But does Freeman really deserve a lot of credit for making the film a success? He wasn’t even on the screen. I think he does. Narrators are important to a documentary because their voice—its cadence, pitch and presence—are really what draws us in to the screen. Without Morgan telling the story, there is no reason to consume penguins for 90 minutes. I think designers need to understand that they too are “narrators” when they design, even if the end product is a simple brochure.

As designers, we are story tellers. That sounds like a cliché, but many creatives don’t really take this to heart. Their brochure cover, or website home page, is like the opening title sequence. We need to draw people into what we design, never assuming that just because our work is colorful it will be consumed. Whether it’s an interactive presentation, a website or even just a postcard, every design has a narrative. The big question is: Are you controlling the story?

Copy gets dumped on your lap. Images get slid across your desk on a disk. The copy’s drones on too long, and the images are boring and need tons of color correction. What’s new? You start plugging the assets in, and it looks like crap. You start making text bold here, and text larger there, hoping that somehow you’ll start to enjoy what you’re working on. This moment never happens. In your heart, you hate the piece. You want it to go away because it sucks. You don’t even know why anyone would read it. You’re just doing your part of the process, hoping someone else might pull the plug on this monstrosity. When you get to this point, understand that you are fundamentally failing at being a designer. You are not controlling the narrative to ensure that all your hard work results in a page turn, an inquiry or a click through for your client.

Even if you’re not the writer, you need to control the narrative. You should want to control how someone reads through your work. The words in a design are just as much a reflection of your capabilities as your actual graphic design. If you let something get printed with a f*cked up headline, the design has failed, period. Don’t be a failure by using these tips.

• Mock up your design with all greeking, and ask the writer to write to fit. You have a better understanding of how long copy should be in a design that a writer. Include places where you’d like to include callouts, sidebars, headings and introductory paragraphs. Adjust the greeking length until the amount of copy feels appropriate (ex: headings are rarely more than 1 line long) and digestible (the subjects of the page can be understood simply by scanning the page).
• Make sure there are introductions to new thoughts. Sometimes less experienced writers don’t understand that new thoughts or changes of the subject require an intro paragraph that clearly indicates, “We’re moving on”. If you see nine paragraphs in a row in the content, ask the writer to break up the story with some suggesting headings. If the copy has no nice, short introduction, ask for one. Something I constantly see is designers who are given the actual content for a design, but no introduction to that content. Every communication or information design job as one or more introductions, even if you need to force them to be crafted. 
• Never just invent callouts or headings. It’s understandable that you need to break up gobs of text with a pull quote, larger type or a callout, but don’t invent these things from basic copy (unless you’re a skilled writer yourself). When you bold things, or make them bigger, you are saying, “This is more important.” Just randomly selecting things to enlarge so you have a more dynamic layout results in confusion. Instead, work with the writer to identify what are the key points being made in the copy, and then pull those points out. Be sure that you feel the points being pulled out actually help someone better understand the purpose of the all the tiny text around it. Magazines do a great job of this.
• Summarize the very specific goal of each page or screen, and verify your design achieves that goal. An example of a great goal for a single page is, “Introduce the reader to the concept of Hiring is a Hassle, validate it with some text the reader can agree with, then introduce The Resumator and explain this brochure will highlight key features.” You can almost imagine the top to bottom layout with such a specific goal. On the flip side, simply having the goal, “Introduce The Resumator” leaves a lot to the imagination.
• Hack away at copy in your sketches until it fits. You’re just sketching, so if a paragraph is too long, hack of the bottom until it fits and add a period. Screw rewriting it—you don’t have time. Later you’ll show the writer how many lines you need edited from that paragraph. Except maybe in cases of annual reports, I feel design drives copy length, and not vice versa. Things are usually said in more words than necessary. Hack away knowing you’re not jamming up your writer.
• Call out crappy copy. Read what you are pasting into InDesign and ask yourself if your intended audience would sit through ready this. If your gut tells you something is wrong, you should speak up. Writers often wonder if they’re setting the right tone and length for their copy. The feedback usually is appreciated when you use a more polite word than crap.
• Take a guess at copy. If you’re gut tells you a specific phrase makes sense somewhere, speak up! If you consider yourself a good designer, then you should respect your gut and throw your idea into the ring.

I think great designers care about the narrative flow of a design, never allowing  crappy story to be told. It may cause a rift with a writer, but remember simply being a design is not your goal. You want to be a great, and great designers don’t reflect on a design and say, “yeah, it looks good…but the copy kind of sucks.”

Well, let’s come back to Earth and realize that we’re building online software and not the future of transportation. Most of us have a practical problem we are trying to solve, full of just enough innovation to potentially be a success (a lucky few are creating something truly amazing). Innovation does come from individual thinking (the “aha” moment), but listening to customers is the only way you can understand what they need in the first place. We’ll never know, but perhaps if Ford never heard someone complain about the inefficiency of buying horses, watching them get old and slow, and then dying, we’d be trotting to the grocery store today.

While I’ve written about this subject in the past, the focus of that article was more on prioritizing features, and not how to use customer feedback to drive early product development. This article focuses on uncovering essential product features by leveraging the intelligence of your customers. So, when you have no product, and just a dream of the solution, how do you pull back from that dream and leverage your early users to help you identify what’s essential?

My answer is you treat early feature requests as if you’re furnishing an empty apartment.

Step 1: Cover the Essentials

Let’s say I just got the keys to my first apartment—ever.  I have $3,000 to furnish the living room—no more—and I have no idea what I should buy first. So I invite you to my brand new apartment and take you into the living room, which is just four bare walls. (So far this sounds like a trashy romance novel.)

Help me out. I have $3k and I need to prioritize what to buy with the cash to furnish the room. Again, assume I have no clue what to buy—absolutely no clue. In your head, name 2 things I should buy first. Got them? Now I bet two of these match what you were thinking:

• couches
• TV
• TV stand
• end tables
• lamps
• coffee table
• DVD
• stereo
• plants

If I was completely off, you do not need to read the rest of this article and my metaphor sucks (and tell me what you were thinking in the comments!). But if I nailed one or both of your items, that’s because you drew upon your experience and needs to help “ignorant me” understand what is essential to furnishing a living room in order for it to be useful. And you’re no genius because you could do this.

This is exactly what your early users will do for you. In a featureless application, the first things people will notice are often the “duh” features that are missing. Without them your product is useless. Why think about a ceiling fan if you have no couch? Why think about “video conferencing for interviews” when The Resumator doesn’t handle “manual resume uploads”? People need to be able to get their existing resumes into The Resumator before it’s the slightest bit useful! Video conferencing is not just icing on the cake—it’s an extra layer of icing!

While all feature requests should be considered carefully, those requests from early adopters should be seriously considered for implementation, especially when they seem obvious and are easy to implement. You need somewhere to sit—get a couch! No one is going to come to your apartment one year from now and say, “Why the hell is there a couch in the living room?” Early feature requests can of course dip into the user-specific, but often they are just obvious—just not to you. You’re not winning any medals for innovation here—implement early requests that are simple and visible to the end user with confidence they will not bite you later on.

Step 2: Add Character and Uniqueness

Once you nail the essentials in your Web app (or apartment), it’s time to try and take what is a functional skeleton and turn it into something that is engaging and noteworthy. This is not easy, but luckily I think there are few strategies for adding unique character to your Web app:

Strategy 1: Paint, Pillows, Plants and Potpourri

So now my living room has all the essentials and is functional, but things still look a little bare. I don‘t have a lot of money, but I want to decorate so that when people come by, they have a pleasant experience. With just a can of paint, a few pillows, some plants and (for the ladies) some sweet smells, I can create a well-designed living space that masks my room’s shortcomings. Heck, painting one wall in a dingy apartment makes any space look better.

I believe in something I call “the façade of great design”. Great design can get you very far. In its early days, I heard many stories about people being drawn in to Mint.com by its beautiful interface design and ease of use, and then panic a week later when they realized they were sharing their bank account information with a brand new company (even though Mint uses the same security as your bank). Mint has many more features today than it did when it launched, but I believe great design was key to early adopters sticking with the product even though it was asking for some serious personal information.

If you work hard on creating a wonderful user experience through great interface and interaction design, you can get by with less features for a longer period of time. If your application feels cutting edge and progressive, users will want to stick around and see what’s next. Their experience using your app is pleasant, so they will come back again. There are many web apps that are successful because of good design and usability, not features. 37signals thrives on this concept. Web 2.0 was all about decentralizing the Web into a series of interconnected and easy-to-use online experiences. If you focus on usability with the few features you have, and create a fantastic brand, you’ll get an early start on creating a loyal customer base. (BTW – this was my strategy with The Resumator.)

Strategy 2: The Tricked-out Entertainment Center

Now let’s suppose I don’t have a sense of good design (or at least I don’t want to tap into it) to add paint, pillows and potpourri. Instead, I want to be the guy on the block with the wall-mounted, 55-inch Samsung TV connected to an Xbox, Blue Ray disc player, digital media center and Dobly surround system. I want people to say,  “Did you see Don’s setup?!!!” and ignore the fact that I have no kitchen table and I reuse disposable plastic cups. I feel as if I can have one incredible area in my apartment, I can be the talk of the town.

What if you focused on one part of your web app, and blew it out into infinity awesomeness? What if you chose one mission-critical feature that, when fully functional, would blow a VC away? This is a strategy for building an app. Focus on one important feature and make it as incredibly useful (or awesome) as possible. I would argue the online document viewing company Scribd did this. By focusing on developing a very attractive and user-friendly document viewer, along with an incredibly reliable document processing queue, Scribd proved to many that despite our pains with reading documents in Acrobat Reader, there was something awesome about instantly embedding any document into any Web page with its exact original formatting—reliably. A few years and nearly $13 million VC dollars later, Scribd is expanding into mobile document viewing, securing key partnerships and publishing deals primarily (in my opinion) because that tricked-out Scribd Reader just seems to be so easy to use. And by focusing on it early, they are simply tweaking it to make it even more awesome. (Note: I have no clue how I ended up with awesome and infinity in this paragraph. I never use those words in real life!)

Strategy 3: The Bull Riding Machine

If you’re the type of person that really wants to make a splash when you lease an apartment, you know you need to have some off-the-wall “thing” in there. Something that people come over just to see. Something that everyone in the building talks about (good and bad). You risk being branded a weirdo or crazy, but you also have the chance to be known as the only person or business within 500 square miles that actually has a bull riding machine. That’s something the neighborhood will talk about, and the fact that it’s the only thing you have in your apartment makes in even more intriguing.

Perhaps the most risky (and rewarding) strategy for early product development is to try and do something that sounds so ridiculous that if it works, you’ll look like a genius. Try to build something completely off the wall into your application and learn from the reaction. LOL Cats is exactly this. Putting text on pictures of cats makes no sense as a business, but that business is doing pretty well. They learned that ordinary people can be extremely creative, and that creativity is viral and can be monetized. Foursquare is simply mobile-based check-ins at locations, but the odd popularity of “checking in” is giving everyone a glimpse of the future of hyper-local marketing. Remember FuckedCompany? That guy is now a EIR at a prestigious VC firm. The guy who from I Wear Your Shirt sells virtually every day to a sponsor. He just wears shirts.

If you’re going to go for innovative, there just simply can’t be any clear rationale for why you’re building what you’re building. Your idea needs the strong smell of innovation with an odor blast of failure. No one is going to tell you to buy a bull-riding machine for your apartment. You need to develop something that exists no where else.

Conclusion

Don’t waste time learning what users need. Build something minimal and get it out there. This is just my two cents for how to plan your first apartment, or Web app. You can always return the mechanical bull if you have the receipt.

First let me tell you I furnished my entire office for about $4,500 complete with four workspaces, including chairs, desk lamps, wastebins and office supplies. A lounge area complete with futon couch, area rug and end table. Lamps, rugs and some strategically placed whiteboards. Throw in a microwave, printer, a wireless router, TV stand, 32 inch HD television and Xbox 360 entertainment system. Finally, I almost forgot a refrigerator, storage ottomans, extra chairs, three bookcases and some very nice standing lamps. All for $4,500—purchased and set up in 7 days.

This cost does not include computers and monitors, and you should invest in great hardware. The costs listed in here are also based on a bootstrapping budget—if you can spend more, by all means do so within reason. Focus on great chairs before anything else.

$4,500 sounds like a lot, but consider that I do not need to spend any more money on this space until my company outgrows four full-time people. If you’re thinking you could have put together a space for less, I agree. But I bet I wouldn’t want to really work there everyday. This space is hopefully full of energy.

Furthermore, I saved this $4,500 before I even set foot in the office. Not because I had the money in the bank —but because I luckily chose the right building for my office. This leads me to my first of ten tips for you when building up your startup office.

Tip #1: Find office space that comes with tax benefits.

Through a few new friends, I learned about a program in Pittsburgh called Keystone Innovation Zones. These are zones that provide tax credits for businesses that choose to operate in certain locations. Don’t let your suburban upbringing blind you—these are not buildings in blighted communities, as some narrow-minded folk would immediately assume. They’re just available space, all over the city, where economic development is encouraged. Your startup could qualify for tax credits simply by moving into the zone. That means if I have a tax bill of $4,500 by the end of 2010, that amount—and probably more—will be credited. If you work with your local government to find out if there are tax benefits for your business to locate in certain buildings or areas, you can offset the costs of moving into that space, and then some.

Below are some pics of my raw space. Three large windows and two rooms. It’s an old factory building, but it’s secure and not drafty. Plus the price was oh-so-right. And we’re not talking about a rented area with other startups (though I would have loved the cross pollination). This is my office—with a key, and a door.

Tip #2: Measure your space, and then hack off 18 inches per measurement.

A tight fit is the worst thing you could have in a small office. If your stuff is barely fitting in the room, then more than likely people are going to feel on top of each other. Some places can be a little tight, but each person’s workspace has to provide adequate room to work. So when you measure your space, write down the resulting measurements with 18 inches subtracted.

You’re not going to forget about these 18 inches per measurement, but rather plan your space without them, and only use them when you really need them to make something fit. This simple concept will change your whole perspective when it comes to deciding what fits where, and what to purchase. Had it not been for this, I would have purchased four employee work spaces for my office instead of three. And when I was upset something might not fit, I was relieved that I could steal some inches from the 18 that I was saving for this exact reason.

Tip #3: Plan out your space as if you had to live there for 6 months.

We spend one third of our day in the office. The last thing I wanted was to sit in a fluorescent-filled room all day, just waiting for the end of the day so I could go home and relax. My office needed to feel like a place that I could tolerate for 6 months if I had to live there. Note the word, “tolerate.” I don’t feel you can make an office that people would want to live in forever (on a startup budget, that is), but your office should feel like a place you wouldn’t mind being in even if you had no work to do. That’s really the best way to simplify this thought. And I knew a small lounge area for relaxing and gaming would be an attractive perk for recruiting.

I decided to make one room for the employees and lounge, and the smaller room a private office so I could be a chatterbox without driving anyone insane. It would also allow employees to not feel like their boss is hovering over them as they may want to check Facebook occasionally without worry of reprimand. Employees could sit and watch TV during lunch or when they felt drained, and a friendly game of Madden or Rock Band might break up a hard day’s work.

Tip #4: Plan a color palette.

To have a cohesive space that is not just wood and dull drab office colors, you need to plan for a color palette. This is not hard, and I am going to make this as easy as I can for those of you who think you don’t know anything about color. Remember the color wheel? If not, google it. Colors opposite from each other on the color wheel work well together, as do colors right next to each other. You can create great 2-color themes with colors opposite each other on the wheel, and great three color palettes with one color, its opposite and an adjacent color.

Seriously, this is so freakin easy. Think about it—you see the color wheel in action every day:

• Christmas (red and green)
• Minnesota Vikings (purple and yellow)
• Denver Broncos (blue and orange)
• McDonald’s (red and yellow)
• Burger King (blue, orange and red)

When you get into shades and tints, you have a lot more options. Just choose the colors you want and get a sample of each as torn paper, marker, whatever—just have a sample because in the store not every blue is your blue.

I chose a specific orange, green and blue as my color palette. If we were standing in my empty office and I told you that was my palette, many might say it sounds ugly. But I am a designer, and you probably aren’t. Trust me—those are awesome colors together.

Tip #5: Shop like a college student.

With your space measurements in hand, you can now see what’s out there for purchase. If you approach this as if you were a broke ass college student, you will recall that you typically looked for cheap stuff that was durable, and used stuff you could buy from others on campus. Remember the great deals you found? You can find these same deals for your startup.

I say first start your search for office furniture and equipment with other startup founders. Be sure to bring along a camera and take pictures so you can capture the things you may purchase and imagine them in your space. Other founders may be moving, shutting down, or downsizing and have available stuff at discount prices. If you can get a Aeron chair from them for $150, I suggest you go for it. An Aeron chair with two years of farting into it is still worth more than any brand new chair, IMHO.

Next, do some browsing in stores and online using Bing or Google Products. Try and find office chairs, futons, and lamps that are one of your colors. DO NOT plan on buying anything—you are browsing and trying to see what is out there. If you can’t find your colors, either change your colors or keep looking. DO NOT give up on having a color palette. Furthermore, don’t plan on buying something expensive simple because it is your color. Follow these guidelines for acceptable prices. I assure you that you can find products in this range, as I did.

• Employee office chairs – $60 to $200 (buy what you can afford–but it must have ergonomic features!)
• Employee workstations – $20 to $150 (Wooden table to decent frosted glass desks)
• Desk lamps – $5 to $10
• Standing lamps – $19 to $30
• Futon/couch – $99 to $199
• TV – Under $400
• TV stand – $50 to $99
• Office supplies – Dollar store (expect Uni ball pens—a must have!)
• Ottomans and end tables – $10 to $20
• Bookcases – $29 to $79 (depending on size)
• Xbox – $199
• Microwave – $29 to $39
• Refrigerator – $100 to $170
• Stereo – Bring in the one you have stored from college
• Rugs – $10 to $40
• Whiteboard space – $12 to $99
• Waste bins – $2 to $7

I was able to find all these things on the lower end of the price ranges above, and in my color palette (except for the white boards—I didn’t know Home Depot had material perfect for this at $12!). Look online for things that are geared towards college students and you can usually find great deals. And yes—it’s quality stuff. Not garbage. Oh—and be sure to get dimensions on EVERYTHING!

Tip #6: Bring along a consultant.

Having someone around who can give you some ideas on what to do in your space is wonderful. Try and bring along someone who has a good aesthetic taste. Ask them to find interesting things for you within your budget. Push them to just look if they keep wondering why you need this kind of stuff for an office. People with an outside eye to your vision might be able to shape that vision in a way that makes the space work better.

My wife played a huge role in finding a cheap couch and lamps, as well as helping me determine how to best orient things in the office. She charges $100 per hour if you need a consult. I’m joking—unless you live in Pittsburgh and are actually going to pay that rate.

Tip #7: Clip coupons, and take advantage of sales.

Did you know Bed Bath and Beyond has some awesome dorm lamps perfect for a trendy office? And did you know you can get 20% off your purchase with some silly coupons they mail every week? And Office Depot sends out 10% off cards if you ever purchased office supplies through their store? Target gave me $10 back because I purchased $100 in stuff. If you take the time to find discount cards and coupons, you can afford that Xbox 360 with just your savings!

During the holidays you find great discounts in stores and online. I found and purchased three L-shaped workstations for $89 each. I slapped a 10% discount on the whole order and took $9 off each one at that. The best deal I found otherwise was $330 per workstation! Screw that! And if shipping online isn’t free, say bye-bye. Try and make purchases when stores are desperate for sales. Take stuff back if it goes on sale the next week.

Tip #8: Put it together fast.

Try and order everything so it comes in the same week. This way you can assemble everything and have a functioning office fast, instead of trickling in boxes over the course of a month. The sooner you get settled in to your office, the sooner you can get back to business.

Tip #9: Leave the fluorescent lights off.

Fluorescent lighting is the ugliest lighting you could have in an office. Imagine if your favorite restaurant or lounge used fluorescent lighting—it’d be a bright, oh-so-not intimate experience that the last thing you could do is relax. We barely have any fluorescent lights in our homes, so when we are under them we can only think of work (or cooking, or….#2).

Light your space with traditional bulbs and lamps. You may need an overhead light as well, but make sure it’s not fluorescent bulbs—hang an IKEA ball lamp or something. Employees new to this type of environment might say it feels dark at first, but I have never met someone who didn’t feel more at home with lamp lighting after a few weeks. You can always turn on the overheads if you really need a lot of light for some special task.

Tip #10: If employees abuse your perks, it’s YOUR fault.

There are so many people who think having a TV or a game center in the office is a recipe for inefficiency. They’re dinosaurs. Showing employees that you trust them to balance work and play during business hours is a great selling point when recruiting. I dare say if you provide these perks, and they’re being abused, it’s your fault. Perhaps you did not set and enforce clear guidelines around usage. Perhaps you hired the wrong people. Most likely, you simply aren’t providing them with challenges in their work that they want to focus on.

The Result

I’m very happy with the result. My wife deserves a LOT of the credit. The space is warm, colorful and inviting. The people who have been to the space for interviews have loved it and seem excited to potentially come aboard. I am thinking about flipping around the workstations to add more privacy for each employee. One week of effort and I was able to not only make my business real, but perhaps make it real to others as well. Better yet, the tax incentives I will receive will more than make this investment affordable. It feels great to just need to worry about putting things on the walls. Please—tell me what you think!

Please note I made a mistake and saturated the photos – it is not this vivid!