I didn’t get to as many presentations as I hoped due to travel and exhaustion, but I think it was a great start.

Left the house at 6 am for my 7:30 flight. Arrived with plenty of time. I don’t know what everyone is complaining about airport security, it was simple and easy for me. Maybe that is just BWI.

Got into Houston 30 min early which was great as without it I was fairly certain my luggage wouldn’t make my next connection that was only 20 minutes after landing. I and my luggage landed safely in Austin at like 12:30. Jumped on a shuttle and got to Omni at about 1. Unpacked and settled in by 1:45 and headed down to the convention center.

Got my badge… was a crazy long line. Ironically bag pick up was even longer so I skipped it and once my badge was obtained I headed to my first chosen panel How Not to Design Like a Designer, which was totally full and I couldn’t get in

So I chilled, had a drink and waited for BattleDecks to begin at 3:30. TBH I thought this year was a let down. Maybe it is time to retire the panel. The slides were funny but the presenters pretty much all sucked. They either had nothing to say, repeated the same jokes or had a agenda that they followed despite the slides. The winner actually ended up being some kid from the audience who made one funny comment. Don’t think I will be doing this again next year.

Next I headed to the Apps for Healthy Kids presentation. Unfortunately this I also found to be disappointing. Having worked on one of the entries for this contest I was really hoping to get some insight into the process of judging and how the contest worked. What I ended up with was a “contests are good, they area inexpensive and people love doing them”. Yeah thanks. Maybe this is such a new concept in government that they feel it was worth a panel, but in my opinion this was so 101 it wasn’t really panel worthy. What I would have loved was some insight into how to translate these contests into action afterwards, the process for running contests, etc. There were some good questions from the audience but I didn’t feel they were really answered. Maybe the panel was just labelled incorrectly as it should have been “Why Government Use of Contests are Good”.

After that I rushed over to the Forrst meetup and got to meet Kyle face to face, which was nice after exchanging so many emails. Met some cool people and had fun. Mikey arrived from the airport and showed up and joined me for dinner.

We then went bar hoping and met up with some friends and just chilled.

At 11 oclock I realized how exhasted I was and headed back home to the Omni for an early night as I knew I would be hitting it hard on Saturday.

To sum it up, panels were sort of crap, social was good. +4 new friends = #win (note NOT #winning).

It’s that time again. WHHEEEEEE. So here are my daily notes on SXSW for myself to remember and share with anyone who cares.

Overall

Whats new at SXSW this year? Well there seems to be the “too cool to badge” movement that is going around. While I understand the logic (much more fun just hanging out and meeting new people then attending a boring speech), I think it isn’t an all or nothing scenario. Yes, probably only 20% of the presentations are “awesome”. A lot are either just rehashing shit you already read about 6 months ago, but those 20% make it worth it PLUS I sort of feel it is the right thing to do in that the “social” is here because the con. Oh well, doesn’t really effect me much, just more commentary.

Gowalla is big this year, along with a ton of other lil apps to support like flash mob style parties. Not sure how long those apps will outlive SXSW, you would need to hit critical mass in a city so that like “starting a party” wouldn’t result in 1 of your 5 friends who also use the app showing up.

T-Shirt design is a bit meh.

Food and drinks seems way cheaper then I remembered, but maybe that is just east coast comparison kicking in.

Scheduling apps are aplenty and they all suck ass. What we really need is something with great filters. Show me suggestions for time slots where I have nothing. Show me where my friends are at. Show me what is around me (GPS). Would also love if something became more “officialized” say with a cost associated and I could see like if places had standing room only before I walked 5 blocks to a offsite conference. Integrate hashtags and tweets to track what is going on. We are SXSW INTERACTIVE. This isn’t a wishlist, this is a shame list… as it shame on us for not having this basic 101 crap.

At the Omni again. As usual, loving that part of it.

Ah yes, the good old “the more it costs the more it is worth” psychological trap that we as consumers find ourselves constantly falling into. As a freelancer trying to price my services I find this concept very hard to reconcile with myself between being a fair and just professional and also trying to emphasize the importance of what I do with a client and making a decent living.

Googling value attribution gives us many case study examples of how we as freelancers hurt ourselves pricing wise by constantly under bidding or even just fairly bidding our services. Clients want to feel that they bought the “platinum” package or some exclusive level of service that is “above the norm”. Have you ever lost a bid to someone who clearly is going to under-delivery and is very much over priced? Thank value attribution.

So how do I use value attribution to help me as a freelancer?

Value Attribution As a Product

If you are a flat fee product provider, this is simple. We have all seen it done a million times. Some clothing designer or restaurant charges 100 times the cost of something we can buy an equal or maybe even better non named version of, yet we still shell out the cash for that label or name. We even feel privledged to do it and chat up how great it is.

So how to do this if your name isn’t Louis Vuitton or Calvin Klein? It’s easy! Find some add on feature that you can withhold from your standard package and offer a “higher” privileged level of features and access for an increased price. Reach for the stars pricing wise on your “platinum” package. While I don’t recommend going crazy with your pricing, you will have a hard time justifying while adding on a single feature quadruples your cost, find the line that you are comfortable pricing it at and push yourself just a little further. The point here is not that the clients aren’t buying “that feature”, they are buying the security and “peace of mind” that they got the best that you offer as well as the psychology of the superiority associated with that platinum label. You will be shocked not only how many clients are willing to pay the extra, but that these clients will probably become your most happy, most verbal and most active users. While your gut instinct may be to think that this is just due to sunk cost, the concept that if we pay for something that we want to recoup our investment, case studies have shown over and over that it isn’t about getting the most for your money, but believing it to have more value; the mindset of the client is that your product is just worth more and deserves more respect (money).

Value Attribution As a Service

As a service provider this is sometimes hard to be creative about enhancing your pricing to include value attribution, especially if you charge hourly and don’t want to feel like you are price gouging your clients.

My advice on value attribution really only applies if you feel you aren’t under pricing currently, unfortunate most of you probably are. Before you get into working with value attribution make sure to deal with right pricing yourself first. While I won’t get into the specifics here about how not to under price yourself, there are thousands of articles on that, I do have a quick trick that helped me deal with under pricing. I was listening to Andy Clark on 5by5′s The Big Web show with Jeffery Zeldman and Dan Benjamin and he gave out this quick little trick that will help you improve you confidence about your pricing but also allow you to not sink your ship by scaring away all your clients. He said that he got caught into the freelancer trap of thinking “I am only earning as much as the hours I can stay awake” and realizing it wasn’t about working more, it was about pricing incorrectly.As an experiment he picked a single random day each month, different day each time, and on that day double his estimate/quotation cost. When he started still winning these doubled bids, he would up his standard rate to that new higher price as he now had the confidence that clients were willing to pay. He kept doing that until he started losing bids and then he knew that number was his rate. Low risk, high return.

For those of you that are currently “right priced” but want to know how you can get value attribution to work for you without selling your soul, here are some ideas. Lets think about the product scenario listed above. The key here is that you didn’t take a crucial feature out of the product hurting your standard package, you simply added something that probably most people wouldn’t need and probably won’t use. Remember you are not claiming that the sole feature is worth the price increase. The price increase is the value attribution. It is about just creating a psychological situation where the client feels they are top dog.

So how can we bring this back to hourly service? This is up to you and your comfort level of what you are willing to do, however here are some more creative examples I have come up with:

• Video Chat – making yourself accessible to the client via video chat during your calls versus just voice
• VIP Status – A “special” email address for priority question handling
• Early Bird Access -first dibs on your available time slots
• Status Reports – Access into your project management tool for their project or being emailed about code commits.

The key here is not to make yourself crazy by increasing your offering, but doing some sort of small things that the clients can feel they are privileged and therefore think the service that they got is higher valued.

Don’t be afraid to offer and highlight this service publicly. You aren’t forcing clients to buy anything and you still have your standard pricing. I sometimes find myself falling into the trap of thinking “is this fair” to the client. What you need to realize with value attribution is that it isn’t about what you would consider fair, it is about what makes the client happy. “Fair” is what your “right sized” standard pricing (hopefully) is for. Your “platinum” price is for the people who aren’t really even buying that small extra feature, but are buying into the idea of being “top dog” or “exclusive”, they WANT to pay you for that privilege, so why leave that money on the table or worse yet lose the deal completely.

This is one of those stupid things that has made my work so much easier, but even as a 10 year photoshop user, didn’t know. If you work on large images like for example a website comp, but have a lot of little components, like buttons, then this will make a world of difference. Go to the little arrow in the top right of your layers panel, choose “Panel Options” and up your thumbnail size. Click “Ok”. Sit back and enjoy.

So it looks like 8-bit avatars are the new fad. I have made a couple for friends and gotten some requests for my source material, so I figured I would release it here. While they aren’t hard to make, this base PSD will get you going on the boring parts (hair, skin, etc) letting you concentrate on the more important “spice” that makes each one unique. I suggest playing around with noise, patterns and gradients… they seem to have the best effect!

Click here to download my 8-bit PSD.

Here are a couple I made using the above as my base:

And even some fancier ones adding effects:

Happy Holidays!

Just posted up my second jQuery badge… Demo here.

Decided to code up this little badge plugin and I will be cleaning it up over the next day or so for “release”, but figured I would put it out into the world for feedback and critique. Right now as it stands it is a very basic badge and contains the following info:

• User Login
• Latest Public Posts

The API is very limited, but as it grows I will add more and more features.

Where to Get It

http://github.com/lynnwallenstein/jQuery-Forrst-Badge/

How To Use It

http://github.com/lynnwallenstein/jQuery-Forrst-Badge/blob/master/README

To Do List

• Improved styling per post type
• HTML5 version
• Multiple built in styles (more then the default)

See a complete list of open issues here.

Update: Demo online here.

Decided to code up this little plugin after not being able to find one that had all the features I wanted, worked with the v2 version of the API and could be called multiples times in one page. Right now as it stands it is a very basic badge and contains the following info:

User Badge

• Basic user account info (link to github account)
• List of public repos (can sort ascending or descending)

Project Badge

• Basic project information (name, description)
• List of open issues (can sort ascending or descending)
• List of recent commits (can sort ascending or descending)

Where to Get It

http://github.com/downloads/lynnwallenstein/jQuery-Github-Badge/jquery_github_badge_0.2.3.zip

How To Use It

http://github.com/lynnwallenstein/jQuery-Github-Badge/blob/master/README

To Do List

• Exclude certain repos
• HTML5 version
• Humanized Dates
• Multiple built in styles (more then the default)

See a complete list of open issues here.

This is going to be a short post, but this lil tip/trick has already saved me a lot of grief and pain so I shall share it here. I use a lot of computers, like 5 daily. I have 2 laptops, 2 desktops a couple of virtual environments, etc. Most of the platforms are setup with the same programs with some minor exceptions for things like netbooks and such not running Photoshop. I found myself trying to come up with ways to deal with syncing my configuration, things like FileZilla config files, fonts, license files, preferences etc. Of course I could setup some sort of domain or something, but that is way overkill for what I wanted. I had up until now been using DropBox (which I still recommend for anyone and everyone… its free!) but I was copying a lot of files back and forth and I would have to remember to do it. Then one of my brilliant friends, Bruce Williams,  let me in on a secret, he used a method of source control, more specifically git and github, to keep track of all his configuration and “syncable” files. Not only does it get and puts things right from where they need to be, it keeps versions of them. Long story short, now all my stuff is synced up, it is backed up as well and I can move from computer to computer without worrying about if I this or that font, which textmate bundles and themes I have, etc.

Anyway I won’t get into the how, because if you don’t know it is probably too complex of a solution to learn for this purpose, but if you are already using source control, might be a quick and easy trick to help you out.

First off, I am going to start off and say this is a rant so if you aren’t in the mood, you probably want to skip over this. Second this isn’t an angry rant, it is a disappointing one. I am not mad at any of the parties specifically involved, but more disappointed as a whole at people and how ungrateful we are as human beings.

So where does all this disappointment come from? I am glad you asked. I am a member of the community Forrst (http://www.forrst.com), which is a community where designers and developers share snaps (pictures), links, code snippets and questions. It is a great community, I highly advise signing up for an invite for anyone in the design/development industry. This rant is not specifically against forrst users, just my point is well illustrated in a conversation that has been going on there. First off some Forrst basics. People post items (images, code, questions, links) and other members can “like” an item and/or leave a comment. This isn’t new to Forrst, this is like Facebook or Digg or any of the 1001 other sites on the internet. Unlike those other sites, the purpose of Forrst is to get critique. So someone suggested we had a dislike button, something I strongly support (also on Facebook and Digg), and apparently I have discovered I am clearly in the minority. Now I have no problem with Forrst not adding a feature that they think would hurt the community, infact I think it is extremely responsible for the owners/creators to understand their users and create a system that functions how they function, what I am actually saddened by is the users themselves. The arguments for the lack of a dislike button appear to be as follows:

• People will just dislike an item and not comment on it which is useless feedback
• People will dislike things just to be mean
• Novice designers/developers will be discouraged by too many negative votes and not continue to learn

Now what makes me sad is that I think every single one of those things is wrong, sad and an obvious deficiency in our community. The fact that we are so self important that we think that people owe us their time for length comments, so childish we would dislike things out of jealousy or so fragile that negative feedback would stop us on our journey to become better is absolutely ludicrous.

Any Lovin is a Good Lovin

Anyone who takes time, even one second, out of their day to help me with critique, suggestions, comments, answers, whatever… is doing me a favor. Whether that be liking, disliking, commenting, taking screenshots of and marking up, branching my code and making changes and sending them back… whatever it may be. I will bend over and kiss each one of their asses as they are doing something for me out of the goodness of their heart. They have decided to busy their brain with my passion/problems/work, if for even 1 milisecond, I should be thankful as they owe me nothing. The audacity I have of making my ego easily puffed by with a single click of a button, but requiring those who don’t agree with me to have to spend more time to express their opinion seems as though I have no interest in obtaining negative feedback. Are comments better then votes? You bet your ass they are, they are way more descriptive and helpful, however why then can I just as easily give praise with a single click? Does that mean the praise is worthless? I am not so high as to think that any spec of help I get from others isn’t valuable and I will thank them for it every day with my whole heart.

Promoting Mediocrity and Fear of Bullies

Why do we continue to allow people to create mediocre shit and tell them it is awesome? If something sucks, I say mark it as so. You can only get better by understand the flaws in what you do. I think there are extremely tactful ways to provide negative feedback without “hurting someone’s feelings”, and to be honest I hope it hurts their feelings, that means they were passionate about what they did and only put it out when they thought it was the best they could do. That is the guy I want to work with. If he has any sort of smarts, he will realize at no point in your life will you ever be better then everyone else in the world at everything. So even if I put out my best work that I am super proud of and you tell me it is shit, at least I know how much my radar is off. If there ends up being people that are assholes and just vote things down out of jealousy or anger, their votes will most likely be lost in the averages as well as the community will weed out the garbage as it grows. You don’t get paid to give your opinion so why would someone waste their time being mean or shitty if they didn’t get a reward?

Crying Over Spilled Milk

If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen. You can’t ask for feedback and expect to only receive glowing reviews. First off that is unrealistic and useless. I am not sure how a person would be so discouraged by bad votes, but would however not be discouraged by critical feedback comments, but that is a whole other issue. We contribute in feedback communities to make each other better people, not to blow smoke up each other’s asses.

So there ends my rant. In reality, whether Forrst ends up having a dislike button or not it is irrelevant. My insight into some of my peers thought process on feedback has certainly been an eye opening experience and if anything I guess I can say I am greatful for that.

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Working with clients and users, feedback is something I get every day from bug reports to feature requests. Despite the fact that these are things we are brought up from a very young age to do; acknowledging something is broken or wishing something could do something new, you would be shocked by people’s lack of ability/knowledge to create a quality feedback report.

I am not going to talk about systems here. Feedback processes are religion. Some people like very open systems like email where you can write whatever you want, others like forms with 100 fields asking everything down to your underwear size and blood type. The process at which you obtain feedback is going to vary depending on your project and preference. What I am talking here is the thought put into what you say in those emails or problem descriptions… the content itself.

The Three Whats

Sick of getting requests like “when I click on the link, it doesn’t work” or “I want a pop up to show me the picture”. Reports and requests like this are useless. Not only do they lack reference of what you are talking about, but they lack reference as to what they are supposed to do. When I am working with a client who needs to give me feedback about a web page I designed or an app I coded I ask them to answer the three whats:

• What were you doing (bug) / what will you be doing (feature)
• What did you expect to happen (bug) / what do you want to happen (feature)
• What actually happens (bug) / what currently happens (feature)

With these there pieces of information I can extract a lot of information.

What were you doing (bug) / what will you be doing (feature)

This gives a frame of reference under which something can be reproduced. Where on the site or what functionality they were utilizing on the app. This fundamentally puts us on the same page so discussion/discovery can begin. It is important here to be as detailed as possible. For example “I was on the homepage clicking on the navigation link about us” is good, but “I was on my Windows 7 machine using IE8 clicking on the about us link in the footer navigation on the page http://website.com/index.html” is MUCH BETTER. While some of that information may be irrelevant, such as it may not be a browser or OS specific bug, providing more information is always better then less as I am not left wondering what were the exact circumstance and where the client was looking.

I ask my clients to send me the following info:

• What operating system
• What browser flavor and version
• What URL where you on
• What functionality where you doing (clicking/scrolling/submitting) and on what was it that you were doing it.

What did you expect to happen (bug) / what do you want to happen (feature)

This is key. You would be surprised by how many bug requests are actually just a misunderstanding of how something works and the page or app works fine, just the client was expecting something else. While this is a bit redundant on things like popup errors (you will get a lot of “I expected it not to crash the browser” or “I expected it not to have a JavaScript error”, it is best to just get your clients in the habit of letting you know what they thought should happen. In the case of a feature this should probably be the beginning of a requirements doc.

What actually happens (bug) / what currently happens (feature)

This is the technical meat. Identifying what needs to be changed or what went wrong. Again it is best to be as descriptive as possible. Error messages, screen shots, log files anything and everything that may help the developer/designer narrow down the problem.  The more I get up front the less I have to go back to the client asking for more details. The one minute you take to gather the details while the bug is happening now, will save many minutes later when your developer calls you and asks you to “replicate the problem” and you have to go track the problem down or “go find that screen where you want that link”.

I ask my clients to give me any/all of these:

• Screen shot of what they are seeing
• Any error messages they are getting
• Error Log/Dump/Crash log of problem
• Description of current functionality that would need to be modified for new functionality such as new navigation or layout

Using the information obtained by these three questions I rarely have to spend much time doing a back and forth with the clients looking for more information or have the inability to replicate the problem or visualize the feature (which of course most times requires more work such as a full feature spec, but I at least am in the same place as the client to start discussion).

Got any tips or suggestions? Let me know in the comments!