It all started with Jeff’s tweet from a week and a half ago:

It got me thinking: what, then, does motivate us? My initial reaction was to disagree: nothing is a bigger de-motivator than a project schedule that’s unrealistically short. As soon as I got over my sense of smug satisfaction from having a decent counter-argument, though, I understood what I believe to be Jeff’s real point. I think it comes across better as the converse:

Never miss an opportunity to make something happen quickly and successfully — it will leave you feeling motivated like nothing else can.

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Over at 24 Ways, Paul Boag has a great list of 10 ways to get approval from clients on design projects.  Notably, many of his tips make sense whether you are seeking approval from clients on design work or colleagues on the next quarterly update.

Here are some highlights:

• Avoid multiple concepts - they take time from the designer and cause confusion rather than clarity.
• Present your designs and provide written support material - it’s important for clients to understand the why behind what you’ve done.
• Use mood boards and show clients samples from sites you preselect as well done - otherwise you might be asked to replicate a terrible approach.

Why 11 ways?  Well, we designed Backboard to facilitate feedback and approval on every stage of all of your projects.  By providing clients with a centralized place to view your work and your explanation behind it where they can also give concrete feedback and approval, you get quicker feedback and can address each point before it becomes an issue.

Yesterday, I was reading a thread on evolt.org’s thelist, perhaps the oldest community of web designers and programmers around.

The topic of the thread was OpenID, the implementation of which on websites is one of the most contentious issues I’ve seen in a long time. Some of the input from the thread:

I have discovered OpenID,
Here is a link if you haven’t heard of it, http://openid.net/
I am un-sure at the moment whether this is a good secure service and I was wondering if any of you folks had any experience with this.

Last I checked, it was going to be too much of a headache for us to implement

I’ve only seen it used on stackoverflow.com, which is even a headache
for a user if you don’t habitually authenticate with one of their
OpenID providers whenever you surf.

I gazed over the specs and that’s exactly what happens.

Personally, I wouldn’t even bother with it. I think it’s a case of “good
ideal, bad implementation”.

Given that Backboard allows you to authenticate with OpenID:

and that embedit.in requires you to do so (the buttons for AOL, Yahoo!, and Google are merely shortcuts to the OpenID URLs for those providers):

you might suspect we have something to say about the whole matter. And you’d be right. The way we see it, OpenID fundamentally solves two very important problems while creating one new problem.

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I was speaking to a young man at a Silicon Valley American Marketing Association meetup a few weeks ago who was interested in entrepreneurship.  He mentioned the whole process of starting your own company seemed chaotic.  I looked back at him and said, “If you don’t like chaos, you might want to reconsider.” After a round of chuckles, the group I was in had a discussion about the role of chaos in entrepreneurship. Our conclusion came to something like this:

The great, fun, interesting and successful entrepreneurs we know enjoy the process just as much as the result.  Your enjoyment of the chaos along the way (and a lot of learning) is it’s own reward.

Two weeks ago some of the Increo team took a small field trip to Stanford’s Startup 101 career fair.  I’ve already shared a bit about what impresses me and this time I figured I’d share some of the fun.  I brought a camera  and snapped a few pictures of the team “hard at work”.  Enjoy!

At Increo, we put a great deal of time and thought into our designs and features – we keep things simple while giving users the power and options they need. We believe a clean UI is integral to a smooth and memorable user experience. Here are a few examples of our philosophy in action:

3 easy steps to creating a Backboard

1. Choose your file to upload.
2. Pick some settings and write a few words about what you uploaded.
3. Invite your reviewers (or invite them later)

That’s it. You don’t need to leave the homepage to start Step 1.  You don’t need to change anything in Step 2. And you don’t even need have an account before you start to create your Backboard.

Hide stuff when you don’t need it

• Step 2 (Customize) is probably the least fun step, so we tried to make it as simple as possible. For instance, the Advanced Options (for downloading, printing, and deadlines) are initially hidden so they’re not intrusive. The user who is looking for more options will find them, and the user who is going through quickly isn’t bothered by more choices.
• In the case you do need a deadline, we make it as easy as possible - just one drop down menu for any day in the upcoming two weeks (and, of course, you can use the full-blown monthly calendar selector if you need a custom deadline).

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