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Getting to Know Our New Neighbors

Ever since we moved into our new larger office, we’ve been exploring the neighborhood and trying to see what we can get involved with.

We’re just a block down now from the main branch of the Akron Public Library. They’re home to many interesting programs (and a great asset to the community), but the one that piqued our interest is the TechZone@Main. Offering up a wide variety of cool equipment and resources, anyone can stop in and use things like 3d printing, green screen video, audio recording studio, photo printing, laser engraving, and more.

What caught our eye was the vinyl printing. We’re working with a local company on getting some external signage for our new office, but we wanted to supplement that with some vinyl graphics for windows.

The library staff was patient and helpful as we prepared our files, and we even got to watch the printer in action, slowly building our graphics, making another pass to score the material after printing so you can easily peel off your custom shapes.

In a few minutes we had our prints; all we had to do was peel away the uncut areas and stick the vinyl to our glass.

Overall it was a great experience and we now look more official from the front door. We’re not sure if this material and approach is what we’ll use long term (and it’s hard to see in the photos), but this was quick and painless way to test it out and learn about the process.

 

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Flight Midwest Startup Conference 2017

I recently had the opportunity to attend the second annual Flight conference in Akron. Put on by our friends at Launch League, this was a great event promoting and enriching startups regionally. Experienced founders and supporters shared their experiences on a variety of topics, and there were high quality panel discussions as well.

It was refreshing to attend Flight not as a presenter or sponsor but just a regular attendee. It was a useful change in perspective to allow myself to get immersed in the day without being preoccupied with other tasks. One thing that I thought was much improved over last year’s conference was the scope and focus of the the programming. The inaugural conference was very broad with speakers talking about everything from design to dev ops. This year it was honed in on startups and their concerns. I thought this helped with expectations and just made everything feel more organized and coherent.

Heading into the John S. Knight center for the conference

When selecting which presentations to attend I forced myself to go to things I wouldn’t normally go to. I’ve been to enough design and development talks that they really need to be a specific niche or topic to pique my interest. This turned out to be a great strategy though, as I pushed outside my comfort zone and had some great discussions.

Two of the presentations in particular I found really useful:

Mark Weisman from Navidar opened up by explaining that his company works as an technology-focused investment bank; which neither invests anything (in a traditional sense) nor functions as a bank. It was a great start to add some levity to what could be a very dry topic. He explained that their primary service is to work with companies who are entertaining buyout/acquisition offers or seeking them to try and get the best price (and the most offers) possible. There were some great stories of work that they did, and the kinds of details that most people wouldn’t even think could affect deals or valuations.

While we’re not pivoting into the finance industry, it really resonated with me how they only work with companies at a certain point in their lifecycle. It’s something we’ve done as well; we work great with teams who need to build an MVP, or need front end and design help to assist their small back-end staff. How we might better position ourselves that way and options for further defining our best clients were in my head all day after hearing this.

Ryan O’Donnell from Sellhack talked about strategies and tools for a sales process. As someone who’s always been on the creative services side of businesses, I’ve tried to stay as far away from ‘selling’ as possible. But, Ryan’s talk was fantastic and made me consider diving in headfirst to help out. His products Sellhack and Replyify help you build upon some LinkedIn strategies for finding ideal clients for your business, contacting them, and following up in an organized and efficient way. It never felt ‘sales-y’ at all, and he shared some great stories and examples of the things he actually uses day to day. We’ve always focused on passive marketing efforts, using speaking and our work relationships to find new potential clients. As we look to grow though, we’re looking at starting some more legitimate sales and content marketing efforts.

Overall, I had a great time at Flight and look forward to see what next year brings.

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Sharing What We’ve Learned

We try to give back to the web community and help others learn (as well as enriching our own skills) in a variety of ways: speaking and attending events, sponsoring things we want to see more of, and trying to participate on social media and in local community discussions. One thing we haven’t haven’t been able to do is mentoring.

We still haven’t really invested in mentoring, but we had the opportunity last week to take a baby step and worked with some new developers on some job shadowing.
Our guests came to us via Akron Women in Tech’s new Code Epic. This is a fantastic program; taking the idea of code schools and bootcamps and making it available to people who can’t afford to quit their day jobs and/or pay the steep tuition.

The developers we worked with had enough experience that we could dive right in and start walking them through our daily routines. We talked through a morning standup meeting, and then went into detail about one of the projects we’re currently working on.

All of us share an overlap of interest/skill in front-end development, so we talked through the tools/projects/frameworks we’re using, and why we made the technology choices we did.

One very interesting exercise was to look at our list of technology involved with the project. We talked through everything, and then went back and added markers by the tools that we knew prior to 2 or 3 years ago. We also made other marks to signify which technology this project is using that didn’t even exist 2 or 3 years ago. The underlying message here was that learning how to learn efficiently, the fundamentals of development, and making informed choices is easily more important than simply trying to master any specific language or environment.

After that we talked through a small feature we need to add, and discussed the pros/cons of different ways we could tackle that problem.

We wrapped up by trying to answer any questions the Code Epic grads had, and we also talked a bit about the pluses and minuses of various work arrangements: consulting or agencies, large or small, in house/product, freelance, etc.

Overall we had a great time. It was really refreshing to talk to some new developers, and learn from them as we shared a bit about what we do and what we’ve learned.

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Talking Personas and Empathy Mapping with UX Akron

I had the great opportunity last week to give a short presentation at UX Akron, and lead a small workshop on personas and empathy mapping.

A persona is simply a fictional character (or set of them) your team creates to serve as a snapshot of your audience. The idea is to take things like demographics, goals, wants and needs and give them a relatable human presence. It’s much easier for us to be empathetic when we’re discussing ‘someone’ rather than just ‘our users’ or some other more abstract reference.

Empathy mapping is an exercise used to get in the mindset of your users, helping you to think and act like they would. You take one of your target users, and divide up a sheet into quadrants: thinking, feeling, seeing, and doing. You brainstorm different ideas with sticky notes for each section to help build a snapshot of this user at this point in time.

Our goal was to learn a bit about personas, and then look at personas that have been created for the UX Akron group. We used empathy mapping to understand the thoughts and motivations each of those personas was experiencing as they were thinking “I’m considering going to a UX meetup”. We looked at our results and it led to some quick ideas on how the group is missing marketing opportunities, or might structure its messaging to better appeal to certain groups.

Overall it was a great night with a diverse group. I look forward to attending as a regular member, and hopefully speaking again in the future.

If you’re looking to learn more about a current design topic, let us know at info@coffeeandcode.com We’re booking speaking and workshop engagements now for Fall and Winter 2016.

Photos credit UX Akron & WOCinTech