Nelson Joyce - Product Designer

Hi Josh Pigford

2024-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Goodluck reviving RSS feeds!

Moving on to New Adventures

2015-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

“Once you raise money in a few months, I’ll rejoin you guys at Rentabilities”, that was the agreement I made with Andy Cook Back in March 2011. He was a tenacious startup founder, but him and his brother just didn’t have the funding to pay me a salary.

As a recent grad with student loan payments looming, I had to find a ‘real’ job. So I joined a small but up-and-coming startup called HubSpot. More than a few months passed (54 in fact), but I’m making good on that promise to Andy. We’re setting out to start a company of our own.

Compared to our 3-man team at Rentabilities, the ~160 person HubSpot felt like a ‘big company’. They had just raised a 32 million dollar series D and were growing fast. During my time there it wasn’t unusual for 50+ new employees to join in any given month.

I had the privilege to be an inaugural member of the HubSpot UX team lead by Joshua Porter. I had never been a designer, but Josh took me under his wing. For over two years I honed my design skills working with Josh, Dan Ritz, and a handful of other great designers.

In October 2013 I got an unusual phone call from the VP of Engineering, Elias Torres. HubSpot was acquiring Andy’s company Rentabilities. Elias asked if I was up for working with Andy on a ‘startup within a startup’. It was an easy yes.

We only had 3 ‘guardrails’ when we started:

Build something that helps small businesses do marketing.
It should be free or cheap.
Use orange in the logo.

After 2 years of hard work, Leadin is something that tens of thousands of people genuinely love. We learned a ton, and had a chance to work with an amazing engineering team in Dublin. It was a crazy grind, but doing so gave me the skills and confidence to start my own company.

HubSpot now has over 1,000 employees and it worth over 1.6 Billion dollars and growing. The products I helped design and build have been used by tens of thousands of people to run and grow their businesses. I’ve made lifelong friends and learned more in my time at HubSpot than I though possible.

HubSpot is a special place that has two incredible founders and no true peer in Boston. Short of starting my own company, there’s no other in company I would rather work for.

It’s also a place that breeds great entrepreneurs. Dharmesh Shah (Founder and CTO of HubSpot), has publicly said, “we’ve wanted to not just build a great company, but also build some great entrepreneurs”. This attitude is why I have so much confidence in what Andy and I can achieve.

Andy and I are really excited about our next idea.

Dealing with Edge Cases in Product Design

2013-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

Designing simple products is hard. Software that starts simple has the tendency to become more and more complicated as time goes on. Ideas come pouring in from customers for that next ‘must have’ feature. In many cases, those features are actually edge cases that will only be useful to a small subset of customers. Trying to optimize an interface to serve all of these edge cases will quickly lead to complexity. It’s our instinct as designers to optimize functionality to the fewest amount of clicks and screens, but when adding edge case functionality, it should be deprioritized in order to keep primary use cases simple.

Some may argue that the ideal situation is to keep your product in its simplest form, never supporting any of these edge cases. That approach may satisfy design purists following a sacred set of ideals, but it is often unrealistic when you’re trying to grow your customer base. At HubSpot we’ve learned that adding this type of functionality is ok, as long as it stays out of the way of the main use cases.

Your product doesn’t need to allow for edge case tasks to be completed quickly and easily. Advanced users are willing to click a few extra times for advanced functionality. The benefit they receive from that advanced functionality is often worth the extra effort. Beginners will also benefit from not being intimidated by a myriad of features they don’t understand.

One of the best examples of this principle in action is Google Search. There’s a ton of advanced search functionality that has been added over the years, but the home page remains just a single input box. In order to access advanced search features, you either need to know advanced query syntax, or find the advanced search link buried in a drop down menu on the results page. Google recognizes that a majority of their users don’t need that advanced functionality, and keeps it out of the way.

It sounds easy, but in practice it’s much harder. Our design instincts tell us to optimize for the fewest number of clicks and screens. We are always trying to create a delightfully simple experience for all our users. But we must ignore those instincts when dealing with edge cases in order to keep our products simple.

GrubHub - An App With a Soul

2012-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

I was ordering food with GrubHub on my iPhone this past week and was pleasantly surprised by this simple graphic on the confirmation screen:

What you aren’t able to see is when you tap the image, the cartoons begin to dance. This type of interaction is what Chuck Longanecker calls an emotionally intelligent interaction.

An emotionally intelligent interaction is any state (or change in state) of a website/app where the messaging or functionality includes attention to details that create a user experience that feels organic and human. These interactions can be a big experience (like when an entire website is down), or a very small experience (such as when an error state on a form element appears). They can be derived from different elements, including messaging and copy, color and design, and responsiveness to user inputs and system outputs.

Combining each of these crafted experiences creates soul and personality for a website. And it’s that emotional connection with users that builds lasting loyalty, and raving fans.

GrubHub has done a great job building a brand with a charming personality that breeds loyal customers. As designers it’s easy to forget that we have so many opportunities like this to put a smile on our user’s faces. Try adding an emotionally intelligent interaction to your app, I’m sure your users will appreciate it.