“I try to lead every decision with user experience. What is the user-facing situation we want to change? Or if the motivation isn’t because of a user benefit, but a pure business reason — what is the impact on the user, and how can we align incentives so this at minimum makes sense to the user? This is critical.” – Ryan Singer (of 37Signals), feltpresence.com
“What I’m going to beat myself up on is what did I miss, what is it that the person sitting in the audience is going to get hung up on and I didn’t ask, Why didn’t I put myself more into that person’s shoes and come up with those nuances questions that tap into the fear and that’s where my concern is. I want to just make it really useful.”
Here are a few updates to the Restaurant Engine dashboard welcome screen. Trying to make the new website setup process as easy as possible.
“If my instructor had said to me, “improvise a melody on top of this track”, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I would have had no idea where to start or what to do. There are too many possibilities: which strings to hold at which frets, and whether to strum or pluck. It’s overwhelming! But instead he taught me a minor pentatonic scale and said “play any note on that scale while this track is playing”. Suddenly the possibilities were narrowed and instead of feeling straitjacketed, I felt free. I was given power, because my options were constrained.” – Jam Tracks and Black Keys, 37Signals Blog
I can relate to this post on so many levels. It brought me right back to the days when I was first learning to play guitar (15 years ago). I remember vividly the day I was introduced to the Pentatonic scale and learning how to “solo” on top of a chord progression. Possibly one of the most exhilarating, and as the author says, freeing, moments in my life.
I can also relate because right now, I’m just beginning to learn to play drums. After many years going in depth into guitar and songwriting, it’s incredibly exciting (and fun!) to be a beginner again on a new instrument. The other day I was introduced to playing drum rolls in triplets and suddenly felt that same feeling of liberation.
But getting back to the point of this post:
The author talks about how setting constraints for users (or in his post, music students), removes the element of fear and being overwhelmed, and accelerates the user’s (student’s) ability to create.
Over the last few years, there has been a huge rise in demand for template-based web design, especially in the WordPress space. Customers want a template that looks and feels great because it was crafted by a design professional. But at the same time, they want the ability to customize it and make it their own.
Most users of WordPress themes are not designers. They don’t know how to make certain design decisions, like setting a clear hierarchy of elements, controlling font sizes in proportion to one another, choosing colors that work together and setting contrast strategically.
So when we as the designer set out to give the user a panel of theme options, it’s important to make internal decisions about what they should have control over but also which design elements are best left unchanged.
I made a few decisions in this regard when crafting the themes for Restaurant Engine:
Users of the WordPress theme should feel a sense of accomplishment when they quickly produce and publish a respectable website. They feel proud to show it off to the world. They feel that same sense of liberation and excitement as beginning music students do when they first learn to create within the right constraints.
The pieces just fall elegantly into place.
Last week I introduced my new startup, Restaurant Engine, a website service designed for Restaurants, built on WordPress.
Part of the challenge in crafting WordPress themes targeted specifically at non-tech savvy customers (non-developers) is to make them as user-friendly and easy to use as possible. All of us WP theme developers know the temptation to provide users with endless amounts of theme options. Especially with color options, where you can easily add a color picker for every single element on the site.
For the color options in the Restaurant Engine themes, I had three goals:
In collaboration with Devin Price of WP Theming, we implemented this color palette system. Watch the video above to see it in action.
If you’re interested to see how this was coded, check out Devin’s post where he provides the details and code examples.
For one reason or another, I’ve been keeping my latest startup mostly under wraps (at least as far as my personal blog and Twitter are concerned). I recently came to the realization that I’m constantly talking/posting about what I will do and not enough about what I’ve done. This time, I just wanted to keep my head down, hustle, and ship (and talk about it later).
But I’m proud to say, this little startup of mine has officially launched in beta. It’s called Restaurant Engine.
In a nutshell: It’s a turnkey, hosted website solution designed specifically for Restaurants. I won’t cover everything about the service here since you can read about it on the site. In this post, I just want to touch on a few “behind the scenes” aspects of the project.
As I’ve written about extensively in the past, I’m a firm believer in the collaboration model for web design production. The key to creating awesome work on the web is to team up with the very best craftsmen in the business. And to constantly grow and mix up my network of collaborators to keep things fresh, grow and learn alongside A players in the industry. This approach has taken my client web design business to the next level.
With Restaurant Engine, I’m applying the same approach to a template-based web design product. I looked to my awesome network of designers and developers to help create the design templates (themes) found on Restaurant Engine, as well as the RestaurantEngine.com site itself. The plan is to continue to bring in leading web designers to create upcoming templates for our customers.
Restaurant Engine is a different take on a WordPress themes shop. It’s a hosted service, with a customized experience and feature set tailored specifically to the needs of restaurant owners. Much like a web designer who hosts the customized websites he/she builds for clients, Restaurant Engine does the same, only with more automation. A Restaurant Engine subscription gives the customer web hosting, a website powered by WordPress (with custom-tailored functionality and options), choice of any theme in our collection, and of course dedicated customer support.
From my experience running ThemeJam (a traditional WP themes shop) I found the customer-base has it’s limitations. We can make the following assumptions about a customer who purchases and downloads a WordPress theme:
And now, a few notes about the tech going on behind the scenes of Restaurant Engine:
In case you haven’t guessed by now, it’s built using WordPress Multisite.
Every customer’s site is a site on the network. There’s also a “template” site, that is replicated whenever a new site is created. The template site has one of our themes pre-activated, various settings pre-configured, and a base sitemap and pages pre-created to get things started.
Signup and Stripe Recurring Payments
I’m really excited about this part. Working with the talented Pippin Williamson, we implemented a custom signup form which simultaneously initiates recurring subscription payments (with a free trial period) processed by the Stripe, and creates a site and account on the network for the customer. Stripe truly is an amazing game-changer in the world of online credit card processing. Absolutely brilliant user experience for managing customers, orders, charges, discounts, etc. No monthly fees. All cards accepted. I can’t say enough good things…
Customer Support
Another piece I’m really excited about is the customer support system. After investigating several options, I’ve settled on Tender app for the support system and Knowledge Base. For live chat support (and pre-sales chat), I’m going with Snap Engage.
Both services offer the ability to embed widgets. So I’ve actually integrated both the support forum and live chat support right in the WordPress dashboard:
