On my daily listen to Andrew Warner’s awesome Mixergy show, this quote from Josh Bartlett stuck out because it relates directly to what has driven my work on Skipper, the app I’m co-creating at the moment.
The spark of inspiration that led to the idea of building Skipper was my need to reign in the chaos of my rapidly growing team. My end-goal is to grow my business, build a great team, improve my relationship to my team, and systemize and scale this growth. If the Skipper app will have helped me achieve these goals, then I’m a satisfied user.
Every design decision, feature idea, and technology implementation is centered around the question: “How does this piece fit within the user’s goal of growing and scaling their team?”
As important as it is to keep things simple and avoid feature bloat, the real key is to keep things focused around the end goal of the user. Sometimes that means a few extra bits of functionality, sometimes it means stripping out the unnecessary.
“No company can grow revenues consistently faster than it’s ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth and still become a great company”. – Good to Great, by Jim Collins
This quote from the amazingly insightful read, Good to Great, hit a nerve with me the minute I read it.
For an owner of a young business—particularly a first-time business owner (which I still consider myself to be)—hiring is among the most challenging things. Why? Because you’re taking a leap into the unknown. You can’t know for sure that you’ll get a return on your investment when you hire someone. You have to place an enormous amount of trust not only in the person you’re hiring, but also in the strength of your business to ride this wave of growth and turn it into profit. Ultimately, you’re placing trust in yourself that you’re making the right decision—both in terms of when to hire as well as who to hire.
It’s no secret that WordPress is the fastest growing content management system (CMS) platform on the web. As of this writing, WordPress has a 54% market share of all websites that use a CMS. As users continue to flock to WordPress, we in turn see massive demand for WordPress’ products and services.
If you’re a WordPress expert, your products and/or services are part of a rapidly growing market. In fact, over the past few years, we’ve seen the launch and success of businesses that are built entirely around WordPress.
In this article, we’ll look at various business models that have proved successful in the ever expanding WordPress arena. We’ll look at the mechanics of each model and how they differ in terms of craft, operation, benefits and downsides. If you’re a designer or developer looking to leverage your expertise in WordPress to build a business, let’s just say you have quite a few options to consider.
At some point during the last couple of months, I came to the realization that I got a new job. I wasn’t necessarily looking for one, and don’t remember applying to be hired anywhere, but somehow I find myself consumed in a very different work environment today than in past years.
This is the year I officially make transition from being a technician to business owner.
My job description has changed dramatically this year from previous years. These days, the bulk of my time is consumed in email, calls, meetings, project management, networking, marketing, sales, interviewing, bookkeeping, and brainstorming “big picture” ideas. In a shrinking minority portion of my time are things like coding, designing mockups, and other technician tasks.
That’s not to say I’m no longer involved in creative/production work. On the client work front- I’m handling most of the creative direction, information architecture, and user experience work. On personal projects, like my current startup, Skipper, I do all of the UI design, front-end work, and product design. Then there is my writing and podcasting work on Freelance Jam, and soon to be speaking work, all of which might be classified as a mix of creative and promotional/marketing tasks.
Time for another update on the design process for a team relationship management app we’re building. Today, things become a bit more “real”. I’m showing you some coded designs I’ve been working on. Follow the links below the screenshots to click around the designs in the browser.
Here, you’re viewing your entire team at a glance. You’ll have the ability to filter and sort. Click any person’s “card” to get to the individual team member page.
Here you see an individual team member’s page. This is where you store and view all of the info you need about them. Stay in contact, keep up with their social media activity, assign them to a project, recommend them to someone else, etc.
Designing Responsively
One my primary goals in this design was to make it as responsive and fluid as possible. Notice when you resize the browser (make it smaller), the content scales with the width and makes a few adjustments to tidy things up (notice how 3 columns become 2, then 1). Check out a quick video of this in action.
A long way to go…
In case it’s not clear, this is not a functional app yet. These are merely front-end (HTML5, CSS3, and a touch of jQuery) templates, not yet integrated with database functionality.
Of course, there are many other screens and interactions to design and build. But I’m happy with how these initial screens turned out, and they’ll set the stage for the general look and feel moving forward.
Feedback welcome
I’m publish steady progress here for a reason, and that is to get constructive feedback every step of the way. Let me know what you think. What you like, and more importantly what’s not working for you (and why).
By the way, does this app have a name yet? See if you can find it...
If you’ve been following my last few blog posts, you know I’m currently in full-on app design mode (the idea, the map, the wireframes). So in between the time spent actually working on it, and between the client work, I’m spending a lot of time just thinking.
Thinking about a few philosophical ideas when it comes to designing a successful app. These points speak more to particular type of app I’m working on (team relationship management app), not necessarily all apps in general. But some things may relate to yours or someone else’s (maybe not). OK, enough blabber… Here’s what’s been on my mind:
Focus on solving one main problem, not many related problems
Not a new concept really, but I still see so many apps—particularly those in the project management space—try to tackle too many different things. “It’s a personal to-do list, invoicing, proposals, collaboration, cloud storage, and CRM all in one!” No, it’s not. It’s probably a great invoicing tool, with mediocre other functions that I personally don’t care about (a.k.a. “bloat”).
