Earlier this week I was lucky enough to meet Andy Budd, MD of Clearleft – and a thoroughly friendly, helpful bloke he is, I might add. We chatted about Andy’s passions – his company, the community, education and jetting off around the world to absorb the culture of as many countries as possible!
Not wanting to be rude, but there are lots of design and UX agencies out there. What makes Clearleft different from the rest?
“Well, our fifth birthday is coming up, so we’re still a relatively young company. However myself, Jeremy Keith and Richard Rutter who founded Clearleft were all reasonably well known in the industry. We’d written books, spoken at conferences and had fairly popular blogs. As such we started with a strong background.
We all had a passion for good quality front-end development, but no matter how well a site is built, if it’s not meeting customer’s needs then the effort is wasted. The key is to improve the usefulness of websites. I come from a user background. I saw the trend in the US on usability, information architecture and user experience back in 2000/2001. At that stage in the UK the focus was on just getting content online, people weren’t really thinking about the end user, so the idea of usability testing intrigued me. I started focusing on asking questions like ‘can people actually use the site and find the information they’re looking for? How can usability testing be integrated into the design process?’ So when we started we were one of the first dedicated UX companies in the UK.
No-one really knew the term in those days, so we spent a lot of time educating clients and the community. We’re not only one of the first proponents of UX but we also have lots of experience! Some other usability companies come from an academic background whereas we’re pragmatic, which feeds into our idea of conducting user testing in coffee shops or other accessible places rather than labs.
We also have a heritage. We’re a small team of between 12 and 14 people – this is deliberate so we maintain quality. We only hire the best people – everyone on the team has 10+ years of experience, and we empower them to make decisions, we trust everyone on the team implicitly and know they’ll do a good job. We’re obsessed with quality which does limit our size as we wouldn’t be able to control our output so well if we had a larger team. We believe in doing a job well, rather than quickly or cheaply.
Finally, we really engage deeply with the community. I travel the world speaking at events, so thought leadership and the idea of setting the agenda are key. We’ve published quite a few books, the latest of which is ‘Undercover User Experience’, about Guerilla UX techniques. The fact we have quite a high profile works in our favour as I’m sure there are plenty of people out there doing something similar, but we do lots of training, conferences, outreach and education which ensures we’re engaged with the community. I feel very lucky – I’m doing something I love and I want to give something back, which is why I want the industry to grow and improve. That’s what motivates us as a company. Clearleft was recently named .Net magazine agency of the year as well as being listed in Wired magazine’s top 100 digital influencers, so our efforts are being recognised – which is great to see!”
You mention something called Skillswap on your website. What is it?
“Back in 2001/2002 I came across the BNM list (Brighton New Media mailing list) which was a local forum for designers and developers talking about what’s important to them. They all seemed to be very open and keen to help each other and that’s what I’ve found ever since – people in the industry love to share and help others. The BNM gave me an idea – if they’re keen to help others, would they be keen to actually teach others?
Every 4-6 weeks we hold an event where 1 or 2 people talk about something that interests them, whether it’s an introduction to flash, or high-level object oriented PHP and everything in between. It’s a small, local event and we were one of the first community meet-ups in the UK. There are lots of similar events around the country now, but when we first started it was all pretty new. It’s a real win-win situation – you give up your time to talk to others about what you know and then you get the time back when you find someone else giving a talk about a topic you want to learn about. So it’s a skill swap! It was the first experience I had of public speaking and lead to me speaking at South by Southwest, so it has the potential to be real springboard. It’s also where the idea of dConstruct came from. We started off with 100 people in 2005 and now get 750 people and sell out each year. We really want to keep it the size it is to make sure it stays personal.”
I’ve heard you love to travel – what’s the most interesting place (or places) you’ve visited?
“I did my degree in aeronautical engineering with the vague idea I wanted to be a pilot – just so I could travel. The degree wasn’t right for me though, so I decided to go backpacking! I was a diving instructor so would work in one place for about 6 months and then move on. I visited some amazing places in South East Asia, like Thailand and Indonesia. I went diving on active underwater volcano’s and with schools of 100 hammerhead sharks – I really had some amazing experiences over a six year period.
It was while I was away that I discovered the web. Before that I used to stay in touch with people by leaving cards behind hostel receptions! Someone introduced me to the web and hotmail – plus I met lots of people who were working on the web. I met someone who had started a web diary (this was about 95/96) and it really sparked my interest.
I still do a lot of conference speaking, partly because I love to visit new places – I can’t tear around the world like I used to when I had no responsibilities, but at least the speaking satisfies some of the wanderlust!
Las Vegas is both fascinating and grotesque. It’s great if you’re into Ethnography (the study of human society and culture) – watching people pouring their kids college fund into the slot machine is fascinating, in a voyeuristic way.
Another place I’ve been to recently is Tokyo. I spoke there last year at a 3 day conference called Web Directions East run by my friend John Allsop. We were treated like honoured guests throughout the whole trip – we were taken to crazy restaurants where they ate delicacies like cow’s uterus! As a vegetarian that in particular didn’t appeal… but they were so kind, fantastic hosts and really appreciated us being there. All the sessions were translated live and everyone came up to speak to me afterwards, they are so passionate to learn, just like the UK was 5/6 years ago.
For a geek, going to Japan is a fantastic experience. It’s this really fun, crazy, intense, Blade Runner style city so it was great to totally immerse myself in it. We even visited Kyoto, the old capital of Japan, which was totally different again – beautiful temples and monasteries and we stayed in a Ryokan (traditional Japanese Inn). The whole experience in Japan was awesome.”
I read your post on the lack of good web design courses in the UK – it’s obvious you’re very passionate on this subject!
“Yeah! There are plenty of training opportunities for web designers, but the problem is the quality. Technology gets out of date so quickly, yet many of the tutors aren’t always the right people to be putting the courses together. They’re either academics who are detached from the industry, or their knowledge is so out of date it’s irrelevant.
We run an internship at Clearleft and our interns often tell us they know more than their lecturer. At 19, you’re told you have to go to college to be a successful designer, but you don’t learn what you need to know. Students then tend to either drop out or feel like they wasted 3 years of their life learning something they can’t use. It’s endemic of a larger problem – lots of people think web design is technology based, or tool based. Students get told they have to use Dreamweaver, but it’s just not true.
To really learn web design you need a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of design, like typography, colour, how to design to create meaning, plus learning about human psychology and behaviour so you can design to satisfy those human desires. However lots of people focus on tools because it’s easy. The result is a lot of under skilled people finding it difficult to get work. We’re at risk of creating an underclass of low paid designers. There’s almost a glass ceiling now. Students are often not even being taught the business side of web design, which would really help them join or start their own business.
I thought these problems were endemic of all degrees, but it’s not the case. I saw some work by product design graduates and they’d created sophisticated, promotional material, thought of pricing, the whole business strategy. If 21 year old product design grads can think like that then web design grads can too.
My friend runs the Interaction MFA at the SVA – the School of Visual Arts – in New York. She gets the top people in the industry to give lectures – and this is what needs to be done to teach web design. We need staff who are involved in the industry now. It needs a forward thinking university and 1 very well-respected designer to put together a programme and kick off some real learning.”
At UX London you’re presenting a workshop on Guerilla Usability Testing – it sounds like a quick and dirty option! Is it?
“Ah yes – well we created an application called Silverback because we basically wanted to democratise usability testing. Usability Testing is a tool and needs to be easy to use. Developers test as they go, and we think it should be easy to do the same in web design, for example:
- Design
- Test
- Does it work?
- If no – find out why and go back and change it!
It’s $50 to buy Silverback and it’s used by NASA, Yahoo, Apple and the Obama campaign sites, although it’s only Mac based at the moment. Guerilla Usability Testing means you can test in your local coffee shop – even if you only test on 3 people, that knowledge is better than nothing. Usability testing is not about opinion, it’s about behaviour. Opinion is subjective – whereas I want to know what people actually do.
In general, the minimum number of people you need are 5 test subjects – this will give you about 80% of the easy to spot usability problems. However, the variation could be 50-90%, so to get close to 99% of issues you need to test between 20 and 30 people. However, I always maintain that it’s better to test 5 people and find most of the problems with your site than not at all. The trick is to test early and test often!
We run the equivalent of Pair Programming at Clearleft. Pair Programming is where you have one person programming and another watching and discussing, commenting and inputting ideas. We find this is a very beneficial for design – the job gets done quicker and it’s more likely problems will be identified. It tends to happen more in the early stages than in production, but we find it can be a very economical practice as tasks can take half the time.”
Thanks Andy, it was great to meet you!
