Corvus Consulting

It’s hard to believe it’s been eight years since I put up the Corvus Consulting shingle. That is, until I look back and recount the projects and clients I’ve worked with, and realize it’s been a very full time.

Working solo brings certain freedoms, in decision-making, in working style, in choosing when not to work. But it also brings a lot of limitations, the kind that slowly diminish how much you can grow and the challenges you can take on.

So it’s time for a change. In the past year plus I’ve been working with Tylor Sherman, first on a small side project now in the freezer but not forgotten, then on Menuito. Our skills and dispositions work well together, and when we both found ourselves thinking next career steps we decided to team up. With that, the Corvus Consulting name is being retired, and I’m very pleased to point you to the launch of Denim & Steel. Our focus will naturally be on web and iOS applications, and we’re happy to hang our new shingle with three client projects already on the go.

For current clients very little will change: same price, same contact person, same way of working, same mission to make things better. But there will also be new opportunities, as Denim & Steel is a design+build agency with a full set of development skills to complement the experience design and product management smarts.

It’s an exciting move to make, and some of you already know from our quiet launch last week but this makes it that much more real. If you didn’t catch that moment, now’s the time to take a look at the brand new Denim & Steel website, and follow us on Twitter at @denimandsteel. It’s been good having you visit here; it’ll be good to see you there.

My first Apple experience was a 3rd generation iPod. I rolled my eyes when I read Designed by Apple in California, and blinked when the other flap of the box said Enjoy. It was different. Usually product packaging congratulated me on my purchase. Or slyly implored me to register, suggesting I wouldn’t have a warranty if I didn’t. Or spilled out a Quick Start booklet that, again, congratulated me on my purchase. This was different.

It worked better than any piece of digital tech I’d owned since a calculator. It was almost as simple to use. But there was more to it, I’d find myself running my thumb along the wheel and wondered at just how smoothly it seemed to exist. Everything had been thought out well. Like many, I get irked when things don’t seem to work right, and that was normal. But here was something that didn’t irk me. Instead, I kept trying to dig into the decisions behind the design; it was teaching me. A few months later I had switched.

Since then, it’s been lesson after lesson in both big picture and tiny detail thinking, in integration, in synthesis, in incremental improvement and patience, in creative destruction and finding so much irritation in the status quo. So often Jobs would reveal something new, woven from seemingly disparate or even irreconcilable threads. And with that virtuosity he could put a human frame around technology by making business, design, quality and service dance to the same tune. Looking back, even his final weeks seemed planned with a graceful exit from Apple and enough time to make his goodbyes. The news even came on a Wednesday – mid week, not near the chaos of Monday or the peace of the weekend. On my iPhone, first an email then Twitter. But even before Twitter loaded, I kind of knew.

There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t work in the world, but Jobs moved multiple industries to a better place through vision and will and a brilliant light. He made that dent in our universe that he set out to, and left behind a legacy that will inspire and teach for generations to come. Lesson one: the things that don’t work in the world can be changed. Goodbye, Steve Jobs.

I’ve taken a shine to a couple of blogs that focus on small touches that make software experiences smoother, and might often otherwise go unnoticed (as good design, by its nature, often does). Little Big Details was the first of this breed, and sets a standard for an observant eye and the ability to dive into the details of how small touches make big differences.

It was on a second blog, though, that I found something worth noting about the overall evolution of Mac OS. On the Finer Things in Mac blog, Dave Chartier notes that in OS X Lion,

When clicking a Quick Look window’s new “Open with Preview” button in its top toolbar, that window morphs into the new Preview window that opens. Classy! The same happens with RTF files and, it seems, just about any files Preview supports.

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A couple weeks ago I was ready to write a short reflection on customer relations gone super-sour, featuring Airbnb. Luckily, I have a black belt in procrastination, which gives these situations time to spin out some more and to make a more interesting story.

The background: a few weeks ago a woman named Emily in San Francisco rented her place through Airbnb and had it thoroughly trashed by a renter in what seems to be a fit of gleeful nihilism by a person bent on bringing as much destruction and pain into a home as possible. The victim had been working things through with Airbnb and decided to blog about her experience, cautioning others and, I think, just venting.

In the days that followed, Airbnb’s actions and lack of actions painted a picture of a company caught in a vortex of legal paranoia and public relations handling from the 6th circle of hell. Fast forward ten days and we find they’ve managed to really turn it around. The missteps as well as the fixes make a fantastic case study in how to do wrong, and then right, by your customers.
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Updated: Robert removed the post that catalyzed this post, along with others to retune his blog to one that doesn’t talk UX design industry. I can respect that, but decided to leave my own response in place because the issue of professionalism continues to haunt our industry, and it’s one I feel strongly about.

I really wasn’t ready for what followed when I noticed #uxbrawl on Twitter yesterday and followed the thread to Robert Hoekman Jr’s painful screed about Whitney Hess. The post is incredibly hard to read, but when I wasn’t overwhelmed by the anger I could understand his complaint, especially about Whitney’s post where she drew a stark line around what UX is and is not with an absolutist bent.

Whitney’s post was easy to shake off as something where I found some good points but disagreed with the posturing. Robert’s post is impossible to shake off, but contains valid points amid the vitriol. But neither post did a lick of good for our profession or the higher cause that many of us take to heart, to make technology better for people. So why am I writing about this at all? To me, the whole thing is about professionalism.

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Continuing to make meaty blog posts out of design leftovers, we now arrive at something substantial: the information and interaction design for a Menuito site. Click on through for sumptuous wireframes, raw early designs and the plated finished work to see how it all unfolded.

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Keeping true to my word, more on how Menuito came into being. In this post I’ll share the vision that set the course and informed the design decisions along the way.

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