I was on the back row of the hall and I was hanging on every word Wilson said, it’s rare to find such a profound talk at a web design conference and it’s something that can make a conference seem so special. This was something you would expect from the greatest TED talk.

This is ‘When We Build’ and you should watch it now.

Wilson Miner – When We Build from Build on Vimeo.

Don’t set out to build a wall.

Set out to lay one brick at a time, perfectly.

Makes a lot of sense.

Each time a child asks why and receives an answer it generally asks it again and again and each time we have to get more specific with our answer or at least make it a little more descriptive to provide more context. Sometimes we run out of answers on the 9th time but we try our best.

Surely at such an early age, children cannot treat the first answer we give them as the only answer they’d receive. Do they think we’re joking with our first answer? Probably not. Once we start answering the same question a 2nd and 3rd time the child knows we can go as far as that. Each time we make our answers longer and eventually the child will get as much context and description as they’d ever get and understand ‘why’ better than they ever could.

I’ve never stopped asking why nor I ever will. This is both a good and bad thing. To a point it’s like a slight OCD, I have to understand the why. If I can’t fathom the why, I become easily frustrated or put up barriers to the information I’m hearing. If I don’t understand something, I’ll keep asking why until I do understand as each time I ask there will be more within an answer. Understanding the why is a little easier out of conversations than in them, I can research and read my way to an answer with more context. In discussion, the people I am talking to can unfortunately become frustrated with the amount of information I require without me explaining my questioning in the first place but I feel they still need to be asked.

The reasons why should ALWAYS be known.

I often bring this in to my work as I expect rather than assume that people other than myself would like to know the reason why they should either do something or use something before doing it. This information should be available to read or see at the lowest barrier of entry, it should be a gate that can be pushed open rather than the need for a key to unlock. By that I mean that a user should not have to think about the why and should move instantly to visualising themselves doing the action.

They and we should ‘Understand The Why’.

Something which I’ve been working on a lot recently is wire-framing and increasingly finding the need for a tidier version than simple sketching. Over time I produced this iPad wireframe set in Illustrator to work from. Every time I start a new project I use this asset file as a starting block. Big props must go to Fueled as without them I would never have had the chance to do so much wire framing or had the need for this set to be created. Within the downloadable .zip, there is an editable Illustrator and PDF file to work from.

Download the Set

The want and need to work on a product rather than client projects was so overwhelming that I’m now very very proud and excited to say that I’ll be joining the team at happiest full time.

Some of you will know about happiest, I’ve been semi-involved with the Newcastle upon Tyne based startup for a while now, some of you may even have an account which is now slightly dormant.

I’m excited knowing that what it is currently is very ‘beta’ and acts as a very very strong foundation to build on and what we will achieve in the near future is something that you will be able to use every day, something that is quick and painless which will reward you for doing it.

Focusing on singular products is what I want to do and for now all my energy is going in to happiest and Industry Conf and I just can’t wait to get going.

Today is a new day and the start of a new journey for myself.

If you’ve ever been involved in User Testing, live or remote by using something like What Users Do, you’ll notice a few things;

1. They’re not like You and I.
2. They do everything different to You and I.
3. You’ll want to sit on your hands whilst watching them go through the required tasks as you’ll want to try and point them in the ‘right’ and ‘better’ direction of how they use a computer, let alone their general internet usage.

I found out this morning from randomly looking to do my grocery shopping online that one of the largest grocery shopping retailers ‘Tesco‘ failed on this first hand. As you’ll see from the below, they have a ‘Sign In’ button however when clicking on it, you can’t sign in. It simply produces a drop down navigation for the areas of the website which is not the action a user requires, nor the information they need to complete the action. To sign in, you have to go through to a section to then sign in by another means.

It takes nothing for a user to become confused by something, it takes nothing to lose a customer because of something not working or confusion as how something works.

Let’s not make things difficult for people using what we build. They’re looking to get from A to B in the most seamless way possible, let us help them do that by not missing things like Tesco.

A small collection of free vectors including a beer glass vector, a wine glass vector, a pitcher glass vector and a soft drink glass vector.

Free to use as you see fit. Within the downloadable file there is a .ai and .pdf file.

Download Free Vector Files

My first post was written on August 5th 2007, just over 4 years ago. Taking that in account I’ve written on average every week since setting this up as my online home.

In August 2007 I was not engaged, never mind married. Kids weren’t on the horizon and now I’m 2 months away from expecting the birth of our first child and I was only just getting in to the web industry. It’s truly been an incredible 4 years, not only that I’ve managed to amass 4 years worth of written thoughts as I was never a writer but for what has happened in those years.

Just as a little insight here’s the top 5 articles (traffic wise) that have been written.

1. How to Present Your Design to the Client

2. Free Vector Check Marks

3. 30 Designers, 1 Question – Where are you most inspired?

4. Free Weather Icons

5. 1080px PSD Grid to Download

What’s Next?

More writing, more free resources and a new design as well as super focus on The Industry.

It’s too easy for us when building a product to build it for us, to have a feature list that WE want. Unless you are very controlled it is far too easy to create an ever growing feature list the size of an aircraft carrier. This is bad when you’re wanting the product to be like streamlined submarine as we all know aircraft carriers do not fit inside of submarines.

Take more time to realise that your users and yourself are so different in reality. Just because you want to do something one way doesn’t make it the same for someone else using the product. Always act on the side of caution and focus on what a user would want to do with your product from various places and make decisions accordingly.

You can limit feature creep extremely well by remembering that what a user wants and needs are COMPLETELY different. On top of that remember that what you want in your product, a user might not need.

Today I’m announcing that I’m accepting talk proposals for the conference, from anyone in the industry from anywhere in the world.

Check out the Industry Conf site for more news on how to submit a talk proposal or if you simply want to sign up to the newsletter. Please pass the word on, I’d love to hear from anyone who wants to give a talk whether that be a story, theory or a practical talk.

Thanks!