Kiva is amazing. It’s a site that lets you make microloans to working poor entrepreneurs in the developing world. Farmers, shopkeepers, builders, textile workers, and shoe sellers in Azerbaijan, Samoa, Togo, Kenya, Ecuador. Kiva helps you help them for as little as $25 at a time.

It’s a loan

This isn’t charity, it’s a loan. Amazingly, 99.7% of loans are repaid. When your Kiva loan is repaid, you can choose to withdraw your funds or re-loan to a new business. It’s a wonderful idea well executed.

One-to-one lending

What’s especially cool is that you are helping one person (and their family). It’s a laser-pointer approach to helping people. Pick one person to help, watch their progress, get paid back, loan them more if they need it.

It’s a refreshing alternative to donating to a mega-charity that blurs the connection between your help and a specific human being. Instead of tossing a dollar in a pile to be mass distributed at a later date, Kiva lets you “look someone in the eye,” hand them the dollar, tell them you’re behind them, and wish them good luck. That’s extra special for the giver and receiver.

The lending process is beautifully simple which is a big part of the appeal. Here’s how simple:

Browse business owners in need

We’re happy to announce the addition of three new sites to our targeted ad network, The Deck. This brings the total number of affiliated sites to 21 and also brings a wealth of talent and smarts to the network too.

Darius Monsef’s COLOURlovers has taken a simple and critical part of design and grown it into a thriving destination for the discussion and analysis of colors, palettes, theory and meaning. Veerle Pieters’s site has always been a great resource for illuminating examples of layout, code and above all, impeccable taste. Our third new affiliate is A Brief Message, a concept developed by Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico that aims to become the “Op-Ed” page for design on the web, by publishing short weekly commentary on matters that matter.

If you have a product or service that could benefit from being in front of millions of web, design and creative pros each month, ping us at The Deck. Limited inventory is available for the fall.

Most of the posts in our Design Decisions series have been about visual design. Why is this pixel here, why is that button there, why does this read like that?

In this installment we want to share some of the thinking behind the execution of a specific feature. It’s not so much about the visual design as it is about the functional design.

Initial import

When we launched Highrise we offered vCard and Basecamp import. You could upload a single vCard with many people, or many vCards with individual people. And if you had a Basecamp account you could pull all the people you created in Basecamp over to your Highrise account.

But that’s wasn’t enough. Well, it was enough for an initial launch. Hundreds of thousands of contacts were imported over the next few weeks. The options we offered were working for plenty, but requests for additional import options began to pile up.

Hearing without listening

This is where we got lost. We heard, but we didn’t listen. We heard “I need to import from…” and lumped all the “froms” into a single pile. Some people wanted to import from Outlook, some from Excel, others from apps that spit out data in CSV (comma separated values) format, and others from other generic CSV sources. So we thought, ok, let’s kill all these birds with one stone and build a generic CSV import tool. Upload your file, match up the fields, and we’ll take care of the rest. That should be easy, right?

What we missed

Here’s what we missed: In a statistical romp, the number of people who wanted to import from Outlook trounced the number of people who wanted to import from other CSV sources. But we didn’t listen to that. We just heard “import from CSV” and we set off to build the generic CSV import tool, cause, ya know, it should be easy, right?

Well, it turned out not to be very easy at all. It was easy enough to get clean data in, but when people sent us sample data it was pretty dirty. Some was encoded wrong, some wasn’t encoded at all. Some was quoted correctly, some was all scrambled up. Some had the same number of columns per row, some was variable. It was a total mess. Not an impossible mess to deal with, but maybe not one worth the effort right now.

Three weeks was two weeks too long

So three weeks in we said what the fuck? Why is this taking so long? Why aren’t we done yet? And it turned out we weren’t done because we hadn’t listened. We didn’t chop the big problem into smaller, more prioritized problems. We didn’t Judo it.

What we should have done

What we should have done was first build an Outlook importer. That was the biggest pain point for the most people. It was our customer’s top priority and it should have been ours as well. Focusing on a single file format removed 95% of the uncertainty. We knew the column names, we knew the file structure, we knew what to expect. When you know how the parts fit together it makes it much easier to build something. You can add value quicker. Maybe not all the potential value, but most of it for most people. That’s a quick win.

Judoed

And so that’s what we did. We put on the brakes, turned the wheel, and pointed our efforts at an Outlook-only importer. It took about a week, we launched it, and we made a lot of people very happy very quickly.

Then we looked at the next most popular import request. It turned out to be ACT 9!. So we grabbed some sample ACT 9! export files, mapped the format, and launched ACT 9! import next.

Lesson learned

Listen, don’t just hear. And don’t lump a bunch of related small problems together—it just makes one big problem. One big problem requires one big solution, and big solutions take a long time (and often don’t go right). You’re better off chopping big lumps of problems into smaller chunks until you’re able to knock them off one at a time. Add value sooner by solving the highest-priority/smallest-problem first. Then move on to the next one. And then the next one. This way you can provide a long chain of value, one link at a time.

Today at the An Event Apart Chicago conference, Liz Danzico wondered aloud what “seamless” means. You hear it bandied about often—especially in the form of a “seamless user experience.”

So, in 10 words or less, explain what “seamless” means in the context of the often-promised “seamless user experience.”

We’re often victims of design piracy. Roughly once a week someone emails us with an anonymous tip that someone has ripped off our “UI look and feel” and is using it for their own site or their own app. It’s amazing what people and businesses think they can get away with.

We send the violators an email letting them know they can’t take our work, our words, our code, or our design. 98% of the time the violators respond favorably and take the design down or alter it sufficiently that it’s no longer recognizable as our design. 1% of the time it takes a few emails before they acquiesce. And 1% of the time it requires legal intervention.

A blank canvas

They usually apologize by saying they didn’t know it was wrong or that their hired design firm did it. But then sometimes they say “Come on, how many different ways are there to design a web page or a web app?” That infuriates me. The web browser is a blank canvas. A big empty box that can hold almost anything. Fill it with something original, something you can call your own.

Inspiration in time

Whenever I run into designer’s block or just need visual design inspiration I turn to the world of wrist watches. I’ve posted on this topic before, but it comes up again often so I figured I’d hit it again.

A tiny canvas with endless possibilities

A wrist watch is a tiny canvas with something to keep that canvas tied to your wrist. It’s just a couple inches round or square or triangular. It has a fixed, common purpose: Tell time. The rules of time are understood. 24 hours in a day, usually displayed as 12. Your brain can tell if it’s AM or PM.

And yet somehow, with these physical and practical constraints, watch design flourishes. From analog to digital to a combination of the two, tens of thousands of designs are born. Different type, different proportions, different shapes, different perspectives, different indicators, different buttons, different bezels, etc. Fresh new designs hit the market all the time. Here are about a hundred different interpretations of the same question: “What time is it right now?”

If watch designers can do it, web designers can do it

So if someone can make a 2” circle look unique, you can make a million pixels look unique. Don’t sell yourself short. Don’t think there’s only a few ways to display content. Don’t think there’s only a couple ways to style a sidebar. Don’t think there’s only a couple different designs for a header with tabs. Don’t think a list always has to look the same or there’s only one way to distinguish time-sensitive information. Don’t think there’s only a couple ways to call something out as important or high priority.

As a web designer you have a lot more options and variables and possibilities than a watch designer. Build something that’s yours. Make something you can call your own. Make your own mark. Cut the excuses and be a designer.

An ad for a dog walker tacked to a tree.

Before we launched the new Backpack a few weeks ago, we used to present new accounts with a Primer attached to the top of their Backpack home page.

The Primer was a cross between quick tips, a brief explanation of some of the stuff you can do with Backpack, and links to key features. Here’s what it looked like:

This worked well enough, but there were a few problems…

1. It took up a lot of space and pushed the key Backpack feature buttons (notes, lists, files, etc) on the home page down below the fold.
2. It could be hidden, but once it was hidden it was gone forever. The position of the primer encouraged people to hide it instead of keep it around for reference.
3. It made a weird first impression. The simple, clean, white page metaphor was marred by a big yellow box at the top. The name of the page (“Home page”) was no longer at the top of the page.

Welcome the Welcome Tab

We introduced the Welcome Tab when we launched Highrise earlier this year. It’s worked out really well so we decided to reuse the concept in Backpack.

The Welcome Tab in Backpack provides even more information than the old Primer, but it doesn’t get in your way. You can keep the tab around for reference as long as you’d like without it cluttering up your pages or pushing down your content. And when you’re ready you can hide the tab permanently if you’d like.

The tab is the first option in the nav bar. You can revisit it anytime if you need a quick refresher course in the basics of Backpack. It also serves as a crude site map of some of key administrative features, links to the help section, links to change your color scheme, change reminder settings, and more.

We think this is a great solution to a common scenario—getting people started but keeping the “getting started” info around for later.

John Gruber’s illuminating review of the C4 conference called out a great line by Wil Shipley:

“This is all your app is: a collection of tiny details.”

That’s the best descriptive I’ve heard of any product, project, person, or object. A collection of tiny details.

Details pile up. One influences another. One often makes another possible (or impossible).

If you stack up a bunch of great little details you have a great shot at a great product. If you stack up a bunch of poorly executed details you have a great shot at a mediocre or bad product.

Of course cohesion doesn’t happen for free. You can’t just pile up a bunch of details and expect a perfect whole any more than you can pile up a bunch of bricks and expect the Taj Mahal, but carefully considered details do set the tone for a great product.

Just be careful and don’t get bogged down on the details early on.

Yahoo is looking for a Design Prototyper in Sunnyvale, CA.

Apple is looking for a Mac OS X Web Developer and a Mac OS X Desktop Software Engineer in Cupertino, CA.

Northwestern University is looking for a Software Engineer / Systems Administrator in Evanston, IL.

Planned Parenthood is looking for a Web Developer in NYC.

Judy’s Book is looking for a .NET developer in Seattle, WA.

The Nation is looking for a Web Producer in NYC.

Casper Star-Tribune is looking for a Web Developer in Casper, WY.

ISITE Design is looking for an Information Architect in Portland, OR.

Lightburn is looking for a Web Designer in Milwaukee, WI.

Crossbow Studio is looking for a PHP/Web Developer in Philadelphia, PA.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is looking for an Interactive Media Specialist in Minneapolis, MN.

Crate and Barrel is looking for a Senior Information Architect and an Internet Project Manager in Northbrook, IL.

More jobs…

These are just some of the recent jobs posted on the Job Board. The Job Board is linked up on over 1,000,000 page views a month on some of the industries most highly regarded sites. If you’re looking for a design, programming, copywriting, or IT executive job, the Job Board is worth a look.

I recently tripped over some fields on this sign-up form:

“If no, please type DNA” so naturally I start typing ATCG AATT CCTC TATT GTTG GATC ATAT… (rim shot!)

I figure DNA means “Does Not Apply,” but it’s also strange that answering “No” to the form question above still requires manual entry into the field below. This “No” then “type DNA” sequence shows up twice on the form. It’s odd, unfamiliar, and confusing. If anything, “n/a” would probably be recognized by more people than “DNA.”

When you build your forms be clear. Think about what you’re asking, why you’re asking, how you’re asking for it, and where you’re asking for it. All these little things matter—especially on long forms. Minor issues on long forms begin to stack up pretty quickly. Remember, copywriting is interface design.