid, doesn't work, not a good idea -->
<div width="40" height="40"></div>
<span width="100" height="10"></span>
Those attributes are sometimes referred to as presentational attributes. The thing to know about them is that they are overridden by any other styling information whatsoever. That makes them ideal as a fallback.
So, if CSS loads and has a declaration like:
img {
width: 400px;
}
…that is going to override the width="500" on the tag above. Presentational attributes are the weakest kind of styling, so they are overridden by any CSS, even selectors with very low specificity.
What might be a smidge confusing is that presentational attributes seem like they would have high specificity. These inline styles, for instance, are very strong:
Using an inline style (which works on any element, not a select few), we’ve moved from the weakest way to apply width and height to one of the strongest. Regular CSS will not override this, with a selector of any specificity strength. If we need to override them from CSS, we’ll need !important rules.
img {
width: 400px !important;
}
To reiterate, presentational attributes on elements that accept them (e.g. , , , , ) are a good idea. They are fallback sizing and sizing information as the page is loading. They are particularly useful on , which may size themselves enormously in an awkward way if they have a viewBox and lack width and height attributes. Browsers even do special magic with images, where the width and height are used to reserve the correct aspect-ratio derived space in a situation with fluid images, which is great for a smooth page loading experience.
But presentational attributes are also weak and are usually overridden in the CSS.
Here’s a nice deep dive into min-width / min-height / max-width / max-height from Ahmad Shadeed. I like how Ahmad applies the properties to real-world design situations in addition to explaining how it works. In the very first demo, for example, he shows a button where min-width is used as a method for (trying to) make sure a button has space on its sides. It works if the text is short enough, and fails when the text is longer. That’s the kind of “CSS thinking” that is fundamental to this trade.
Web application development is set to evolve as we’re at the dawn of a new decade in 2020. There are so many things that could change the way people access web applications.
Before 2002, we only knew desktops & laptops as the mediums to access the internet and its web applications. Then came mobile phones, and we had a new way to access the web. However, the mobile web was untidy and at times, inaccessible. There seemed to be no fitting way to use web applications in mobile phones until the iPhone joined the fray.
Since the launch of the first Apple iPhone and the subsequent smartphone revolution, the way we interact with web applications has completely changed. Today, we interact with web applications through mediums which were never considered possible once.
A 2017 research by ComScore suggested that over 50% of web searches will be voice-based by 2020. Well, 2020 is already here. What have we got?
As of 2019, the number of people using the voice-powered Google Assistant has grown 4x.
Google and Amazon power more than two-thirds of smart speakers in the market. Out of these, Amazon sold more than 10.5 million voice-powered speakers in Q3 2019, whereas Google sold 3.5 million units in the same quarter.
A study by Google in 2017 already claimed that voice searches make up for 20% of total web searches. We still await the reports for 2019.
As per another research by Google in 2019, over 72% of people owning smart-speakers use them regularly. That means well over 5 million people are already using voice search daily.
What does all this mean for web application development? It means that the days of scrolling through the web to find answers to web queries are nearing their end. Though the prediction by ComScore could only be proved or disputed by the end of this year, it is absolutely clear that voice-based searches are increasing.
Voice-based web application accessibility makes interaction almost as intuitive as human conversations. It’s exactly that peak we’re aiming for.
2. Chatbots
Chatbots have been trending for well over a decade now. But with more advancements in AI and Neural Language processing, we are coming closer than ever towards the utopian future envisioned through mass chatbot adoption.
They will be the ideal medium of communication between customers & businesses. There is another bold prediction about chatbots that has been making waves recently. Gartner predicts that 85% of customer interactions with businesses will happen through chatbots by the end of 2020.
As of now, over 30% of interactions indeed involve chatbots in one way or the other. Whether it’s an online chatbot helping customers through basic queries, or smart chatbots translating languages for us, we’ve come far ahead.
3. Web application speeds
The world’s top search engine, Google already recommends that web pages must load in as quickly as 3 seconds to give users optimal browsing experience. This speed is blazingly fast when compared to the 3G speeds we were used to around 5 years ago.
Now that we’re closer to 5G speeds, we’re not far from a time when web applications will load at the same speed as some of the offline applications we access today.
4. Streamlined workloads through API First-design
The more connected our world becomes the more APIs are required for every web application. Now, with the rise of the IoT, even our mobile devices, homes, cars, gaming systems, wearable tech, and laptops are all connected.
While all of this is a great convenience for end-users, they could spell some trouble for developers if they start building such applications from a bad starting point.
In traditional methods of web application development, developers design the user application first and then back-end developers start adding the respective APIs. Once done, these are given to the front-end team for QA & testing purposes.
During this process, the front-end team is also simultaneously working on building SDKs for testing and verifying API activities.
Did you see the problem here? I’ll tell you. In this process, the front-end developers are waiting for the back-end team for adding the APIs. This wait is obviously time-consuming.
The only way to not have the front-team team wait for the back-end developers would be an API-first design, such as using a headless CMS platform.
5. Motion-UI
Research says that the global human attention span is just 8 seconds as of 2013. This is a drastic decrease from the average attention span of 12 seconds as reported in the year 2000.
Most experts attribute this change to the ever-growing use of smartphones & social media, and the boundless ocean of content served to users. Having unlimited access to all types of content on the internet, people are used to diverting their attention to everything they witness within a span of seconds.
So how will businesses deal with this problem? Enter motion UI! Motion UI in web application development refers to interfaces that move, show you a moving story with every single scroll.
I don’t think words will be enough to define this. Here, have a look at an example of Motion UI.
Motion UI makes website content so much more engaging and ultimately results in them taking their time and attention to focus on what your web application offers. In this way, Motion UI is one of the newest emerging trends that most B2C online businesses will follow in 2020.
6. Modular website designs
We all love the concept of having separate modules combined to build single powerful cohesive units. We have seen this in computers, cameras and a lot of other devices we come across in our daily lives.
Unlike the traditional approach using templates, modular design helps developers reuse components and modules to create a web page. From a visual perspective, modular design is a huge evolution above templates. Such blocks can display content & information in more powerful and engaging ways.
7. The emerging mobile-first web
Since the smartphone revolution and its mass adoption, people are finding it more comfortable to use mobile phones to access the internet. This change became obviously evident Google, the king of the internet itself became mobile-first.
This meant that every business leveraging SEO has to make its website suitable for mobile devices on a priority basis. Now that businesses are prioritizing mobile device communications over everything else, we will soon witness a new mobile-first web, where the best experiences using the web will be tailored for smartphones and other portable devices.
8. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is becoming pervasive across all industries, so the web application development space is no exception. AI is behind some of the best drag & drop website builders such as Wix, and it also has a crucial role in the development of other low-code development platforms.
In 2020, we’ll be seeing more of web applications deploying AI & machine learning algorithms for various purposes- to predict user activities beforehand, understanding their interests and giving them the best possible recommendations, and effectively (also ethically) using their data to provide them with an immersive, intuitive navigating experience.
9. Finding ethical ways of using Data
2019 has seen a lot of data theft scandals becoming known to the public eye. As if Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal wasn’t enough, we’re now seeing giants such as Google and Amazon being accused of misusing user data.
In 2020, we’ll see companies trying to fight off such accusations and giving their customers better clarity about how their data is being used. One of the best ethical examples I can find about good use of data is how Apple does it.
Apple indeed collects user data. But instead of sending the data to their servers, the data is analyzed locally (on the device) and any benefits using the data are made available to the user directly, on their device itself.
This way, their’s no fear of data being sent to unknown sources, as everything is stored safely within the device of the user. I predict we’ll see more companies trying to do the same with their web applications and change the way they collect and use data.
10. The continued onslaught on Ads
Advertisements in 2020 have become like the common cold. We know it’s a problem, yet it’s never given enough attention and then it goes away by itself.
People have gotten used to ignoring online ads, so much so that businesses are now seriously questioning its potential to generate user interest. In fact, Google itself is trying to find something to gain revenue besides advertisements.
This year, we’ll likely see the onslaught continue as user feedback propels businesses to focus more on the UX than delivering advertisements. Perhaps we might even see a parallel trend wear businesses will find new ways to serve ads to users without interrupting their web browsing experience.
Which Web Application Development trend are you prepared for?
So these were the most exciting web application development trends in 2020. I am personally excited about new advancements in voice search and Motion UI. I feel these two are the trends that will truly move the market, and shape how we access the web applications in the future.
The business value of design has been proven at scale by the McKinsey Design Index. The report shows the best design performers increased their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry counterparts.
However, we still see designers struggling with these common problems:
Projects are stop and start designers lose momentum and focus;
Potentially impactful design work isn’t put into production;
Designers are given solutions and have to try and bring projects back to the problem;
Stakeholders aren’t involved or our out of reach;
Business strategies and desired outcomes aren’t clear;
and the list goes on.
With the right people, enough rigor, patience and pragmatism. These problems can be solved, but then we often start all over again on the next project.
We are great at measuring usability and analytics. We can show how we’ve increased conversion rates on our e-commerce store, or how far people scroll down a page. In doing so we have created a culture of the world’s best design brains thinking about how to get more people to click a button.
We need to change this, we need to start measuring the potential for impact, of design, in a consistent way. We need a metric that people can see and they want to move.
Meet DIET (Design Impact Evaluation Tactic)
DIET asks key questions, that are fundamental for designers to be impactful in their work. The designer’s answers give a DIET score at the key stages of the project.
Numbers are powerful they give us an object to point at and discuss. They keep the conversation focused. The meaning behind a number is more important to designers, the why, not the what. Having the ingredients for good design baked into a number helps cross the divide of design and business metrics.
Why We Focus On Product Metrics Instead
“The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.”
— “Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands on business,” Daniel Yankelovich, 1972
However, the potential value of design can’t be measured using a product metric such as conversion rate or time on task. What we are measuring here is the outcome of a product.
The product could be a square wheel or a chocolate fireguard, improving these products may show better metrics but is a means to an end.
If we as designers are spending all our time trying to move a needle how and where does innovation live in our work?
Measurements Gives Us A Language
Back in the 1700s, people were measuring temperature using cylinders of water and wine. This resulted in inaccurate measurements. It wasn’t until Fahrenheit came along and introduced constants to measure from, that things improved.
In one of his early experiments of constants, Fahrenheit used a glass of icy water as a low scale, and the upper scale being his wife’s armpit. Having the two constants meant he could measure temperatures against them. Fahrenheit went on to invent the mercury thermometer. The German’s scale of measuring temperature is still used in the United States today.
Fahrenheit gives us a consistent language to talk about the measurement of things. “It’s 120 degrees Fahrenheit outside” instantly informs you that it’s going to be very hot today, so don’t forget to wear sunscreen.
So, Like Fahrenheit, Do We Have A Glass Of Icy Water And An Armpit?
Design lives and breaths in different environments in different ways. In larger orgs projects, often balloon so get ditched or pivot. Stakeholders or key decision-makers can be out of reach. Business strategy can be unclear and not communicated well. Teams are fluid and can often be without the skills needed. All of these things are part of the ingredients which either prevent or allow design to thrive and grow.
Diagram showing how design is messy at the start but then things become clearer over time (Large preview)
The British design council suggested in 2005 that designers share similar approaches in their process, which they mapped out as the Double Diamond. The Double Diamond consists of a problem space and a solution space. The shape of the diamond is to represent divergent (thinking broadly) thinking and convergent (narrowing things down) thinking.
With designers on different projects, I mapped the journey of a design project from start to finish.
Team 1 completely missed out the problem stage, as they didn’t have a researcher at the time. Time passes and eventually the project pivots.
Team 2 followed a Lean UX process and their project evolved.
Whereas Team 3 used a Google sprint and their project got ditched.
So, some projects evolve or pivot and some get ditched, but we don’t record why?
Looking Beyond The Double Diamond
Often projects come to a design team in the form of a brief. This will be part of the business’s overall strategy. Market research and predictions of future trends inform this strategy space.
Before the Double diamond we have a strategy segment and after a ship and backlog segment. (Large preview)
The ship and backlog space are often managed outside of the design team and very few designers I spoke to understood how work got prioritized here.
The View From A Stakeholder
Stakeholders are likely to be looking after many projects, which live in the strategy chain.
The strategy segment is linked to many other strategy segments. Stakeholders often focus on delivering the strategy and want a direct path to delivery. (Large preview)
Projects in the strategy chain will be intrinsically linked, and require a holistic view of a business. So it’s not surprising that stakeholders just want to get things through to the delivery chain.
Strategically the business will look into future trends and consider finance and risk to the business. There will be a lot of technical input too, can we build this with our current infrastructure? Shall we purchase a 3rd party solution? How can we reduce the risk and cost to the business?
So what ends up happening is. Projects balloon, time in the problem and solution space increases.
Projects often die or change direction in the problem and solution space (Large preview)
Designers get asked questions in show-and-tells and presentations.
Like “Why are we doing research?”, “We already know this is true”, “Why is this taking so long?”
Ultimately design projects often die in these scenarios. Or can lead to poor outcomes.
A solution could be better communication, clearer strategies, shouldn’t all this be managed better in the boardroom? Perhaps but, teams change, stakeholders come and go. We fight the same fights over and over. We don’t have a common language like Fahrenheit to describe design impact.
People value data at scale, data makes decision making easier, as there is something to hang the decision off.
DIET can give you that data.
How DIET Works
At each stage of a project, the team answers 5 questions and is given a score out of 10. The questions are based on the foundations that designers need to be impactful with their work
Scores are recorded at each stage of the project. (Large preview)
Stage One
The strategy stage is for when you first hear about a project.
We understand the business need/outcome.
We understand the user needs.
The subject matter experts & stakeholders are involved.
The constraints (financial, time & tech) of the project are clear.
Do we have the skills needed?
Stage Two
The problem stage is when you have completed your research on this particular problem.
We know how people currently solve the problem.
The problem resonates with our users.
We are solving the right problem.
The subject matter experts & stakeholders are involved?
Do we have the skills needed?
Stage Three
The solution stage is when you have designed and tested your solution.
Our solution solved the problem.
Our solution is commercially viable.
Our solution is going to be put live.
Have we recorded our learnings?
Have we shared our story?
To be impactful we need to work within our constraints, for our projects to be viable.
If we are consistently designing stuff that can’t go live, we just build design debt and frustration.
Here are examples of two projects that have DIET scores:
Outcomes of projects are shown to be poor when the DIET score is low, when its high they are improved. (Large preview)
Project A had low scores all the way through and resulted in a poor outcome. Project B scored highly and the outcome is good.
Having a score from teams of predicted impact and matching that against actual impact. It gives us a base to show how, why and even if our design foundations work.
Once you know a constant exists, you can make predictions about things yet to be discovered.
Over time, we have a constant to measure from. We can use this constant to learn where and why design impact succeeds and why it fails.
Is attrition rate (staff turnover) linked to low scores?
Do low-scoring projects take more time?
Do low-scoring projects mean poor team health?
How To Use DIET
At each stage of the project (Strategy, Problem & Solution);
Every two weeks on a Monday or at the start of a sprint cycle;
The feedback loop is large and the effort to constantly keep teams tracking scores is challenging. However, we have seen these benefits.
DIET acts as a good early warning signal;
DIET helps teams share knowledge earlier and on a regular basis;
DIET gives people the confidence to speak to their managers.
We have a long way to go and are still learning. The project is open source and we’d love to hear your thoughts and get your input to learn more.
One Voice For Design
Good communication across all levels is a common trait in successful teams. Having a tool which gives a constant to communicate design impact at scale gives consistency to our communications. Is DIET a way to do this?
