It’s not the end of the world; as Seth Godin recently said, “I don’t care so much how much money you raised, or who you raised it from. I care a lot about who your customers are and why (or if) they’re happy.”

Dead-on. Which is why I am even more excited about this graph that we put together:

Those are people getting out of debt on our site. Even better, by comparing the lines, we see that more engaged users are getting out of debt faster. Correlation is not causation, but this connection proves that the use of ReadyForZero can play a serious role in helping people. It gives me confidence that I’m making progress to living up to my standards for great designers.

“With a focus on psychology, UX designers can build services that directly help people improve their lives. It’s not new; AA and Weight Watchers were around before the Internet, and they help people through difficult and long-term behavior change. Still, there are big advances to be made. Web services are starting to blur the edges between online and offline interactions. Nike+ and Fitbit track and provide insight into your exercise. ReadyForZero helps people change their behavior and get out of credit card debt. HealthMonth creates competitive / supportive groups of people who improve at the same time.

This is grander than enabling behavior—it is changing behavior. It is also only just beginning.”

Read the rest of my guest post over at UXMag.

Am I a great designer?

The answer to this question matters – to me, and to everyone else.

First, it’s deeply personal. I don’t think many people aim to be mediocre, and this question is the yardstick by which we measure our professional life.

Second, in the vein of Cennydd Bowles’ excellent closing plenary from the IA summit, being a great designer involves having a huge, positive impact on the world. We should all strive for this, and if the field is to realize its full potential, we must. We cannot settle for mediocrity, for focus on profits, for improving the short-term at the expense of the long-term. We cannot use, as Umair Haque puts it, yesterday’s ideas.

So how do we measure it?

The thing is, it’s very hard to even understand the question. What is a great designer? We can judge someone by many metrics: respect, pay, book sales, twitter followers, users of their products, revenues of their products, or any of a million other things. My gut tells me that these things may be a result of greatness, but that they don’t strike at the heart of the issue. One doesn’t need to be popular or rich to be great.

With that in mind, I’ve set down a simple list of things that I think I must do to even begin to enter the realm of greatness. It’s a draft version; let’s collaborate on making it better. I can only claim to check a few of these items off my list, but it’s obvious that trying to fill each of these areas will make me significantly better. I hope you find it equally useful.

A Framework

Using this guide is simple: Answer the questions honestly, and strive to fulfill each one completely.

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1. Are you working on something truly important?

You should be able to answer this unequivocally. You are increasing happiness on this Earth, and can prove it. In the future, when you look back on what you are doing right now, you will say “yes, I was working on the right thing”. You are tapped into that youthful, driven sense that the world needs saving and you’re playing a vital part. The most important decision we make as designers is not within a project, it is what project we choose to work on.

The guy who codified planned obsolescence was a very successful marketer. He helped sell billions, even trillions of dollars worth of product. But I don’t call him “great”. I call him a bastard, responsible for untold landfills of cheap, discarded consumer goods.

2. Are you learning something new?

You are actively learning a new domain of knowledge. This involves at a minimum reading, being taught or mentored, and practicing in this domain. No matter your age or experience, there are many things to learn. Stagnation does not make a great designer.

3. Are you a mentor?

You periodically meet with a designer more junior than yourself, providing them with guidance, feedback, and inspiration. Mentoring or teaching is one of the most powerful ways a person can use their time. A few hours of your time can have an lasting, sustained impact on the future of both your students and the world. Every great designer should take the time to pass their invaluable wisdom onwards.

4. Are you a mentee?

You periodically meet with a designer more senior than yourself, who helps you continually improve yourself. The most successful people in history have all had mentors. Leonardo da Vinci had Andrea del Verrocchio. MLK had Benjamin Mays. Not only do mentors have answers to your questions, they tell you which questions you should be asking.

5. Do you contribute to your professional community?

You blog, speak, write, evangelize, organize, or curate within your own niche of the design community. Everyone, from the youngest fledgeling designer to the lifelong thought leader, has a unique and important perspective on the design profession. We are lucky to call ourselves members of one of the most flexible, forward-looking, wide open professions in the history of the world. Your contribution is important, and while creating it you shape your own unique expertise.

6. Do you feel ownership of your work?

You endure the unbearable bad feedback that throws your passionate work into a trash can, and bask in the radiant glow of good feedback while staying humble. You champion your designs and the ideals that created them, through unending hurdles and teams and budgets and whatever else can be thrown in your way.

Creating beautiful designs, handing them off, and walking away is easy. Long term ownership of a design is hard. It makes you take heroic stands as well as accept brutal compromises.

7. Are you proud of your day-to-day efforts?

There are many ways to define good work, from quantitative results to qualitative feedback. Here, we take a self-reflective approach: You do great work so long as you feel that it is great. You have produced your very best effort given the constraints and needs of the project. You have battled and danced with these constraints until they made you bleed, and you have left the design room with something to be proud of.

8. Have you ever created anything timeless?

You have made something that even your kids would someday be proud of. This thing has longevity – its effects will last beyond the next version, the next redesign, the next generation. It has impacted the future in a noticeable way, large or small. Someone in the world has benefitted greatly from this thing, and would thank you from the bottom of their heart if they ever met you.

9. Do you empower your team to be better?

You make a conscious effort to improve the dynamic of your team. You are a source of positive energy, selfless in your efforts to help your teammates become great themselves.

Our ability to bring the best out of everyone around us results in better products, smarter people, and happier colleagues. Even when we must fight for our designs, it is with respect and shared optimism that we approach this “fight”.

10. Are you happy?

This is a difficult question, but it pierces the heart of the issue: Your overall happiness is a subconscious yet powerful evaluation of how you’re doing. If you do crappy work and are mean to people, you will be unhappy. Buddhism teaches that attaining happiness is forgetting the self, and this applies profoundly to our work. If we care deeply about what we do, we can lose ourselves in it, become vulnerable to it, grieve when it fails, and experience real bliss when it is successful. This question can be alternatively phrased: Are you vulnerable to your work? Thus, if you have done great work, you are happy.

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How many of these can I check off? Not enough! I argue that we should all be scoring 100% on the first nine questions, and doing our best on the tenth. If our entire community can hit this stride, we are well positioned to change the future for the better.

Let your passion out into the world. Every single one of us is great at something unique, and we owe it to ourselves to share that with the greater community. That’s why I produce all this Axure stuff – because I’m good at it, and it makes people happy. Seriously: happy! That’s a damn good feeling.

Few professions provide this opportunity, this interconnectedness and openness that allow people of any age or location to make an immediate, positive impact across the world. Throughout the conference, as I sat through presentation after presentation of really cool people making really cool things, I realized yet again that the world is there for the improving. For each of us. So take some time outside of work to make something awesome – you’ll get back a thousand times what you put in.

Thanks.
-Loren

I invite you to check out some new content and some reorganized content at the work and projects pages, a better footer, and one miserable defeat to Internet Explorer’s vicious bug engine (can you find it?). I should also mention that IE6 is dead to me.

Thanks to everyone who reads and comments, expect more good content to follow.

It’s easier than I thought

By far, the most difficult part of making these lifestyle changes was committing to them and making the jump.  Once the decision was set in motion, the steps to making it all work appeared naturally.  Some were harder than others, but with a clear path came simple decisions.  I started working freelance with Rod Ebrahimi, forming BIG.  I began using Twitter and blogging, interacting with the community to meet great people, forward thinkers, and potential clients.

Then it was a matter of grabbing my Macbook, making sure most of my documents lived in the cloud, preparing clients for the time change, setting up the trip, and hopping on a plane.

It’s harder than I thought

That isn’t to say that everything has been easy.  There are challenges to working abroad.  The internet is run by a hamster in a wheel here in Argentina.  My workspace environment, at the moment, leaves a lot to be desired.  Tossing out my established routine has until recently disrupted the zen-like days and weeks where I could achieve great productivity.  The side trips, exploration, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, plays, revoluciones, tango, and all that there is to a new country certainly cut into what otherwise would be career time.

But every minute is worth it.  You can’t make up for this type of life experience.

It won’t last

My final, and personal, opinion on the matter is that it won’t last.  Not for me.  Although many of the barriers to working across the world have fallen, some still exist.  Skype has failed me far too many times during client meetings.  I miss all the conferences.  Face time with clients and coworkers is non-existant.  My experience in South America has been an absolute blast, and I’m thankful for the opportunity to take such an extended trip while working.  But I will be returning to the USA on my scheduled date later this year, and will be excited to get closer to the action.

Jeff Harrison figures out how to do Drag and Drop interactions.

Axure releases excellent Widget Libraries for 5.5 (beta available here).

W. Scott Williams made a nice Sliding Drawer widget.

The current version of the beta reflects some awesome new functionality.  There is a much-needed dynamic panel manager, a Location and Size pane, 9-slice image scaling, and the ability to change the way drag-selecting objects works.  There is also native support for loading custom widget libraries, of which there are an increasing amount.  Heavy Axure users will understand how great many of these updates are.

Read the full announcement and explore all the updates at Axure’s blog.

Feature Creep, the result of giving in to the attitude that “this feature would be nice” in your product, inevitably results in increased design and development costs, bloating of your product, and a reduction in simplicity.  Here, I propose a strategy for the discovery and brutal elimination of unnecessary features.

Ideas reproduce.

Those driving ideas and products tend to be idea generators – people who bubble with enthusiasm and want to leverage every possibility in their upcoming product or version.  As creatives involved in the process, designers also think up options and features that may provide usefulness.

During the brainstorming phase of a project, the team ideally produces a wealth of directions that the product can take, and explores all avenues.  Ideas flow freely, bounce off each other, and breed like rabbits.  They should be remembered, captured, tagged, identified, explored, and discussed.

Then, they should be decimated until only the best remain.

Natural selection.

After the optimistic, criticism free generation phase of the project, it’s time to take the gloves off.  Set expectations with the team and ground rules for discussion.

1. Ensure you have defined your problem.

   Without knowing what you’re solving, the solution will be meaningless.  Write down the problem as concisely as possible.  This should have been done before the brainstorming stage, but sometimes the problem can shift as brainstorming continues.  Do not leave this step until your problem is identified.

2. Collect your solutions.

   Your brainstorm session has ideally generated a wealth of interesting and insightful solutions.  However you have decided to manage your solutions – sticky notes, bullet points, twitter posts -collect all of these solutions in a single place.

3. Evaluate each solution relative to the problem.

   How well does the solution address the problem?  Which is simplest?  Examine each solution with the highest suspicion.  It should stand up to attacks from many angles, supported by how well it addresses your original problem.

4. Sidebar all solutions that don’t directly relate to the probem.

   Some of your solutions will be crazy, head-in-the-clouds, never buildable, frilly junk that were fun at the time but can probably be tossed now.  Others are great ideas that could be included in a “version 2″ of the interface you’re building, and these can be kept on the sidelines until later.

5. Design and enjoy your clean, simple, realistic interface.

   With this now-limited solution to your problem, you will have a manageable design and development project, in which you have the resources to focus on quality interaction, simple visuals, and standards based development.