Crowdsourcing Your Graphic Design Needs

Recently, I've found myself leveraging crowdsourcing tools to meet some of my foundational graphic design needs. Specifically, I have created several (OK, three recently, four overall) contests on 99 Designs. My first foray with the site came about two years ago when I commissioned the logo for FoodFinder.net. Back in the spring, I took even more of a leap when I had some web development work done.

Just today, I awarded winners for two logo contests for upcoming projects. Since I've now done 4 contests, I figured I'd share some tips I've gleaned from working with the service. Also, I should mention that I also investigated using crowdSPRING, but I decided to stick with 99. The only reason was that I have always had good luck with 99, and didn't have a compelling reason to change.

Tips For Running A Design Contest

• Design Contests are a Lot of Work: Keep this in mind, the process can be draining. Make sure you don't have too much going on, as you really need to invest in providing ratings and thoughtful feedback. This last time, I had 2 going at one time, and based on the schedule of my day job, I struggled to keep up with feedback.
• Be Aware of the Timezone Difference: 99 Designs boasts a global community of designers, which is great because there are some really talented folks who don't live near you. Just be prepared for some time lags on revisions, and that not everybody's first language is English.
• Provide Feedback Liberally : You may notice the health indicator for your contest. This is driven by how much feedback you give. My first contest did fall out of healthy status early on due to my lack of textual feedback. Typically, I think a good ratio is about 35% - 40% of entries to feedback. Often times, a designer will submit 3 of 4 designs at a time, and I'll roll all of my thoughts into one comment. I've had good luck with that approach.
• Don't Discount a Designer Based on One Design: I've had many first entries that I didn't like at all, but if you're honest (and respectful) and the designer has enough direction, they will often come back with something you'll love.
• Be Specific, but Don't Micromanage: Designers crave direction and feedback, and it's great to see your ideas incorporated as an entry progresses. That said, the reason I'm doing a contest is because I need their skill and expertise. Many designers will do whatever you tell them to because they're trying to win a prize. It's better to say "I'm looking for a typeface that's a bit more professional" is better than "Can you try using Comic Sans 8pt italic".
• Be Respectful of People's Time: I don't ask designers for more than 1 revision unless I feel like it's a legitimate winner, and just needs a few more tweaks. Also, as soon as I know a design isn't what I'm looking for...I eliminate it
• When to Guarantee the Prize: There are several options you have when setting up a contest - one is to guarantee the prize. I am very willing to do this, as it will attract more designers. However, I typically wait until I see 1 or 2 entries that I'm sure I will be happy with. For me, this usually takes about 3 to 4 days. I also go with a blind contests...I think designers prefer not to have their ideas leveraged in other designs.

I guess that's it for now; I'll comment if I think of anything else. I do have to say the I was so happy with the results of my website redesign contest (which I was very skeptical about), that I've since worked with designer, that Jack Herbert directly on upcoming projects. He really immersed himself in the site and came up with ideas that I hadn't considered. I wouldn't have expected that kind of engagement from the crowdsource format.

Anyway, I'm a fan of crowdsourcing, but it's a bit of a process adjustment. Apart from being unpopular by content and design experts for devaluing their services, you're putting other types of constraints (e.g. timeline) on the project. That said, you'll never get the sheer volume of design hours for the money. For a small business owner/hobbyist, like myself, it's a great option. Have you tried it? What do you think?

A Complete 180 Approach

For the past 2 years, I've put a lot of time and effort into developing my little restaurant site, FoodFinder.net. This past weekend, I added another site to my portfolio. Unlike FF, which is completely custom built using the Microsoft stack of technologies, the new site, which is a wine guide called Wine Guidelines, goes against every motivation I've ever had when building sites.

For one...I won't be doing any building. I purchased the site in a Flippa auction for a couple hundred bucks. It really was an impulse buy. See, I just finished reading Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup (Amazon affiliate link), and a host of other resources on the topic of building a small software company. It has really altered my perspective from that of a developer (focusing on perfect architecture and pristine code) to that of a businessman (release the product as fast as you can, and refine as you go BTW...this only works for web-based products). I think this change in mindset has been slowly going on over the past five years or so.

So Why This Listing

Anyway, a few things attracted me to this particular listing.

• It's based on Wordpress: I've been more and more intrigued with WP as a website backbone, and wanted to dig in a bit.


• The content is automated: Using various Wordpress plugins, the site gathers content from various sources. I'm very curious to see if a site can run on autopilot and have any success.


• The topic is a hobby of mine: I'm actually a bit of a wine drinker (as are many of my friends). Plus, it ties in to a wine/food pairing algorithm I've been mulling for FoodFinder.net


• The cost to run and operate this site will be small: I've already got a hosting environment built up and ready to host that is a fixed expense. Other than the purchase cost, and a few hundred more bucks I'm going to throw into a new logo and custom theme. There shouldn't be any more cost.


• The BIN came with a ton of perks: Between the content and software that was included in the auction, it was pretty much a no-brainer

So What Now?

Unlike FF, which I have intentionally avoided loading up with ads so users would have a better experience, the new site is loaded with ads and affiliate links. My intention is to put in about a week or two of refining the content, tweaking the design, and doing some light marketing (link building, social media, word of mouth, etc), I intend to leave the site alone except for writing the occasional wine article. I have a new project in my sights, and will be getting that underway tomorrow, with the intention of launching early next year. Plus, I have a few FF enhancements I'll do on the side.

Stay tuned.

Follow Me

Friends and followers are the cornerstone of social media. In fact, I just began following my own blog, just so I don't feel too lonely (does that wind up being some kind of circular reference...bah dum chhhh). Anyway, the art of finding food to try is soliciting the advice of knowledgeable and trusted foodies, or at least people that you trust. FoodFinder's follower functionality allows you to do that very passively.

Following Foodies
When implementing relationships on FoodFinder, we went with following over friending. Friending typically opens up channels of communication and involves initiation and acceptance by the two parties. Following is simply a way to observe. As foodies use the site, they will inevitably run across users they've never met, but whose culinary taste are in line. Who better to observe than someone who has similar taste, but who also runs in different circles. The more foodies of this type that you identify, the easier it will be to find great new places and dishes to try.

Make sense? If so, log on and follow me.

Making a List, Checking it...

Now that we've qualified the foodies in our little community by calculating their reputation, we need to give them outlets so they can share their expertise with the world. In FoodFinder 2.0, foodies can easily create lists for restaurants and menu items. Not only that, but lists can be both positive and negative.

Making a List
So why lists? List are not a new concept. In fact, they're fairly common across sites of this ilk. That said, one of the things that we've always strove to do is give foodies a way to exert their influence with minimal investment. I strongly believe that there is a large community of knowledgeable restaurant experts who simply don't like to write. To tap into and channel this voice, we seek to provide ways for these users to participate, and add content without requiring an essay. That's why we've always had the "point and click" ratings for restaurant and menu items. Lists are easy to create, and even easier to add to. From just about anyplace you view a restaurant or menu item, you can build your lists.

Haven't created any lists yet...login, or create an account and give it a try.

A New Way to Rate

As I mentioned in the last post, when I created the second version of FoodFinder.net, one of the cornerstone pieces was the Reputation Engine. It affords an information seeker the ability to discern between a meaningful review (written by a foodie who is well-traveled and whose opinion is greatly respected) and a less meaningful review (written by someone with limited dining experience, a restaurant's owner, or somebody who otherwise has a bias). In the first version of FF, I saw this all the time...even more so because I allowed anonymous ratings. This issue, one of "Cit-Crit" vs. restaurant critics is often debated, and is a problem that I wanted to take a stab at.

Rating by Reputation
The overall ratings on FoodFinder are now calculated in a completely new way. First, anonymous ratings and reviews are gone. They still appear at the element level (i.e. menu item, comment card, or restaurant aspect), but they no longer figure into the calculation of a restaurant overall review. Instead, a rating for a restaurant is weighted by the reputation of the foodie. This is obvious when seeing the effect on the top restaurants page. For those of you who don't live in San Diego, believe me...this is a much more accurate list (although there's still room for improvement IMHO).

Based on the early success of this new approach to rating, I may expand it to include menu items, and the other restaurant aspects (food, service, and atmosphere). What do you think...am I on the right track?

Tales of a Restaurant Guide Upgrade

What's up foodies and technophiles...long time, no talk. Well, I'm just 2 short weeks removed from the re-launch of FoodFinder.net, and I'm really happy with the product. The new look and feel is great and there are some new features that work together to give a unique take on the ever-crowding restaurant guide space. Over the next few days or so, I'll do a quick walk-though of the new feature set and some lessons learned. For now...let's start with the basics.

The Foodie Reputation Engine
This feature came in a bit late, but lays the foundation for (what I think) is a pretty innovative idea; more on that in a sec. Plus, I got to satiate my algorithm-loving inner geek. Taking a page from Stack Overflow, I created a reputation engine. The goal was to mathematically qualify a the knowledge of a foodie based on level of participation, dining experience, and community recognition. I won't go into the boring (and super secret) details, but from a high level, it borrows concepts from SO, and Google's PageRank concept.

"Why should I care?" you ask. Now, when you read somebody's comment card, check out their ratings, or view one of their lists. More specifically, this approach attempts to solve the problem of user-reviews being less valuable due to lack of experience or potential bias...a point that is well articulated in the first question of this article.

Well, that's it for today. Next up, I'll tackle "Ratings by Reputation".

Space...My Current Frontier

More and more, I've found myself thinking about what makes a website usable. Now I'll come right out and say, I'm no UI expert and I'm a pretty below-average designer. I have worked with some talented UI folks and picked up a few principles along the way. Whether or not I use them correctly, I have no idea, but I do try to use them. Bear with me as I opine about my current perspective.

The more the interweb grows, the more important it is to give users meaningful content ASAP. Let's be honest...there's a lot of crap out there, and the crap isn't going away. As a web user with an extremely finite attention span, I want content now and I'm not going to give any more effort than I have to in order to get to it. Here's a real world example.

I've pretty much abandoned Myspace in favor of Facebook for a couple of reasons. On MySpace, I see:

• When I log in...I see ads, I see giant logos, I see a huge picture of me, I see how many people are in my network (a meaningless 9 digit number), and a whole bunch of other crap I'm not interested in.


• My profile is pretty locked down and I still get tons of spam. I don't want to look at your web cam or buy your pharmaceuticals


• Clutter. "Cool New Videos", "Profile of the Day", and tons of other garbage I have to wade through to get to what I care about.
  

Meanwhile, on Facebook I get:

• A tiny logo, unobtrusive but functional navigation, and most of the screen dedicated to the site content.


• Speaking of the content, I care about it. The micro-blogging of my friends is a great, low-impact touch-point. Because the content they post comes from people I know, it's mostly pre-screened. Sure, there's stuff I'm not interested in, but because I've got so much functional space, I can scan and dismiss in a matter of seconds. It takes very little work to get what I'm looking for.

Anyway, I've done a few major functionality releases on foodfinder.net lately...search revamp and add restaurant functionality to be exact, but I've also worked pretty hard to give my users more meaningful space. Specifically, I cut the logo size by about half, removed most of the ads (all but one), and got rid of some other filler/dead spacing. Particularly on the restaurant page, I've got much more substance above the fold.

I don't know if this will pay off or not, but I definitely feel a lot better about the user experience. Hopefully, it will translate to more users. What have I missed?

What do You Suck At?

In my humble opinion, this is an important questions that you need to keep asking yourself. My current day job is very political. I've actually been spoken to by my management for saying things like "we suck at this", or "we don't do X very well". Their response is typically..."don't say we suck--say we have opportunities". Don't get me wrong, I understand the need to stay positive (particularly in the management role that I'm in). However, if something needs to be changed, you need to create a sense of urgency to make that change. Otherwise, it will just fester waiting for somebody to take the "opportunity" to fix it. So what do I suck at (and when I say "I", I'm referring to foodfinder.net.

I SUCK as search. It's a strange thing to have to admit, because I have tons of experience with many different types of product search ranging from the travel industry to retail. Anyway, I really dropped the ball with FoodFinder, but luckily, I have a plan to rectify this.

Lets take a look at how search works now:

• A user enters a location and optional keyword


• The address is resolved to a longitude/latitude and the user is shown restaurants within a 5 mile radius of that point


• If the user enters a keyword, a LIKE operator search is applied against the appropriate fields


• The user is brought to a page with a list abbreviated results of restaurants and menu items (6 of each) that meet the search criteria. At that point, they can click to choose which they want to see (there is no paging on this page)


• Once they choose, they get expanded results and paging. They also get a refine utility that allows them to filter results by price, rating, keyword, distance, and rating status. They can also rate the inline and load menus inline.


• All search logic is done via AJAX calls from the browser.

When I wrote this, I had many factors in mind that I was trying to address. How do I let the users search both restaurant and menu items with the same input form? How can I get users rating food and restaurants as soon in the experience as possible? How can I make the results as fast as possible with current hardware limitations? I address all of these concerns, but the final result was search tool that gave a piss-poor (almost unusable) search experience.

Since the initial launch, I've had to go back and revisit several key areas of the site. I've got a long way to go, but I finally have a vision for resurrecting FF's search functionality. My plan is as follows:

• Get rid of the AJAX. This will help with users who navigate with the back button (like I often do), and give them bookmarkable query strings


• Integrate "Intuitive Location Filtering". If a user enters "1 main street, san diego ca", they're probably interested in seeing what's near them (in which case, the current model is probably fine). If they enter "San Diego, CA", they probably want to see the entire city. I will be crafting a routing that tries to determine what the user really wants by their location query and filter accordingly.


• Enhance the keyword part of the search. Right now, if you enter "Ruths" as your keyword term, you will not get see "Ruth's Chris" because of the apostrophe. The new algorithm breaks down the keyword phrase and evaluates the individual terms with inappropriate punctuation removed to treated as word boundaries.


• Add a search summary and advanced options in an obvious place when a search is completed. This will allow folks to see exactly what they're looking at (particularly important with the intuitive location algorithm) and how to modify those options.


• Get rid of the multi-state. It's confusing. One state will exist for search and users will need to click through to a restaurant to get interact with the data.


• Leverage the work Google has done. Google is the undisputed kings of search. They have already trained the community to deal with different types of data consolidated within one result set. Why not take advantage of the "training" that they've already invested in?


• Let the users sort. Duh. Users can only filter (if they can figure out how). Let them sort the results to better aid them in what they're looking for.


• Add support for tags. Tags are a great, free-form organizational tool. Sites like http://delicious.com/ have done some amazing things with tags (there are also sites that haven't figured it out yet). For me, relying on the community for restaurant meta-data, I really need to make tags more powerful. Don't worry, I'm on it.

Well, that's it. It's a lot to bite off, but I really think it will be worth it. Plus, the work I'm doing on search (and have done of the restaurant page with menus) will set me up for a mobile implementation.

So, what am I missing here? I'm sure there are several things. I'm also sure that these changes will be an exponential improvement over the current search experience. Any thoughts?

Web Advertising?

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to get people to check out my little restaurant guide. I’ve tried a few different channels that I’d like to talk about.

First of all, I am currently willing to spend about $100 per month; this is because I fund this endeavor out-of-pocket. Since I launched the site back in July, I’ve tried buying Google adwords, and also experimented with Facebook ads. When I first configured my Google ads, I was getting about 8 clicks per day, but I was getting a lot of users that I simply couldn’t offer value to (foodfinder.net is still has very limited US restaurant coverage). On the next round, I did a bit more targeting by geography both in terms of keyword selection and making my landing pages a bit smarter. By click rate dropped to 2-3 per day, but my bounce rate also fell by about 10%.

Facebook offers super targeted advertising, but I started with a small geographic search area (San Diego and surrounding cities). This yielded about 1-2 clicks per day (although my total ad spend was under 10 dollars over a 14 day period).

Clearly, I’ve got a steep learning curve here. I think I’m going to try some less conventional forms of advertising. A friend and co-worker who just release a cool viral object tracking game site turned me on to a cool new ad channel. The site is called Girl in Your Shirt and it takes an innovative approach to marketing via social networking.

This will be my next endeavor--I’ve got shirt printing now, and will soon drop $75 bucks to see what kind of traffic this can drive. I’ll keep you posted. In the mean time, any thought on how to spend $100 a month to drive some web traffic? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

My Biggest Challenge: Data Acquisition

I've gotten a couple of requests this past week that relate to the most difficult part of building the intrepid restaurant guide that is FoodFinder.net. Both of these, while very different from each other, tie into the same theme--gathering restaurant data.

The first one inquired about adding international restaurants. Wow...this would be super cool. I really look forward to expanding overseas. Unfortunately, I'm years, not months away. Reason one--I have limited database space (about half a gig). Even my US coverage is a work in progress. I've collected restaurants in about 20 major markets, and have filled out areas around the two places where I've lived (southern New England and Southern California). These 2 regions also get the most attention in terms of new restaurants and updates.

The second request was for an update to the menu for Martha's Exchange & Brewery. Normally, this would be a simple matter, but their menu is not available electronically (normally, I would have told the manager to send me an electronic copy of the data, but since I used to frequent their on the weekends, I figured I'd knock it out and brush up on my typing skills at the same time). In the future, I won't make a habit of doing this.

Also, I'd like to expand the amount of data available for an individual restaurant. I think Yelp does a great job providing detailed meta information about their listings. I plan to add this by opening up control over some of the restaurant data to the community and the owners or managers. So much to do, and so little time.