itching pixels

(I wish I had read this blogpost before I’ve got into one;)

Now there are so many chances to travel, form a company and spend a 3-month period somewhere in the world – more than 300 tech-only startup incubators exist at the moment.

We ended up in Estonia and got a seed investment from GameFounders, Europe’s first gaming accelerator.
First of all, it was an experience of a lifetime. Sort of like traveling to India for the first time. Not because Tallinn resembles Delhi or anything like that, but we all had to change our mindset, learn and adapt.
We didn’t know what to expect at all. In early September, we were about to travel to a small country near Russia to participate in the first batch of a new seed incubator – without a contract that could have given us the least amount of security.
We got the acceptance notice 9 days before setting off.
I should have started my UX Design Masters in London in the middle of September.. The whole thing was a big mess!

One month later, we had two prototypes, an Estonian company, a seed investment, advice from 30+ mentors and a lot of opportunities.
In one sentence: it was definitely worth it.

But, there were a lot of really unexpected realizations during the time I spent there and these were the most important ones:

1. Seed incubators have only one goal business-wise: that you will get a second round investment as soon as possible.
You’ll have one person organizing the fund-raising, pitching and networking almost full-time.
This is a must, and you must plan accordingly. If only two of you are developing, designing and promoting the product, it will be really tough to get anything done during that 3 months period.

2. You’re gonna burn the seed money in 3 months and after that you’ll have another 2-3 months to survive – because usually that’s how long it takes to finalize the second round. If you have a completed product and revenue by that time – you’re all set. If not, then you have something to figure out. But you love challenges, right?:)

3. If you average out the advice you get from mentors, you’ll end up with the most generic product imaginable.
There will be a point when you need to start ignoring them and ask why they want you to do – insert whatever advice you got from them -.
They are mostly making assumptions based on their previous experience that has probably no use at all, as the market changed at least twice since they made their first success.

And of course, no one knows how good luck helped them to succeed, there are too many variables. But, as the mentors you’ll meet are highly intelligent, they are the guys who really want to figure it all out. And that could easily result (unintentionally) in bad advice. Your job is to filter those and keep the rest.

4. Going and staying lean is hard – and if you’re like most of us, it goes against your nature.
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” Reid Hoffman

Believe me, the last thing you want is being embarrassed by “your baby” that you’ve spent all your time on for months. It requires constant, conscious effort and willpower, something like a diet, or quitting smoking.

But seriously, every minute your product stays in “stealth mode” is a minute wasted. Nothing works as you initially imagined, and the sooner you realize it, the better.
We had to change the name of the application, the icon, the revenue model, and there will be a lot more to go. There’s a chance that the original concept will stay the same – although not much;).

5. Planning for more than two weeks is sometimes necessary – but also, completely useless. So don’t put much effort in it.
Before launching your product, financial forecasts look like this:
You’re multiplying a random number (audience) with a random number (conversion rate) with a random number (the price you initially want to ask for).
It means that you don’t have a faintest clue what the outcomes will be.

6. The toughest decisions are the ones that don’t really matter.
We spent days thinking and discussing “big” decisions we had to make – and at the end, we either had to choose a third option or the whole thing didn’t have any impact at all.
You better set a time limit for each decision and if you can’t make up your mind within that limit, the pros and cons are probably so balanced out that you should just flip a coin.
The biggest problem is that these “big decisions” don’t just waste time but consume a lot of energy, too.

7. As a startup, you can move fast. You can change your entire business model in a really short period of time – and that’s something big organizations can’t do. This is you edge.
Embracing uncertainty is something only startups can do. So, don’t be afraid. Anyway, the whole thing would be far less exciting without it.
If you have an opportunity, seize it. Change whatever you need to change, don’t get attached to your plans, preconceptions or habits.

So we spent 3 months doing – most of the time – things we had not done before. And the beauty of it is that you can’t prepare for it in advance… Problems come up, you have to learn how to solve them in a really short period of time and put your fresh knowledge into action like 5 minutes later. If you like these sort of things, you will be in the right place!

You should also read this thread on Quora, it’s funny as hell.

Renaming files is not fun. (I know, some people like it, but it was never my taste:)
But if you want to design an iOS app, you need to have all the necessary files for every imaginable resolution:

UIelement.png
UIelement@2x.png
UIelement~ipad.png
UIelement@2x~ipad.png

There are two Mac apps that can do this job, but there is no Windows alternative for Resource Helper / Ship it!.

So I made (hacked together) a Photoshop script that can automatize the process:

Download it here

How to use it:

1. Copy the script to your Presets/Scripts folder (and restart Photoshop)

2. Start designing your app in 640*960 (ihpone 4 retina resolution)

3. Save the UI element you’ve just made as a psd.

4. Choose File -> Scripts -> iOS UI element exporter

5. Just Relax.

A very enthusiastic umpa lumpa will automatically resize and rename the pictures.

Two things you need to know:

This only works well if you’re using vectors elements – that’s needed to have the picture enlarged for retina ipads.
Also, don’t use the script to generate backgrounds, only UI elements. Backgrounds have different aspect ratios (3:4, 16:9, 2:3) and it won’t look good if you just stretch them automatically.

I want to thank my file renaming phobia for urging me to create this script. It was definitely worth it!

Here is the story of a few unexpected events that changed my life:

10 months ago I was at my grandma’s place, looking for some inspiration. I needed some illustrations for my upcoming article for Psychological Design (a post I’ve never written, for a now ceased-to-exist blog – sssght).
I was browsing a book called 100 Things Every Designer Should Know About People when I first saw the Kanizsa Triangle.

My first thought was: “that’s cool. does it work with other pictures, too?”. Surprisingly, the answer is yes, and it seemed liked nobody thought of that before (I have to tell, I still can’t believe that;).
This was the first unlikely event, and there were a lot to follow.

So I started re-creating a bunch of the well-known iconic pictures that surrounds us, logos, cartoon characters, paintings – with Kanizsa’s method.
For example, Bugs Bunny looks quite nice if you re-wrap it as an optical illusion:

Around completing the 100th picture, I showed it my future co-founder, Adri, whom I just met for the first time at a Startup Weekend. By the way, we won the pitching competition – but with another project. Nevertheless, we started working on how to create a whole brand based on this idea. Something I couldn’t have done without her. From this point, I’m gonna use “we” instead of I, since we worked on it together closely.

After a lot of thinking and preparation, we launched it – with small success. It didn’t really took off, and we didn’t really know why. ThinkInvisible was featured on a few design blogs, but that didn’t really do the trick in our case.
Until.. we got on the first page of 9gag.
And it became a tipping point for the whole project – something I would never have thought of before. The third unlikely event.

Soon ThinkInvisible traveled around the world, the tumblr blog reached 100k visitors,we’ve got featured on more than 500 blogs. Among them, this is definitely the most bizarre one. It’s the most unlikely place where you expect to find these pictures: on the Russian Sylvester Stallone fansite.

And it was so cool, because by that time, I didn’t even know how to use Photoshop! I hacked together the pictures with Illustrator & Fireworks (I’ve got something to tell you: you should never use Fireworks. period.)
It was a big boost in every sense, I learned how to do an insane amount of stuff in a really short time period – it was both rewarding and fun at the same time.
And the whole process of searching for new pictures to “thinkinvisibilize”, creating and testing them didn’t really felt like work – the enthusiasm we had was the major driving force.

The first problem

Can you imagine how would you feel like if you were asked this question 20 times a day:
“What the hell is this?”
“What should I see?”

I was going mad… and we had to come up with something that can explains what ThinkInvisible is all about – in like 3 seconds.
After experimenting a bit with animation (for the first time, of course), I’ve created a small animgif that you can still see if you go to thinkinvisible.com for the first time.

(click on it)

That small tweak decreased the bounce rate we had on the website (it was quite high at the beginning) by 30%! Actually, I think we wouldn’t have succeed without that 67Kb of ancient technology. (I think it can be easily classified as the fourth unlikely event.)
Of course, a lot of people still can’t see what’s hidden in the picture, and I’m really curious why is that and what’s common in those people. If you have any idea, please drop me a line!

The method

There are 3 types of ThinkInvisible pictures, can you spot the difference?

This one only uses the silhouette of… a famous director, in this case.

This works with the outlines – there are a lot of things you wouldn’t recognize only by their silhouette.

And the third one is a stripped down version of a detailed picture (a black & white transformation does the trick)

In my experience, the first one is what really uses the Gestalt psychology, and it is the most fun, too.

We also had to find out whether people recognize the riddles or not – because it can quickly become frustrating if they are too difficult. There were 40-50 people regularly filling out forms and rating the pictures by their difficulty. I’m grateful for that and I hope they enjoyed it at least a little;).

 

Is this a game?

We didn’t really think of ThinkInvisible as a game at first – it was much more like an eye-candy than anything else. But the most fun I’ve had with the whole thing was when I saw my friends’ faces when they were about to guess a picture.
That feeling is so cool – everyone who doesn’t understand why game developers make games should experience it.
It seemed like it solving a picture provides a weird kind of reward, something that is usually property of a game.
Of course it wasn’t me who drew the conclusion, one of my friends said one night that “it would be cool to make a mobile game out of it”. No more words were needed.

Adri, Andras (our programmer), and me shipped ThinkInvisible – The Game for iOS (now it’s also available for Android & Windows Phone – thanks to Peter Nagy & Daniel Rusznyak) in two months. Honestly, I didn’t even have an iOS device before – that’s how experienced we all were 8 months ago… But more on that later!

All in all, I’ve just discovered something by random chance, randomly met someone a week later who became the co-founder of the project that was seen by millions of people because of a random 9gag submission.

Thanks to ThinkInvisible, I’ve got deeply involved into the startup community, organized a team that got into Europe’s first gaming accelerator, created 4 apps in 6 months without any prior experience (one with a really ambitious goal) and became a designer that I wanted to be.
I feel like I can’t be luckier than I have been in the past 9 months. Let’s see what comes next;).

So you are a graphic designer and you think you need a personal identity – not necessarily to show off your skills, but because you need to have one.
And designing it can cause a lot of problems. I, myself can’t even count the hours I wasted on experimenting with my own personal identity – and still, it’s in “beta” at best.

I mean, how can you have something as a graphic designer that both represents your skills, your mindset and your style when all of these variables are changing extremely fast?
And I really do hope that none of them will eventually stop improving.

Before writing this post, I asked this question on Quora – I was really curious what experienced designers think on the topic, and I’ve got really cool answers that confirmed my superstition.

“I usually find it weird for designers to have a logo…where do you even put it? I usually find it weird for designers to have a logo…where do you even put it? I try to keep my name in my portfolio as neutral as possible, putting more emphasis on the work. If you look at some of the big names in graphic design, very few have “logos” (Sagmeister, Scher, Beirut, Müller-Brockmann…ok maybe Massimo Vignelli but he has his own agency). ”
Victor Ng, Designer at Pinterest

I have to say I was surprised that the most experienced designers recommended to not to have a personal identity at all.
My first thought was: “but it’s like selling the best ice creams in town without an ice cream stand!”
Which is of course completely false, since if your ice creams are so good, you can just walk around with a portable ice box full of your product and sell them in no time.
If you think about it for a second, having no personal identity suggests that you know what you’re doing and you don’t need the fancy stuff to prove it.

The conclusion is that I either need something that I can always fall back on, something that is so core that no new trend, Photoshop/Illustrator function or effect can override – or just eliminate the whole time-consuming and problem by having no personal identity.
At least until somebody invents the automatically changing personal identity that needs no maintenance at all. I would definitely subscribe for a service like that.

Which one tastes better: drinking coke from a large bottle (2,5 L) or from a small one?
Would you care more of your online representation if you got only one like per day from Facebook to spend?
And what if you got only a small portion of food in a restaurant?

How do these limitations effect your experience?

I don’t know whether it’s true for everyone or it is just me, but I love drinking from those small soft drink bottles. And at the same time, I find it quite difficult to value the things that I have a stockpile of…

Let’s call this weird effect the scarcity principle.

This effect comes from the assumption that something is rare because it is popular and everybody wants to get hold of it. And we know that if something is popular, that’s a good indication of its quality.
That’s the same case why you prefer a Porsche more than a Volkswagen, even if they both have the same specifications: mostly because those sport cars are rare. If everybody drove a sport car, I bet nobody would really appreciate them.
I think it is the main reason why so many expensive restaurants only serve a small portion of food. This way they can really make you appreciate the dish you ordered. Continue reading →

Can you imagine a scenario where you were asked a question and you chose the obviously wrong answer, just because the others did the same?

Actually, it can happen to you, as well. 75% of the people who participated in Solomon Asch’s 1951 conformity experiment chose the obviously wrong answer at least once during the test.
By hiring actors, he was able to apply peer pressure to the subjects and increase the number of wrong answers from 3% (control group) to 32%, which is quite impressive.

This is what people call the effect of social proof.

Imagine the influence of it under another condition, where the right choice isn’t that obvious… For example, if you’re not sure whether the joke you’ve heard in a sitcom is funny or not.
And then you hear the invisible guys laughing on it in the background. And you automatically start to appreciate the joke that was – originally – mediocre at most. Continue reading →

Today, I would like to do three short experiments with you:

Please have a look at the picture above.
Can you tell me which line (from the right side) matches the length of the line on the other side?
It seems fairly easy, doesn’t it?
Now, imagine that you’re participating in a group experiment where five people were asked the same question before you, and they all answered the same: the third one.

What’s happening here?
It seems so obvious that only the second one has the same height as the line on the right, but they chose the other one… Strange.
So, your answer is … ?
Continue reading →

What do you think is the least noticeable method to change one’s preference?
The surprising answer is: to include another, seemingly irrelevant choice, that is especially similar to the one before.

Imagine, that to read this article further, you would have to do me a favor. You have two choices:

1. Pay with a tweet, and read 2 articles.
2. Invite 5 friends and read 5 articles.

If you want to decide rationally, you have to answer all the following questions:

• How much is transforming my twitter feed into a billboard worth?
• How much is my friends’ trust worth?

And, most importantly, how much is this article worth at all? Continue reading →

..Do you really want to research the Internet for a week to be able to make up your mind which HTC smarthpone is right for you from the 12 slightly-different ones?
And although this question is quite manipulative, the answer can be easily “YES!”, if you ask the right person…

And that’s exactly my point. Wide variety of products can appeal to a particular kind of customer: a well-informed one. One who knows what he or she wants exactly.

In his book called “The Long Tail”, Wired editor Christopher Anderson argues that products that have a low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough.
Actually, it’s not an argument, it’s a fact, just have a look at the figures. Probably that’s why we have shops that specializing exclusively in leather gloves, import tea or pesticides – although I, myself don’t understand the need for them.

But it should be taken into account that the appeal of enormous amount of products depends on the context. For example, if you want to order a good bottle of wine at a reasonable price, you won’t get much help by visiting this website: Continue reading →

One of the most famous psychology experiment happened almost ten years ago in a British supermarket.
Sheena Iyengar and her colleagues set up a small tasting booth, where they either offered 6 or 24 different kinds of jam. What they first found is that only 40% of the people stepped to the booth when there were only 6 jars of jam on the table, compared to the 60% result in the other case.
Now, here comes the surprising fact: only 3% of the customers who “dropped by” to taste the 24 different kinds of jam actually bought something, compared to the astonishing 30% who were offered the less amount of choices.

That’s a ten time increase produced only by limiting the options presented to the customer.

Imagine the scenario where you want to buy a 27- inch monitor, because you had enough of the old, giant-size CRT display that you have now.
You visit your favorite electronic store (virtually, of course) and finally count up exactly 1117 monitors that you can choose from.

Continue reading →