Have you ever looked at a beautiful website but thought, “I hate those colors?” No? Of course, not. That’s because color, and more specifically, color combinations, are integral to our notions of beauty — you wouldn’t find a design appealing if you disliked the colors.

I’m not interested in starting a turf war between server-side rendering and client-side rendering. The fact is that SvelteKit supports both, which is one of the many perks it offers right out of the box. The server-side rendering paradigm is not a new concept. It means that the client (i.e., the user’s browser) sends a request to the server, and the server responds with the data and markup for that particular page, which is then rendered in the user’s browser.

To build an SSR app using the primary Svelte framework, you would need to maintain two codebases, one with the server running in Node, along with with some templating engine, like Handlebars or Mustache. The other application is a client-side Svelte app that fetches data from the server.

The approach we’re looking at in the above paragraph isn’t without disadvantages. Two that immediately come to mind that I’m sure you thought of after reading that last paragraph:

1. The application is more complex because we’re effectively maintaining two systems.
2. Sharing logic and data between the client and server code is more difficult than fetching data from an API on the client side.

SvelteKit Simplifies The Process

SvelteKit streamlines things by handling of complexity of the server and client on its own, allowing you to focus squarely on developing the app. There’s no need to maintain two applications or do a tightrope walk sharing data between the two.

Here’s how:

• Each route can have a server.page.ts file that’s used to run code in the server and return data seamlessly to your client code.
• If you use TypeScript, SvelteKit auto-generates types that are shared between the client and server.
• SvelteKit provides an option to select your rendering approach based on the route. You can choose SSR for some routes and CSR for others, like maybe your admin page routes.
• SvelteKit also supports routing based on a file system, making it much easier to define new routes than having to hand-roll them yourself.

SvelteKit In Action: Job Board

I want to show you how streamlined the SvelteKit approach is to the traditional way we have been dancing between the SSR and CSR worlds, and I think there’s no better way to do that than using a real-world example. So, what we’re going to do is build a job board — basically a list of job items — while detailing SvelteKit’s role in the application.

When we’re done, what we’ll have is an app where SvelteKit fetches the data from a JSON file and renders it on the server side. We’ll go step by step.

First, Initialize The SvelteKit Project

The official SvelteKit docs already do a great job of explaining how to set up a new project. But, in general, we start any SvelteKit project in the command line with this command:

npm create svelte@latest job-list-ssr-sveltekit

This command creates a new project folder called job-list-ssr-sveltekit on your machine and initializes Svelte and SvelteKit for us to use. But we don’t stop there — we get prompted with a few options to configure the project:

1. First, we select a SvelteKit template. We are going to stick to using the basic Skeleton Project template.
2. Next, we can enable type-checking if you’re into that. Type-checking provides assistance when writing code by watching for bugs in the app’s data types. I’m going to use the “TypeScript syntax” option, but you aren’t required to use it and can choose the “None” option instead.

There are additional options from there that are more a matter of personal preference:

• ESLint to enforce code consistency,
• Prettier to clean up code formatting,
• Playwright for browser testing locally,
• Vitest for unit testing.

If you are familiar with any of these, you can add them to the project. We are going to keep it simple and not select anything from the list since what I really want to show off is the app architecture and how everything works together to get data rendered by the app.

Now that we have the template for our project ready for us let’s do the last bit of setup by installing the dependencies for Svelte and SvelteKit to do their thing:

cd job-listing-ssr-sveltekit
npm install

There’s something interesting going on under the hood that I think is worth calling out:

Is SvelteKit A Dependency?

If you are new to Svelte or SvelteKit, you may be pleasantly surprised when you open the project’s package.json file. Notice that the SvelteKit is listed in the devDependencies section. The reason for that is Svelte (and, in turn, SvelteKit) acts like a compiler that takes all your .js and .svelte files and converts them into optimized JavaScript code that is rendered in the browser.

This means the Svelte package is actually unnecessary when we deploy it to the server. That’s why it is not listed as a dependency in the package file. The final bundle of our job board app is going to contain just the app’s code, which means the size of the bundle is way smaller and loads faster than the regular Svelte-based architecture.

Look at how tiny and readable the package-json file is!

{
    "name": "job-listing-ssr-sveltekit",
    "version": "0.0.1",
    "private": true,
    "scripts": {
        "dev": "vite dev",
        "build": "vite build",
        "preview": "vite preview",
        "check": "svelte-kit sync && svelte-check --tsconfig ./tsconfig.json",
        "check:watch": "svelte-kit sync && svelte-check --tsconfig ./tsconfig.json --watch"
    },
    "devDependencies": {
        "@sveltejs/adapter-auto": "^2.0.0",
        "@sveltejs/kit": "^1.5.0",
        "svelte": "^3.54.0",
        "svelte-check": "^3.0.1",
        "tslib": "^2.4.1",
        "typescript": "^4.9.3",
        "vite": "^4.0.0"
    },
    "type": "module"
}

I really find this refreshing, and I hope you do, too. Seeing a big list of packages tends to make me nervous because all those moving pieces make the entirety of the app architecture feel brittle and vulnerable. The concise SvelteKit output, by contrast, gives me much more confidence.

Creating The Data

We need data coming from somewhere that can inform the app on what needs to be rendered. I mentioned earlier that we would be placing data in and pulling it from a JSON file. That’s still the plan.

As far as the structured data goes, what we need to define are properties for a job board item. Depending on your exact needs, there could be a lot of fields or just a few. I’m going to proceed with the following:

• Job title,
• Job description,
• Company Name,
• Compensation.

Here’s how that looks in JSON:

[{
    "job_title": "Job 1",
    "job_description": "Very good job",
    "company_name": "ABC Software Company",
    "compensation_per_year": "$40000 per year"
}, {
    "job_title": "Job 2",
    "job_description": "Better job",
    "company_name": "XYZ Software Company",
    "compensation_per_year": "$60000 per year"
}]

Now that we’ve defined some data let’s open up the main project folder. There’s a sub-directory in there called src. We can open that and create a new folder called data and add the JSON file we just made to it. We will come back to the JSON file when we work on fetching the data for the job board.

Adding TypeScript Model

Again, TypeScript is completely optional. But since it’s so widely used, I figure it’s worth showing how to set it up in a SvelteKit framework.

We start by creating a new models.ts file in the project’s src folder. This is the file where we define all of the data types that can be imported and used by other components and pages, and TypeScript will check them for us.

Here’s the code for the models.ts file:

export type JobsList = JobItem[]

export interface JobItem {
  job_title: string
  job_description: string
  company_name: string
  compensation_per_year: string
}

There are two data types defined in the code:

1. JobList contains the array of job items.
2. JobItem contains the job details (or properties) that we defined earlier.

The Main Job Board Page

We’ll start by developing the code for the main job board page that renders a list of available job items. Open the src/routes/+page.svelte file, which is the main job board. Notice how it exists in the /src/routes folder? That’s the file-based routing system I referred to earlier when talking about the benefits of SvelteKit. The name of the file is automatically generated into a route. That’s a real DX gem, as it saves us time from having to code the routes ourselves and maintaining more code.

While +page.svelte is indeed the main page of the app, it’s also the template for any generic page in the app. But we can create a separation of concerns by adding more structure in the /scr/routes directory with more folders and sub-folders that result in different paths. SvelteKit’s docs have all the information you need for routing and routing conventions.

This is the markup and styles we’ll use for the main job board:

<div class="home-page">
  <h1>Job Listing Home page</h1>
</div>

<style>
  .home-page {
    padding: 2rem 4rem;
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
    flex-direction: column;
    justify-content: center;
  }
</style>

Yep, this is super simple. All we’re adding to the page is an

tag for the page title and some light CSS styling to make sure the content is centered and has some nice padding for legibility. I don’t want to muddy the waters of this example with a bunch of opinionated markup and styles that would otherwise be a distraction from the app architecture.

Run The App

We’re at a point now where we can run the app using the following in the command line:

npm run dev -- --open

The -- --open argument automatically opens the job board page in the browser. That’s just a small but nice convenience. You can also navigate to the URL that the command line outputs.

The Job Item Component

OK, so we have a main job board page that will be used to list job items from the data fetched by the app. What we need is a new component specifically for the jobs themselves. Otherwise, all we have is a bunch of data with no instructions for how it is rendered.

Let’s take of that by opening the src folder in the project and creating a new sub-folder called components. And in that new /src/components folder, let’s add a new Svelte file called JobDisplay.svelte.

We can use this for the component’s markup and styles:

<script lang="ts">
  import type { JobItem } from "../models";
  export let job: JobItem;
</script>

<div class="job-item">
  <p>Job Title: <b>{job.job_title}</b></p>
  <p>Description: <b>{job.job_description}</b></p>
  <div class="job-details">
    <span>Company Name : <b>{job.company_name}</b></span>
    <span>Compensation per year: <b>{job.compensation_per_year}</b></span>
  </div>
</div>

<style>
  .job-item {
    border: 1px solid grey;
    padding: 2rem;
    width: 50%;
    margin: 1rem;
    border-radius: 10px;
  }

  .job-details {
    display: flex;
    justify-content: space-between;
  }
</style>

Let’s break that down so we know what’s happening:

1. At the top, we import the TypeScript JobItem model.
2. Then, we define a job prop with a type of JobItem. This prop is responsible for getting the data from its parent component so that we can pass that data to this component for rendering.
3. Next, the HTML provides this component’s markup.
4. Last is the CSS for some light styling. Again, I’m keeping this super simple with nothing but a little padding and minor details for structure and legibility. For example, justify-content: space-between adds a little visual separation between job items.

Fetching Job Data

Now that we have the JobDisplay component all done, we’re ready to pass it data to fill in all those fields to be displayed in each JobDisplay rendered on the main job board.

Since this is an SSR application, the data needs to be fetched on the server side. SvelteKit makes this easy by having a separate load function that can be used to fetch data and used as a hook for other actions on the server when the page loads.

To fetch, let’s create yet another new file TypeScript file — this time called +page.server.ts — in the project’s routes directory. Like the +page.svelte file, this also has a special meaning which will make this file run in the server when the route is loaded. Since we want this on the main job board page, we will create this file in the routes directory and include this code in it:

import jobs from ’../data/job-listing.json’
import type { JobsList } from ’../models’;

const job_list: JobsList = jobs;

export const load = (() => {
  return {
    job_list
  };
})

Here’s what we’re doing with this code:

1. We import data from the JSON file. This is for simplicity purposes. In the real app, you would likely fetch this data from a database by making an API call.
2. Then, we import the TypeScript model we created for JobsList.
3. Next, we create a new job_list variable and assign the imported data to it.
4. Last, we define a load function that will return an object with the assigned data. SvelteKit will automatically call this function when the page is requested. So, the magic for SSR code happens here as we fetch the data in the server and build the HTML with the data we get back.

Accessing Data From The Job Board

SvelteKit makes accessing data relatively easy by passing data to the main job board page in a way that checks the types for errors in the process. We can import a type called PageServerData in the +page.svelte file. This type is autogenerated and will have the data returned by the +page.server.ts file. This is awesome, as we don’t have to define types again when using the data we receive.

Let’s update the code in the +page.svelte file, like the following:

<script lang="ts">
  import JobDisplay from ’../components/JobDisplay.svelte’;
  import type { PageServerData } from ’./$types’;

  export let data: PageServerData;
</script>

<div class="home-page">
  <h1>Job Listing Home page</h1>

  {#each data.job_list as job}
    <JobDisplay job={job}/>
  {/each}
</div>

<style>....</style>

This is so cool because:

1. The #each syntax is a Svelte benefit that can be used to repeat the JobDisplay component for all the jobs for which data exists.
2. At the top, we are importing both the JobDisplay component and PageServerData type from ./$types, which is autogenerated by SvelteKit.

Deploying The App

We’re ready to compile and bundle this project in preparation for deployment! We get to use the same command in the Terminal as most other frameworks, so it should be pretty familiar:

npm run build

Note: You might get the following warning when running that command: “Could not detect a supported production environment.” We will fix that in just a moment, so stay with me.

From here, we can use the npm run preview command to check the latest built version of the app:

npm run preview

This process is a new way to gain confidence in the build locally before deploying it to a production environment.

The next step is to deploy the app to the server. I’m using Netlify, but that’s purely for example, so feel free to go with another option. SvelteKit offers adapters that will deploy the app to different server environments. You can get the whole list of adapters in the docs, of course.

The real reason I’m using Netlify is that deploying there is super convenient for this tutorial, thanks to the adapter-netlify plugin that can be installed with this command:

npm i -D @sveltejs/adapter-netlify

This does, indeed, introduce a new dependency in the package.json file. I mention that because you know how much I like to keep that list short.

After installation, we can update the svelte.config.js file to consume the adapter:

import adapter from ’@sveltejs/adapter-netlify’;
import { vitePreprocess } from ’@sveltejs/kit/vite’;

/** @type {import(’@sveltejs/kit’).Config} */
const config = {
    preprocess: vitePreprocess(),

    kit: {
        adapter: adapter({
            edge: false, 
            split: false
        })
    }
};

export default config;

Real quick, this is what’s happening:

1. The adapter is imported from adapter-netlify.
2. The new adapter is passed to the adapter property inside the kit.
3. The edge boolean value can be used to configure the deployment to a Netlify edge function.
4. The split boolean value is used to control whether we want to split each route into separate edge functions.

More Netlify-Specific Configurations

Everything from here on out is specific to Netlify, so I wanted to break it out into its own section to keep things clear.

We can add a new file called netlify.toml at the top level of the project folder and add the following code:

[build]
  command = "npm run build"
  publish = "build"

I bet you know what this is doing, but now we have a new alias for deploying the app to Netlify. It also allows us to control deployment from a Netlify account as well, which might be a benefit to you. To do this, we have to:

1. Create a new project in Netlify,
2. Select the “Import an existing project” option, and
3. Provide permission for Netlify to access the project repository. You get to choose where you want to store your repo, whether it’s GitHub or some other service.

Since we have set up the netlify.toml file, we can leave the default configuration and click the “Deploy” button directly from Netlify.

Once the deployment is completed, you can navigate to the site using the provided URL in Netlify. This should be the final result:

Here’s something fun. Open up DevTools when viewing the app in the browser and notice that the HTML contains the actual data we fetched from the JSON file. This way, we know for sure that the right data is rendered and that everything is working.

Note: The source code of the whole project is available on GitHub. All the steps we covered in this article are divided as separate commits in the main branch for your reference.

Conclusion

In this article, we have learned about the basics of server-side rendered apps and the steps to create and deploy a real-life app using SvelteKit as the framework. Feel free to share your comments and perspective on this topic, especially if you are considering picking SvelteKit for your next project.

Further Reading On SmashingMag

• Differences Between Static Generated Sites And Server-Side Rendered Apps, Timi Omoyeni
• How To Use Google CrUX To Analyze And Compare The Performance Of JS Frameworks, Dan Shappir
• A Look At Remix And The Differences With Next.js, Facundo Giuliani
• Building A Server-Side Application With Async Functions and Koa 2

In this episode of The Smashing Podcast, we ask what is a design manager? What does it take and how does it relate to the role of Designer? Vitaly talks to Slava Shestopalov to find out.

Show Notes

• Connect with Slava on LinkedIn
• Read Slava’s posts on Medium

Weekly Update

• How To Enable Collaboration In A Multiparty Setting written by Hannah Kühne & Madlaina Kalunder
• Primitive Objects In JavaScript: When To Use Them written by Kirill Myshkin
• Exploring Universal And Cognitive-Friendly UX Design Through Pivot Tables And Grids written by Yuliia Nikitina
• Testing Sites And Apps With Blind Users: A Cheat Sheet written by Slava Shestopalov & Eugene Shykiriavyi
• Design Under Constraints: Challenges, Opportunities, And Practical Strategies written by Paul Boag

Transcript

Vitaly: He’s a design leader, lecturer and design educator. He has seen it all working as a graphic designer in his early years and then, moving to digital products, UX, accessibility and design management. Most recently, he has worked as a lead designer and design manager in a software development company, Alex, and then, later, Bolt, the all-in-one mobility app. Now, he’s very keen on building bridges between various areas of knowledge rather than specializing in one single thing, and we’ll talk about that as well. He also loves to write, he has a passion for medieval style UX design myths. Who doesn’t? And is passionate about street and architecture photos. Originally from Cherkasy, Ukraine, he now lives in Berlin with his wonderful wife, Aksano. So we know that he’s an experienced designer and design manager, but did you know that he also loves biking, waking up at 5:00 AM to explore cities and can probably talk for hours about every single water tower in your city. My Smashing friends, please welcome Slava Shestopalov. Hello Slava. How are you doing today?

Slava: I am Smashing.

Vitaly: Oh yes, always.

Slava: Or at least I was told to say that.

Vitaly: Okay, so that’s a fair assessment in this case. It’s always a pleasure to meet you and to see you. I know so many things about you. I know that you’re very pragmatic. I know that you always stay true to your words. I know that you care about the quality of your work. But it’s always a pleasure to hear a personal story from somebody who’s kind of explaining where they’re coming from, how they ended up where they are today. So maybe I could ask you first to kind of share your story. How did you arrive kind of where you are today? Where you coming from or where you’re going? That’s very philosophical, but let’s start there.

Slava: That’s quite weird. I mean, my story is quite weird because I’m a journalist by education and I never thought of being a designer at school or the university. During my study years, I dreamt about something else. Maybe I didn’t really have a good idea of my future profession rather about the feeling that it should bring, that it should be something interesting, adventurous, something connected with helping other people. I dreamt about being a historian, geographer, maybe traveling in the pursuit of new adventures or inventions, but ended up being a journalist.

Slava: My parents recommended me choose this path because they thought I was quite talkative person and it would’ve been a great application for such a skill. And since I didn’t have any better ideas, I started studying at the university, studying journalism. And then, on the third year studying, during our practice, and by the way, I met my wife there, under the university, we are together since the first day of studying, we were in the same academic group, not only on the same faculty, and we were passing our journalistic practice at the Press Department of the local section of the Ministry of Emergencies, meaning that we were writing articles about various accidents happening in the Cherkasy region, taking photos of, sometimes, not very funny things. And accidentally, there I tried CorelDRAW, there is the whole generation of designers who don’t even know what those words mean.

Vitaly: Well, you don’t use CorelDRAW anymore, do you?

Slava: Not anymore. I don’t even know whether this software is still available. So I accidentally tried that in our editorial office where, as our practices, was not even real work. And somehow, it was more or less okay. I created the first layout. Of course, now I am scared to look at it. I don’t even have it saved somewhere on my computer. That’s an abomination, not design. But back then, it worked out and I started developing this skill as a secondary skill. I’m a self-taught designer, so never had any systematic way of learning design, rather learning based on my own mistakes, trying something new, producing a lot of work that I’m not proud of.

Vitaly: But also, I’m sure work that you are proud of.

Slava: Yeah. But then, later, I joined first small design studios and I’m forever thankful to my, back then, art director who once came to my desk, looked at the layout on my screen and told me, “Slava, please don’t get offense, but there is a book that you have to read.” And he hand me handed me the book Design for Non-Designers. That’s an amazing book, I learned a lot from it, the basics of composition, contrast, alignment, the visual basics. And I started applying it to my work, it got better. Then of course, I read many more books for designers, but also, books on design, on business and management and other topics. And gradually, by participating in more and more complex projects, I got to the position where I am right now.

Vitaly: So it’s interesting for me because actually I remember my days coming also without any formal education as a designer, I actually ended up just playing with boxes on page. And I actually came to design through the lens of HTML, CSS back in the day, really, through frontend development. And then, this is why I exclusive design accessibility lies way, it’s close to my heart. And it’s the thing that many people actually really like that kind of moving into design and then, starting just getting better at design.

Vitaly: But you decided to go even further than that. I think in 2019, you transitioned from the role of a lead designer, if I’m not mistaken, to design manager. Was it something that you envisioned, that you just felt like this is a time to do that? Because again, there are two kinds of people that I encounter. Some people really go into management thinking that this is just a natural progression of their career, you cannot be just a designer, and this is in quotation marks, “forever,” so you’re going to go into the managerial role. And some people feel like, let me try that and see if it’s for me and if not, I can always go back to design or maybe to another company product team and whatnot. What was it like for you? Why did you decide to take this route?

Slava: The reason was curiosity. I wouldn’t say that I was the real manager because design management is slightly different, probably even other types of management like product management and your engineering management, it’s not completely management because what is required there, if you look at the [inaudible 00:07:01], you will notice that the domain knowledge, the hard skills are essential and you’ll be checked whether you have those skills as well apart from the managerial competence. So I wouldn’t say that this kind of management is 100% true, complete management as we can imagine it in the classical meaning, it’s the combination of what you’ve been doing before with management and the higher the percentage of management is, the higher in the hierarchy you go.

Slava: In my situation, switching from the lead designer to design manager was not that crucial. I would say more critical thing that I experienced was switching from a senior designer to lead designer because this is the point where I got my first team whom I had to lead. And that was the turning point when you realize that the area of your responsibility is not only yourself and your project, but also someone else. And in modern world, we don’t have feudalism and we cannot directly tell people what to do, we are not influencing their choices directly. That’s why it’s getting harder to manage without having the real power. And we are in the civilized world, authoritarian style is not working anymore, and that’s great, but we should get inventive to work with people using gentle, mild methods, taking into account what they want as personalities, but at the same time reaching the business goals of the company and KPIs of the team.

Vitaly: Right. But then also, speaking about the gentle way of managing, I remember the talk that you have given about the thing that you have learned and some of the important things that you consider to be important in a design manager position. So I’m curious if you could share some bits of knowledge of things that you discovered maybe the hard way, which were a little bit surprising to you as you were in that role, for example, also in Bolt. What were some things that you feel many designers maybe who might be listening at this point and thinking, “Oh, actually, I was always thinking about design manager, maybe I should go there,” what was some things that were surprising to you and something that were really difficult?

Slava: Something that was surprising both for me and for other people with whom I talk about design management is that we perceive management in the wrong way. We have expectations pretty far from reality. There are some managerial activities that are quite typical for designers, for the design community in general, something that we encounter so often that we tend to think that this is actually management. Maybe there is something else but not much else that we don’t see at the moment, not much is hidden of that management. And that’s why when we jump into management, we discover a lot of unknown things that this type of work includes.

Slava: For example, as a Ukrainian, I know that, in our country, many designers are self-taught designers because the profession develops much faster than the higher education. And that’s why people organize themselves into communities and pass knowledge to each other much faster and easier. And there are so many private schools and private initiatives that spread the knowledge and do that more efficiently so that after couple of months of studying, you get something. Of course, there might be many complaints about the quality of that education, but the sooner you get to the first project, the sooner you make your first mistakes, the better you learn the profession and then, you won’t repeat them again. That’s why I know the power of this community. And mentorship, knowledge-sharing is something extremely familiar to Ukrainian designers.

Slava: And then, generally, I observe the same tendency in the Western Europe that knowledge-sharing, mentorship is the usual thing that many designers do, that many designers practice. And we think that when we switch to management, we will simply scale this kind of activity. In reality, it’s just not even the largest part of management. And when people are officially promoted to managers, to leaders, they discover a lot of other areas like hiring people then being responsible for the hires because it’s not enough just to participate in a technical interview and check the hard skills of a candidate, but also then live with this decision because you cannot easily fire a person, and sometimes, it’s even wrong because as a manager you are supposed to work with this person and develop them and help them grow or help them onboard better and pass this period of adaptation. By the way, adaptation and onboarding, another thing than retention cases, resolving problems when your employees are not satisfied with what they have right now, including you as a manager and many other things like salary, compensation, bonuses, team building trust and relationship in the team, performance management, knowledge assessments.

Vitaly: Right. But then, is there even at all any time then to be designing as you’re a design manager? I know that in some teams, in some companies you have this kind of roles where, well, you’re a design manager, sometimes it would be called just… Yeah, well, [inaudible 00:12:54]. Sometimes design leads are actually also managers, depending if it’s like a small company or a larger company. And then, would you say that given the scope that is really changing when you’re kind of moving to management, should you have hopes that you will still have time to play with designs in Figma?

Slava: It depends on how far you go and on the org structure of the particular company. In some cases, you still have plenty of time to design because management doesn’t occupy that much time, you don’t have many subordinates or the company so small that the processes are not very formalized. In that case, yep, you can still design maybe 50% of your time, maybe even 70% of your time and manage during the rest of the time. But there are large companies where management occupies more and more time and then, yeah, probably you won’t be designing or at least designing the same way as it used to be before.

Slava: There are multiple levels of design, multiple levels of obstruction. For example, when you’re moving pixels in Figma in order to create a well-balanced button, that’s design. But when you’re creating a customer journey map or mapping a service blueprint together with stakeholders from other departments of your company, that’s design as well, but on the higher level of obstruction. You are building a bit larger picture of the product service or the whole experience throughout products and multiple services of the company. So I would say that there is always space for design, but this design might get less digital and more connected with organizational design, interaction between different departments and other stuff like that.

Vitaly: Right. So maybe if we go back a little bit into team building or specifically the culture and the way teams are built, obviously, we kind of moved, I don’t know when it was, but we kind of moved to this idea that T-shaped employees is a good thing. So you basically specialize in one thing and then, you have a pretty general understanding about what’s going on in the rest of the organization, the rest of the product and so on. It’s quite shallow, but then, in one thing, you specialize. At the same time, you see a lot of people who call themselves generalists, they kind of know a lot about different things but never really specialized deeply into one thing. And so, you also have this, this is probably considered to be not necessarily just the I shape, where you kind of get very deep in one thing, but really, this is it, you just specialized so deep that you have pretty much no solid understanding about what’s happening around.

Vitaly: And then, one thing that has been kind of discussed recently, I’ve seen at least a few articles about that is a V-shape, where you kind of have a lot of depth in one thing. You also have a pretty okay, solid, general understanding about what’s going on. But then, you also have enough skills or enough information about the adjacent knowledge within the product that you’re working on. So I’m wondering at this point, let’s say if you build a team of designers, what kind of skills or what kind of shape if you like, do we need to still remain quite, I would say, interesting to companies small and large? What kind of shape would that be? If that makes sense.

Slava: Yeah, so you want me to give you a silver bullet, right, for-

Vitaly: Yes.

Slava: … a company?

Vitaly: Ideally, yes.

Slava: Doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. On the one hand, I think that’s a good discussion, discussions about the skill sets of designers, but on the other hand, we are talking a lot about ourselves, maybe, more than representatives of all the other professions about what we should call our profession, what shapes, skillset should we have, what frameworks and tools should we use? It’s extremely designer-centered. And here, of course, I can talk for hours and participate in holy wars about what’s the best name for this, all that, but essentially, at the end of the day, I realize that it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t make sense at all. Okay, whatever we decide, if you are whatever shape designer, but you are not useful in this world, you cannot reach the goal and you cannot find your niche and make users happy and business happy, then it doesn’t matter what’s written on your resume.

Vitaly: Right. So-

Slava: But then, the one hand, yeah, of course, logically, when I think about it, I do support the T-shaped concept. But again, depends on how you understand it, whether those horizontal bar of the T is about shallow knowledge or good enough knowledge or decent knowledge. You see how thick it is? And that’s why we have another concept with this We shape designer, which is essentially another representation of the T-shaped format. The idea is the same that as a human being, of course, you want to specialize in something that’s passion, that you maybe love design for and maybe that’s why you came into the profession. But at the same time, you are obliged to know to a certain minimally required extent, the whole entirety of your profession.

Slava: Ask any other professional, a surgeon, police person, whoever, financial expert, of course, they have their favorite topics, but at the same time, there is a certain requirement to you as a specialist to obtain certain amount of knowledge and skills.

Slava: The same about designers, I don’t see how we are different from other professions. It’s why it’s quite fair to have this expectation that the person would know something about UX research. They are not obliged to be as professional and advanced as specialized UX researchers, but that’s fine for a designer to know about UX research, to do some UX research. The same about UX researchers, it never hurts to know the basics of design in order to understand what your colleagues are doing and then, you collaborate better together.

Vitaly: Which brings me, of course, to the question that I think you brought up in an article, I think maybe five or six years ago. You had a lot of comments on that article. I remember that article very vividly because you argued about all the different ways of how we define design, UX, CX and all the different wordings and abbreviations, service designer, CX designer, UX designer, and so many other things.

Vitaly: I mean, it’s really interesting to me because when I look back, I realize now that we’ve been working very professionally in this industry, in whatever you want to call design industry, UX industry, digital design industry for like… What? … three decades now, maybe even more than that, really trying to be very professional. But when we look around, actually, and this is just a funny story because just as we started trying to record this session, we spent 14 minutes trying to figure out how to do that in the application here. So what went wrong, Slava? I mean, 30 years is a long time to get some things right and I think that we have done a lot of things. But frankly, too often, when you think about general experience that people would get, be it working with public services, working with insurance companies, working with something that’s maybe less exciting than the landing page or a fancy product or SaaS, very often it’s just not good. What went wrong, Slava? Tell us.

Slava: Nothing went wrong. Everything is fine. The world is getting more and more complex over time, but something never changed, and it’s people, or we didn’t change. Our brain is more or less the same as it was thousand years ago, maybe a couple of thousand years ago and that’s the reason. We are people, we are not perfect. Technology might be amazing, it even feels magical, but we are the same. We are not perfect. We’re not always driven by rational intention to do something well. There are many people who are not very excited about their jobs, that’s why they provide not so good service. There are periods when a good person does bad job and they will improve later, but the task that they deliver today because of many reasons will be at this lower quality.

Slava: Then decision making, we are emotional beings and even if you use a hundred of frameworks about decision making and prioritizing, it doesn’t deny our nature. There are even people who learned to manipulate all the modern techniques, who learned about design thinking and workshops and try to use it to their own advantage. Like, “Oh, okay, I cannot persuade my team, so let’s do this fancy exercise with colored sticky notes and try to-

Vitaly: Well, who doesn’t like colored sticky notes, Slava, come on.

Slava: Digital colored sticky note, they’re still colored and look like sticky notes, right? And those people just want to push their own ideas through workshops. But workshops were designed for something else. The same with business, there are unethical business models still flourishing, there are dark patterns just because some people don’t care. So the reason is that we are the same, we are not perfect.

Vitaly: Right. Well-

Slava: We create design for humans, but we are humans as well.

Vitaly: But sometimes I feel like we are designing for humans, but then, at the same time, I feel that we are spending more and more time designing with AI sometimes for AI, this is how it feels to me. I don’t know about you, every now and again I still get a feeling that, okay, this message that was written by somebody and sent to me, it has a little bit of sense or feel or I don’t know, taste of ChatGPT on it. Just I can tell sometimes that this is kind of for humans, but it’s in a way appears to me as if it was written for AI. So do you have this feeling sometimes that you get that email or you get that message, it’s a little bit too AI-ish? Do you have this experience?

Slava: Sometimes I have this experience, but the reason is that it’s a hot topic right now. You may have already forgotten about another trendy topic, NFT, blockchain, everything was in blockchain, everything was NFT. But over time, people realize where the use cases are really strong and deserve our efforts and where it just doesn’t fit. It’s like with every new technology, it passes the same stages. There is even a nice diagram, the cycle of adoption of any new technology when there is a peak of excitement first when we are trying to apply it everywhere. But then, there is this drop in excitement and disillusionment after which we finally get onto the plateau of enlightenment, finding the best application for this technology.

Slava: I remember the same in the area of design methodology when design sprint just appeared, people tried applying it everywhere, even in many places where it just didn’t fit or the problem was too large or the team culture wasn’t consistent with the trust and openness implied by such a methodology as a design sprint. But over time, it found its application and now, used not that often, but only by those people who need it.

Vitaly: Right. Talking actually about team culture, maybe just to switch the topic a little bit, maybe you could bring a few red flags that you always try to watch out for. Because of course, when you are working with a diverse team and you have people who have very different backgrounds and also have very different expectations and very different skill sets, inevitably, you will face situations where team culture clashes. So I’m wondering, what do you think would be the early warning signs that the manager needs to watch out for to prevent things from exploding down the line?

Slava: That’s a good question. I would turn it into slightly different direction because I think of that kind of paradigm. I would try to prevent this from happening. The best way to deal with it is not to deal with it, to avoid dealing with it. So embracing the culture, understanding it and building it is important because then you won’t need to face the consequence. I wouldn’t say that there are real red flags because culture is like user experience, it’s like gravity, like any other physical force, it just exists. And whether you want it or not, if it’s described in a fancy culture brand guideline or not, it exists anyway. The thing is to be sincere about culture, to embrace the existing culture and to broadcast it to the outside honestly.

Slava: The problem is when the communication about the culture is different from the actual culture. There are various cultures, there are even harsh cultures that someone would find extremely uncomfortable, but for example, for other people it can be a great environment for growth, for rapid growth. Maybe they will change their environment later, but during a certain period of life, it might be important.

Slava: I remember some of my previous companies with pretty harsh cultures, but they helped me to grow and to get where I am right now. Yeah, I wasn’t stressed, but I knew about it. I expected it to happen and I had my inner readiness to resist and to learn my lessons out of that. But the problem is when the company communicates its culture externally as the paradise of wellbeing and mindfulness, but in reality they have deadlines for tomorrow and never ending flow of tasks and crazy stakeholders who demand it from you immediately and give you contradicting requirements. So that’s the problem.

Slava: Of course, yeah, there are some extreme cases when the culture is really toxic, when these are insane, inhuman conditions, I don’t deny that. But in many cases, something that we simply perceive as uncomfortable for ourselves is not necessarily evil, sometimes it is, but not always. And my message is that cultures should be honest. And for that purpose, people should be honest with themselves.

Slava: Manager should look at their company and try to formulate in simple way what type of a community this is. For example, in, again, one of my previous jobs, we realized that our team is like a university for people come to us and are hired because they want to grow rapidly, they want to grow faster than anywhere else, that’s why they join our company. They don’t get many perks and bonuses, the office is not very fancy and we are not those hipster designers who are always using trendy things. But at the same time, you get a lot of practice and you can earn the trust of a client, you can take things you want to be responsible for yourself. You are not given task, but you can take the task you find important.

Slava: And when we realized that, we included it into our value proposition because as a company you’re not even interested in attracting people who will feel unsatisfied here. If you are working this way, but your external messaging is different and you attract those people who are searching for something different and then, when they come in they’re highly disappointed and you have to separate with them in a month or a year or they will bring the elements of this culture to your culture and there is a clash of cultures.

Slava: So the point here, I’m just trying to formulate the same idea but in different ways, it’s to be honest about the culture, it’s extremely important. But also, awareness about your culture. It’s not written, it exists. And sometimes, the company principles are quite misleading, they’re not often true because the real culture is seen at the office, it’s in the Slack chat, it’s in the way how people interact, what they discuss at the coffee machine.

Vitaly: Yeah. And there are, of course, also, I think I read this really nice article maybe a couple of years ago, the idea of different subcultures and how they evolve over time and how they can actually mingle and even merge with, as you might have very different teams working on different side of the world, which then find each other and bring and merge culture. So you kind of have this moving bits and moving parts.

Vitaly: Kind of on the way to one of the conference, I went to Iceland. And there was a really nice friendly guy there who was guiding us through Iceland. And he was telling all this story about nothing ever stops, everything is moving, everything is changing, glaciers are changing, the earth’s changing, everything is changing, everything is moving. And people are pretty much like that. People always find… I mean, maybe people don’t change that much, but they’re still finding ways of collaborating better and finding ways to create something that hopefully works better within the organization. How do you encourage that though?

Vitaly: Very often I encounter situations where it feels like there are people just looking at the clock to finish on time and then, go home. And then, there are people who just want to do everything and they’re very vocal and they will have this incredible amount of enthusiasm everywhere and they will have all the GIFs in Slack and so on and so forth. But then, sometimes I feel like, again, talking about culture, their enthusiasm is clashed against this coldness that is coming from some people. And then, you have camps building. How do you deal with situations like that?
You cannot just make people more similar, you just have to deal with very different people who just happen to have very different interests and priorities. How would you manage that?

Slava: That’s an amazing question, and you know why? Because there is no definite answer to it.

Vitaly: I like those kind of questions.

Slava: Yeah. It’s not easy and I struggled a lot with that. I know perfectly, based on my experience, what you’re asking about. One of the solutions might be to hire people who have similar culture or at least consistent with the existing culture. Because if your whole team or the core team, the majority in the team who set this spirit and this atmosphere, they are proactive, you shouldn’t hire people who are highly inconsistent with this kind of culture. Yeah, they might be more passive, more attentive to their schedule, but they should not be resisted at least. They can support it maybe in a more calm way, but you don’t need someone critically opposing that state of things, and vice the versa. Over time, I understood that.

Slava: Sometime ago, I thought that all designers should be proactive, rock stars, super skilled, taking responsibility about everything. But you know what? That’s quite one-sided point of view. Even if I belong to this kind of designers, it’s important to embrace other types of professionals because the downside of being such a designer is that you are driven forward by your passion, but only when you have this passion and motivation. But if it disappears, you can hardly make yourself do the simplest task. And that’s the problem because this fuel doesn’t feed you anymore.

Slava: On the other hand, those people who are more attentive to their balance between work and relaxation, people who are more attentive to their schedule and are less energetic at work and may be less passionate about what they do, they are more persistent and they can much easier survive such a situation when everything around is falling apart and many people lose motivation just because motivation is not such a strong driver for them.
So over time, I understood that there are multiple types of designers and they’re all fine. The thing is to find your niche and to be in the place where you belong.

Vitaly: Right. Interesting. Because on top of that, I do have to ask a question. We could do this forever, we could keep this conversation going forever. I want to be respectful of your time as well. Just from your experience… There are so many people, the people who I’ve been speaking to over this last couple of years, but also here on the podcast, everybody has different opinions about how teams should be led and how the culture should be defined in terms of how people are working, specifically all-remote, a hundred percent remote or all on site, a hundred percent on site or hybrid with one day overlap, two days overlap, three days overlap, four days overlap.

Vitaly: What do you think works? I mean, of course, it’s a matter of the company where people allocated. And obviously, if everybody is from different parts of the world, being on site all the time, moving from, let’s say, fully remote to fully on site is just really difficult. So what would you say is really critical in any of those environments? Can hybrid work really well? Can remote work really well? Can onsite work really well? And there’s truly no best option, but I’m just wondering what should we keep in mind for each of those?

Slava: The culture. So look, culture is everything and it influences the way how people work efficiently. If is networking is really active in the team, if people communicate a lot apart from their work and tasks and everything, and if it’s normal for the team, if it’s part of the reasons why people are here in this company, then offline work is preferable. If people are more autonomous and they like it and everyone works like that in the company, then there is nothing bad in being hybrid or remote. So you see, it depends on the attitude to work and general culture, the spirit, how people feel comfortable.

Vitaly: All right. But are you saying that if you have, let’s say, a mix of people who really prefer on site and then, really prefer remote, then you kind of get an issue because how do you merge both of those intentions?

Slava: But how do you get into that situation in the first place?

Vitaly: Well, good question.

Slava: Why have you attracted so different people to your company?

Vitaly: But for the rest [inaudible 00:37:39] with HR?

Slava: Yes, I read processes.

Vitaly: But there might be different teams and then, eventually those teams get merged and then, eventually, some people come, some people leave and people are rotating from one team to another. And then, eventually, before you know it, you end up in a situation where you’re working on a new product with a new team and then, part are remote, part are on site and part don’t even want to be there.

Slava: That’s why large companies have processes. The thing that you are describing is quite typical for huge companies because you cannot keep similar work culture forever. As you scale, it’s becoming more awake and hard to match all the time. There is an amazing diagram that I saw in LinkedIn, it was created by Julie Zhuo, who also wrote a great book on management. And this diagram shows how people are hiring, like this, A hires, B hires, C hires, D, and there is a slight difference in their cultures. And if you imagine it as the line of overlapping circles, when A hires B, B hires C, C hires D and so on, then you notice how far A is from let’s say H or G, they’re very far away because this line of hiring brought certain distortion, certain mutation into the culture understanding with each step.

Slava: It’s like evolution is working. With every century or thousands of years, certain species changes one tiny trait, but in a million of years, you won’t even recognize that. The same with huge companies, you cannot control everything and micromanage it. So naturally, they’re extremely diverse. And many companies even are proud of being diverse and inclusive, which is another aspect, which is great, but in order to manage it all, they have to introduce processes and be more strictly regulated just to keep it working.

Vitaly: Right. Right. Well, I mean, we could speak about this for hours, I think. But maybe just two more questions before we wrap up. One thing that’s really important to me and really dear to me is that I know that you’ve been mentoring and you’ve been participating in kind of educating about design also specifically for designers who are in Ukraine. And I mean, at this point, we probably have many more connections and many more insights about how design is actually working from Ukraine right now when the war is going on. I’m just wondering, do you see… Because we had a Smashing meet a couple of months ago now. And there was an incredible talk by one of the people from set up team in Ukraine, in Kyiv, and they were speaking about just incredible way of how they changed the way the company works, how they adapted in any way to accommodate for everything. Like some people working from bomb shelters. This is just incredible.

Vitaly: Those kind of stories really make me cry. So this is just unbelievable. And I always have this very, I don’t even know how to describe it, like incredible sense of the strength that everybody who I’m interacting with who is coming through [inaudible 00:41:00] keep after all this time. It’s been now, what? It’s like one and a half years, right, well, much more than that, actually looking at 2014.
So the question, I guess, that I’m trying to ask here is that strength and that kind of obsession with quality, with good work, with learning, with educating, how did it come to be and how is it now? I don’t know if it makes sense the question, but just maybe your general feelings about what designers are feeling and how are they working at this point in May 2023?

Slava: That’s a good question. Unfortunately, I might not be the best person to answer because I’ve been living in Berlin for three years and fortunately, I never experienced working from a bomb shelter, although, many of my friends and acquaintances did. But what I know for sure is that Ukrainian design community is quite peculiar and it’s an insurance trait. It’s not something that we are taught, but something that just our characteristic. I know that unlike many other people from other countries, Ukrainian designers are really hungry for knowledge and new skills. And the level of self-organization is quite high because we are not used to getting it off the shelf, we are not used to receiving it, I don’t know, from educational institutions, from the government, from whoever else.

Slava: In Ukraine, or at least definitely my generation, millennials, we understand that if we don’t do anything, we will fail in life, that’s why we try to build our career early, we think about our future work during the last years of school and at the university, already planning where we going to work, how much we going to earn and how to find your niche, your place in life.

Slava: And the same in design, we are not waiting until our universities update their programs in order to teach us digital design, we are doing it ourselves, partnering with universities, participating in different courses, contributing to those programs. And I think that this feature, this trait of Ukrainian designers is extremely helpful right now in crisis times. Maybe it didn’t get us that much by surprise, it was still unexpected. But Ukrainian designers and other professionals in other professions, they just try to always have plan B and plan C and maybe even plan D.

Vitaly: Yeah, that’s probably also explains… I mean, I have to ask this question, I really do. Why medieval themes in your UX memes? Oh, even rhymes, it must be true.

Slava: First of all, it’s beautiful and funny. The first time I used medieval art-based memes was several years ago when I worked at EPAM Systems and prepared an internal presentation for one of our internal team meetups. And it was hilarious, everyone was laughing. And since then, I just started doing it all the time. It’s not like-

Vitaly: And you have like 50 of them now or even more?

Slava: More. Many more. It’s just something original. I haven’t seen many medieval memes, especially in the educational and other materials about design and UX. So it’s just, I like to bring positive emotions to my audience. So if it’s hilarious and makes them laugh and if it’s something new that others are not doing or at least that intensively, then why not? And I simply enjoy medieval art, including architecture, gothic style, Romanesque architecture, it’s something from fairy tales or legends, but then, you realize, it was real.

Vitaly: Yeah, so I guess, dear friends listening to this, if you ever want to give or find a nice gift for Slava, lookout for medieval art and any books related to that, I think that Slava will sincerely appreciated.
Now, as we’re wrapping up, and I think that you mentioned already the future at this point, I’m curious, this is a question I like asking at the end of every episode. Slava, do you have a dream project that you’d love to work on one day, a magical brand or a particularly interesting project of any industry, of any scope of any sites with any team? Do you have something in mind, what you would love to do one day? Maybe somebody from that team, from that project, from that company, from that brand is now listening.

Slava: Great question, and maybe I don’t have an amazing answer to it because it doesn’t matter. I’m dreaming about bringing value, creating something significant, but I never limited myself to a particular area or a particular company or brand, it just doesn’t matter. If it’s valuable, then it’s a success.

Vitaly: All right, well, if you, dear listener would like to hear more from Slava, you can find him on LinkedIn where he’s… Guess what? … Slava Shestopalov, but also on Medium where he writes a lot of stuff around UX, and of course, don’t forget medieval-themed UX memes, and also, on his 5:00 AM travel blog. Slava will also be speaking in Freiburg at SmashingConf, I’m very looking forward to see you there, and maybe even tomorrow, we’ll see about that. So please, dear friends, if you have the time, please drop in at SmashingConf, Freiburg, September 2023.
All right, well, thank you so much for joining us today, Slava. Do you have any parting words of wisdom that you would like to send out to the people who might be listening to this 20 years from now? Who knows?

Slava: Oh, wisdom, I’m not that wise yet, but something that I discovered recently is that we should more care about people. Technology is advancing so fast, so the thing which is left is the human factor. Maybe AI will take part of our job and that’s great because there are many routine tasks no one is fond of doing, but people, we are extremely complex and understanding who we are and how we designers as humans can serve other humans is essential. So that’s where I personally put my effort into recently, and I think that’s a great direction of research for everyone working in design, UX and related areas.

The prospect of networking can be stressful, especially when you’re a new founder, and especially if you’re not a naturally extroverted person. But building up your professional network is one of the most effective ways to spread awareness of your brand, make vital connections, and get access to the resources, expertise, and leadership you need to take your venture to the next level.

In today’s economy, entrepreneurs need every edge they can get. So how do you forge those important, authentic connections? It’s probably not as difficult as you think. Let’s go over some basic, proven strategies to build your network.

Don’t be openly transactional

This tip might sound counterintuitive. After all, the whole point of networking is to advance your professional prospects by creating mutually beneficial relationships with people in your field. The phrase “mutually beneficial” itself implies an exchange (i.e., a transaction.)

But people tend to react negatively if you make the transactional aspect of networking too obvious. The contemporary model of networking stresses relationships and helping, and downplays horse trading and asking, “What have you done for me lately?” Keep things casual and personal when you’re networking, at least initially. Networking is like any other social interaction: Downplaying what you want isn’t deceptive, it’s simple courtesy.

Be efficient, not overextended

Networking can feel like a burden, especially to the modern entrepreneur clocking 16-hour days. But networking can have such a galvanizing effect on your career that smart founders consider literally moving across the country just to get access to more valuable professional networks.

Many experts suggest allocating a set amount of time per day or week to maintaining and developing your network — for example, one hour a day when you just touch base with high-value professional contacts.

This approach has two big benefits. One, you’ll be consistently cultivating your network, and having a predetermined amount of time to devote to networking protects you from the possibility that it’ll encroach on your time. Two, you’ll be forced to concentrate on your most promising relationships, while phasing out less useful ones.

Hone a high-value presentation

As we mentioned above, effective networking involves forging mutually beneficial relationships. In today’s turbulent job market, people are especially eager to network if you have something to offer them. Make your value clear by stating your current credentials and expertise on sites like LinkedIn, since that’s where most networking contacts will check you out. 

Don’t make things too dry, though. A little personality will go a long way when it comes to making a favorable and memorable impression.

Be active on social media

Many professional contacts will make a point of checking your social media accounts. Use these accounts to convey your professional and personal selves. Offer updates, insights, commentary, humor, and even innocuous content like photos of your pet or lunch. Remember, you’re not just trying to impress people — you’re also trying to endear yourself to them.

Another tip when it comes to your social media accounts: Try to stay active on your main platforms by posting at least once per week. You want to present yourself as engaged and active — not mysterious and absent.

But face-to-face is still the gold standard

As engaging as social media and Zoom meetings can be, face-to-face networking is still the best way to make connections. So much of human communication is non-verbal, and things like body language and eye contact are as important, if not more important, than the words coming out of your mouth. It’s tough, if not impossible, to forge an authentic connection without face-to-face contact.

Have a game plan

Before you start networking, think hard about what you want to get out of it. Do you want to find a mentor or a collaborator? Are you trying to raise awareness of a new venture, expand the voice of an existing one, or consolidate your influence? 

Once you understand your “mission,” you can think about who can help you achieve these goals, and what kind of skills and experience those people might have. At that point, it’s just a matter of forging the relationships.

Cultivate mentorships — from both sides

Don’t forget, there are three “directions” you can network in: upwards (people further along their career paths than you), laterally (your peers), and downwards (people not as far along in their career paths). You shouldn’t neglect any of these levels!

One of the most effective ways to leverage the diverse talents of these groups is through mentorships. Seeking out mentors can get you valuable access to institutional knowledge, leadership, and specialized experience, while taking on mentees can give you valuable perspective, and cultivate contacts in the next generation.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help

One of the more confusing truths about networking is that people don’t like to be pestered or put upon, but they do, under the right circumstances, like to do things for people.

Why? There are a lot of reasons. Beyond the obvious benefit of reciprocity, doing a favor for someone also confers a feeling of virtuousness, and it provides an opportunity to demonstrate and exercise power. Asking someone to do something for you can actually be a great way to seal a new relationship. The trick, of course, is learning how to do it without imposing on them.

Don’t forget to follow up — and maintain

Once you’ve made some contacts, don’t neglect to follow up with them a few days later. Sending them a quick email or text, especially if it touches on something specific that you spoke about during your earlier interaction, is an incredibly effective way to cement your good impression. Social media is a great venue for this — a like or comment on one of their posts is an easy, low-maintenance way to create a moment of connection and awareness.

But don’t think that following up, or networking as a whole, is a “one-and-done” task. You should actively maintain and cultivate your network going forward. This means making regular contact, whether it’s a quick chat at a convention or industry meeting, or an email just to check in on how things are going. If you wait too long between contacts, those connections and relationships you worked so hard to forget will fade away, and you’ll be back at square one.

Featured Photo by Product School on Unsplash

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OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is a technology that can scan written or printed text (from files such as images or PDFs) and convert it into a machine-readable format. The word “machine-readable” here means editable or modifiable. So, in other words, OCR can extract data from unalterable files and convert it into changeable text. 

This raises the question, “What is the use of OCR in business?” Surprisingly, this technology has many applications in businesses of different natures. In this post, we are going to discuss these applications.

Benefits of OCR in Business

We have created a list of all the benefits that you can get if you integrate OCR into your business-related processes. For example, with the help of OCR, you can convert your physical documents into searchable digital files. The list of such benefits is very wide. 

Let’s explore some of these benefits.

1. Enhanced Document Storage

Hard copies of documents take up much physical space, making them difficult to organize. On the other hand, digital documents are much easier to store and manage.

Businesses around the world are in the process or have already gone paperless because of the immense benefits of digital storage. 

OCR can be used for this document digitization. All you have to do is scan your physical documents with the help of OCR software. The result generated will consist of copyable text that can be converted into a digital document. This document can be stored on hard drives or on cloud storage.

2. Advanced Document Security

OCR is very useful for document protection as it is much harder to breach digital documents as compared to physical ones. Similarly, physical documents are also prone to other hazards. For example, in case of a leak in the document storage room, crucial documents can get wet, and all the valuable data inside them will be lost.

Additionally, there are numberless other possibilities that can damage physical documents. OCR helps us digitize documents. Such computerized files can be easily secured with the help of passwords and other protective measures. 

This eliminates the risk of:

• Document Stealing
• Document Damage
• Document Leak

3. Improved File Accessibility

Some of you might think about why it is necessary to use OCR for the digitization of files when we can simply just take images of physical documents. Well, a machine cannot directly comprehend the data inside an image.

This is why there is a need for documents first to be converted into an editable text format. Such documents can easily be searched for. This improves document accessibility by a considerable amount.

According to online data, 77% of business owners want to be able to access files remotely. This shows how many people prefer digital documents over hard copies.

4. Ease in Document Editing

Smaller brands and businesses that are in the process of going digital in terms of documents usually have their files in the form of images or PDFs. These files can not be modified. Similarly, physical documents also have this issue that they cannot be altered.

OCR can fix this problem quite efficiently. Multiple tools are available that recognize these characters and extract text from image. These characters may include:

• Alphabets
• Numbers
• Mathematical symbols
• Special signs

And much more. When such data is in text form, it can easily be edited or modified. In this way, OCR makes the editing process for a business substantially more convenient.

5. Automated Data Entry

OCR is not only limited to data extraction. Other technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, can be combined with OCR for new usages. These usages include data entry as well. OCR can be used to recognize data from files and enter it into relevant software.

This data may include:

• Invoices
• Bank Statements
• Receipts
• Bills

Similarly, a number of other unorganized documents are also a part of this list. This process of data entry automation saves companies tons of time and resources. 

Manual data entry takes up so much unnecessary effort and also comes with the risk of errors. This is the reason why the majority of businesses have started automating such processes with the help of OCR. 

Conclusion

To summarize, OCR is a stepping stone toward digitalizing your physical documents. Digital files clearly have the upper hand on physical documents in terms of storage, security, accessibility, and editing. In addition to the computerization of documents, OCR is also useful for the automation of various tasks. With so many benefits, it is clear that all businesses should integrate OCR into their business-related tasks to increase efficiency.

Featured image by PayPal.me/FelixMittermeier from Pixabay

The post Top 5 Benefits of OCR Technology for Your Business  appeared first on noupe.

Every month we take the opportunity to look at some of the most creative and innovative website designs to be launched in the previous four weeks.

Many brands have started utilizing social media to understand customer issues and complaints. Most of their audiences are active on social media channels. This gives them direct access to customer insights and requirements. Brands can also reinforce their branding efforts by bringing in customer support services through social outlets. 

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are some of the most popular social media platforms. These platforms are mostly used to promote the brand and its offerings. You can also use them to resolve customer issues. One of the most popular means of doing this is responding directly to customer comments and posts. 

What is social listening?

Social media listening platform means understanding customer issues and feedback through social media. Brands track customer feedback and opinions to improve their products or services.

The customer conversations give them insights into customer behavior and buying patterns. It also helps them get a clear idea of their angst, frustration, or issues. Social listening can also be used to keep a close eye on the evolving requirements of end users.

Here are some ways of improving customer service through social listening: 

1. Recognize the most popular social platforms 

Before using social listening to resolve customer queries/complaints, recognize the social platforms on which most of your customers gather.

• If you run a B2B type of business, most of your clients may be active on LinkedIn or Twitter.
• Instagram is the best place to address customer issues related to shopping brands. 

Finding the right content distribution will help you track industry-specific brands, customers, competitors, etc.

• Suppose that you sell SaaS products. In this case, most of your customers may be active on LinkedIn.

In this case, choose LinkedIn as your content distribution platform. 

Set alerts or notifications on these social media platforms so that you don’t miss out on important conversations. The alerts or notifications will also help you prioritize customer queries or complaints. Different social platforms have different ways of doing this.

For instance, you can use the communications tab to set up notifications on LinkedIn. 

Focus on popular social platforms to bring in customer engagement. It will help you build long-lasting relationships with your customers, which will ultimately boost your business. Be active on these social platforms to improve your customer response rate.

2. Use social listening tools 

Tracking customer conversations via several social media platforms can be a challenging and time-consuming task. Social listening tools can help automate some of these tasks. 

Social listening tools help you keep a close eye on customer conversations. These tools use brand mentions, tags, and keywords to track these conversations. You can also create a search query to fetch customer conversations without any issues. 

Smart use of social listening tools prevents you from missing out on a single customer conversation. These tools not only save you time but also enable you to send prompt responses to customer queries and complaints.

• You can also latch on to a comprehensive customer management suite like Konnect Insights.

It helps you understand what customers are saying about your brand and products. 

Also, it helps you track customer conversations and analyze them automatically. Based on the insights obtained through this social listening platform, you can make data-driven decisions. 

Konnect Insights is one of the best platforms that allows you to manage customer experiences. You can listen to their conversations and respond to them immediately using its tools and features. It is possible to integrate this platform with several apps that can help you manage customer data. 

The wide range of tools offered on this platform helps you enhance customer relationships. You can conduct surveys and evaluate customer feedback through these tools. It also comes with crisis management capabilities. With these capabilities, you can pre-empt a crisis and take prompt action to resolve it. 

3. Listen to what customers are saying through forums and communities 

Social media is not limited to social media accounts and pages. Countless forums and communities are active on social media. The audience uses these communities and forums to discuss their issues. They also use these social outlets to connect with like-minded people. You can target those communities that contain your target audiences. 

• For example, if you manufacture gaming phones and devices, you can focus on gaming communities and forums. 
• The communities like Quora and Reddit can also help you to discuss customer issues and complaints in detail.

These communities will provide you with in-depth insights into customer issues or pain points. By analyzing their pain points, you can make significant changes to your product and customer service. 

Leaving open threads on social media can leave your customers frustrated. Address customer issues through these threads. It will also help customers who are facing similar issues. It will help improve your customer service, which will in turn allow you to maintain customer loyalty. 

4. Convert frustrated users to loyal customers 

Listening to customer issues and complaints is just one part of the process. Many more efforts are required to provide a satisfactory experience for your customers.

• You can start by acknowledging the customer’s issues and apologizing for them. 
• Next, you must provide more clarity to the customers by discussing with them in private. If possible you can explain to them over a phone call or meet them in person. Faster response time makes customers feel like you understand their concerns. 

Make customers feel like you care for them. Small things like sending them an apology letter or giving them extra loyalty points for being patient can help your brand go a long way. Once you have resolved the issues or complaints of the customers, you can ask them to subscribe to the newsletters. 

• Create email newsletters that focus on discussing the product features in detail. Also, keep the customers in the loop about your latest offerings through these newsletters. 
• Addressing customer complaints is not enough. You must also acknowledge positive reviews and feedback. A simple thank you can be enough on most occasions. 

Social listening tools will ensure that you respond quickly to the appreciation notes of your customers. It will make your customers think that you feel good when they appreciate your offerings. Tiny efforts like these will strengthen your customer relationships.

5. Analyze the customer service problems faced by your competitor’s customers 

Social listening helps you analyze the strengths and shortcomings of your competitors. By using insightful social media tools, you can recognize the concerns that your competitors’ customers are facing. Using this, you can revamp your customer service strategies. 

Suppose that some of your competitor’s customers are not happy with the limited customer service options they offer. You can capitalize on this shortcoming and try to lure them in by offering more options. 

• For instance, you can offer customer support services through chat, email, telephone, etc. Keep your customers satisfied by providing them with more options to connect with your support executives.

It will not only give you a competitive edge but also help you expand your customer reach. 

Tips to improve customer service using social listening

These are some additional tips that can help you improve your customer service:

1. Be proactive 

Be proactive while addressing customer concerns and complaints via social media.

• By being proactive, you can notify a customer even before they have encountered a problem. 

Suppose that you sell software solutions and that your software is scheduled for maintenance activity due to a recent update. Now, it is better to inform all your customers in advance than respond to their complaints afterward. It will create a good impression on your customers. 

2. Merge content marketing apps with social listening tools 

The social listening tools help you track customer conversations in real-time.

• By merging content marketing apps with social listening tools, you can manage customer interactions.

Handling the customers in real-time can also help you avert a crisis. Choose social listening tools that are backed by powerful algorithms. You should be able to enter search queries, keywords, and brand names to monitor conversations. These tools should also be integrated with content management apps to offer seamless customer service. 

3. Discover brand influencers 

Discovering the influencers who have the maximum impact on your customers can also improve your customer service. You can track how these influencers deal with and manage end users. Adopt some of their strategies to make your customer service more impactful. 

• Influencers usually have knowledge of re-targeting groups based on their conversations. By using their insights, you can construct formidable marketing campaigns. Some of these insights can also be used to retain customers. 

Train your customer support executives to cross-sell your offerings. Suppose that a customer who uses your software is suffering an issue due to poor security measures. Now, if your support executives are fully trained in cross-selling, they can pitch your antivirus software smartly to the users. 

4. Conduct a market research

Thorough market research will help you find the best platforms to address customer issues. Once you shortlist the popular social platforms, start offering customer service through your social media accounts and pages. 

5. Find what to track and how to track

Just listening to everything that your customers are saying is not feasible. You must also decide what to track and how to track it. A clear plan can help you monitor the things that can affect your brand’s image and customer service. 

While using social listening tools, you can focus on these things:

• Brand mentions
• Industry buzzwords
• Customer complaints and feedback 
• Customer appreciation received through reviews and feedback 
• Hashtags relevant to your business 
• Hashtags related to your competitors
• Mention your industry influencers 
• Tracking how the influencers engage with your target audience

6. Collaborate with influencers

You can also collaborate with the influencers to keep a close eye on the customer’s issues and concerns. By working with them, you can create formidable customer acquisition and retention strategies. Learn how to pitch relevant products or services by analyzing customer service. 

Conclusion

Social listening is a much quicker and more cost-effective solution than traditional marketing tools. Use social listening tools to improve customer service and retain customers. You can also integrate these social listening tools for online crisis management. 

Identify the right channels for handling customer queries and complaints. After that, you can focus on picking the right social listening platform. Konnect Insights can help you manage the customer experience. Its myriad of features enables you to evaluate customer conversations. Finally, you can improve your existing customer service portals to integrate social listening activities seamlessly! 

Featured image by Thorsten Frenzel from Pixabay

The post Ways To Use Social Listening To Improve Your Customer Service appeared first on noupe.

Attaining a healthy work-life balance becomes a challenge for employees as they have to juggle multiple responsibilities at the workplace and at home while maintaining relationships with their family members. 

So, how can employers help their employees achieve a better work-life balance while being productive at work? 

From trying out different work schedules to doing away with unnecessary meetings, check out a few actionable steps employers can take to help employees find a healthy personal and professional balance.

What Is Work-Life Balance?

Work-life balance is all about creating a balanced environment for employees that allows them to accomplish their job duties efficiently while giving them ample time to prioritize their personal lives. A better work-life balance enables individuals to work productively while taking care of their well-being after office hours. 

However, due to the rising demand to achieve greater results, employees are struggling to strike the right balance between their personal and professional lives. This is the reason why business leaders and employers must step in to help employees achieve a state of equilibrium so that they can prioritize both lives equally.

Ways to Improve Work-Life Balance

Allow Adequate Paid Time Off

One of the best ways to help employees attain a work-life balance is by providing them with adequate paid time off. Many employers are, in fact, providing unlimited paid time off options to promote an employee-centric environment. Employees can take time offs whenever needed to recharge and refresh, spend more time with family, plan a vacation, or complete personal work. 

Besides, managers must encourage employees to use their PTO whenever they need it and make sure that employees don’t hesitate or feel guilty to request time off. Managers are supposed to set the tone of the workplace, therefore, they can lead by example by taking time off from work for a much-deserved rest. 

They can also demonstrate the significance of work-life balance by leaving the office on time, taking adequate breaks, and not mailing to employees when they are on time off.

In addition, employers can adopt simple practices to promote work-life balance, such as challenging employees to meet their friends and family at least once a week, whether on weekends or by using paid time off. 

Try Alternative Schedules Over Traditional 9 to 5 Approach

As the demand for more flexibility has surged, employers are experimenting with different work schedules that are way too versatile and flexible over the regular ones. For instance, in the flex schedule, employees can work at their own pace; that is, they can work during the time which is convenient to them and when they feel most productive. 

In other words, here, employers give their employees the freedom to do their work any time of the day or week. 

Similarly, compressed workweek schedules such as 9/80 and 4/10 are renowned for their different approaches, which squeeze the total work hours of a week into fewer days. For instance, in a 9/80 work schedule, the total 80 hours of two weeks are completed in 9 days rather than ten days, thus providing an additional day off every second week. 

In addition, companies nowadays are also opting for a 4-day work week to render their employees more flexibility and work-life balance. 

Adopt Remote and Hybrid Work Culture

Remote workers cite better work-life balance and overall wellness, as remote working provides employees with the freedom to organize their day at their convenience. As a result, they can do their job when they feel most productive and make sufficient time for other activities outside of work. 

Besides, many employers are switching to a hybrid work culture that enables employees to work 2 to 3 days from the workplace and other days from home. This schedule allows employees to interact with colleagues on a regular basis and gives them a break from the daily commute while offering more time to spend with their families.

Cut Down on Unnecessary Meetings

One of the major productivity killers is the time squandered on various meetings. With the work-from-home culture, the biggest disadvantage that appeared is that the meetings or discussions that could have been done within a few minutes have now taken the form of half an hour-long Zoom meetings. 

What’s more, in order to discuss a few things with multiple stakeholders and colleagues, employees may have to block their calendars for a certain time.  On top of that, some employees don’t need to attend certain meetings since they don’t have much to contribute, which ultimately wastes their time and reduces their productivity.

So, look into the calendar of employees; if they are loaded with multiple meeting slots, then there are chances that they may not be able to focus on their main work and may have to compensate for it by working extra hours outside the office.

Consider freeing up the employee’s calendar by discarding unnecessary conferences and meetings. Instead, establish a system of half an hour brainstorming sessions in which team members of a project can meet and discuss things in advance in order to clear any doubts or roadblocks.  

Build an Employee-Centric Company That Supports Young Parents

All employees have a family to look after, and the best way an employer can improve employees’ morale is by supporting them with their responsibilities. For instance, many organizations are providing their employees with free backup childcare, workplace daycare, remote learning pods for kids, sabbaticals, and additional paid family leaves, so that young parents can pay attention to their young children while pursuing their jobs.

Employers should also consider providing perks and benefits such as maternity, paternity, or shared parental leaves to employees with young children so that they have sufficient time to complete their parenthood responsibilities. 

Avoid Glorifying Busy Work Culture and Overworking

One of the biggest reasons why employees in certain industries feel more burnout is due to the culture of staying super busy and working extra hard. Especially in organizations where it’s a norm that overworking and taking extra responsibilities is a measure of your dedication to your job, it is likely that employees will face burnout, stress, and ultimately experience work-life imbalance. 

Thus, it is crucial that employers should stop promoting a work culture where overworked employees are considered the epitome of ideal workers. Instead, they should spread a message that the ideal worker is someone who is efficient at the workplace but at the same time has a great life outside of their office. Furthermore, they should encourage employees to take ample rest and sleep every day as the well-rested employees are most productive and creative.

Encourage Employees to Take Sufficient Breaks

According to a published survey report from Tork, 9 out of 10 respondents revealed that they are more likely to stay in an organization where employers encourage their employees to take breaks in between work. Breaks are crucial as they help restore productivity and creativity levels when working long shifts. 

Besides, breaks give desk job workers some time to rest their eyes and the entire body. Taking breaks in between work not only helps in increasing productivity, but also makes employees feel more engaged, energized, and relaxed. 

To promote breaks in your organization, managers can leverage the Pomodoro technique method that follows the approach of taking a 5-minute break after every 25 minutes of work. Managers can also organize some fun activities or games to help employees disconnect from work for a while. Some employers are also establishing a dedicated space known as a nap area or nap pods, where employees can take a nap while at work to get refreshed. 

Communicate with Employees Regularly

If you want to create a better work-life balance for your employees, the foremost thing is to communicate with your employees regularly. For example, managers can book a monthly one-on-one meeting with their team members to ask them about their well-being and workload. Let them know if they can do anything to support their wellness or need help in prioritizing their work schedules. 

It is recommended that managers regularly assess the employees’ workload and productivity. Suppose they witness a sudden slip in performance or an excessive absenteeism pattern. In that case, they should try to communicate with employees if they are facing any challenge inside or outside the workplace and if they can help them sort it out. 

In addition, they can encourage them to avail of their PTO if they need a break from work or offer other such solutions. Besides, employers should have an open-door policy so that employees can reach out to management if they face any issues and express their concerns freely without any fear of repercussions.

Bottom Line

Striking the right balance between professional and personal lives is challenging for every employee. However, employers can help their employees find a better work-life balance by adopting the above-mentioned ways. Following these practices will not only make workers happier and more productive but also, your company will be known to promote a better work-life balance that will help you attract top talent and retain the best ones.

Featured image by mostafa meraji from Pixabay

The post Ways To Improve Work-Life Balance For Employees appeared first on noupe.

“If you don’t want to work within constraints, become an artist.” That is what one of my design lecturers told me when I was at university back when the web wasn’t even a thing.

That has turned out to be one of the most useful pieces of advice I ever received in my career and has led me to embrace and even enjoy working within constraints, which probably explains why I tend to specialize in highly regulated sectors with enormous amounts of stakeholders and legacy.

So, if you find working within constraints challenging, this is the post for you. In it, I hope to change your attitude towards constraints and provide practical ways of dealing with even the most frustrating barriers.

But let’s begin by looking at the kind of constraints you could find yourself facing.

Constraints On Every Side

The constraints we face come in all shapes and sizes, from technical constraints due to legacy technology or backwards compatibility to legal constraints relating to compliance requirements or accessibility.

Then there can be inadequate availability of images, video, and text or simply a lack of access to stakeholders.

However, the biggest two, without a doubt, are a lack of time and a lack of resources (either money or people). In fact, it is rare to encounter a project where somebody is not in a hurry, and you have enough resources to do the job properly!

It is easy to let all of these obstacles demoralize you, but I would encourage you to embrace, rather than resist, their constraints.

Why You Should Embrace Your Constraints

Constraints are not a set of necessary evils we have to endure. Instead, they are the core of what shapes the work we do.

• Constraints provide a clear set of guidelines and limitations, which can help focus the design process and prevent scope creep.
• Constraints help to build trust with clients or stakeholders, as they can see that the designer is able to work within their limitations and still deliver a high-quality product.
• But most importantly of all, constraints can lead to more creative and innovative solutions, as designers are forced to think creatively within the given limitations.

I have done some of my best work over the years precisely because of the constraints placed upon me, not despite them.

Also, some constraints are a good idea. Ensuring a site is accessible just makes sense, as does limiting the time and money an organization is willing to invest.

Not that you should blindly accept every constraint placed upon you.

Know When To Push Back Against Constraints

Unsurprisingly, I would encourage you to challenge constraints that are based on incorrect assumptions or outdated information. However, you won’t come across those that frequently.

More common are constraints that make sense from “a certain point of view.” However, these kinds of constraints are not always right within the context of the project and its long-term objectives.

For example, attempting to deliver a project within a strict budget and on an aggressive schedule may reduce the cost to the organization. But it will substantially increase the risk of the project failing, and so ultimately, the money and time that were spent will be wasted.

Another common example is compliance constraints. These constraints exist to protect the organization from possible risk, but many larger organizations become so risk-averse that they undermine their competitiveness in the market. They swap one type of risk for another.

The key in these situations is to demonstrate the cost of any constraint placed upon you.

Demonstrating The Cost Of An Unhealthy Constraint

Often, those who impose constraints upon you do not see the problems these constraints create. This is usually because they are only thinking in terms of their own area of responsibility. For example, a compliance officer is only going to be thinking about compliance and not the broader user experience. Equally, the IT department is going to be more focused on security and privacy than conversion or usability.

Ultimately the decision of whether to enforce a constraint or not comes down to balancing multiple factors. Therefore, what you need to do is

Demonstrate the cost associated with a constraint so that senior management (who take a more holistic view) has all of the facts to make a final decision.

You can demonstrate the cost in one of three ways. You can either focus on the damage that a constraint causes, the cost of not taking an action the constraint prevents, or the lost opportunities imposed by the constraint.

Let’s look at each to help you see more clearly how this can work.

Highlight The Hidden Damage Of A Constraint

I once worked for a consumer electronics company. One of their biggest sellers was a kettle that included a water filter which prevented limescale build-up (I know, I work on the most exciting projects!)

The company insisted that when somebody added the kettle to their shopping cart, we should automatically add a set of water filters as well.

This is a well-known dark pattern that damages the user experience, but I also knew that it was increasing the average order value, a key metric the e-commerce team tracked.

To combat this constraint, I knew I had to demonstrate that it was causing damage that the e-commerce team and leadership were unaware of. So, I took the following steps:

• I gathered evidence on social media of users complaining about this issue.
• I contacted the customer support team to get some metrics about the number of complaints.
• I contacted the returns team to find out how many people returned the filters.
• I looked on review sites to see the number of negative reviews relating to filters.

Sure enough, I found substantial evidence that this was a major issue among consumers. But I didn’t stop there. I wanted to associate a financial cost with the decision, so I made some estimates:

• I made my best guess at the cost of combating the negative reviews, referencing various sources I found online.
• I researched the average cost of dealing with a complaint and combined it with the data from the customer services team to guess the overall cost of dealing with filter complaints.
• I used a similar approach to work out an approximate cost of processing returned filters.

Now, let me be clear, these were nothing more than guesses on my part. My figures were not accurate, and people in the company were quick to challenge them. But associating a dollar value with the problem got their attention!

I agreed that my figures were probably wildly off and suggested we did some proper research to find out the real cost.

You don’t need hard data to demonstrate there is a problem. An educated guess is good enough to start a discussion.

Of course, not all constraints are actively causing damage. Some are merely preventing some better action from being taken. In these cases, you need a different approach.

Focus On The Cost Of Inaction

Over time, an organization establishes processes and procedures that have been proven to work for them. The bigger the organization, the more standard operating procedures they have, and the more constraints you encounter.

Well-established companies become so afraid of losing their position that they become extremely risk-averse, and so place considerable constraints on any project.

People succeed in organizations like this by doing what has been done before. This can be problematic for those of us who work in digital because most of what we are trying to do is new.

To combat this bias towards the status quo, we need to demonstrate the cost of inaction. Put another way, we need to show management that if they do not do things differently, it will threaten the market position the organization has established.

In most cases, the best approach is to focus on the competition. Do a bit of research and show that the competition is less risk-averse and gaining market share as a result. Keep mentioning how they are doing things differently and how that threatens your organization’s market position.

Another tactic is to demonstrate how customer expectations have changed and that if the company does not act, they will begin to lose market share.

This is particularly easy to do because users’ expectations regarding digital have skyrocketed in recent years.

“The last best experience that anyone has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experiences they want everywhere.”
— Bridget van Kranlingen, Senior Vice President of IBM Global Markets

Put another way, users are comparing your organization’s subpar digital experience to the very best of what they are interacting with online, even when that comparison is not fair.

A bit of user research goes a long way in this regard. For example, consider running a system usability scale survey to compare your digital platforms to this industry benchmark. Alternatively, run a survey asking how important the digital experience is to customers.

While fear of losing market share is a big motivator to well-established businesses, younger, hungrier businesses tend to be more motivated by lost opportunities.

Demonstrate Lost Opportunities

Your management, stakeholders, and colleagues often do not realize what they are missing out on because of the constraints they place upon you. It, therefore, falls to you to demonstrate those opportunities.

Sometimes, you can make this case with analytics. For example, recently, I was working with a client who insisted on having a pricing page on their website, despite the fact the page showed no pricing! Instead, the page had a request pricing form.

They wanted to keep the page because they were afraid to lose the handful of leads that came via the page. However, I was able to convince them otherwise by pointing out that the page was actively alienating the majority of users who visited it, effectively losing them leads.

I did this by demonstrating the page had a higher bounce rate than any other page on the site, was the most common exit page, and had the lowest dwell time.

But analytics is not my favorite approach for demonstrating lost opportunities. Instead, I typically turn to prototyping.

Prototyping is a great way of demonstrating exactly what an organization will miss out on if they insist on unreasonable constraints, presuming, that is, that you create a prototype that is free from those constraints.

I use this approach all the time. Imagine, for example, that you have been told that a particular technology stack imposes a set of restrictive constraints on how an interface is designed. By prototyping what the interface could be if you were free from those constraints, you can make a powerful case for changing the technology stack.

Having a prototype gives you something to test against. You can use usability testing to provide hard evidence of how much it improves the user experience, findability, and even conversion.

Even more significantly, a prototype will excite internal stakeholders. If your prototype is compelling enough, they will want that solution, and that changes the conversation.

Instead of you having to justify why the IT stack needs to be changed, now the IT team has to justify why their IT stack cannot accommodate your solution. Stakeholders and management will want to know why they cannot have what they have fallen in love with.

Of course, people will not always fall in love with your prototype, and ultimately, many of your attempts to overcome constraints will fail despite your best efforts, and you need to accept that.

Conceding Defeat With Grace

Let’s be clear. It is your job to demonstrate to management or clients that a constraint placed upon you is unhealthy. They cannot be expected to know instinctively. They do not have your perspective on the project and so cannot see what you see.

This means that if they fail to remove the constraint you consider unhealthy, it is your failing to demonstrate the problem, not their fault.

Sure, you might consider them shortsighted or naive. But ultimately, you failed to make your case.

Also, it is important to note that you don’t always have the whole picture. A decision may be bad from a user experience perspective, for example, but it may be the right thing for the business. There will always be other factors at play that you are unaware of.

So when you fail to make your case, accept that with grace and do your best to work within the constraints given to you.

Ultimately your working relationship with management, colleagues, and clients is more important than your professional pride and getting your way.

As web design technologies raise the bar on what it is possible to achieve on a realistic budget, there’s a rising debate about whether increasing features and functionality offer increased value or whether simple websites are better for businesses.