The power of designing in a foreign language.

We recently began a design project with a company based in Saudi Arabia.  The open innovation community is going to be in Arabic, so we decided to design it all in Arabic and fill it in with Arabic filler text.

What happened next was fascinating.

 Because our brains were not registering the words, we looked at the first round of designs through an entirely different lens. Instead of copy and buttons and calls to actions, we saw the designs only by colors, shapes, icons and images.

Our early designs would require some explaining to anyone we showed them to, but after some time and fiddling, we could show someone the design in Arabic and they could navigate it. They could explain what they thought was going on and it was right. They could pick out where they should add comments, what the various galleries of content being presented.

I think if we had done this same process in English or even Lorem Ipsum, we would have relied on the text too heavily. When we were forced to use basic icons, shapes, colors and visual queues as the only means of communication, and our awesome partners at Young & Hungry we were forced to simplify.

I think even when we have English community sites to design, we might start the process with Arabic, or Chinese or some other language with different characters to define a more pure and usable UX before we start adding copy.

Try it sometime.

Be lazy to build smarter.

Today we met for a brainstorm about how to increase conversions on our off the shelf tool.

We identified a few potential problems that might be causing the low conversion rate. All the usual suspects were on the list including weak or confusing calls to action, confusing pricing and too many steps to sign up.

We began thinking of all the ways we could fix each of these issues and soon had 10-20 ideas we were confident would help.

Next, we tried something different. Instead of prioritizing each of these ideas by its potential benefit vs. resource investment, we held a second brainstorm around each of the ideas we had outlined. We came up with ideas about how we could learn whether or not any given idea would make a positive impact on conversion rate with the minimum amount of work possible.  How could we learn the laziest way possible.

Soon we had creative ideas for how we could turn a several day development project into a simple test on our site that may not be the ideal user experience, but would answer the question of whether or not we should invest time down the road.

Next time your in a brainstorm or prioritizing what to work on next, demand that your team be as lazy as possible. With the right guardrails seeing your product through the lens of laziness can spark amazing ideas for testing complex solutions in really easy ways.

Go forth and be lazy!