As a working designer, my focus is on results - and I’m willing to try new; and even unexpected things to get them.

Beating the Control with handwriting

I worked for a business that relied heavily on online advertising to drive the subscription model that fed profits. We had A/B tested into a very text-heavy big box ad which had served as the control for a long time, and which bested any rival that presented itself. I am a huge fan of trying new things, and love the instant feedback that one gets from A/B testing. With that in mind I tried a wide variety of approaches to try and beat the control. Initially I tried to enhance the existing control by “highlighting” passages of text, or circling them with a “red pen.” These approaches did nothing to lift the results, and even depressed performance a bit. 

I decided to try changing the format of the ad by printing it out in my own handwriting. Amazingly, this did the trick. These ads went on to outperform the control for a good period of time. In fact, they did so well that I worked with a developer to replicate my handwriting as an actual font so that we could scale the ad creation and enable anyone within the company to create their own ads.

The wild world of guerrilla user testing

When tasked with creating deliverables that required a specific cascade of user actions for success, I prefer not to wait for outside validation. Often these were relatively small projects; landing pages, order pages, etc. but their importance and impact on the business could be huge. Rather than create a landing page and throw it over the fence to see how it performed, I would often create my own user testing on a very small and precise scale. Here is what I would do:

1. Create the deliverable - and it had to be in an interactive form - whether it be HTML, a clickable PDF, or even paper prototyping.

2. Locate an empty conference room, or free table; on a high-traffic path.

3. Set up the project to be tested and wait for a coworker to pass by. Ideally this would be someone not intimately familiar with the process or product I was looking to test. 

4. Once someone appeared, ask them if they had a minute or two to test something out. I would explain what the task was that I wanted them to perform and then I would let them try it out.

5. Ask that the tester explain out loud what they were doing and be vocal with any questions they might have.

6. Document the results, thank the user for their time, and return to my desk to iterate.

I found that these micro sessions often uncovered issues or suggested improvements that I would not have seen until later, or perhaps not at all. It also had the added benefit of gaining non-test related insights from other members of the company I would not have heard from otherwise.

Being better than stock photos

One of my biggest frustrations as a designer is the ubiquity of uninspired and predictable stock photography. I take my own photos whenever I can. Not only does this allow me to get exactly what I’m looking for, it’s free and I know I’ll never see the same photo in someone else’s work. Some examples of this at work are:

• Macro photos of Apple watches for ads. Taking my own macro photos allowed me to make the watch face the subject of the ad, and also gave me a look and feel for the ads that I hadn’t seen before. 

• The “Cancel My Subscription” ads. One of the campaigns we ran often relied on the phrase “cancel my subscription” and featured that phrase digitally superimposed on a fake cable bill. These ads felt too complicated - the cable bill couldn’t really be read as a bill, the “handwriting” was obviously a font, and they were sterile and uninteresting. But the ads were working. I wanted to simplify the ads and get at the core message - that there was an annoyed human being who wanted their cable subscription cancelled. I got rid of the fake bill, fake handwriting and simplified things as much as possible. I simply wrote the message “Cancel my monthly cable subscription!” In Magic Marker and asked a coworker to hold it as if they were having a mugshot taken. Now the message was being delivered by a real live human - someone who was fed up with cable and wanted out. This version of the ad performed so well on Facebook that I was asked to create a new version every month. To my knowledge, a version of this ad still runs to this day.

• Posing coworkers for infographics / book covers. Sometimes I needed a human form for an illustration or image - and when I did, the depiction needed to be realistic, not cartoony. When this happened I would once again enlist my coworkers. I would find an available individual, pose them, and take as many photos as needed. Since I relied on these photos for silhouettes, I was able to assure them that their personal details wouldn’t appear in the work. I used this method quite a few times and again it allowed me to get exactly what I needed, sped up the process, and resulted in a much better final result than if I had needed to rely on my drawing skills or stock photography.