Howells.

Last week I attended OFFF, which was a fun few days of interesting talks and meeting people in Barcelona.

The keynote was delivered by my pal Matias Corea of Behance, whose message was about Making Ideas Happen. I particularly liked a slide he showed which listed all the most common excuses that people have for not making their ideas/dreams happen. How many do you recognise, and what can you do about them?

• It’s not the right moment. There’ll never be the right moment. It’s as simple as that.
• It’s not polished enough. It doesn’t matter. It’s far better to get something out the door, tell people about it, and use feedback to make it better.
• I’m worried about the competition. The competition doesn’t matter. There is always an opportunity to create something better than the competition, regardless of how superior they may seem in terms of resources.
• I have to pay the bills. Matias framed this along the lines of: “would you rather pay your sad bills with your sad time and sad money, or pay your happy bills with happy time and happy money?”
• I don’t want to fail. Turn failure from a negative to a positive: it’s beneficial to fail. In fact failing a lot of the time was a consistent theme from the talks at OFFF; a lot of great personal work comes out of failure.
• I don’t have time. When you’re in a bar drinking a beer, can you still feasibly complain about having a lack of time? Sounds facetious, but it’s true. I knew one guy who effectively gave up going out partying for a month and had one of the most productive and fun months of his career, creating a whole array of personal projects. Wake up an hour earlier; go to bed an hour later. You’ll always be able to find time to make something you want.
• Someone is already doing it. Matias used Google as an example here. When they started, there were 17 different search engines doing effectively the same thing (remember Alta Vista?). To reiterate an earlier point, there is always an opportunity to take and idea and make it better.

I’m guilty of so many of these, so I’m posting it here to return to as a checklist to give myself a kick up the ass when I start whinging about not starting something.

Last week I swung by to say hello to the Taylor Pemberton and the rest of the New York-based creative team behind Wantful: a new startup that aims to reinvent the way in which you buy gifts for friends and family online.

This is how it works:

You select who you’re buying a gift for. Let’s say I’m buying a birthday present for my girlfriend. You are then asked to answer a few lifestyle questions about that person in a very simple, visual way the reminds me of Hunch. The questions attempt to generate their taste profile. One of the questions asks you to judge the person’s taste in style on a continuum: a series of products laid out and photographed beautifully.

Once the profile is complete, Wantful presents a series of products that they might like. You can select a budget, from $30 to $500. In my example, it generated quite a few very tasteful food-related gifts (which is pretty appropriate), and featured items that I’m certain she would like, and which I might have bought for her ordinarily.

From the list, you select 16 products, or you can have them generate a random selection for you. These items are then compiled into a customisable book, which is shipped to the recipient. All they need to do is pick a product, return to the website, enter a code, and the item is then shipped to them, without revealing its cost.

The system is smart, and the website (and recipient’s book) is beautifully designed. I managed to steal an example of the booklet and it’s packaged in a handsome, quality embossed envelope printed by the same firm that prints Apple’s collateral.

One criticism that I’ve heard levied against the idea is that it is impersonal. That may be, and I wouldn’t really use it to buy a present for my girlfriend or anyone very close. But the market is still enormous: the wedding and corporate markets alone provide a compelling opportunity, and ultimately the idea might become so mainstream as to be acceptable. Ultimately any service that helps the recipient get something they might actually want is a good thing: I dread to think of how much all the unwanted, discarded gifts cost each year.

Beyond the fact that the site and product is beautifully designed, another key to its success will be the quality of the items on offer. Since they are gifts, the products on offer must always be high quality and consistently so. Flash sale sites like Fab or Gilt don’t have to worry about this (though they really should if they are to remain relevant): they simply need to flog as much junk as possible with tiny margins.

I’m excited for the company, and with $5.5m in Series A funding I think we’ll see interesting things happen with them very soon.

☛

I find myself tweeting occasional opinions about responsive web design without painting a bigger picture of my actual view on the current state of responsive design. Usually crossed-wires ensue, people get offended, some get heated, and others start trolling me hard.

So I thought I’d take this opportunity to pull together some thoughts I have about where we are on the topic. I’m deliberately not going to link to few other resources, or name any names, because frankly there is so much content and opinions to read about responsive design that pointing out specific view points this early on is useless.

I’m also going to sound quite uninformed and ill-read on the topic. That’s because I am quite uninformed and ill-read: I try to avoid most articles and opinions just to try and form my own ideas. That said, as someone who has taken the time to read this (and therefore who cares about it), I would love to hear your own opinions on the matter and hopefully I can integrate them into this post and help it evolve into something more solid and useful.

An Ill-defined Bandwagon

I attend quite a lot of web design conferences (or at least I used to: most are now repetitive and offer little more than an elaborate Smashing Magazine blog post). Almost without exception, speakers deliver the same message: everything you do must be responsive. They demonstrate this by showing off their latest work, which looks pretty and technically well executed.

But often the examples are not real-world, large-scale, commercial projects: they are personal blogs, or for products/services that require just a few pages of content. While that’s great, and does point to a future where every site responds well to the device it is being viewed on, they aren’t sites that comprise tens of different template styles, or feature myriad types content.

Rarely this message is delivered with any caveats. The amount of effort to both design and develop responsive sites takes a great deal more time and money since you’re effectively designing one, two, or three more websites, depending on which breakpoints you decide is appropriate. (And what a luxury it would be to have the time, resources, and money to create large-scale responsive sites: most of us work on projects that don’t.)

The same speakers often talk about how denying that the future of interactive design is akin to denying global warming (someone said this once, I can’t remember whom), while others say that if you don’t design (and develop) with responsiveness in mind, “you can’t call yourself a web designer” (I know who this is, but won’t name names).

This last message infuriates me particularly for a few reasons. Firstly it was written by someone who is employed by an agency that seemingly has produced almost no responsive sites: at least none that appear in their portfolio, and secondly it must be incredibly disheartening if this is read by someone just starting out in the industry who has only just got their head around basic CSS and Javascript. And I don’t need to talk about the problem we have with education and encouraging new people to join the industry.

Responsive Design is Hard

The fact is responsive design is hard. For new designers and developers, it is very hard. I know my way around CSS and Javascript fairly well, and even I struggle a great deal getting my head around some of the finer points of responsive design. (Not least since there appears to be twenty different ways and self-styled best-practices to approach the problem.)

Because it is hard, many responsive sites are very poor. They are led by a need to have their practices accepted by web celebrities and popular thinking rather than delivering a quality product. The bandwagon that everyone is jumping on is very ill-defined, and the results are less than satisfactory. Even as I type this, the bandwagon is in flux, given the onset of responsive images thanks to retina displays that if rumour have us believe, will be more commonplace than just iPads later this Summer.

Anecdotally, none of my non-web-industry-friends actually like when sites resize and fit to their phone. It goes against the mental model they have of their favourite websites. They find it frustrating since suddenly, sections are missing and the navigation is pared down or removed entirely. Further, I have never met a client who is in the least bit impressed when you sit in front of them, resizing the browser again and again (I’m certain that it’s only us lot who actually does that).

In conclusion

Of course I’m not denying that responsiveness shouldn’t be considered when you start a new project. This site is responsive, for instance, because it suits the content: simple written text. But for a vast majority of the sites I work on, making them responsive would cost a huge amount of cash and take a lot longer to implement. I don’t want to force a client into investing in thinking or a practice that is still quite immature.

But if responsive design is a fundamental requirement, I would suggest taking some of Jakob Nielsen’s advice (I feel I’m the only person who agrees with this, however). Until we know how to make site usefully responsive, give the user an option to experience the full website.

I’d like to see designers and agencies should stop just talking about the tools and techniques of responsive design, and focus on how responsive design is woven organically into the fabric of real-life, practical, and well-executed projects. The designers and developers who consistently create great responsive sites don’t shout about it just to be heard or to attract new clients; it just forms part of their daily output. These are the leaders who are ultimately going to determine what constitutes good responsive design, and who will define the bandwagon.

The first session of the 99% Conference which I attended last week was a session with Union Square Ventures’ Brad Burnham. If you don’t know USV, you’ll know about their portfolio: Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, among a handful other network-oriented startups. It’s worth understanding the principle criteria for USV investments to digest the advice he gave the gathered crowd. They invest in large networks of very engaged users, defined by user experience, and which are defensive against network effects. They look for novel and differentiated networks: they won’t, for instance, won’t fund an Pinterest clone.

Brad’s talk centered on the weird economics of networks, and how they behave and are defined in fundamentally different ways to industries defined by the products they create. Networks don’t create a product: they behave much more like governments in that they provide the infrastructure on top of which the network can thrive. Instead of building roads and transport links, network companies handle the physical technical infrastructure, but also the tasks like spam control and manage user policies.

Network companies play on enabling efficiencies. Craigslist destroyed $17bn of value from incumbent, industrialised companies: i.e. newspapers. All Craigslist do with a team of about 20 is connect the endpoints: the users perform all the work. They cost next to zero to start, and Brad references Foursquare that garnered 100k users on just $25k. Tumblr has never spent a single dime on marketing. New features are deliberately hidden as easter eggs, and they leave the dissemination of the platforms functional value to its most influential users (“Hipster bloggers in Williamsburg”, he suggests).

Here are a few nuggets of solid advice fro the talk:

• You don’t always need to consider the monetary return from a user handing their data over to your network. A real-world corollary is the fact you wouldn’t throw the host of a dinner a couple of bucks after you’d eaten; the benefits of the dinner party are less tangible in the same way that your product’s benefits might be.
• Think really carefully about the core group that might initially be interested in your network. Twitter was founded by the attendees of SXSW; Facebook by Harvard students. Think carefully about the physical attributes of your userbase and what their needs are, rather anything all-encompassing.
• Don’t lose sleep over a major incumbent swooping in on your idea. (Read: Google.) Big companies are amazingly inefficient. An incumbent often can’t mobilize or incentivize their staff in the same way a very focussed team of hackers and designers.
• Even if your startup is knocked down by an incumbent, only your investors lose: you won’t. By building a product and going through the processes it demands means you are picking up extraordinary experience and connections. The time you spend on working on your product is never wasted: you will always come out stronger for it, regardless of the outcome.
• What USV looks for in a startup isn’t always easy to define. What they do look for is a team of people who are very well-versed and proficient in both code and design (David Karp of Tumblr): they are not looking for “day-trippers”: someone with an investment banking background is unlikely to be successful in creating a consumer-facing social network.
• Before approaching a VC, they want to see evidence of growth and traction. And if you are getting growth and traction, they’ll likely hear about it and approach you before you need to approach them. So focus your efforts on traction.
• Don’t overplay the importance of ad revenue in your pitch. If ad-revenue plays a very large part of your pitch, it starts to look less compelling. This may not be true however if your product or network plays to a very specific niche or consumer.
• Further to this, advertising was created for television and magazines: advertising was never created for the web (and effectively doesn’t work), so re-consider what you mean by advertising revenue; consider new approaches.
• Don’t approach a VC until you show commitment. It’s unlikely you’ll have a VC believe in you if you don’t believe in your product. You can demonstrate commitment by leaving your day job and spending your time focussed on the product. There are exceptions: Delicious was founded by Joshua Schachter while he worked at Morgan Stanley. Yet he demonstrated commitment by being willing to walk away from his $350k-per-year Quant analyst job to focus on his product.
• Ultimately it costs nothing to create a product. At least do something with your idea, however basic.