UX¶
Purpose
To identify the norms and practices of our UX-driven process at Countable.
Scope
Currently covers marketing, branding, user experience design and testing.
Marketing¶
Defines how we communicate with potential clients. It screens for clients with similar values, with whom we’d like to collaborate on exciting projects. To anchor this, revisit our Value Prop for Clients
Branding Projects¶
Branding Process¶
- Brand development questionnaire
- Discovery meeting (review other work, discuss answers to questionnaire). The person delivering the work must attend this meeting, in-person or web conference.
- Develop creative brief (internal). See the example Creative Brief below.
- Propose sketches and color paletttes. Cherry pick key points from the creative brief to present.
Branding Guidelines¶
How can we get more buy-in, commitment, alignment and clarity earlier.
- Validate the direction by reviewing other work together.
- Inspiration board.
Demonstrating reasearch, expertise and intention in designs.
- Provide about 3, no more than 5. “I’ve narrowed dozens of sketches down to the best 3. This is why I recommend these directions to your audience…”
- Explain how the proposed designs capture their desired brand requirements, and appeal to the audience.
Creative Brief¶
Visual design is a communication tool for meeting the right kinds of clients and subcontractors. We aim to establish visual standards to best connect us with people who will go the distance to make a big postive impact on the world.
Offering¶
- We rapidly prototype custom software using web technology to understand domain problems more deeply and demonstrate value early on.
- We do our best to embody transparency and maximize value creation for everyone as a side-effect of creating value for stakeholders.
Audience¶
Clients¶
- We are segmenting (filtering for) groups inside organizations who identify as startups but often exist in other organization structures. People who want to try something new and affect change using the web.
- Typically, small enterprises (50 to 500 employees) often with some technical acumen (3 to 5 out of 10), no in-house developer team, or an incomplete one that lacks some web tech areas.
- Another example is a funded startup that needs a world class web technology component such as a dashboard, customer interface or API. Persona: Tifa has raised seed funding and needs a prototype for market research, further momentum with funders.
- Lastly, we’d like to continue to pursue government contracts particuarly when there’s a clear agenda for change using the web. There is a movement in BC government to embrace agile methods and improve software that we’re excited to support and be part of.
- The typical decider is the owner or tech lead of the organization. Persona: Barrett runs a private firm that developed a disruptive hardware component but doesn’t have web UI, apps or cloud integration.
- Their web app will touch many people. We’d rather build things that are publicly used by millions, because these tend to have higher impact (all other things equal), and create more visibility for us.
- We want clients who are interested in “growing the pie” rather than “dividing the pie”. A warning sign of a bad client might be someone who thinks our hourly rate is too high for example. An ideal client should be happy that we charge a profitable rate because: We want partners who want to make money together with us, not make money at our expense; We want partners who choose us because of outsized value, not because we’re cheapest; We want clients who push us to create more value for them; If we can’t provide enough value to charge profitable rates, we shouldn’t be hired by that client because both sides should find a more ideal partnership.
- We should be able to create at least $100,000 in value for the client, and should be able to charge a third of that. Our typical minimum contract size should be $30,000, so that they make at least $70,000 in profits.
Staff¶
We want to attract ambitious, talented people who are good communicators. Persona: Aeris wants a job that is challenging with lots of autonomy to hone her skills alongside ambitious and skilled peers.
Segmentation¶
Given our experience range is so broad, it’s hard to segment by industry. Instead, we segment by ambition. Our value prop “Look at this wide range of great projects we’ve done: We can do anything on the web. If you have a moonshot idea, want to go beyond the status quo in our business where no one else has before, you don’t want someone who specializes in your industry’s status quo as they’ll deliver just that. We’ve demonstrated the ability to create next-level web technology that disrupts your competitors and breaks your industry’s mold. We create leaders on the web.”
Competition¶
Several other categories compete with us, including hiring in-house, freelancers, placement firms and agencies. Of these, we most directly compete with agencies who do end-to-end web based software development work. Here are some we admire, and why.
- Dockyard - open source focused, profess to “make an effort to both teach and learn”.
- Caktus Group - They’ve focused on a specific technology (Django) to be best at. Open source
- TWG - Great services page,
very clear. Agile, fellow Canadian.
Top google results for “Web Application Firm” and “Web Software Firm”. This means they have pretty effective SEO/copy.
Top company identified on clutch.io, Canada (that we actually like)
- Lift Interactive - Highest billable rates in this list.
Similar scope/approach:
- Five Agency - Good process explanation.
- Breue - Super clear CTA “Get your free product roadmap today.”
- AndYet - Likes bleeding edge front end web tech, novel approach.
We admire these teams for beating us on contract bids :)
- Freshworks - Beat us at the Mines Digital Services contract.
- RealFolk - Beat us at the Concierge (devex) project.
- OliveWood - Beat us at the Queue Management System enhancements contract.
- LlamaZoo - Beat us at a VR demo project.
How we want to Differentiate¶
- Specialize in audacity. Work with clients to develop a stretch goal that’s exciting to collaborate on.
- Expertise in prototyping quickly to test ideas and market response.
- Pre-packaged best practices for avoiding technical debt, helping with succession, scalability, operations.
- Focus on our versatility, and successes in many different industries.
Impression¶
This is a web dev firm, that has great technical depth”, as soon as the page loads. This technical depth should be apparently simply from the form of the site.
Theme¶
Space + dreams. Space is a little overdone, lean towards the latter going forward. Dreams characterize our values of working for big impact long term, enabling creators on the web, and making a better remote work environment for our team.
Tone¶
- Audacity. Big Dreams.
- Clarity and simplicity.
- Adaptability.
Design Principles¶
- All design elements should be intentional and have an explainable purpose. Less elements emphasizes the best ones. Don’t try to be clever or subtle. This symbolizes how we value clarity and simplicity.
- The design should be functional, and facilitate the intended usage.
- The design need not always follow design trends but should at least indicate we are aware of them. Cherry pick some trends that work.
- Advanced technical elements (3d, parralax, etc ) are good because they showcase out technical work but should not be used at the expense of being simple.
- We value clarity over cleverness and subtlety.
We like the ideas from Brutalist Web Design
Evaluation of Creative Ideas¶
To evaluate creative ideas, first spend 6 minutes generating your own ideas for the problem and write them down. Compared to using evaluation criteria, the best ideas are identified 77% of the time instead of 51% of the time this way.