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The Miss Universe Card Failed in One Glaring Design Principle – Being Understandable

The other night’s Miss Universe beauty pageant highlighted another example of how poor design can lead to awkward, high profile consequences. If you haven’t seen or heard, Steve Harvey mistakenly proclaims Miss Colombia as Miss Universe. Steve had to apologize and backtrack and name the real winner, Miss Philippines. As you’d expect, the internet exploded with internet memes and Twitter posts poking fun at Steve.

But really, Steve is a scapegoat for a poor card design. Take a look at what Steve was looking at:

I harp on UI and UX a fair bit already, and this just highlights the importance of clean, directed design. You can understand the need for the card to be easily editable so winners can be printed after votes. However, their design is not good, and did nothing to help Steve.
Let’s look at Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles for Good Design, and see where the Miss Universe card fell short:
The biggest principles the card failed was being understandable and thorough down to the details. I don’t know if the pageant also reviewed what the card looked like with Steve beforehand, but a little training upfront could have helped. However, great design should allow anyone to understand a product with or without training.
Here’s something that may be a little more fitting:

Okay, so I’m still not a designer. However, this took five minutes in PowerPoint, and it’s got a clearer message as to who won. The eyes follow a logical and natural progression from top to bottom with who won.
Point is, UI and UX extend beyond technology of websites and applications. They’re crucial, too, in physical collateral whether that be brochures, business cards, and even pageant winner cards. See this bathroom door as another example.
How would you design the card for Miss Universe? Any other poor designs you’ve seen, and you think you could design something better?
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Starting With Nothing: Solving Early Churn With Empty State Design

I recently stumbled on an article on TechCrunch about empty state designs – “The Most Overlooked Aspect of UX Design Could Be The Most Important”. It’s pretty good, and I won’t rehash the whole thing.
In gist, empty state design refers to the design and experience (UI/ UX) of an application when a new user opens an app or new feature. For example, if you just downloaded a photo sharing app, what would the app say and do to motivate you to use it? Poor empty state designs can lead to confusion, diminished interest, and the like which ultimately yields high churn early on.
Benjamin Brandall, the author, writes empty state designs should tell the user three things:
  1. What is this page/ platform for?
  2. Why are you, the user, seeing this?
  3. How can you fill out this page?

Body Boss was built quite feature heavy without clear call-to-actions upon new registration. We noticed this more apparently when we were signing up coaches on the spot at a trade show early on.

When coaches entered, there was an empty dashboard because no players had done any workouts yet. It was just a great-looking black screen. That’s not useful or sexy.
Our first design was a beautiful black screen. Not helpful, and not actually sexy
Similar to what the article suggests and what is common in successful apps today, we added a Getting Started Wizard walking coaches through setting up their organization.
We added a Getting Started Wizard walking the user through a simple set-up process when a coach first registers

The Getting Started Wizard walked through many different building blocks of Body Boss including adding players individually, or importing en masse
The result was more coaches knowing exactly what they needed to do to get started. We saw engagement rise especially in areas like inviting coaches, setting up groups, etc. The wizard was a great tool to complement our drip onboarding emails, too, to additionally provide structure in the onboarding process.
Check out Brandall’s article, and let me know your thoughts!
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Funding + Contractors = Unrealistic Expectations = Cutting Corners?

Working with several startups over the last couple years, I’ve noticed a recurring theme with well-funded companies using third-party contractors – that is, many sacrifice quality in favor of urgency to deliver a more feature-rich product oftentimes by cutting corners.
That is, startups aim for seemingly arbitrary dates to deliver a product, forgoing things like customer discovery or shifting responsibilities to contractors. In some cases, contractors have not worked in the startup environment or are bought into the business to make the best decisions.
  • I believe the “business” should define what the user flow (experience) should look like with input by a UI/ UX designer. Except in one project, the business shifted user flows to the UI/ UX designer. Being an outside resource without the experience of the business, the designer was left to insert his own vision. So when designs were up for approval, the business owners threw up all over them. Why? Because the designs didn’t match their vision.
  • An early-stage entrepreneur launched a new travel platform without testing the product with customers and gathering feedback for customer acquisition. His previous life in investment banking funded his startup’s six-figure development costs. However, when he launched, he had no answers to how to acquire customers in a highly competitive market. He ended up shutting down almost immediately.
Funding/ money is a funny thing – you want it, but without control, can set unrealistic expectations and take the scrappiness out of startups. You may expect quality to go up, but instead, efforts to ameliorate investors by hitting deadlines motivate the startup to cut corners and sacrifice quality; whereas in bootstrapped, lean startups, quality is tuned to critical elements, and growth occurs more organically.
These aren’t rules… but rather anecdotes of what I’ve seen.
What are your thoughts on how funding has affected startups and expectations? How would you implement some of the lean startup and scrappy methods in a well-funded startup? How else could startups use contractors more effectively?
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