As you've probably read--or seen for yourself--Yahoo has opened their site to link to third party Web sites and Web-based applications. They've replaced the (mostly) generic directory of Yahoo properties that once occupied the left rail with a list of shortcuts to other Web sites called "My Favorites."
The old Yahoo.
Along with the usual Y! properties like news, sports, and finance,
they've also pre-loaded a number of popular Web sites to choose from
such as Facebook, eBay, and The New York Times, and allow users to add
their own sites. This list of "apps" can be likened to an application launch bar that
presents in-page previews of the Web site's content on rollover. This new approach toward third party content is a win-win, as it gives their users a sneak peek at the latest feeds from their go-to destinations, while providing Yahoo! with new, contextually-relevant advertising opportunities before sending them off to external sites.
Accessing third party applications
Here are a few things I've noticed while playing around with my redesigned homepage:
• For the most part, "My Favorites" behaves as I'd expect it to. Adding to and editing the list are easy to do, and the instructions and iconography are simple and effective. Adding URLs is easy, maybe too easy: When I added .con instead of .com they went into the list as well, so it's not checking for valid Web addresses. And editing a URL once you've added it to the list is not possible. You have to delete and start over.
• The list holds up to 36 customized links, but only 15 are visible on the site. My guess is that the second and third tiers will be out of sight/out of mind for most users, as the only way to access them is from small pagination links at the very bottom of the column, below the fold.
• Tucked away in the top right corner of the page is the question, "What are you doing?" It's a fair question, since it's answered by millions on Twitter and Facebook every minute, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with those status updates, which can easily be linked, for better or worse. It doesn't seem to have much to do with anything, to be honest. It just sits in the top right corner, telling me what I'm doing. I'm told it links to my Y! profile page, but I've never looked at that, so doubt anyone else would check there for my whereabouts.
• They've done a good job of simplifying the homepage overall without removing much of the content. Very little content is noticeably missing--some areas have been stripped down, removing headers or category tabs, and some have been moved to the footer. Through small changes to the content and visual design throughout the page, they've made the content links much more visible and easier to scan than before.
• They're back to the purple logo. How long has it been red now?
As far as I can tell, not much else has changed. For folks who rely on the Yahoo homepage, I doubt this redesign will cause much confusion. It might even get people to stick around a bit longer before they click down into an article or off to another site. For anyone new to Yahoo (although I don't know who that would be), or those who haven't been there in a while, the redesign offers an alternative to a straight-up RSS reader, as it allows you to interact with third party content without leaving the page, while catching up on to Yahoo's more popular syndicated news feeds. But will the redesign convince me to make a special trip to my Yahoo page now before I venture off to Facebook or Boing Boing? Probably not.
Jennifer started her multifaceted
career in tangible and interaction design at the circus--quite
literally--at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. In the last 13
years, she has created multi-platform products and services for myriad
clients including Nokia, Yahoo!, BBC, Gucci, and American Express. Her
design management background includes the Prada Epicenter store in New
York, which inaugurated a new paradigm of tangible retail experiences.
Jenn is fluent in French and Italian, and has lived and worked in the
U.K., France, Italy, and Germany. Before Kicker, Jenn was VP of User
Experience at HUGE and at Schematic, and is on the faculty at New
York's School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design. Her work has
been exhibited throughout Europe, including the Victoria & Albert
Museum in London. Jennifer has a Masters in Interaction Design from the
Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.
Kicker Studio has come a long way since our start in September 2008. Although the recession has certainly taken its toll and kept us from doing what we'd planned, it's also helped us do things we hadn't expected. And those things may have helped us grow in important and unexpected ways.
Over the past ten months, we've had to take things in stride, recognizing opportunities in disappointment, and celebrating successes with moderated excitement. We've learned to follow our intuition and do what we enjoy; and we've had the fortune to have seen and played with technologies that won't be around commercially for years. And the work we've done to stay together has taught us how to be a true team.
As for me, it's been a trying year; but asked today if I'd do it again, I'd say yes. I can't imagine doing anything else. Here's why. We believe in staying focused on some simple things that have kept us going:
Mark your successes. Our concept project, The Kicker Touchscreen Conference Phone was a success. We enjoyed the process, and we're proud of the outcome. We've had a great response from the design, gadget, and VOIP communities and a lot of interest in where we're taking it next. (We've got a waiting list of buyers for once we get it built!) More importantly, we learned a lot about working together, and proved to ourselves that our collaborative approach to product design works.
Since then, we've met the challenges of the new economy head on and come out fighting. We had a strong message, and now a strong showpiece. So when our pipeline began to thin again, we did what any designers would do--primary research. We needed to get our message to the right people. So we talked to experts in the field, devised a plan, and charged ahead. It's all or nothing when your business's future is on the line.
Design what moves you. It hasn't been easy, but we've pushed ourselves to explore what it means to create work that has meaning for us, designing concepts that are deeply personal while still having relevance as Kicker projects. For example, we collaborated on a short exercise to design a concept phone for my father, addressing his communication issues specifically. Projects like these remind us that while it's important to do what you're good at, it's equally important to do what moves you.
Engage the community. We've had a lot of good press for a company so young, with coverage in publications like Crunchgear, Boing Boing, Core77 (twice!), Wired, and now Fast Company. We're lucky to be well supported by the design community as well--our blog Kick It has nearly 1000 RSS subscribers, and we've got over 1000 followers on Twitter. We've been given opportunities to engage the community in conversation through speaking engagements and blog posts, and contribute to research studies on designing for new interactions.
Don't get fooled by your pipeline. We've got clients: four of them! For the first time this year, we're all engaged in billable work. We're still focused on new opportunities, and new leads are coming in every day.
But we're not so easily fooled. Unemployment numbers rose again in June, and we've been here before. We still have no idea what the next six months will be like. But because of the work we've done to get here we're stronger, and we're ready for what comes next.
Reflect, review, reassess. Kicker Studio will be officially a year old next month. We're one of many stories of startups who have hung in through a trying first year, and when we celebrate that fateful opening day in September, we'll do what most new companies do: reflect on the past year, review our plan, and reassess our goals. We'll be especially thankful that we've made it this far; hopeful that we're through the worst the economy has to offer.
But really, we're just getting started. As we continue to grow, we look forward to new challenges that require a different kind of discipline and focus. Of course we'll continue to change over time, refining our roles, strategically defining organization through the people we hire.
This experience has taught us that even in the toughest financial climate, being passionate about what you do, and focusing on the future really does count for a lot. It's going to get a lot harder before it gets easier, and for it to work, it will be work. You won't make a lot of money at first, but there are other rewards. And hey, if you're going to get laid off, at least you get to give yourself the boot.
We're excited about where we're going. I hope you are too. Follow our progress on our blog, Kick It, or via Twitter.
Jennifer started her multifaceted career in tangible and interaction design at the circus--quite literally--at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. In the last 13 years, she has created multi-platform products and services for myriad clients including Nokia, Yahoo!, BBC, Gucci, and American Express. Her design management background includes the Prada Epicenter store in New York, which inaugurated a new paradigm of tangible retail experiences. Jenn is fluent in French and Italian, and has lived and worked in the U.K., France, Italy, and Germany. Before Kicker, Jenn was VP of User Experience at HUGE and at Schematic, and is on the faculty at New York's School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design. Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Jennifer has a Masters in Interaction Design from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.
We started Kicker Studio out of a desire to work differently. Our strategy was to combine the disciplines of interaction design, visual design, and industrial design to make devices that are designed with a truly integrated approach. Wishing it and doing it, however, are two different things. While we shared an interest in designing for new technologies, and a common vision for the kind of company Kicker could be, we were five different people with different experiences, coming together to start something new; and as in most collaboration, there was a learning curve toward understanding each other's points of view.
For some of us, design until now had been entirely physical, and focused on the mechanical properties of products, while to others it had been mostly digital palettes of hexes and bins. For our new company, it had to be a combination of both. We were excited to learn from each other, and put our approach to collaboration to the test. We embraced the challenge. How hard could it be?
A bit harder than we thought. We were still learning how to communicate with one another internally. Combining multiple working styles and overlapping skill sets required a lot of patience as we got to know each other. As we worked together, we came to know each other's strengths, and how each of us could best contribute to the fabric of the group.
We quickly learned that we each approach problem solving differently. To wit: while we were working on Canesta's Gestural Entertainment Center, we created a prototype living room environment in our studio. The Canesta camera that powered the entertainment center covered about 70 degrees at 10-foot distance, and we needed to get a sense of how much of the room that would be. So we all set out to solve the problem simultaneously. Already at his desk, Tom went directly into the graphic design program Illustrator--he'd draw a living room to figure it out; Mike quickly turned to his rulers and calculator--this was definitely a math problem for him; Dan stared toward the ceiling, pondering the solution in his head; and I tried to get Jody to help me bodily approximate the distance between pieces of furniture in the room. We were greatly amused by each other's efforts--why leave the problem to one person when all five can work on it at once? We each arrived at different answers, but it was how we each got there, and what said that about us, that we found most interesting. We would use this as a strength going forward.
The Canesta project was a great exercise in collaboration, experimentation, and learning by doing. These are especially important in designing for new technology, as there is still so much to be discovered. And since there often isn't one expert, the collective intelligence is particularly important. We worked in small teams, often exchanging roles, and taking the time to step back and observe the progress, and learn from other people's work. And some of the best ideas we had came from the corner of the room.
But our nemesis was (and continues to be) the recession. There's no test of office harmony like the financial frustration we'd found ourselves in the spring of 2009, and we needed to be especially aware of how our individual stress was felt by the group. It's sometimes difficult to balance one's own needs with the needs of the organization, especially in harder times. Through difficult conversations, we learned that we needed to communicate more, listen to one another first, and not assume that everyone else has drawn the same picture of a problem. We realized that our different perspectives were quite complementary, and would serve our collaboration well, both on projects and in dealing with the challenges of running a business.
Around March, when it looked like the economy had gotten the best of us, we knew we needed to do something with a view to the future, or else call it quits. To create the possibility of a future, we needed a new Kicker project that we could talk about. If clients weren't paying for work, we could at least design our own project to demonstrate our approach. Hence, the Kicker Touchscreen Conference Phone was born.
Why conference phones? We all know conference phones suck. It's an area vastly underserved by new technology. And it was something, we hoped, that everyone (especially potential clients) could relate to. We wanted to combine the humanity of in-person meetings with the convenience of efficient technology, and show that form and function, designed together, result in a better product.
This project was an opportunity for us to work toward a common goal, at a time when it would be easy to splinter off into different directions. We needed an opportunity to collaborate toward something that we were all passionate about: designing product behaviors. And it allowed us to focus on something positive when, frankly, there wasn't much else to be positive about. We were excited about the problem, the possibilities and the process of learning from each other's expertise. Through this experience we developed a few core tenets for Kicker projects: the ways in which we get most from our different points of view. And here they are:
Get everyone involved in the research. We formed teams of mixed skill sets and had everyone observe small offices making conference calls. We wanted to benefit from the different perspectives of each discipline, and got better ideas as a result.
Create design principles that will govern both the physical and the digital. This will ensure a cohesive experience from both sides. Our conference phone was designed for transparency, so you can see what is happening on a call; openness, so that it phone works with other systems like calendars; and it's unobtrusive, so it doesn't get in the way of communication, as so many phones do.
Evolve the form and function in tandem, allowing for lots of back and forth. We explored the object and interface designs at the same time. After we mapped out the features our phone would support, we did what we named a Functional Cartography to figure out what functions belonged in hardware, and what functions belonged in software. We kept it up on the wall for reference as we went from pencil sketches to wireframes and 3-D models, and we constantly revised. This allows us to also synchronize the emotional feel of the interface and the form as we moved from wireframes to color interface designs, and from 3-D models to renderings.
Get to something physical quickly, so that everyone's talking about the same thing. Be it a sketch or a drawing, a found object, or a cardboard prototype, we found this extremely helpful. When we started talking adding removable microphones to the phone, for example, we quickly gathered found objects that represented what we meant to make sure we were all talking about the same size.
There were still amusing communication gaps from time to time. Once, for example, when Dan, an interaction designer, was talking about putting a button on the "chrome" of the device, Mike, an industrial designer, turned around in disbelief: "You want to put chrome on the device?" he asked, incredulously. Dan meant the edges of the screen, often referred to as the "chrome" by UI designers, where menus and controls often go, not the metal finish. We've learned to embrace these opportunities to learn from each other as reminders of the relationship between the physical and digital.
The experience of running this project internally confirmed for us that we really could work together to make something special. And it helped us realize and articulate a Kicker DNA--made from the sum of our individual strengths, one that we now felt confident taking to our clients and show them what we could do.
Jennifer started her multifaceted career in tangible and interaction design at the circus--quite literally--at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. In the last 13 years, she has created multi-platform products and services for myriad clients including Nokia, Yahoo!, BBC, Gucci, and American Express. Her design management background includes the Prada Epicenter store in New York, which inaugurated a new paradigm of tangible retail experiences. Jenn is fluent in French and Italian, and has lived and worked in the U.K., France, Italy, and Germany. Before Kicker, Jenn was VP of User Experience at HUGE and at Schematic, and is on the faculty at New York's School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design. Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Jennifer has a Masters in Interaction Design from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.
If you want to start the year right, start it with a trip to Vegas.
At the start of every New Year, technology companies big and small make a pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show. This year, the brand new Kicker Studio was no exception. The halls were somewhat emptier than usual, as many companies had downsized their participation or withdrew from the trade show all together; but we were undeterred.
While our client Canesta demonstrated our design of their gesture-controlled entertainment center to interested partners, we conducted a surgical strike on the trade show floor. With a demo video in one hand and Dan's new book in the other, we covered every inch of the convention center. We were on a mission: to find more work. Nothing feels as good, and as tiring, as pounding the proverbial pavement of a trade show floor. An astounding number of products suffered from a lack of good design, and we were there to offer our help.
As a new company, we had modest goals. A few billable projects were all that we asked. Hell, we'd take just a single billable project! As a five-person company, it didn't take much to keep us afloat, and compared to what our larger competitors charge, we were a bargain; and in this economy, everyone is a bargain hunter.
But we expected a slow start to the year. The world was counting down to inauguration day, while counting the rising number of jobs lost since the fall. We managed to make a lot of new contacts at CES, but we knew it would take some time before the temperature of our pipeline would thaw. After all, people were still trying to come to grips with the idea of an economic recession. By now, we'd learned to measure our optimism with a dose of sad, hard realism.
By early February, we were pleasantly surprised: we'd started several conversations with companies we'd met in Vegas, and people who'd heard about our company were contacting us out of the blue. Canesta had announced a partnership with Hitachi, and planned to publicly launch our work at the TV of Tomorrow conference in March. We were looking forward to the publicity, and excited to be finally able to showcase our work. We thought our luck had finally changed. We were counting on this new surge of interest to bring in five or six new opportunities, and if all went well, a new project or two. At one point we counted 20 viable project leads--a lot for a studio our size--and wondered how quickly we could scale up if we won even a third of them.
Turns out we needn't have worried, as all 20 leads had evaporated by April.
The recession hit each of our potential clients differently. Some reprioritized their initiatives and put our work on "the backburner." Some went with larger, more established firms who were making huge concessions to win projects that would normally be too small for them to entertain. As the potential project pool got smaller, the pool of agencies bidding for each project grew. And as the newest kids on the block, it was difficult to compete. The landscape had changed, and this meant we needed to rethink our approach to sales.
We tried new tactics, such as forging alliances with other design companies who might have more work than they needed. Designers understood us! Surely, they'd give us work! However we'd underestimated the level to which larger firms were affected, and in talking to them found out that there just wasn't enough work to go around. And then when veteran consultancies began reporting layoffs, we knew that the toll the recession had taken on our industry was worse than we'd ever expected.
We spent weeks teetering on a seesaw, so close to being overbooked while also being moments away from bankruptcy. At the start of each month we would look at the money coming in vs. the money owed and try to do magic math. If not for the one client we did have, for whom we were incredibly grateful, we might not have been able to keep our doors open. No one enjoyed the frequent conversations about how far we could last before we closed our doors.
But while our six months of sweat and tears had tried our optimism, it hadn't killed our spirits. We realized that in this economy making it six months was an achievement in itself, one definitely worth celebrating. So we decided it was time that we threw a party. We made it a triple play--Jody curated an interactive art show called Tangible Tech in our gallery, Dan hosted a panel discussion on the future of gestures, and we celebrated the launch of our six-month-old baby Kicker. It's important to celebrate the small victories, even though it's sometimes hard to see them peaking out over the pile of losses. Our six-month-anniversary-launch-party was not to be missed.
We also went back to the drawing board, looking at the way in which we presented our capabilities and the work that backed them up. We reevaluated the way we communicated our value proposition. Were we selling ourselves correctly? Were we speaking in terms that our clients understood? Were we differentiating ourselves enough from other design firms? These are good questions to ask yourself in any economy, but doubly important in the current economic climate.
We knew our methodology made sense, so we decided that needed to put it to work--for ourselves, as an opportunity to tweak our collaboration process; and for potential clients, to create a case study that could demonstrate our approach to product design. After all, it's always better to show than to tell.
We wanted to pool our talents toward one project that spoke to what Kicker Studio was all about: design from the inside-out. So we created a concept to do just that. While we'd never been ones to sit idle, always devising internal projects and prototypes, doing research and writing, this project would keep us going during the darkest months, and give us something to look forward to by Spring. And by collaborating with each other on this one project--focused on something we were all passionate about--we learned a lot about each other, and the green shoots of a Kicker culture began to emerge.
Jennifer started her multifaceted career in tangible and interaction design at the circus--quite literally--at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. In the last 13 years, she has created multi-platform products and services for myriad clients including Nokia, Yahoo!, BBC, Gucci, and American Express. Her design management background includes the Prada Epicenter store in New York, which inaugurated a new paradigm of tangible retail experiences. Jenn is fluent in French and Italian, and has lived and worked in the U.K., France, Italy, and Germany. Before Kicker, Jenn was VP of User Experience at HUGE and at Schematic, and is on the faculty at New York's School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design. Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Jennifer has a Masters in Interaction Design from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.
The first three months of any startup endeavor is full of new things. How soon can we get the Web site up? Which logo do we like? Do we have an NDA? How about a fax template? We could really use some coffee mugs, a whiteboard and our own trashcans. If only we had some income, we might be able to buy these things. Oh what an exciting day that will be!
Kicker Studio opened for business in September 2008, as the economy around us collapsed. We didn't have seed money, or investors, or clients, or even a starter project lined up. But thanks to our partner Mike who had a studio and a shop, we had an office to go to, and desks to sit at, even if we couldn't afford trashcans.
A few curious clients got in contact with us before we even had our official website up. We were so excited--people were already asking for us and we hadn't even set up shop! We were all abuzz. The first proposal we tackled was particularly challenging, as we didn't yet know what a Kicker proposal looked like, who would write which part, or which partners' model from a previous company we should follow. Added to that was the complication of collaboration across time zones, as Dan Saffer was traveling in Tokyo, Tom Maiorana and Mike Scully were in San Francisco, Jody Medich was at Burning Man, and I was in New York. You might say that we did that one by the seat of our pants; and, not surprisingly, we didn't get the work.
It's amazingly easy, when you're starting a new business, to forget everything that you've learned. In particular: sales is a numbers game, that sales cycles can often be long and unpredictable, and that not all leads--or even intense interest in your company--lead to project work. Innocents that we were, we forgot all of those things for the first few months, and got so excited by every possible lead that came in that you'd think each was a Wonka Golden Ticket. We were surprised by the new kind of energy that goes into everything when your business depends on it. When it's a matter of survival, it becomes much more visceral. And personal.
Alongside our early adventures in inventing our sales pitch, we sent out our first round of "Hello! We're here! Please hire us!" emails to friends, family and business contacts. And we excitedly awaited the responses from the hoards of friends of friends who'd be dying to have us design products for them. And we waited, and waited. We thought that it was only a matter of time before an amazing opportunity found us--here we were, ready to work. But the emails never came in, the phone never rang. Dan even tested that the phone was actually working several times.
We came to understand that the massive downturn in the economy meant no one was spending money on anything, let alone a brand new company like Kicker. Sometimes there are more factors in play than a business plan can predict, and our plan was shot to hell. Timing is everything.
But thanks to our connections, we had our first billable work within our first weeks of business. With our old-economy thinking, mixed with new-company optimism, we estimated that it might take six weeks or so for us to land our second client. And we weren't really prepared for what would happen if it took longer than that. How would we pay the bills if we didn't bring in new business by January? How long could we continue without work? We considered all the usual ways companies get by when they're starting out--taking on freelance work, private loans, small business loans, and lines of credit. These were hard questions to answer, and the first of many times we'd have to ask them over the coming months.
There were days we'd come into work and not know what to do. But the truth is there's always something to be done; the trick, especially for a new business, is continually inventing new things. We wrote blog posts, worked on sales materials, and created little projects that kept us learning and gave us something to talk about. For example, we still needed a whiteboard, so Tom made one out of tileboard, Kickerized it, and turned it into a blog post and instruction set for making your own DIY whiteboard. Core77 picked up the story the next day. We were so proud. And we learned something important: in order to do things that other people will be interested in, you need to do things that you find interesting.
About two months into the Global Economic Crisis we finally landed our very own project, thanks to a referral from our friends at Stimulant. Silicon Valley technology company Canesta needed help designing a gestural language and interface for an entertainment center using their camera technology. As Dan's book Designing Gestural Interfaces was about to be released, the timing could not have been better. We finally had our chance to do what we'd set out to do: design a product from the inside-out, designing the behaviors and the interface in tandem. I will never forget the fun we had collaborating on that project, designing our ways of working together as we designed gestures for controlling a TV. It was the moment we knew we had done the right thing in starting Kicker.
By the time I packed up my Brooklyn apartment and headed west for good in January 2009, Kicker had already completed our first project with Canesta, and had a product demo on display at the Consumer Electronics Show. Things were finally looking up. In retrospect, that first 15 weeks were telling of how the next six months would go--a roller coaster ride with extreme highs and lows. And over the next six months we'd continue to learn that no extreme is long lived--there are new extremes around every corner.
Jennifer started her multifaceted career in tangible and interaction design at the circus--quite literally--at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. In the last 13 years, she has created multi-platform products and services for myriad clients including Nokia, Yahoo!, BBC, Gucci, and American Express. Her design management background includes the Prada Epicenter store in New York, which inaugurated a new paradigm of tangible retail experiences. Jenn is fluent in French and Italian, and has lived and worked in the U.K., France, Italy, and Germany. Before Kicker, Jenn was VP of User Experience at HUGE and at Schematic, and is on the faculty at New York's School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design. Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Jennifer has a Masters in Interaction Design from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.
When Dan Saffer first suggested that I move to San Francisco to be one of the founding partners of a new design studio, I laughed. I remember thinking, "That's a flattering idea, but he must be joking." I was immersed in other things at the time--leading a 25-person User Experience team at HUGE, training for the New York City triathlon, and in contract on new construction in Brooklyn--not to mention on another coast. I liked my life (and my income, to be honest) and had never seriously considered starting my own studio. Too much risk!
My philosophy on risk, especially someone else's, has always been something like "might as well give it a try, and worst-case scenario you end up back where you started." In the case of my own opportunities, that's often preceded by a requisite "no, that'll never work" line of defense (see above), but eventually "what's the worst that can happen" gives me permission to take an opportunity seriously long enough to decide whether or not I believe in it. This philosophy got me to move to Italy for graduate school at Interaction Design Intitute Ivrea and gave me the courage to step up into a director role as a new hire at Schematic. Had the new studio been in NYC, it would have been so much simpler. But leaving my life as I knew it, and committing indefinitely to a life in a new city was a lot to swallow.
But over the next several months, I pushed past "that'll never work" and started listening. Dan had given a new company a lot of thought, and had strong ideas about what kind of studio we would be. I believed in him, and as I began contributing to the conversations with the other new partners, I started to realize that I also believed in me. While I enjoyed challenges of management and I'd learned a ton about agencies and operations, I missed doing the actual design work. Being in a small agency allows one to be able to think strategically and execute on a vision, which is hard to do in a large design agency. I was ready to put my experience to work on creating a company from scratch, whose success was on us to make happen. I also wanted to get back to more physical interaction design, working with embedded technologies to make everyday objects more desirable, responsive and adaptive to our needs.
The founders all had similar notions of design, creativity, and the kind of culture we wanted to create--critical if you're going to start a company together. We were smart and capable. It just might work. We laid out a plan for how we might get to day one, and I started trying the idea on for size. "I'm thinking of moving to San Francisco," I'd tell people, to see if they thought I was crazy. "What if I started my own company?" I'd ask friends and trusted colleagues, to see if they'd talk me down. And no one did. Obviously risk doesn't seem quite as risky when it belongs to someone else, but the support I got from friends and family really kept me going while I made the mental leap from possibility to reality. If you're thinking about a new idea, I'd recommend this approach: try the idea on for a while by telling people it's real.
Of course these were the days of blissful ignorance, when everything was imaginary and lived only in Google docs. Our little studio was a happy hypothetical one, with a mission statement, marketing plans, brand attributes and a three-year plan. We knew who we wanted to be when we grew up and how we would avoid becoming our parents. We held a summit among our soon-to-be partners, finalized our plans, and registered as real-live business in California. We were excited, and energized, and not even all that scared. Then again, we hadn't quit our jobs yet.
Truth be told, the downturn hadn't quite hit its full stride when we decided to start the company, now called Kicker Studio. The economy wasn't rosy, as I recall, but we still had banks. Our first day open, however, the Dow dropped over 500 points. It made the list of Time's top 10 stock market meltdowns. Not a good day to open for business. It brought home the reality of the decisions we'd made. We were open for business, in the new, horrible economy.
Jennifer started her multifaceted career in tangible and interaction design at the circus--quite literally--at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. In the last 13 years, she has created multi-platform products and services for myriad clients including Nokia, Yahoo!, BBC, Gucci, and American Express. Her design management background includes the Prada Epicenter store in New York, which inaugurated a new paradigm of tangible retail experiences. Jenn is fluent in French and Italian, and has lived and worked in the U.K., France, Italy, and Germany. Before Kicker, Jenn was VP of User Experience at HUGE and at Schematic, and is on the faculty at New York's School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design. Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Jennifer has a Masters in Interaction Design from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.
• The list holds up to 36 customized links, but only 15 are visible on the site. My guess is that the second and third tiers will be out of sight/out of mind for most users, as the only way to access them is from small pagination links at the very bottom of the column, below the fold.
• They've done a good job of simplifying the homepage overall without removing much of the content. Very little content is noticeably missing--some areas have been stripped down, removing headers or category tabs, and some have been moved to the footer. Through small changes to the content and visual design throughout the page, they've made the content links much more visible and easier to scan than before.
Mark your successes.
Design what moves you.
Don't get fooled by your pipeline.
For some of us, design until now had been entirely physical, and focused on the mechanical properties of products, while to others it had been mostly digital palettes of hexes and bins. For our new company, it had to be a combination of both. We were excited to learn from each other, and put our approach to collaboration to the test. We embraced the challenge. How hard could it be?
The Canesta project was a great exercise in collaboration, experimentation, and learning by doing. These are especially important in designing for new technology, as there is still so much to be discovered. And since there often isn't one expert, the collective intelligence is particularly important. We worked in small teams, often exchanging roles, and taking the time to step back and observe the progress, and learn from other people's work. And some of the best ideas we had came from the corner of the room.
Around March, when it looked like the economy had gotten the best of us, we knew we needed to do something with a view to the future, or else call it quits. To create the possibility of a future, we needed a new Kicker project that we could talk about. If clients weren't paying for work, we could at least design our own project to demonstrate our approach. Hence, the 
Get everyone involved in the research. We formed teams of mixed skill sets and had everyone observe small offices making conference calls. We wanted to benefit from the different perspectives of each discipline, and got better ideas as a result.
There were still amusing communication gaps from time to time. Once, for example, when Dan, an interaction designer, was talking about putting a button on the "chrome" of the device, Mike, an industrial designer, turned around in disbelief: "You want to put chrome on the device?" he asked, incredulously. Dan meant the edges of the screen, often referred to as the "chrome" by UI designers, where menus and controls often go, not the metal finish. We've learned to embrace these opportunities to learn from each other as reminders of the relationship between the physical and digital.
While our client Canesta demonstrated our design of their 
By early February, we were pleasantly surprised: we'd started several conversations with companies we'd met in Vegas, and people who'd heard about our company were contacting us out of the blue. Canesta had announced a partnership with Hitachi, and planned to publicly launch our work at the 
We tried new tactics, such as forging alliances with other design companies who might have more work than they needed. Designers understood us! Surely, they'd give us work! However we'd underestimated the level to which larger firms were affected, and in talking to them found out that there just wasn't enough work to go around. And then when veteran consultancies began reporting layoffs, we knew that the toll the recession had taken on our industry was worse than we'd ever expected.
But while our six months of sweat and tears had tried our optimism, it hadn't killed our spirits. We realized that in this economy making it six months was an achievement in itself, one definitely worth celebrating. So we decided it was time that we 
We knew our methodology made sense, so we decided that needed to put it to work--for ourselves, as an opportunity to tweak our collaboration process; and for potential clients, to create a case study that could demonstrate our approach to product design. After all, it's always better to show than to tell.
It's amazingly easy, when you're starting a new business, to forget everything that you've learned. In particular: sales is a numbers game, that sales cycles can often be long and unpredictable, and that not all leads--or even intense interest in your company--lead to project work. Innocents that we were, we forgot all of those things for the first few months, and got so excited by every possible lead that came in that you'd think each was a Wonka Golden Ticket. We were surprised by the new kind of energy that goes into everything when your business depends on it. When it's a matter of survival, it becomes much more visceral. And personal.
But thanks to our connections, we had our first billable work within our first weeks of business. With our old-economy thinking, mixed with new-company optimism, we estimated that it might take six weeks or so for us to land our second client. And we weren't really prepared for what would happen if it took longer than that. How would we pay the bills if we didn't bring in new business by January? How long could we continue without work? We considered all the usual ways companies get by when they're starting out--taking on freelance work, private loans, small business loans, and lines of credit. These were hard questions to answer, and the first of many times we'd have to ask them over the coming months.
About two months into the Global Economic Crisis we finally landed our very own project, thanks to a referral from our friends at Stimulant. Silicon Valley technology company Canesta needed help designing a gestural language and interface for an entertainment center using their camera technology. As Dan's book 
My philosophy on risk, especially someone else's, has always been something like "might as well give it a try, and worst-case scenario you end up back where you started." In the case of my own opportunities, that's often preceded by a requisite "no, that'll never work" line of defense (see above), but eventually "what's the worst that can happen" gives me permission to take an opportunity seriously long enough to decide whether or not I believe in it. This philosophy got me to move to Italy for graduate school at 
But over the next several months, I pushed past "that'll never work" and started listening. Dan had given a new company a lot of thought, and had strong ideas about what kind of studio we would be. I believed in him, and as I began contributing to the conversations with the other new partners, I started to realize that I also believed in me. While I enjoyed challenges of management and I'd learned a ton about agencies and operations, I missed doing the actual design work. Being in a small agency allows one to be able to think strategically and execute on a vision, which is hard to do in a large design agency. I was ready to put my experience to work on creating a company from scratch, whose success was on us to make happen. I also wanted to get back to more physical interaction design, working with embedded technologies to make everyday objects more desirable, responsive and adaptive to our needs.
Of course these were the days of blissful ignorance, when everything was imaginary and lived only in Google docs. Our little studio was a happy hypothetical one, with a mission statement, marketing plans, brand attributes and a three-year plan. We knew who we wanted to be when we grew up and how we would avoid becoming our parents. We held a summit among our soon-to-be partners, finalized our plans, and registered as real-live business in California. We were excited, and energized, and not even all that scared. Then again, we hadn't quit our jobs yet.
