There’s a phase we go through in our maturity as designers. At first we don’t have a lot of confidence in our process, so we hide while we work. We take feedback from directors, programmers, customers, and say “Ok let me go away and work on that and I’ll get back to you.” Then we go away for a few days or a week and monkey around with our mysterious process until we feel good enough to show something again. We don’t like to show things that are still in progress. If somebody checks in we say “I’m still experimenting with a few things.” We design in secret.

When we get more confident a new phase opens up. We believe more in our process and we know that things are never perfect. So we start showing work earlier and start talking about our rationale at a given step. We’re excited for feedback on a clumsy design because we know feedback will steer us to a better one. We might even be unafraid to open our tools and do some real work in real time in front of people. This is designing in the open.

Is there anything we can do to speed the transition from designing in secret to designing in the open? My experience is yes, it can happen with a little help from the outside. Whoever is managing the project or directing it can ask for smaller, more frequent steps.

Instead of asking for 10 changes and waiting a week, you can ask for 1 change and wait 15 minutes. Evaluate the change, praise it or identify weaknesses, and suggest the next change. By asking for small changes, you take the pressure off the designer because you aren’t asking for miracles. You also take the pressure off the review process because the set of constraints and motivating concerns is smaller. The design is easier to talk about because there are a fewer factors involved.

By working hand in hand, reviewing small changes as they are made, designers gain confidence and learn to expose their process. And this technique is no training wheel. The better a designer is, the more open they are to discussing small changes and getting feedback. It’s a virtuous cycle leading out of secrecy and into productive openness.

Update: Pixar President Ed Catmull makes the same point in this quote on getting over embarrassment:

In the process of making the film [Toy Story], we reviewed the material every day. Now this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people. Most people—imagine this: you can’t draw very well, but even if you can draw very well, suppose you come in and you’ve got to put together animation or drawings and show it to a world-class, famous animator. Well, you don’t want to show something that is weak, or poor, so you want to hold off until you get it right. And the trick is to actually stop that behavior. We show it every day, when it’s incomplete. If everybody does it, every day, then you get over the embarrassment. And when you get over the embarrassment, you’re more creative.

As I say, that’s not obvious to people, but starting down that path helped everything we did. Show it in its incomplete form. There’s another advantage and that is, when you’re done, you’re done. That might seem silly, except a lot of people work on something and they want to hold it and want to show it, say two weeks later, to get done. Only it’s never right. So they’re not done. So you need to go through this iterative process, and the trick was to do it more frequently to change the dynamics.

Thank to Ben for pointing me to the Catmull quote.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Highrise
A collection of Highrise tips and tricks
A list of tips to help you be more productive in Highrise.

Highrise now has custom fields!
For example, you can add a custom field called “Referred by” to keep track of who referred a customer to you. Or “Spouse’s name” so you’ll never forget the name of the husband or wife of one of your contacts. Or maybe a field called “University” to keep track of which college someone went to. Or maybe you just want to keep track of a “Customer ID”. Custom fields make it all possible.

New in Highrise: Infinite scrolling
Browsing activity about your Highrise Contacts, Cases and Deals is now much faster and more fun. You can just scroll through activity streams to see everything—no need to click ‘next page’. When you reach the end of the page, Highrise automatically loads any additional items.

Lead Trainer at 435 Digital uses Highrise to keep track of class registrations
“I need to keep track of the emails I get from all over, with questions about dates and prices and the like…Highrise has been great for helping me stay organized and now, as we grow our staff, my colleagues as well.”

London web agency: “Highrise Deals are great for building up a picture of cash flow for the coming months”
“Tags may be something you see all over the web, but don’t underestimate their power in the context of a CRM. Make sure you get all users to conform to the same tagging system, this means that when you need to find an expert in SEO or a list of your previous clients, you’ll be able to get them in the click of a button.”

PCTechTalk.com takes a detailed look at Highrise
“If you’ve ever thought that you’d like a better solution for managing your customer info, definitely give Highrise a try.”

Basecamp
More control over to-do permissions in Basecamp
“Now, if you restrict somebody’s permission to only ‘Messages & Files’, they will no longer be able to check off to-do items. You will have to give people ‘plus To-dos’ access in order to allow them to check off items. By default, anyone you invite has full access (messages and files, to-dos and milestones). It’s up to you if you’d like to restrict their permission after they are invited.”

New in Basecamp: Share files with your Free plan
By popular demand we’ve added 10 MB of file storage to every Free Basecamp account! Now you can share files, documents, images, and designs with your clients or team.

New in Basecamp: Faster time entry
Before this change, entering time in Basecamp projects required navigating three pull-down menus to select the month, day and year. It was slow and required too many clicks. Those pull-downs are now replaced by a single field that shows the full date in plain text. Clicking the field pops up a small calendar—choose the day with just a click.

Continued…

I always get a kick of out seeing how other people customize the home screens on their phones, so I put out a call for screen shots from everyone at 37signals. We got a pretty good response so I thought I’d share:

Kristin Aardsma (Support)

Continued…

Design matters

We believe you can’t be a great software company without great design. We believe in clarity, smooth user experiences, the right words in the right places, well organized and clean code, and all the little touches that make an interface feel just right. You should believe in these things too.

What you’ll be working on

Designers at 37signals are always working on different things. You may be working on polishing up an existing feature in Basecamp or designing the UI for a brand new feature in Highrise. You may be revamping Backpack or fundamentally rethinking some UI in Campfire. Or maybe you’re involved in designing a brand new product or a new marketing site. You may be asked to come up with something no one has ever seen before.

Besides having great visual taste and talent, you must code well-structured HTML/CSS. Basic Javascript or Rails skills are a plus, but not required. Great writing skills are required.

Work on products that define an industry

At 37signals you’ll be working on products that people rely every single day on to get their job done. Your work will impact millions of interactions. You’ll be working with some of the best designers, programmers, dev ops folks, and customer support people in the industry. Our team is top notch and we want you to make it even better.

Solve real problems

Our projects are always focused on solving real problems. When the problem goes away we know the design is right. Your job, as a designer at 37signals, is to make our customers’ problems go away.

Be a leader

At 37signals, designers lead the teams. Each development team is made of up three people – two programmers and one designer. The designer also manages the project. In addition to designing the screens/elements, you’ll keep the team focused and make calls about what’s important.

What we’re looking for

We’re not looking for a certain design style, we’re looking for a certain design approach and taste level. Simplicity isn’t enough – clarity is where it’s at. You think about how people interpret the objects on the screen. What they think about, what moves them, what frustrates them, what makes them happy. You know that the right design decision can make all the difference.

You’re excited to discover a better solution, even well into a project. You don’t mind throwing something out in favor of a better idea or implementation. Projects at 37signals start with real code. Feedback from an evolving prototype guides the team. While we’re very pragmatic about code, it is important that your design/code is easy to change in response to feedback.

You love to write, too

You understand that copywriting is design. The words matter as much as the pixels. Great visuals with weak words are poor designs. You should care about how things are phrased as much as you care about how they look.

Chicago or anywhere

We’re open to hiring the best person no matter where they are. If you’re in Chicago all the better (we have an open desk for you in our office), but if not that’s fine too – more than half of our company works remotely all over the world. If you do want to relocate to Chicago we’re open to that as well.

How to apply

Send relevant work samples, and anything else that will make you stand out, to [email protected]. Include [UI DESIGN] in the subject of the email.

It doesn’t matter where you went to school, or if you even graduated. It doesn’t matter if this is your first job or your fifth. Doing great work and being driven to improve yourself and everything you touch is what matters.

If we think you may be a good fit we’ll be back in touch with step two of the application process.

Application deadline

We’ll be accepting applications for this position until June 6, 2011.

We look forward to receiving yours.

Transcript for Episode #26 of the 37signals Podcast, Q&A with Jason and David, is now online. You can also listen to it. Below is an excerpt.

David: Something that matters when you’re trying to pick a business partner is that it can’t just be about the craft. If all I was interested in doing was programming, then I don’t think I would have been a good fit for a business partner. If you want to be a partner in a business, you have to be willing to wear many more hats than just that of your craft. You have to dive into all sorts of issues: personnel, building a company, finance, marketing. There are so many other things than just the technical aspect of it.

Jason: I also think it’s important to make sure that you’ve worked with this person for a while. I get emails occasionally from people starting businesses looking for business partners. They’re like, “Hey, I just met this guy who’s a programmer. Should we go 50/50 on something?” It’s like a marriage. You should date for a while. You have to work with somebody and get to know them. You’ve got to make sure you can get along and you can stand someone for a long period of time. It’s important to work with somebody first before you link up in legal terms, because a business is a legal entity and it can be messy if things don’t work out.

David: I’ve seen it not work out a couple of times for people. It’s incredibly painful. Once you’ve split things up into equity and somebody owns a part of your company, it is incredibly painful to divorce yourself from that person. You really have to be sure that it’s a good fit.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), the father of American landscape architecture, may have more to do with the way America looks than anyone else. Beginning in 1857 with the design of Central Park in New York City, he created designs for thousands of landscapes, including many of the world’s most important parks.

His works include Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Boston’s Emerald Necklace, Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, Mount Royal in Montreal, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol and the White House, and Washington Park, Jackson Park and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. (The last of those documented excellently in Erik Larson’s book The Devil in the White City.) Plus, many of the green spaces that define towns and cities across the country are influenced by Olmsted.

Below, ten lessons from Olmsted’s approach:

1) Respect “the genius of a place.”
Olmsted wanted his designs to stay true to the character of their natural surroundings. He referred to “the genius of a place,” a belief that every site has ecologically and spiritually unique qualities. The goal was to “access this genius” and let it infuse all design decisions.

This meant taking advantage of unique characteristics of a site while also acknowledging disadvantages. For example, he was willing to abandon the rainfall-requiring scenery he loved most for landscapes more appropriate to climates he worked in. That meant a separate landscape style for the South while in the dryer, western parts of the country he used a water-conserving style (seen most visibly on the campus of Stanford University, design shown at right).

2) Subordinate details to the whole.
Olmsted felt that what separated his work from a gardener was “the elegance of design,” (i.e. one should subordinate all elements to the overall design and the effect it is intended to achieve). There was no room for details that were to be viewed as individual elements. He warned against thinking “of trees, of turf, water, rocks, bridges, as things of beauty in themselves.” In his work, they were threads in a larger fabric. That’s why he avoided decorative plantings and structures in favor of a landscapes that appeared organic and true.

3) The art is to conceal art.
Olmsted believed the goal wasn’t to make viewers see his work. It was to make them unaware of it. To him, the art was to conceal art. And the way to do this was to remove distractions and demands on the conscious mind. Viewers weren’t supposed to examine or analyze parts of the scene. They were supposed to be unaware of everything that was working.

He tried to recreate the beauty he saw in the Isle of Wight during his first trip to England in 1850: “Gradually and silently the charm comes over us; we know not exactly where or how.” Olmsted’s works appear so natural that one critic wrote, “One thinks of them as something not put there by artifice but merely preserved by happenstance.”

Continued…

I’ve been working out with a trainer for the past few years, mostly because I’m too lazy to go to the gym on my own. But also because I want to get better at working out. I want to be more efficient and not waste time doing stuff that doesn’t matter, etc.

My biggest problem has been slowing down. I tend to work out too fast. Lift too fast, do crunches too fast, do pushups too fast, etc. It may sound counterintuitive, but you can actually waste time by doing things too quickly.

I haven’t been able to catch myself when I’m going too fast. I’m certainly capable of slowing down, and I fundamentally understand the benefits of slowing down, but I just couldn’t come up with something that pops in my head to encourage me to slow down when I find myself going too fast.

Then my trainer asked me what I would do if I had three darts, had already thrown two, and I only had one shot left at hitting the bullseye.

I told him I’d slow down. I’d take a deep breath, measure the distance, mock a few practice throws back and forth, settle in, focus, and throw. I wouldn’t rush up there and just toss the thing.

And it clicked for me. When you really want to do something right, which is usually what you should be striving for, you tend to slow down.

Of course it’s all relative as some things are more important to get right than other things, and there’s often external context which may make slowing down impossible, but in general, given the opportunity, you’d slow down to get something right.

And while some things really do require split-second decision making, the worst thing to do is to invent artificial urgency and cheat yourself.

Jason 04 Mar 2006 — What’s the most ignored paradox in software development? Every time you add something you take something away.

Screen real estate. Interface clarity. Simplified testing. Shorter development time. Certainty. Agility. Managability. Familiarity. Adding anything dilutes everything else. That’s not always a bad thing, just be aware of it. Be aware of the trade-offs.

The dilution effect is why maintaining a clear vision for your product is so important. Without a clear understanding of the limits and boundaries of your product, the product will morph into something you no longer recognize. Or worse, something you can no longer manage or control.

A product people loved can turn into a product people liked. Then the product people liked can turn into the product people can live with. Then the product people can live with can turn into the product people can live without.

Of course the reverse can also happen. A product people can live without can become a product people love, but once you’re at the love stage it can turn around on you just as fast.

This reality reveals itself on release day. The first thing you’ll hear from customers that love your product is how they’d love it even more if it did this or that also. How you handle the “also” is what separates greatness from mediocrity from failure.