Eric Bieller

Last week, my wife and I were in the middle of our typical midweek dilemma: Are we going to cook at home or just be lazy and order SpoonRocket?

Of course we ultimately gave in to our lazy alter egos and decided to place our order. But to our dismay, we had waited too long and SpoonRocket had sold out!

Desperate times called for desperate measures. We had our hearts set on Tortellini Alfredo and by god that's what we were going to have!

So we decided we were going to build the exact same meal ourselves that was available at SpoonRocket, and compare the price. So we headed up to Trader Joe's and the smackdown began.

The Results

1 SpoonRocket Tortellini Alfredo: $8.70 1 SpoonRocket Tortellini Alfredo: $8.70

SpoonRocket total: $17.40

Broccoli Cauliflaur: $2.29 Mozzerella Cheese - $2.79 Tortellini Pasta - $1.99 Alfredo Sauce - $3.29

Trader Joe's total: $10.36

In the end, we ended up with a higher quality meal that cost considerably less. We even had leftovers! This experiment changed the way we look at on demand food delivery, we'll certainly be opting for eating in more often.

Other Considerations

Speed

In my opinion, the primary selling point of SpoonRocket is speed. You don't have to fuss with a trip to the store or with the actual cooking. That certainly increases the value of the service for someone like me, and I'd definitely pay a little bit extra for it.

Quality

I've experienced varying quality from my SpoonRocket orders. I've had everything from rock hard rice to lukewarm pasta. But the convenience is often worth putting up with sometimes sub par quality.

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I hate to admit it, but I never really memorized my multiplications tables as a kid. I was more concerned with playing video games and music. But as an adult, I find myself faced with basic math problems every single day. I'm all about taking the path of least resistance when it comes to learning, so I figure, if I want to get better at math, I'm going to exploit as many tricks and shortcuts as possible.

The beautiful thing about math is that it's full of patterns. If used correctly, these patterns can make memorization a breeze (or even unnecessary). I recently found a really easy technique for calculating multiples of 9. After just a little practice, I'm able to easily calculate the answer of any basic multiplication problem where a 9 is involved.

First let's identify the patterns. Here are the first few multiples of 9:

The first pattern I notice is that the tens place is always one less than the multiple.

So if you're trying to solve 9x6, you know that the answer starts with a 5 in the tens place. Simple! We're already halfway to the answer. But how can we easily calculate the second number?

This pattern may be a little harder to spot, but if you subtract 10 from the multiple, the difference is the same as the number in the tens place!

Most arithmetic hacks involve taking a complex problem and breaking it down into smaller, simpler problems. Using the technique above, we break a single multiplication problem into two simple subtraction problems. It may take some practice before you're able to use this technique without hesitation, but stick with it and the answers will start to come naturally.

Have any math hacks of your own? Share them in the comments section below!

I never cared about geography as a kid. I just couldn't rationalize how this information would be useful as an adult (oh how silly I was). So I cheated my way through geography tests by hiding a little map inside of my jacket. I'd just open it up, take a peek, and write the correct country name on the paper.

Well, fast forward 13 years, I now live in San Francisco, one of the most culturally diverse cities in the US. I meet amazing people from all over the globe every day. When they tell me where they are from and I can't even point it out on a map, I just feel like I've disrespected them.

I feel I owe it to these other cultures to, at the very least, know where their homeland is located. So I set out to learn the location of every country on Earth, all in a single weekend.

My Strategy

I thought long and hard about my own personal learning style and decided that my iPad could be the perfect tool. The touch interaction really fits my visual learning style. So I set out to find the perfect app for this task. Here were my requirements:

I must to be able to record my progress so that I know the information has been retained.

I must be able to focus on single continents at a time.

For larger continents, they must be broken up into smaller sections (No way I was going to study every single country in Africa at the same time!)

Canada provinces must be included.

Finding the right app

I spent a good deal of time simply searching for the right app that would satisfy my criteria and provide an interface where I could really feel like I was learning, retaining, and having fun too!

I played around with quite a few apps, but there was one that stood out above all the rest for me. 

TapQuiz Maps - Free on the App Store

TapQuiz Maps provides a really simple "Question and Answer" mode which simply gives you a country name, and a few seconds to tap it's correct location on the map. 

What's great about this game is it calculates your percentage of accuracy and gives you a speed rating. I found that if I was learning a new area, my percentage would look something like this:

1st try - 20% accuracy

2nd try - 35% accuracy

3rd try - 65% accuracy

4th try - 80% accuracy

5th try - 95-100% accuracy

This was a huge breakthrough for me. It meant that I could quantify how long it would actually take to learn all of the countries, since each section took anywhere between 5-7 tries for me to have complete mastery, quicker than I thought!

TapQuiz also breaks up continents like Europe and Africa up into smaller chunks, making learning the entire continent a breeze!

The Cons

TapQuiz gave me everything I needed to learn the location of every country on Earth. But there were a few pain points:

All countries on the map view are colored. This is really helpful during the learning process but makes it difficult to point out the actual country on a map where every country is the same color. I fixed this by pulling up a version of Google Maps with country labels turned off and testing my retention.

It's absolutely amazing that TapQuiz breaks up larger continents like Africa up into smaller regions. But once I had all of a continents countries memorized, I wanted to be tested on the continent as a whole. For this I used GeoExpert, another really solid iPad app. When used in conjunction with TapQuiz Maps, you have a really powerful learning tool.

Going even further

Since I learned the location of every country in the World I decided, why not learn a bit about them! So a couple times a week I've been thinking up a random country, pulling up it's Wikipedia entry and learning all about it's history and current events. It just seemed like a logical next step in my search to better understand our World's geography.

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My goal is to give everyone out there a sense of just how easy it can be to learn the location of every country in the World. It can be intimidating at first, but you must be persistent. I can't explain how satisfying it is to be able to recall the location of any country out of thin air. 

Give it a try, I think you'll be shocked by how easy it actually is!

For years I've been a slave to the classic mobile design workflow: render a PNG in Photoshop, save it to dropbox and load it up on my mobile device or tablet. 

There's no doubt it's hugely beneficial to be able to see your designs on the target device during the design process, but this workflow is extremely limiting and makes for a very arduous process.

Over the past year I haven't had the chance to do much mobile/tablet design, but we recently started working on our iPad app here at Sqwiggle, so I was able to pop my mobile designer cap back on. But I decided this time I was going to change things up and seek out a new workflow, one that would give me the freedom to preview my designs while I create them, without having to save any images or transfer any files.

Skala Preview

This is by far the best app I have found for persistently previewing designs on a device. It automatically generates a preview directly on your device every time a change to your file is detected. Sounds magical right? It is.

Skala works by establishing a remote connection to Photoshop, which generates and sends still images in the background as you work on your design. The beauty is that it only shows exactly what's in your Photoshop work area regardless of zoom level.

Simply install the app on both your Mac and your mobile device or tablet, then setup your remote connection to photoshop. Learn more here.

Download Skala Preview for Mac - iOS - Android

Cons

While this is a truly amazing app, it's not perfect. On my MacBook Air it can sometimes cause my Photoshop to lag, it's mildly annoying but the benefits still hugely outweigh the disadvantages. 

There are also occasions where previews stop sending and I'm forced to restart the app on my desktop. Still, a small price to pay for such a huge improvement to my workflow.

Using Linked Smart Objects

Another improvement I found was using linked smart objects to preview various states of the app. For example, if you have an app with 3 main states:

1) The main content area of the app 2) Left menu opened 3) Right menu opened

I'd have 3 PSDs total, one main PSD for the content of the app, one for the left menu, and one for the right. But in both the menu PSDs I would insert the content as a linked PSD. This means that any change I make in the main PSD will be reflected on the others. Here's an example of my layers palette:

You can see the the main content area is simply a linked PSD. Any change made in that PSD will be immediately reflected in this one.

Creating a linked PSD is dead simple, just go to File >> Place Linked... and select the file

My Setup

Another step to improving my workflow was giving my iPad some permanent desk space. I went out and purchased the Halter Portable Rotating Stand for my iPad. Now my iPad has a nice, comfortable spot where I can easily preview designs as I build them in Photoshop.

This setup has lead to a huge increase in my productivity and ultimately allows me to produce even better work much more quickly.

Room for Improvement

I've bumbled around the startup culture for the last decade, pursuing all sorts of ideas, some really stupid and others potentially brilliant. I've also sought funding quite a few times, only to hear pretty much every type of "no" in the business. 

However, after raising my very first seed round for Sqwiggle, I gained a much better perspective around why investors get up in the morning, what makes them tick, and most importantly, what attracts them to an idea. I am by no means an expert, but here are some things I've learned:

They must be excited about the space

Seek out investors who are interested in the space you're working in. Follow them on Twitter and Quora and learn what gets them excited. Look them up on AngelList and research their past investments and connections. It's all about finding investors that will understand the space you're playing in and will be able to bring the most value to your company.

They rarely invest in ideas

Ideas are great, but they don't get investors up in the morning. Investors want to know that you have the drive and scrappiness to actually create something. I wouldn't even think about an investment without a working prototype that can demonstrate what you're trying to accomplish. Bonus points if you actually have people using it. Double bonus points if they are paying you.

They want to see traction

With Sqwiggle, we were able to secure funding because we were able to show at least some market interest in the form of 40 paying companies.

Even small amounts of traction can help investors to feel more confident in the space and the product. It also shows your ability to hustle.

They invest in the team

Investors love solid teams. Background counts for a lot here but so does ability. Typically, the closer to the hustler, designer, developer dream team you are, the better.

They want someone they trust to vouch for you

An investors network is everything. If someone they know and trust tells them they should pay attention to you, almost nothing speaks louder. Don't be afraid to ask for a friend for an intro. It's super common and, as long as you're polite, people are often happy to send an introduction if they find what you're doing interesting.

When raising our round for Sqwiggle, we sent cold emails, engaged with influential people on Twitter, and reached out to pretty much everyone in our own personal networks. 

They love prior success

Nothing says more about a founder than having a successful startup under his or her belt. This basically puts a halo over your head and, while it doesn't guarantee a successful raise, it is a huge indicator of potential future success.

So there you have it. I really hope this is helpful for any entrepreneurs who would like to raise funding but aren't exactly sure how to grab the attention of investors.

Have any tips of your own? I'd love to hear them, share them in the comments section below!

In the early days of Sqwiggle, we knew how important it would be to get as many beta testers on our early prototype as possible. We weren't even close to being ready to launch publicly, but we knew that user feedback would be critical in helping us craft the product and get it ready for an official launch.

It was tough getting those initial eyeballs on our beta signup page, but here are a few techniques that ended up working really well for us. 

Submit your site to Betali.st

Betali.st is a great site created by Marc Köhlbrugge which showcases new startups that are looking for beta testers. It's a great way to tap into the early adopter market and can end up driving hundreds of beta signups from a single post.

Submit your site to Product Hunt

Product Hunt is another great site for driving some initial traffic to your site (and getting some very constructive feedback!). Products are posted daily to Product Hunt and ranked by the community. Generally, they prefer sites which are currently open to the public, but they do make exceptions:

"Generally we encourage submissions of products that are available to download or buy immediately; however, the occasional crowdfunded, pre-launch, or private beta submission is acceptable if it's awesome!"

Post on Hacker News

As soon as we had a working prototype for Sqwiggle, we threw together a quick video demoing the product and posted it to youtube. Then we submitted it to Hacker News under "Show HN". The video got some attention, which lead to some high quality signups.

Someone from Techcrunch also reached out and was interested in doing a write-up, which subsequently drove even more signups. This article ended up playing a key role in getting our early product out the door publicly since it afforded us a base from which to launch our public product.

Ask other founders and thought leaders for help

Sometimes it's as simple as reaching out and asking other founders or thought leaders in your industry to take a look at your site and give you some feedback. If they like it, there's a good chance they will share it out to their network.

This one has huge potential but may take you out of your comfort zone (which is a good thing). It definitely worked out well for us and lead to some really solid relationships with other like minded and well connected people.

Answer questions on Quora

Quora can be a great tool for driving high quality traffic to your product. If you provide intelligent, well thought out answers to the community, some users may pay a visit to your site. Since Quora attaches your bio to every answer you give, this is a great spot to share what you're working on.

So those are some of the techniques that worked well for us here at Sqwiggle. If you have any other tips for driving traffic to your beta signup, let me know in the comments section below!

My wife and I decided to actually put some effort into our halloween costumes this year. After racking our brains trying to find something unique and fun, we finally settled on green army men. Our goal was to look as realistic as possible. I think we did a pretty good job!

Here's one of the first shots of the night. We stopped by the party store and created a bit of a buzz!

Of course I have to keep a good look out when we're this close to the Tenderloin :)

Afterwards we headed to a friend's halloween party, just up the street. We decided to make a stand in the kitchen:

Then it was off to the streets! Overall the reaction to our costumes were really positive. Lots of people wanted to stop and take photos which was fun but a lot of work since it actually took some time to strike a decent pose.

So that's our DIY green army man costumes. If there's enough interest I might post a how-to. It definitely wasn't easy but the costumes were actually fairly cheap. And hopefully you could learn from our mistakes hah.

In a world with so much noise, where everything tries to be bigger and better than it's competitor, less has truly become more.

Many software products seem to become increasingly bloated throughout their lifecycle. The need to stay competitive inevitably leads to an overblown feature set where the core of the product is overshadowed. This has brought us into an age where feature requests take precedent over smart product design decisions and customer feedback drives product design.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

This happens because, when entrepreneurs set out to solve a problem, they ask "How can I improve X" when they really should be asking  "How can I make X drastically simpler". Products like Square, Stripe and Medium have ushered in a new age of "Do one thing and do it damn well". My Co-founder Matt Boyd actually wrote an excellent post on this topic. I highly recommend checking it out.

Use the noise to your advantage

Contrary to what you might think, all this noise actually makes it easier to stand out. Well designed and thoughtful products almost always get the spotlight over the crappy ones, because they dare to be original and stop trying to be something they're not.

"Pinterest meets Dribbble for pets"

If this sounds even remotely like your startup pitch, I'd highly suggest taking another look at the problem and how you are trying to solve it. Stop trying to be all things to all people and just do one thing extremely well. 

Conclusion

If you want to stand out, do less but do it damn well. Less is more.

What do you think? Do you agree with my point of view or maybe you see it a different way? Leave a comment below and let's chat about it!

I've been off the job market for a little while but I've been thinking about it lately and wanted to share some of my frustrations. One thing that irked me in particular were the code tests. Somewhere along the line it became standard to challenge a candidates abilities in person during an interview.

These technical evaluations are typically in the form of pair programming challenges, riddles, code problems, even written tests! You may be thinking "Well if a programmer is good they should be able to do fine on the tests!" Wrong.

Here are a few of the big problems with on-site testing:

That awkward feeling of being watched

You don't typically write code with someone looking over your shoulder. It can be very nerve wrecking and greatly skew your perceived skill level.

Who codes on a white board?

During many technical interviews I have been asked to solve a programming challenge on a white board. First off, my handwriting is atrocious. Kind of hard to solve a problem when you can hardly read what you're writing. A white board is also really awkward for writing code. If you're not an experienced white board programmer you're certainly going to slip up here.

You are out of your element

A couple years ago I was doing a technical interview and was given a crappy IBM laptop, told to sit in a conference room and solve a coding challenge that was written up in a text doc. The whole experience was extremely awkward. I use a particular browser, IDE, OS and specific tools that have become integral to my workflow. If you take those away from me, obviously my results are going to suffer, especially in the speed category.

Most interviewers ask the same questions

The last time I was interviewing, I began encountering the same questions over and over. When this happens, the questions no longer have anything to do with skill level or critical thinking ability, they just become a game of memory. I've literally been handed a job offer during an interview after solving a couple puzzles which I had failed that same day at an earlier interview. I just don't do well under that sort of pressure, but once I had time to work them out on my own, I aced them.

So how do I find the right engineer for the job?

Review their Github

Any programmer who wants to be taken seriously on today's job market should have a flourishing Github. It's an easy and painless way to get a quick and overall sense of the candidate's history and technical ability before even scheduling an interview.

Hire for culture

Sure it would be great to find an engineer who really knows his/her stuff and can write amazing code, but if no one gets along with them, they have no passion for the product and aren't excited about learning new technologies, how long would you really keep them around?

Instead focus on hiring great learners who mesh nicely with your team dynamic. Personalities can't usually be changed, but coding skills can always be learned.

Give them an assignment

There's no harm in giving the candidate a coding task. This is something they can complete on their own terms and timing. Afterwards you should be able to review the code and get a great view of the programmer's abilities.

Passive testing like this is so much better because it allows the candidate to complete the assignment in their own environment, in their own time, which inevitably leads to higher quality engineers.

It doesn't have to be anything super complex, time consuming or challenging. It's just to get an overall picture of the programmer's level. Is their code dry? Are they writing less code wherever possible? Are their comments smart and useful? These questions should be easy to answer after the assignment is complete.

Conclusion

You should be striving to hire smart people who are fast learners, if you do this the rest will fall into place. The best way to determine this is by engaging with candidates to establish cultural fit and by examining their engineering history to determine their experience and ability to learn.

Couple this with an at-home assignment and there's no reason you shouldn't be completely confident in your next engineering hire!

When Matt, Tom and I began working on Sqwiggle back in February of 2013, we initially decided to see how far we could get while bootstrapping. The beautiful thing about working on your startup full-time and hardly having enough money to live and is that you really have incentive to get to revenue as quick as humanly possible. 

So we bootstrapped the product to an MVP and started charging about 3 months in. Once we saw that businesses were willing to pay for the service, even in it's early stage, our thoughts on funding began to shift a bit. We started talking more and more about possibly raising a seed round and, before we knew it, Tom and Matt had booked flights to join me out in San Francisco so we could start the hustle.

A single email that changed our lives

To begin the funding process, the team began shooting emails out to everyone in our network, setting up coffee meetings and asking for help in any way. This lead to some great advice and a few helpful connections, but was certainly giving way to a slow and arduous fundraise. 

So, late one night Matt decided to embark on a coffee fueled emailing frenzy, literally cold emailing every influential person that he thought might be interested in what we were building. Naval, co-founder of AngelList, was one of them.

We were extremely excited when Naval replied and invited us down to the AngelList office to demo Sqwiggle in person! During the demo, his eyes lit up and he made the decision to invest in Sqwiggle then and there. He even pitched us on being the first company to do an AngelList Syndicate, which we gladly accepted :)

Network power

Naval was an amazing ambassador for our product. Having his personal network and AngelList behind him provided us an amazing opportunity to get in front of some great Angels and VCs. We received 55 intros in total and had meetings lined up for the following 3 weeks!

We also began trending on AngelList shortly thereafter, which really helped to jumpstart the fundraising process even more.

The right way to send a cold email

There are a few things I would recommend trying if you really want your email to stand out. Long, cookie cutter emails are destined for the trash. If someone is considered influential, chances are they don't have much time. Keeping your email short and to the point shows that you are mindful of their time.

Subtle flattery goes a long way. Mention something cool that you read on their blog, ask a question about their company or mention something they tweeted about. This shows that you are putting in the effort to actually get to now the person before you contact them. And if you think they are a rockstar, don't be afraid to let them know! This is how we were able to raise $1.1 million for Sqwiggle.

I was brainwashed by the standing vs sitting hype long ago and have been a fan of standing desks ever since, though I wanted something more legit than the typical stack of boxes. Example:

I recently came across this post by Colin Nederkoorn, outlining how him and a colleague of his created a super cheap, yet stylish standing desk for just $22.

Personally, I prefer an adjustable solution so that I don't have to dive right into the deep end and could stand half the day if I so desired. However, most decent quality adjustable standing desks seem to start at around $300, and I'd hate to shell out that kind of cash for the sake of an experiment. 

Just the other day, though, I came across Colin's post, and something sparked. The great thing about this setup is, while it's not necessarily adjustable, it would be really simple to convert it back to a sitting desk if I became tired of standing during the day.

So I decided that day that I was going to give his setup a try. I immediately hopped on Taskrabbit and had someone head across the bay and pick up the supplies I needed from the nearest IKEA. By 3pm I had my new standing desk up and running!

The desk couldn't have been easier to assemble. It took about 30 minutes and even came with an instruction manual! 

Here's the final product:

Customer feedback is your best friend when building a SAAS web product. The more in tune you are with your customers needs, the better your ammunition is when creating new features and improvements. Trouble is, it can be extremely difficult to sift through the mountains of customer feedback you receive. 

At Sqwiggle, we have always encourage a direct line of communicate between us and our customers. The founders all monitor a shared inbox using HelpScout. Every email sent to [email protected] goes into this inbox. We also actively monitor Twitter and make sure and reply to everyone who mentions us. This ensures the entire team is equally aware of what our customers are saying about our product and what features they are requesting.

We've noticed that nearly every customer who vocalizes a problem typically provides a potential solution as well. This is the true test of a product designer. Do you give the customers what they want or what they need?

If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'Faster Horses'." -Henry Ford

I highly recommend listening to every single thing your customer has to say about your product, but it must be filtered out and usually taken with a grain of salt. After all, customer feedback is very valuable, but it's only one small piece of the product design puzzle.

What do you think? How do you filter out your customer's feedback and feature requests? Leave a comment and tell me about your process. Thanks for reading!

My startup, Sqwiggle was recently written up in Techcrunch so I thought it would be helpful to let everyone know what happened as a direct result of the article.

Opening the floodgates

Greg Kumparak published his writeup on Sqwiggle on Thursday, April 11th, 2012 at 11:00 am PST. Within the first hour or two we had about 1200 people visit our site. From there, traffic steadily leveled out at about 250 visitors per hour. At one point we were gaining beta signups at a steady rate of 20 per minute but this number naturally decreased alongside our traffic. Over the next week we saw a steady stream of traffic with a few spikes here and there. In total we gained about 4000 beta signups and saw over 17,000 unique visitors to our site. Since the article we posted we have seen a steady stream of residual traffic to our site.

The results

So here are the direct results of the article:

Beta signups are through the roof, which has given us an amazing launchpad for our product.

We gained signups from tons of huge companies around the valley and around the world.

Quite a few investors have reached out, expressing interest in Sqwiggle and wanting to know more.

Thousands of RTs on Twitter and tons of users reaching out to us personally, expressing interest in Sqwiggle. In total our followers grew by around 10x.

We setup [email protected] and have received hundreds of emails since the article went live. Some requesting beta access, others with feedback, and a few just wanting to say congrats :)

In the first week of the article we had about 10,000 visitors to our site.

Since the article we have seen a steady stream of beta signups due to residual traffic.

Backlinks to our site grew heavily since many blogs re-blogged the article or wrote-up their own take on our product.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the differences between building a web site or a web app in today's world as opposed to the previous decade. There have been so many small but powerful technological advances which have completely changed the way that we create new things on the web. If you are familiar with me at all, you know that I previously wrote a short ebook called The Twitter Effect. Since releasing, I have had great feedback and 1000s of downloads. My words genuinely helped other Twitter users and contributed to making the web a more respectful and thoughtful place. I have every intention of writing a second book, but have had a hard time nailing down the topic. I decided to write this post because this is a topic I have been considering and have been passionate about for a while.

What's it all about?

Programming frameworks have been around for quite a while but have increased in popularity over the last 5 years or so. The beauty of a framework is that it reduces the need for intense low-level programming knowledge and makes it dead simple to get off the ground without wasting time setting up MVC/OOP structures, creating user logins, crafting CRUD functionality, and the list goes on. Frameworks aren't just for back-end programmers either. Frameworks & preprocessors like LESS, SASS, Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery and Backbone.js extend some of the same benefits of a framework to the front-end developers, streamlining mundane tasks and making the front-end work in a more OO fashion. I am also be interested in exploring the culture of hackathons. I'd like to show how quickly apps can be built and explore the modern technologues and software used to build them.

What's the goal?

The first thing to note here is that everyone's process is different. There is no one size fits all here and there likely never will be. Even though we are designing user interfaces we are still creating art. Creativity and inspiration sit at the core of UX and UI design which makes design processes subjective. That being said, here's what my typical design process looks like..

Thinking

When I'm faced with a design challenge, the first thing I do is sit and think. I don't open Photoshop, I don't break out the sketch pad.. I just sit and think about what it is that I'm building. I try and wrap my head around the value of the interface, what the most important parts might be and how the user flow might feel. It's sometimes enough to simply sit in front of my computer and reflect on the experience I am about to build, but often great ideas come to me when I am taking a shower in the morning or laying in my bed at night. So, if I'm feeling blocked on a design and not sure where to begin, sometimes I'll just leave it for tomorrow. I usually find that I start the next day full of ideas and ready to start sketching.

Sketch it out

After I feel like I have a good mental handle on what it is I'm trying to build and I have thought of some fun interaction experiments to try out, I take to my sketch book and just start drawing. I often find myself initially leaving out or forgetting UI and interaction elements that were in my head but that's alright. Sketching is a process and doesn't have to be perfect. Start with a simple outline and iterate on it until you have something more encompassing. Keeping your sketches low fidelity is key.. It's easy to get caught up in the details but do yourself a favor and save all the beveled edges and drop shadows for Photoshop. Jason Fried of 37signals recommends sketching with a sharpie since it's relatively impossible to sketch in detail.

Sketching Tools

At the very least you'll need a pencil and some paper, but there are some other neat tools out there that can make sketching user interfaces a bit easier. UX Sketchbook - This is one of my favorite tools. It's a perforated, bound book of paper with pre-printed browser boundaries. It even leaves room for writing notes. There is also an iPhone App Sketchbook to help with crafting mobile interfaces. UX Sketchbook Ruler - You also can't go wrong with a nice ruler. It helps when you need to make a sharp boundary line or guide. Pencil - Right now I'm primarily using the GraphGear 500 for my sketches. I prefer a mechanical pencil since I don't have to deal with sharpening and they last longer than a normal pencil. I do, however, sometimes prefer the softer lines of a classic #2 so I'll make sure to keep that in my pencil cup. Drawing Table - I snagged this basic drawing table from Amazon which makes it a bit easier on my back and neck when I'm sketching for extended periods of time. I highly recommend a drawing table if you find yourself sketching often. The drafting table I use

Designing

Once I feel like I have a visual representation of what it is I'm trying to build, I immediately take to Photoshop while it's all still fresh in my mind and I'm feeling excited about pushing some pixels around.

Design Tools

Photoshop - This is pretty much a necessity for any UI designer, though there are alternatives like Gimp, Pixlr or Sketch. Feel free to suggest others in the comments section below. Template Starter Kit - I personally recommend using a Photoshop starter template since it just speeds things up. It's easy to build your own but I use a pre-made one called "Quommunication Starter Kit". Their website is no longer available but you can download the starter kit here. If this starter kit doesn't suit you then a quick Google search will uncover some other great options. GuideGuide - GuideGuide is a free photoshop extension which I use to manage and generate guides in different column layouts. Honestly, I don't know how I ever designed without it! I highly recommend giving this extension a try.

Common design process mistakes

Think before you design Instead of just jumping into Photoshop or breaking out the sketch pad, next time try sitting and reflecting on the design problem that you are solving. Brainstorm fun new types of interactions to try out. Look around on similar websites or services and observe the design decisions they made. For some this might be a 10 minute process and for others it might be an hour or more. In either case I believe it is an important step in the process. Sketch it out! Even if you are taking a sharpie to a post-it note, it is almost always beneficial to draw things out before opening up Photoshop and moving around pixels. Pencil and paper is much more pliable and disposable than Photoshop document. Use that to your advantage. User-centered design User-centered design is the idea of keeping the user in mind while designing an interface and also involves testing the validity of design assumptions against real-world users. In other words.. if you have a user-base, take advantage of them by running A/B tests and seeing how different interfaces perform. Not every designer is in a position to attain real user feedback on new designs but, if you are, I highly recommend taking advantage of it so that you can build a system based more on data than assumptions.

Conclusion