Shape Up is Basecamp’s take on product development: fixed time, variable scope, and real work shipped in focused cycles instead of open-ended sprints. Reading the theory is one thing. Living it as a designer is another. So this interview is a follow-up to our primer on Shape Up, this time from the design seat: a candid conversation with Ivy, a Senior Product Designer at Process Street, on what the method actually feels like in practice.

Ivy walks through how Shape Up plays out day to day: what clicked, what didn’t, and the one phase the team had to add to make it work. First, a quick recap of Shape Up’s core phases so her answers land.

Continue Reading

Web design is more than how something looks. A good site has to communicate clearly, load correctly, guide the visitor, collect feedback, and survive the handoff from designer to client.

These free Process Street web design process templates give you repeatable checklists for the work behind that outcome: animation, social media images, usability testing, client onboarding, UX, brand identity, headers, logos, and launch QA.

Continue Reading

Steve Jobs did not arrive at Apple's design philosophy from one neat school of thought. His taste came from architecture, Zen Buddhism, Bauhaus, electronics, calligraphy, kitchen appliances, arcade games, instant cameras, early interface metaphors, and the counterculture around him.

These 11 profound influences explain why Jobs pushed Apple toward simplicity, craft, and products that felt obvious once they existed. The list is still useful because great design rarely comes from design alone. It comes from what a builder notices, steals, rejects, and obsesses over.

Continue Reading

Design processes and checklists turn subjective creative work into a repeatable system. They help teams capture requirements, review work, collect feedback, and ship designs without relying on memory or one person’s taste.

That matters because design is still business work. A strong design process connects user research, brand standards, approvals, and delivery so the final asset is not just attractive, but useful, consistent, and ready to perform.

There’s no better moment than the ‘lightbulb moment’.

The one where you finally figure out a solution to a tricky problem, or just come up with an ahead of the curve plan, scheme, or proposal. The euphoria is intense enough to make you get out there and shout about it from the rooftops. Or, do a song and dance on the street, à la Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

OK, perhaps the latter is a little hyperbolic. But the point remains that coming up with a great idea is a wonderful feeling.

The only problem is that, at some point in the relative future, more ideas need to be thought of. And for those working in creative fields such as advertising, design, and software engineering, ingenious ideas need to be generated on a regular basis. We’re talking daily, here.

So how can you and the rest of your team continually think of stellar ideas?

Through ideation.

That’s why, in this Process Street post, I’m going to spell out what ideation is, the benefits of ideation, 7 different ideation techniques to use, and what to do before undergoing ideation for the first time.

Read the following sections to get completely clued-up:

• The definition of ideation
• The team and business benefits of ideation
• The 7 best ideation techniques to use
• Undergoing your team’s first ideation session

Let’s not make this a song and a dance.

It’s time to get straight into it!
Continue Reading

Videos are a powerhouse when it comes to marketing, explaining your product, and much more.

Heck, when users are spending 88% more time on websites that have videos, you can see their power just in terms of retention.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to request or create effective videos if you don’t have experience in the field. Terms can be confusing, and video producers might struggle to act on the feedback you give if you don’t know how to communicate the message effectively.

That’s why it’s vital to know how to perform an effective video review; there’s an art to it.

At Process Street, we’ve gone through the hard work of learning how to review videos and give actionable comments. That’s why I’ll be showing you how to do just that., including:

• Basic video creation process
• Video editing steps
• What is a video review?
• Video review glossary
• The video review process
• Video review best practices
• Run your video review processes with Process Street

Let’s get started.
Continue Reading

The importance of the relationship between product and marketing is something that’s often overlooked.

But when the product and marketing teams aren’t on the same page regarding the product and the problems it aims to solve, chances are the marketing won’t match the product’s value proposition and in turn, will discourage potential users from signing up.

This could be detrimental to the success of a product organization.

So, what can you do to avoid these miscommunications and build a synergistic relationship between the two?

In this article, I’ll share some tips and information that will be critical in strengthening the relationship and performance of the product and marketing teams at your company to achieve success.

We will cover:

• What is product marketing?
• Understanding the product-first marketing approach
• Product marketing synergy
• Benefits of product marketing
• 3 Key elements to product marketing synergy
• How to use Process Street to strengthen product marketing strategy
• Product marketing synergy: The bottom-line

Let’s get started!
Continue Reading

Data shows that creative design is reshaping products, portfolios, and industry standards at more than 70% of companies.

If creative design is so important, doesn’t it also make sense to invest time and money on writing a good creative brief?

Before the actual work of designing an infographic, launching a PPC campaign, or even beginning to pull ideas together in the early stages, you need to be sure that you have a solid creative brief.

The creative brief is the foundation upon which the work of any creative project will be done, but all too often projects fall short because of poorly written, bloated, non-actionable, ambiguous creative briefs.

And what’s arguably a bigger problem than a poorly written creative brief? The process (or lack thereof) that led to its creation.

In this Process Street article, I’ll try to address the elements that make up a good creative brief, but perhaps more importantly, I’ll look at how to build a process for creative brief writing; one that’s consistent, reliable, and gets the job done.

Continue Reading

As we build businesses, we strive to make them successful in what they do and efficient in the way they carry that out.

Six Sigma is framework with dual American and Japanese origins which helps companies achieve both of these aims.

We want to take company processes and make them better, smoother, faster, easier – it’s what Process Street does. But having a complex process optimized to the highest degree, as Six Sigma advocates, is tough.

That’s why we’re going to look at Design for Six Sigma.

This will take the Six Sigma lessons and apply them to creating new processes or products. Importantly, it will help us set up these processes or products in a way which makes them ready from the start for further Six Sigma-inspired analysis.

According to Quality-One:

…[U]tilizing Design for Six Sigma methodologies, companies have reduced their time to market by 25 to 40 percent while providing a high quality product that meets the customer’s requirements.

In this article, we’ll look at:

• What is Six Sigma?
• What is Design for Six Sigma?
• What is DMADV?
• What is the difference between DMAIC and DFSS

We’ll run through the best practices of creating new products and processes in a way that they can be improved and optimized from the very beginning.

Don’t waste your time with poor processes. Start right and continue properly.

Read on to see how it works!

Continue Reading

In 2016, Process Street went from using a basic Bootstrap theme to a custom-branded website, complete with a logo change and full aesthetic overhaul. We did it to avoid looking dated, and to make the site consistent with our app.

Like many startups, we focused on building a great product first, and rightfully overlooked the importance of a brand until the time was right.

A brand is the often low on the list of startup priorities. Startups develop in a fast-paced, cutthroat environment and are concerned primarily with attracting early users as beta testers, building disruptive products, and iterating based on feedback. Tech is a mercurial industry; many companies start out with a solution to a problem that could be adopted by everyone from individuals to large corporations.

Over time, by stabbing in the dark and following growth over all, a tech startup could find itself with a brand that doesn’t match its product. That’s something we grappled with in 2016, and it’s something even big tech companies come up against every couple of years.

Continue Reading