Negative

• It's killing my CPU and scrolls slow
• A bit too much going on, cognitive overload!
• Waiting for page load is a BAD THING
• These things are all killing the UX

Positive

• It's really clear what you do
• You have a focused niche and target audience
• You're showing the work immediately, and it's cool
• You're brand comes across as really creative

If you toned this back a bit and saved the FX for just a few select places, I think you're on to something.

Just my 2p.

I know what you mean. Their work looks awesome but they aren't quite communicating their value on the home page.

I'd probably recommend they stop talking about themselves and talk about how they can help their clients.

For example (it's a bit wanky, but should demonstrate the idea):

"Enhance your visitor experience."

"We are a design studio that helps public and business venues create amazing interactive visitor experiences using beautiful digital visualisations and cutting edge technologies"

Thanks Scott. I'm tempted to put the summary at the top or in a side bar. But the idea of relating features to how we solved it is good.

Many thanks, that's good food for thought. Especially with the "shareable content" approach.

About a year ago we started doing research rather than just jumping into prototyping. I'm still learning if this is a "great thing" or not but have seen some successes and failures.

On one app improvement project, we retrofitted analytics and learned that 80% of people only cared about 20% of features (weird that this re-enforced the Pareto principle!). This helped us focus our efforts and reduce the scope of the release.

On another product improvement project, we conducted user interviews during discovery and learned a lot of frustrations users have about the status quo. This info still influences design decisions. On a negative note, I'm not sure any of the insights really took us beyond what we know from good old UX principles.

One thing I have noticed is that our clients generally have a great gut feeling on what will resonate with their customers. So they have a good idea of "what" to build. I'd like to find research techniques that bring new insights even to people that have worked in an industry for 20 years and know their customers very well.

Don't throw in the towel, there are plenty of business leaders who value what you want to do. Find a new leader.

Put another way, you need a boss/manager who can fight your corner. If your leadership doesn't value your process, or at least give you ownership of it, then you'll never get the support you need.

I sometimes hire designers, so took that perspective when looking at it. P.S - I'm not a design guru or anything but am hugely interested in it.

Likes

• It's really fast to load and render. That's a sign of good taste in my view.
• It's really clear what you do
• A diverse set of portfolio items to chose from, assume first is best so picked that
• First portfolio item covered your process, which looks robust, so I'd be fairly confident you can design something that works for people
• You show visual design, it's useful to see where you're at with that

Improvements

• Would be good to know what timezone you're in (found it on LinkedIn - Finland!)
• I'm left wondering why you do what you do. I'd be interested to know what makes you tick, in a single sentence. It would help set you apart. What do you stand for? (ala Simon Sinek)
• Similarly, what it's like to work with you. What's your focus? Speed? Collaboration and being constantly in-touch? Offering advice? Challenging opinions?
• I'm wondering if you design native mobile, or just mobile web.
• Be interested to know who your industry heros are, helps me understand where you're thinking comes from

Take or leave this feedback, just blurting it out :)

We've done 2 quarters of company-wide OKR's for our creative team of 12 people who build products for clients. We failed pretty badly too. Both times we bit off too much at once, and also it wasn't managed very well by myself, so it didn't get the focus it needed. But we'll keep trying!

Anyway, next time we'll pick a more aspirational Objective. Something that you'd wake up and feel excited to achieve. And we'll also limit ourselves to 3 or 4 Key Results.

Some of the Objectives that I think could be fitting to a creative team are:

"Validate all our designs using data, to help us build better products" "Conduct research projects and then educate customers about them" "Become a company that promotes wellness" "Become a company that supports constant team education and growth"

Hope this helps

T

Amazing to see such an in-depth write-up. Have been working on taxi apps since 2011 so looking forward to giving this a proper read. Thanks for sharing. Will post proper feedback later!

I use Apple Reminders for personal list synced across all devices. My company uses JIRA.