Page load times are important to customer happiness, and if you haven’t used the Chrome User Experience Report tool yet on your website or web app, I urge you to do so.
Screenshot from the free Chrome UX report tool.
Tracking things like:
Time to First Byte
First Paint
First Contentful Paint
First Meaningful Paint
Time to Interactive
These are important numbers to measure and improve. However, I think we can add a qualitative measure to the list. Introducing…
Time to First Smile.
When does your customer feel delight? Do they know what to do next? Are they telling all their friends about your product? Do they feel a cha-ching moment soon after signing up?
An attendee asked why I was interested in accessibility: Did I or someone in my life have a disability? I’m used to answering this question—to which the answer is no. A lot of people seem to assume that a personal connection is the only reason someone would care about accessibility.
This is a problem. For the web to be truly accessible, everyone who makes websites needs to care about accessibility. We tend to use our own abilities as a baseline when we’re designing and building websites. Instead, we need to keep in mind our diverse users and their diverse abilities to make sure we’re creating inclusive products that aren’t just designed for a specific range of people.
This echoes what I’m reading in Tragic Design: The Impact of Bad Product Design and How to Fix It by Jonathan Shariat and Cynthia Savard Saucier: “We shouldn’t wait until we or someone close to us needs it to start caring about accessibility.”
Manuel’s post contains a lot more on getting started with accessibility. Check it out!
It serves me as a reminder that inclusive design is about creating a diversity of ways for people to participate—good design is for everyone.
The 2018 Design in Tech Report from John Maeda is alive and kicking (I’m late to sharing this as it debuted at SxSW in March.) This year’s deck places a strong focus on inclusive design and artificial intelligence.
Computers aren’t good at inclusion. They’re good at exclusion, because they’re only based on past data. The business opportunity for the future-thinking designer is in inclusion. — Fast Company
In a brainstorming exercise with my group at the altMBA, I expected to dive deep into the work, tuning our understanding of business models while working under pressure to create as many ideas as possible in a short time. We did just that, relishing our creativity and ingenuity.
Yet the most satisfying outcome wasn’t how deep or wide we ranged as much as the practice of creating the right space for it to happen. Allowing discovery, allowing the best work to shine through. The moment created by the creative space was the true prize.
In our session there grew a playfulness and a natural building up of ideas as serendipitous intersections occurred where a concept, channel, or stream could be cloned to adapt to a new business idea. Growing, it created momentum and provided a sense of space — room to roam.
The diversity of the team made for richer output as we kept exploring. Ideas born from one member cloned rapidly into new ones by tapping into our backgrounds, affinities, and environments. Though we started together pitching and editing out loud, it was slow going. The pace accelerated only after a 45-minute switch to brainwriting, writing solo to bring more life to the list. We successfully avoided the problem of “one loud voice” by taking turns narrating and typing.
Creating the space to run together started with finding a format that built enough structure without slowing us down. We later dubbed this the napkin sketch for its simplicity.
The napkin sketch technique produces a great number of ideas without too much detail. Just enough to explain a business idea or “micro” business model to a friend in plain English.
Here’s how it works:
Outline and pitch the business idea.
Detail the basics only: value proposition, market, costs, and revenue.
If you feel a spark, clone the sketch and adapt it.
Repeat until you run out of ideas.
If you freeze an idea too quickly, you fall in love with it. If you refine it too quickly, you become attached to it and it becomes very hard to keep exploring, to keep looking for better. The crudeness of the early models in particular is very deliberate. — Jim Glymph, architect
Jim Glymph (Gehry Partners, architects 1990–2007) explains the value of crude early models—what my altMBA group called “Napkin sketches.
Originally posted on Medium—and if Matt’s reading this, it’s required for the course. 🙃
If you want to be an effective strategic leader, you can’t settle for a regimen of reading board books and showing up for quarterly meetings. You must engage fully on your organization’s mission; seize opportunities to observe frontline work; and, at each board meeting, take every chance to confront the big, long-term issues by asking tough questions.
After checking the gauges, you’ll know what to do next: keep effective performers, remove laggards, and ask the tough questions and demand answers.
This advice for board members applies equally to an executive team member in a business setting, leading teams at Automattic. In short—do the work, be open to the burden of responsibility, and seek out direct connections.
The Sensible Leader 