Sounds like a great plan to begin with. But in an everyday situation its limits were reached quite soon. Tight deadlines, schedules and product launches shape the daily business in an agency. Allowing creativity full bent outside of client projects becomes a feat of strength, gaining knowledge in new fields of expertise a real challenge that often falls by the wayside. Back the the team was too small and the number of projects too large in order for the Freebie Friday to become a fixed point in the working week. So unfortunately, it ended before it even started and the idea was put to the shelf, gathering dust for almost half a decade.

Die Verantwortung liegt dabei klar bei der Geschäftsführung. Making room for personal development clearly is the responsibility of the management. Middle-term the frustration rate increases at the cost of motivation and innovative thoughts. What is left is a team that simply works through day-to-day operations. That’s not enough for us.

In the scope of our yearly strategic meeting in January we instituted many changes in our agency. So now, once more we introduce the Freebie Friday, for we believe that innovation can only evolve from an open space. The desire for personal development and team building, the culture of trial, error, assessment and learnings has to be accepted by each and every team member. We evaluated exactly where we want to go, what needs to change in order to get there and above all, how and what everyone in the team can contribute to that goal.

Some might ask for the economic risks of such an institution as the Freebie Friday. Fortunately, we are able to say that the level of individual responsibility is very high and everyone has a good understanding of priorities, a sensitivity for resource planning and a good portion of curiosity.

So the message was clear: Less working on external projects, more time to follow your own interests and capabilities, of which the whole team and agency will profit at the end of the day. There needs to be space for ideas in order to achieve change and progress. Taking new perspectives, supporting new approaches, implementing new technologies as well as extending existing knowledge is the main aim. In reality, this means a whole lot of working hours that can’t be offset, trust in the autonomy of the staff as well as a trial-and-error mentality. The only condition is, that the gained knowledge is transferred in internal and external workshops and – if possible – is integrated in projects and concepts to come. Whether it’s Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Growth Hacking, Artificial Intelligence or the development of Drupal modules for certain use cases. The list of ideas is long and we will share the first results of our work soon.

The post We celebrate the Freebie Friday Revival first appeared on Zensations.

Located at the beautiful Santa Monica Pier (oh yeah, now guess what) in Santa Monica, more than 300 people from all over the world met for the conference, workshops, party and the #smashingconf photowalk, which was one of my two days favorites.

The topics that had been dealt with were kind of varied, but always “Forrest Gump” related. It’s sort of an in-joke but those of you who saw the movie know why.

They gave a broad hint by adding a Forest Gump slide to every talk. So, this leads many of us, me included, to the more or less strongly believe that Tom Hanks is going to be the second conferences day’s mystery speaker. Actually he wasn’t, just to make this clear. It was Cameron Moll, who did a pretty good job and made a statement propably everyone had experiences over the years:

But let’s get back to topic.

There’s definitely something about performance optimization going on these days. While the idea of it is absolutely not knew, it’s recognizable not only in terms of technical aspects, but also due to project workflows in general. Steve Souders (Design / Performance) opened with a statement I totally agree with.

It makes work much easier to happen in small interdisciplinary teams and bringing devs, designers, marketers and project managers together at an very early project stage improves communication and increases the number of overlaps. This is so true and out of my experience I can fully agree with it.

Referring to websites in general, performance plays the key role. Users expect sites to render in less than two seconds, so speed is THE factor for great user experience. Because this is what users are really after. Due to this bigger budgets on performance optimization can be expected in future.

Both, Trent Walton (future of the web) and Petty Toland (Design consistency) addressed another major point in their talks. It’s particularly important to understand that people see things completely different and therefore it’s essential to create interface designs clients really can understand. Sounds pretty clear, though. But let’s face reality: in times of hundreds of thousands of different devices that range from smartphones to wearables to household appliances and TVs, designing responsive for just three kinds of devices (desktop, smartphone and tablet) is overtaken.

! It’s the nature of the web to be flexible and should be our role as designers and developers to embrace this flexibility, and produce pages, which, by being flexible, are accessible at all. Trent Walton

Walton definitely spoke from the heart of our developers by approaching that times of psd to html are over and showing up with finished png is like showing up with a statue. We all know this typical situation in a meeting with customers where designs in form of pngs are being discussed. The first 20 minutes are filled with concerns about logo sizes, missed term links and all those tiny little things. Instead of talking about every single detail prototyping should be the way how projects are to be proceeded in future. Designs should more be a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a special purpose. Living styleguides, here we go again.

! If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousands meetings. Trent Walton

Andy Budd (ux / user experience) was very refreshing when he talked about the job of UX designers in general, because there are only a few which have a deep understanding of the matter and know how it works. It will always be a niche and it’s not a whole field of design, especially as not every designer is a UX designer. User experience design is about the way people perceive a product and it means more than creating wireframes, because they are no rocket science and definitely not the solution for every kind of UX problem.

As important predictability and reliability are, todays designs are often no longer spontaneous and surprising. We are thinking in components which leads to lack of creativity and results in a web that is full of predictable and boring designs. A bad idea will always be a bad idea, even with hundreds of iterations.

Last but not least let’s not forget about websites’ content strategy. It’s still common to start the design process without any content strategy or even content, which is the worst possible way – particularly when it comes to complex and comprehensive requirements. As it is in the case of development when living style guides are defined, content style guides should be created as well because addressing questions at an early stage is definitely important.

My personal favorite speaker was Aaron Draplin (design) – he definitely killed it and his session was the absolutely most amazing of all. Lots of music and stories about his work – starting from not paid work for friends up to logo design for the president of the United States. Well, don’t want to recap, you definitely have to see it.

As mentioned in general it’s all about performance, responsive design and advanced workflows these days. Websites have to be accessible and predictable, but at the same time we have to focus on individuality, creativity and even more professional workflows that meet the requirements of complex web applications.

Obviously I didn’t mention all the amazing talks and speakers, but you can find all slides of #smashingconf Los Angles on Lanyard.com. You can also find more impressions on Flickr.

Such a great group! #smashingconf #photowalk

Ein von Cat Clark (@oh_cat) gepostetes Foto am 29. Apr 2015 um 19:41 Uhr

The post What was going on at #smashingconf Los Angeles? first appeared on Zensations.