With Google’s new update to the search algorithm (Hummingbird) and changes coming to the way people perform searches, it’s important for all of us in search, content and all things digital to have a paradigm for thinking about the way people look for information.
We’ve used a lot of fun metaphors in usability (pogo-sticking, the scent of information) and I find it particularly helpful to use metaphors that people can remember and internalize. In particular, people need to know how to think about search from a use case scenario (how the customer actually behaves), because otherwise, their digital roadmaps take them down the wrong road (similar to map apps that get you lost—they shall remain nameless in this blog, but you know who I mean).
That’s why I’ve picked four major types of searchers and named that after the way us former city-dwellers used to live. Inspired by the popular paelo diets, this is the paleo-search framework for thinking about how people look for content. Thinking about these four archetypes use case scenarios should help you as you plot information architecture, labeling of buttons, content and interactivity.
People’s Search for Information is About Their Urgency
Hunter: This person is in specific need of information and wants to find it quickly. Your hunter is looking for a location, a price or the lyrics to a particular song. If she can’t find what she’s looking for, she’ll keep looking for it, with laser-like focus.
Gatherer: This person is gathering information and might even be comparing sites, one to the other. Not convinced that her search terms are correct, she may even be willing to be swayed by a related link. She’s the type of person who you offer additional content to, and try to persuade with a chatty, back and forth conversation that takes place over multiple pieces of content.
Farmer: A farmer is a type of gatherer who is looking for information that he or she can use for later. So, he may use Read Later Apps like Pocket or Instapaper to indulge in your content while waiting in line or commuting. That’s why it’s so important for your content to be future-ready and portable, so that people can ingest it wherever and whenever they are.
Conqueror: This person needs information NOW! Where’s the nearest gas station because I’m running out of gas? What’s that restaurant’s phone number so I can make a reservation? How many U.S. Presidents have there been because I want to win this bet? Your Conqueror is going to use voice-activated search (like Google by Voice) and results right on the search engine’s page (the new infamous QA that Hummingbird seems to have ushered in). He’s not interested in being swayed by keyword suggestions or how life is going to change if he clicks on that related link.
I’ve found thinking about searchers using this framework can really help you build better use case scenarios. I also think that by thinking about how hungry people are for information in the moment can help you build better content.
What do you think?
via Online it ALL Matters http://onlineitallmatters.blogspot.com/2013/10/how-people-search-web-paleo-search.html
In today’s social climate, it is more important than ever to create a recognizable brand for your store. Vital to that effort is building a relationship between your store and your customers that exceeds the usual search-click-buy interaction.
Most storeowners think about two things: traffic (how to get more targeted visitors to their websites), and conversion (how to turn those visitors into buyers). Few realize that there is a critical third piece to the puzzle: community engagement. This means connecting with your customers by adding value to your marketplace beyond just listing products for sale. By interacting with your customer outside of the sales process, you create more opportunities to build familiarity and trust for your brand.
People prefer to purchase from companies they know and trust. When you establish yourself as more than just another company peddling a product, you give consumers more reason to purchase from you, rather than your faceless competitors. This is the basic principle behind ecommerce branding.
So what is branding, exactly? Is it a color scheme, a logo, a sound? It is more than the sum of its parts. It is the feeling your customers associate with your store. This feeling is shaped by all the interactions they have with any facet of your business.
Videos on Informational Pages
Some of the most commonly overlooked opportunities for branding on an ecommerce store are on the pages that provide additional company information, such as your privacy policy, shipping information, contact, and about us pages. Believe it or not, people read these. By doing so, they give you the chance to build and shape your relationship with them. It is a perfect opportunity for some face time via a video explaining the details on each of those pages. This has the added benefit of increasing your store’s conversion rate. These videos — particularly the shipping information and FAQ videos —can also be placed on your individual product pages, which will increase your conversion rate all the more. This works best on a template that allows tabbed product details.
One of the best ways to build brand recognition within a market is to offer something beyond products to your customers. This could be solving a problem your customer has, via an educational guide about a product line, a how-to video, a product bundle, or a list of resources.
I recently experienced this strategy as a consumer. I was shopping for a new video microphone. I did my research and picked the one I wanted. As I compared prices online, I found the product for roughly the same price on several different sites. One site grabbed my attention, however, and it had nothing to do with the price. The site, The Podcaster's Studio, is not a store. It's an informational hub about audio and electronics. It contains an educational video on how to use the mic and how to pair it with complementary products — which it listed.
I ended up purchasing the products through the site's affiliate links because it added the most value to my shopping experience. When I need another piece of electronic equipment, I’ll check that site first and likely buy from its recommended products — i.e., affiliate links — because I trust its expertise. By offering more than just a "search-click-buy" experience, the site branded itself to me as a helpful source for making purchasing decisions about audio and video equipment.
This educational video strategy should be applied to all of your best selling products in our ecommerce store. Video on product pages typically increases conversion rates. Simple how-to videos are easy to create. A similar option is a how-to-choose video, as seen in the example below. This is a good choice if you have multiple products in a category. It allows you to explain the differences and features of each item in more detail than you could in a written description.
Taking advantage of all available opportunities to connect with your customers via video allows you to become more than just another faceless company. This leads to more satisfied customers and more repeat business. It builds your brand.
“We perceive the world—both physical and digital—in spatialterms.”
Browsing the Web. Surfing the Net. Navigating a Web site. Traversing a hierarchy. Going back. Scrolling up and down. Returning home. We’ve seen such metaphors throughout our history of using computers to interact with information. Haphazard though they may seem be, these metaphors highlight a universal reality of human psychology: we perceive the world—both physical and digital—in spatial terms. As George A. Miller [1] observed in 1968:
“Mankind evolved in a world of space and time. Our memories evolved to record events that transpire in space and time. Modern attempts to externalise and enlarge that memory should not, and probably need not, neglect its spatiotemporal dimensions.”
Out with the Old, in with the Older
“Despite mankind’s age-old proclivity for perceiving things in the context of space and time, the majority of today’s Web experiences resemble a relatively recent invention: the book.”
Miller’s insight is as important today as when he wrote those words. However, despite mankind’s age-old proclivity for perceiving things in the context of space and time, the majority of today’s Web experiences resemble a relatively recent invention: the book. Books comprise the following:
pages of information that are organized into sections
a table of contents that lists those sections
an index of all the concepts an author has mentioned in the book
The architecture of most Web sites follows this same pattern:
pages of information that are organized into sections
a navigation bar that lists those sections
tag clouds or keywords for all the concepts the site mentions
This similarity is understandable. As content shifted from print to digital in the early days of the Web, we transferred our approaches from the old medium to the new one. However, while this may have been expedient at the time, the effectiveness of the book metaphor has diminished, and this metaphor is now holding us back.
The Medium Is the Message
“The time has come to adopt a more appropriate metaphor for interacting with information, one that acknowledges the spatial reality of human psychology.”
At this point, the skeptic in you might be thinking, “What difference does it make whether we think of Web sites as being book-like or spatial—just let them be Web sites.” While it’s true that Web sites certainly have an identity of their own, it’s impossible to consider them apart from the cognitive model that we use to understand them. In their influential bookMetaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson convey the important role that conceptual metaphors play in our everyday lives: [2]
“Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.”
The time has come to adopt a more appropriate metaphor for interacting with information, one that acknowledges the spatial reality of human psychology. I believe that we have such a metaphor in information wayfinding—a concept that depicts interacting with digital information as analogous to navigating a physical environment.
Wayfinding as Spatial Problem Solving
“Wayfinding has much in common with the way we know people interact with information.”
Kevin Lynch coined the term wayfinding in his 1960 book, The Image of the City. [3] Lynch recognized that a person’s ability to navigate a city relates closely to how spatially oriented that person is within the city. He quantified a city’s navigability according to its imagability—that is, the likelihood of its evoking strong images in observers, and therefore, enhancing their sense of orientation.
Architect and environmental psychologist Romedi Passini further developed the concept of wayfinding in the 1970s and 1980s. [4] Defining the term simply as “spatial problem solving,” Passini identified three interrelated cognitive processes that wayfinding requires:
Developing a decision plan. A person forms as precise a plan of action as possible based on his goal. For example, wanting to visit the British Museum would involve numerous intermediate decisions such as finding the nearest tube station, determining which tube line to take, finding the correct platform, and so on.
Executing a decision from the plan. Once the person has made a decision, he must execute it at the right place and time.
Processing environmental information. To execute a decision correctly, however, the person must notice and comprehend relevant information from the environment. In addition, changes in the environment—a closed tube station, for instance—frequently prompt changes to the decision plan.
Wayfinding has much in common with the way we know people interact with information. In particular, Marcia Bates’s berrypicking model of information seeking [5] portrays a process where—to paraphrase Peter Morville [6]—what you find along the way changes what you seek. Likewise, Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card’s information foraging theory [7] compares information seeking to rummaging for food in the forest, where users follow information scent as they sniff their way onward. Both models present information seeking in terms of spatial problem solving.
The Future of Information Architecture
“Information architecture is the architecture of information spaces.”—Andrea Resmini at World IA Day 2013
“If we are to build modern information environments that are coherent—that is, which are imageable and facilitate orientation—we must put the page metaphor to rest and embrace the spatial nature of information wayfinding….”
Today, we find ourselves in a world where print has gone electronic, we distribute our computing across numerous devices, and the digital and the physical have become intertwingled. If we are to build modern information environments that are coherent—that is, which are imageable and facilitate orientation—we must put the page metaphor to rest and embrace the spatial nature of information wayfinding that is so ingrained in the human psyche.
You may have noted that this is only “Information Wayfinding, Part 1.” Parts 2 and 3 will appear here on UXmatters in the coming months. In Part 2, I plan to outline four elements that make up every information environment and four strategies that people use to find their way through these environments. Then, in Part 3, I’ll look at specific design principles for crafting effective information wayfinding experiences.
[1] Miller, G. A. “Psychology and Information.” ACM SIGDOC, Volume 17, Issue 3, August 1993. Reprint.
[2] Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.
[3] Lynch, Kevin. The Image and the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960.
[4] Arthur, Paul, and Romedi Passini. Wayfinding: People, Signs, and Architecture. Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1992.
[5] Bates, Marcia J. “The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface.” Online Information Review, Volume 13, Issue 5, 1989.
[6] Morville, Peter, and Jeff Callender. Search Patterns: Design for Discovery. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2009.
[7] Pirolli, Peter L.T. Information Foraging Theory: Adaptive Interaction with Information. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Well hello there, 2013. It’s taken us a few weeks to settle into you (if we still used checks, this’d be about the time we’d stop writing “2012” on them). Now that we have, we like what we see: people taking risks, taking charge, and taking a stand. Passionate conversations about not just which tools to use, but why our work matters. A community coming together to make sense of a web that’s changing faster than we can refresh our tiny screens.
But before we barrel into the future, we’d like to take a moment to reflect. So we asked some of A List Apart’s friendly authors and readers to share the lessons they learned last year, and how those lessons can help us all work—and live—better in 2013.
Solving information gluttony
In 2012, I left Seattle and the company I founded to join Twitter and help solve the most serious issue in the world that I might be qualified to solve: information gluttony.
We used to live in a world where we didn’t have access to enough information to keep us properly informed; now our problem is the opposite: there is so much signal competing for our attention that we spend entire days swimming through it in search of what’s actually important in our lives.
The most essential service of the next decade will be the one that keeps you the best informed in the least amount of time. There’s more to life than staring at screens all day. —Mike Davidson, VP of design, Twitter, and founder, Newsvine
Successful design takes organizational change
In 2012, I worked with organizations of all sizes and stages—from a couple of people just starting out to enormous, established, complex operations of thousands. The resulting designs ranged from gentle evolution to revolution.
Changing the design of an interactive system changes the organization behind it. This year was full of striking examples. The more we can anticipate this—by asking questions, talking openly, and planning for change—the more successful the outcome. I think we all know this, but it can be easier to avoid dealing with it and “just focus on the design.”
Organizations are just groups of people with goals, rules, and customs. Designers are just people with certain skills. But because of insecurity on both sides, differences trigger defense mechanisms. We resort to jargon. All the hoo-ha around “design thinking” is just a distraction. Design is a business activity. It goes well when designers and businesses work together to solve a real problem with good information and clear goals. The hard part is confronting all the specific mundane things that interfere. So, I guess that’s the goal for 2013: getting over ourselves and looking deeper at what makes a successful design solution. —Erika Hall, co-founder and director of strategy, Mule Design
Positive change takes time
I was reminded of our responsibility to leave the world in better shape than we found it and that change always takes time. These lessons were reinforced as I researched TV browsers and worked on responsive images.
TVs don’t support the TV media type because if they did, it would break the 99 percent of the web that uses “screen.” This reminds me of the vendor prefix debacle. When we cut corners on projects, we don’t realize the long-term impact it has on the web. When it comes to responsive images, progress is measured in weeks of effort and collaboration. New standards take time and persistence.
Outside of technology, I attended my first PTA meeting. I was inspired by the presidential election. And I ended the year horrified by the tragedy at Newtown and determined to help prevent it from happening again.
In both the web and in our greater community, I see people despair that change doesn’t happen more quickly. That we can’t make the world better overnight. But if this year has taught me anything, it is that we can’t ignore the hard work that needs to be done. And that we all must take up the charge to make the world better than it we found it—both on the web and in our society. —Jason Grigsby, co-founder, Cloud Four
Experimentation over assumption
For me 2012 was a year of experimentation. I learned that the more certain you are about something, or the longer you’ve been doing things one way, the more important it is to abandon your assumptions and try the complete opposite. The more embedded your assumptions are, the less you notice them—so this is not easy.
In 2013 I’d like to figure out how to help people using WordPress as a development platform, find ways to make blogging more social and connected, and adapt WordPress to be touch-native. —Matt Mullenweg, founder, Automattic and WordPress
Life shapes work
2012 was a year of difficult lessons for me. Since 2008, I’d been making business decisions based on a vision I’d invested in heavily, both emotionally and materially. Saying goodbye to that vision meant making tremendous changes, and that wasn’t easy to do. (One of my employees gave me a Christmas card that opened with “2012: The Year That Sucked.”)
During those long months, I did a lot of thinking about how my work has shaped my life over the past four years. And at some point, I realized that the true opportunity here, in fact, is to figure out to let my life shape my work. So in 2013, I want to help people understand how their own life experiences—both professionally and personally—can inform and improve their work. And if this sounds like a change in direction for me, it’s not. At its core, content strategy is about taking stock, setting goals, storytelling, wayfinding, and, ultimately, imparting real change. (Any good content strategist will tell you that, at some point, a client has suggested they change their title to “content therapist.”)
Being able to articulate a point of view based on real-world experience is so critically important. It can change your work, your career, and the industry as a whole. Just ask the people whose words appear in this and every ALA issue. —Kristina Halvorson, president, Brain Traffic
In it together
No matter how hard we work, none of us can say “I did it without help.” Everything that is foundational for us as web professionals, from code to design to content to mobile to apps to revenue models (it’s an extensive list, really), we owe to someone who came before us. As I look back on 2012, my biggest takeaway is the tremendous debt of gratitude I have to all of you.
In 2013, my hope is that this spirit of gratitude becomes pervasive. It is my hope that understanding how all our work is connected will inspire us to dream bigger, conquer greater challenges, discard our fears, and remember to criticize and hold each other accountable when we stray. It doesn’t matter if you are my competitor; it doesn’t matter if you agree with me. What matters is that if you are making the web (and therefore the world) a better place, I’ve got your back. Thanks for having mine all these years. —Leslie Camacho, entrepreneur, former CEO of EllisLab
Design systems, not screens
More than half of U.S. laptop owners now also own a smartphone, and nearly a quarter of them own a tablet too (source). And, of course, with the holiday season past us, the number of users who own a device in all three categories will jump higher still. Users move between devices so fluidly, and in patterns that we often can’t predict. Now apps are starting to connect to other devices to control, synchronize or extend an experience.
I think we’re going to see more cross-channel design thinking in 2013 to address simultaneous multi-device usage, and frequent device hopping in a single workflow. Continuity between platforms will be important, but we don’t need to make the experience the same between devices. The user experience will morph with each context. We’ll need to design systems, not screens, to solve cross-channel experience design problems. —Aarron Walter, director of user experience at MailChimp
Confidence versus humility
The biggest thing I learned last year is that the two most important characteristics of a good designer are ones that, at first, appear to contradict one another.
On the one extreme, designers need to be confident in the solutions we come up with for the problems we’re solving. We need to keep digging into the theory of design and its related disciplines, and we need to hone our craft constantly. Solid theory and excellent technique need to become so ingrained that they simply become second nature—cornerstones of everything we design.
But equally important, we need to be open to the possibility that some of our decisions might be wrong. In fact, we need to welcome it. We should hang on to a measure of ego-less self-doubt every time we present a new design to the world. Admitting our mistakes and making changes based on good critique do wonders to improve our designs and our craftsmanship. That’s why user testing and thoughtful peer reviews are so essential.
The phrase that has emerged to describe this combination of skills and attitude is “humble design,” and I like it. But an even better summary comes from John Lilly: “Design like you’re right; listen like you’re wrong.” That’s not a contradiction. It’s a recipe for success. —Rian van der Merwe, user experience designer
Connecting with clients
In 2011, I reported that “the best design connects people.”
In 2012, as I started my own design studio, I realized more and more how true that is. Starting out as a one-man shop after working for and with agencies for years, I fully anticipated that the majority of my work would be back in Photoshop. However, I’m finding a significant amount of my working hours this past year—48.73 percent to be exact (thanks Harvest!)—has been on the phone/Skype/in-person investing in conversations with clients I trust and who trust me. Great design comes from meaningful collaboration, reinforced by trust on both ends.
In order to create great design that connects people, it’s important to connect with great people who value great design. —Dan Mall, founder and design director, SuperFriendly
Reseting device expectations
One of the main things I’ve come away from 2012 with is the understanding that people don’t use devices the way we expect them to.
In 2011 I met Ludwick Marishane, a 20-year-old student from South Africa. He’d invented a gel called DryBath that works without water. Because he didn’t have a computer, he typed his entire 8,000-word business plan on his Nokia 6234 cell phone.
People use whatever devices they have access to. Ofcom found that 20 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds visit websites on a game console. It seems like a lot. But it’s easy to forget that for some, a game console may be the only device they have access to that has a browser.
The console browsing experience improved considerably over 2012, which should lead to more people browsing on TVs—so the living room environment is a context we need to be thinking about a lot more in 2013. —Anna Debenham, freelance front-end developer
Getting over ourselves
More than anything, I’d say we were able to prove some things we should have already known in 2012. Halfway into the year, we hired a full-time SEO. Well, we hired a digital strategist, because everyone knows web shops and SEO consultants don’t mix.
We should have done this a long time ago. We’ve known for a while that we’ve been too focused on launch, but we were too caught up in all the usual self assurances to dedicate someone on the team to doing something different. Honestly, I can’t think of another event in our recent history that’s had such a positive impact on our business.
This coming year, I’m hoping to get rid of any remaining stereotypes and continue to reevaluate what we do. I think our industry tends to look down on anything other than the beautiful, repeatable mechanics of our craft. In some ways, it limits our business relevancy.
It took us a little while (sixteen years) to get over ourselves long enough to try something new. I’m hoping we’re able to move a little faster next time. —Aaron Mentele, partner, Electric Pulp
Making, not just consuming
Don’t tell me you haven’t woken from a nap or a night of blissful slumber to find your [insert favorite mobile device here] wedged in your hand. Life online is so wonderfully seductive that we tend to focus so intently on the light-emitting screens of various sizes, we forget about how much easier it can be to solve problems when our brain is engaged doing something else. And, by “me” and “you,” what I really mean is me.
When I was working at Flickr, I ran four miles three times a week. We were working through some pretty gnarly adventures: launching internationally in multiple languages and jurisdictions (“think, Flickr thinks!”), introducing video (“Keep Flickr still!”). Running kept me (mostly) sane. I found that when I was away from everything, I could work through problems more easily.
What I’d forgotten over the last few years is that I’m happiest when I’m making things with my hands. In 2012, I took a six-week online painting course and participated in a lino block printing bee. That time when I’m doing something with my hands has become that four miles three times a week. My brain can noodle through problems in ways that staring at a blank document or empty spreadsheet can’t.
In 2013 I’d like to spend less time online consuming and more time offline creating. Or rather, consume more wisely. I need to buff up my making skills for the impending zombie apocalypse. —Heather Champ, Findery
Diversity is a feature
The conversations within our community this past year have reminded me just how much designing for the web has completely and irreversibly changed since I started working in this field. Early on, our practices focused on normalizing CSS rendering and JavaScript logic across five or ten popular browsers, so that our designs looked and behaved in one “same,” expected way. Essentially, we were making print designs navigable on a computer. Considering the number of browsers relevant to us today, it’s easy to look back on those days as a simpler time in our field, but the truth is, that work was very difficult—perhaps even impossible. Our jobs weren’t simpler then, but our focus has since shifted in an important way.
Today, we design for a medium that is completely its own. We’ve realized that diversity is a feature, not a bug; we’ve acknowledged that delivering an identical user experience to everyone is a missed opportunity. We’re moving from an age of normalization to an age of contextualization, where developing websites that cater to browsers’ diverse features, constraints, sensors, and input modes makes for a subtly different, and more appropriate, experience for each person.
Supporting all users today demands a new definition of “support” itself: the successful delivery of essential content and functionality to a device. Beyond that, we should embrace that things will rarely be the same. —Scott Jehl, designer/developer, Filament Group
Being honest
This year I gave a talk called “True Story,” where I told everyone to stop bullshitting and tell simple, honest stories.
Three days before my talk, I realized I was bullshitting. It didn’t sound like me. I was trying to impress people, not help them. I spent three days and nights rewriting my talk. I didn’t stop until I wrote something that made me cry. It wasn’t perfect, but it felt right.
As a content strategist/writer for hire, a big part of my job is keeping companies—and myself—honest. I’ll be working on that in 2013. —Tiffani Jones Brown, content strategist at Pinterest
Living with urgency
This year was one of many realizations and additions to my toolkit as a designer and leader. A few that I came back to repeatedly over the year are:
Trust and vulnerability are a prerequisite for creativity within a team
When creating as a group, those relationships are more important than talent, ideas or process
That fine line between too much self-editing and not throwing out enough concepts is a horizon to always keep an eye on
But bar none, the most important lesson I learned was to live life with urgency. Not in a stressful, frantic sense, but that things you may or may not be focused on—relationships, projects, ideas, etc.—can come to an end when you least expect them to. Living with with anything less than laser-sharp focus and purposeful haste is not enough. 2013 is going to be a year of living and creating with urgency. —Hannah Donovan, co-founder/design director, This Is My Jam
Making better use of better tools
I got a lot of milage out of the phrase “this gig wouldn’t be any fun if it were easy” this year.
When I was in my early twenties and just learning carpentry, all of my tools were terrible. My hammer bent nails, none of my saws ever cut in a straight line, and my tape measure always managed to be off by just a little bit once everything was said and done.
Let’s be honest: responsive web design isn’t easy when you’re just getting started with it. It calls for some major changes in both thinking and process. You start out clumsy at first, like with any new tool; maybe you even find yourself cursing it out from time to time. Thing is, once you’ve struggled through it and you stand back to admire what you’ve built: yeah, maybe you can see a couple of seams and maybe you could have done a few things better, but you’ll know those mistakes before they happen next time. When we move on to the next job our tools seem a little lighter, sharper, and more accurate than they did on the last one, because we got better with them.
This year we all started getting the hang of an incredible new tool. Next year we’ll get even better with it.
We’ll probably still do a fair amount of cursing, though. —Mat Marquis, designer/developer, Filament Group, and technical editor, A List Apart
Facing your fears
2012 was about fear. Throughout my career I’d convinced myself that I was not one of those people that spoke in public. And then I was dumb enough to go out and write a book. Part of that book was about convincing people to get over their fear. To avoid being a hypocrite I had to go out there and do the thing that I was most afraid of. And so I found myself onstage in front of a large audience.
I hadn’t slept the night before. I was terrified. My heart was racing. And I realized in that moment that I could either walk away or face that fear. So I let myself be scared. I acknowledged it was real. And that it had a right to exist. And I embraced it. And I went out and did the thing I was most afraid of in the world. And I did OK. And the next time I spoke in public I was still afraid, but a little less.
My hope for you in 2013 is that you ask yourself what fear is keeping you from accomplishing. What are you most afraid of? Stop waiting for courage to come. That comes after. —Mike Monteiro, co-founder and design director, Mule Design
