Recruitment is the necessary evil mountains of Mordor that we as researchers must pass through in order to gain access to our users. But what if it doesn’t have to be like that?

Recruitment: Back-and-forth, error-prone hell

I love our users, but abhor the recruitment process with a passion. Accidentally misspelling a user’s name or giving them the wrong date and time is the kind of mortifying mistake that keeps me up at night.

Before the new process I’m about to share, we used to

• Manually contact all our users and maintain multiple back-and-forth conversations — explaining the research, how it works, proposing time slots and finding the Goldilocks slot that works for everyone
• When recruitment periods were tight, I’d find myself checking my phone outside work or on-the-go to coordinate users, all the time hoping I don’t make errors while doing this on mobile
• And even after a slot is confirmed, there’s having to remind yourself to make sure the user gets a Calendar invite, and then remembering to remind them so they remember to show up

The writing was on the wall:

A purely human-driven recruitment process was too manual, error-prone and delay-heavy.

If any of this resonates with your soul, welcome fellow recruitment-weary researcher. May you find rest here.

What success looks like

As designers we must not just articulate the problem, we must define what good looks like. For me, that was:

• Efficiently and correctly scheduled research slots
• Users are well-prepared with the details and what to expect (and show up!)
• A process with flexibility to accommodate edge cases and the variability that come with every new round of recruitment

I also wanted this solution to try and keep within the tools we already used at Stampede. This not only avoided unnecessary additional tool subscriptions, it minimised the learning curve for other Stampeders looking to replicate the process.

At a glance, here’s how it works:

This new process uses existing tools Stampede already uses:

• Notion: The database keeper
• Google Calendar: The scheduler
• Claude AI: The personal secretary

Now, let’s break it down:

1. Set the stage with Claude, Notion and Google Calendar

1.1 Connect Claude to Notion and Google Calendar

1.2 Notion database and message templates

• Set up your database of users in Notion.
• While you’re at it, include message templates in the same page that Claude can use to generate personalised messages for your users, such as:
  • Initial outreach messages
  • Messages with booking links
  • Pre-session reminders

1.3 Google Calendar Booking Link

Google Calendar’s Scheduling Appointment tool is great for pre-setting research slots and letting users pick the slot that works for them. This takes a huge amount of manual work out of the back-and-forth ‘Does this date work for you?’ dance.

1.4 Give your Claude Project recruitment instructions

If you’re not already using it, use Claude Projects to keep context about your project all in one place via ‘Files’. We’ll give it some recruitment instructions here so Claude will apply them to any chat you open up.

Here’s the sample prompts I used:

Notion page for recruitment:
<INSERT LINK HERE>

Contains recruitment list and message templates.

==========
Rules to follow when updating the user recruitment spreadsheet:

1. For any change you make, confirm it back to me in the chat on the exact change you made. 

For example, if my prompt was:
"Change John's slot to 2 Mar, 9am-10am", you make the change and then confirm it back showing the before and after in table form.
* 1st column header: "Field", data: Date
* 2nd column header: "Before", data: John's original slot date and time
* 3rd column header: "After", data: John's new slot date and time

2. If a change I made might have missing details, also clarify with me if I want to add the missing details.

For example, if my prompt was:
"Add in Mary Sue, new user"

Make the change, confirm back to me the change you made (as per Rule #1), then list the other details that are missing (like email address, Whatsapp number) and ask if I want to update that too.

3. When I prompt for it, do a Daily Verification Check between the Notion and Google Calendar.

* Flag any mismatches in a table, comparing what's in Google Calendar and what's in Notion. Don't make changes without my consent. 
* When verifying, the calendar event title does not have to be identical, what matters is the correct user, date and time, location (virtual/physical).

How to match the participant:
* In most cases, the email listed in the Notion for the user should be the same as the email of their Google Cal invite.
* If this is not the case, look for the closest match - e.g. the user's first or last name in the event title, initials in the email address.
* Where there is ambiguity, flag that unknown to me so I can specify which users match between the Notion and Google Cal. 

Situations you might flag:
* A user's Notion status is '5. Slot booked' but their date/time in Notion doesn't match that same user's slot in Google Calendar -> Flag the difference to me so I can reconcile
* A user's Notion status is '5. Slot booked' but has no Google Cal invite set -> Remind me they are missing a calendar invite
* A user's Notion status is '5. Slot booked' and they have a Google Cal invite, but the location or video conferencing has not been updated.
* A user's Notion status is '2. Pending reply' -> Prompt me to check in on this user for any new replies
* A user's Notion status is '3. Replied; to send booking link' but they don't have a corresponding Google Cal invite -> Remind me they haven't received the booking link yet
* A user's Notion status is '4. Booking link sent' but they don't have a corresponding Google Cal invite -> Remind me they haven't booked a slot yet
* A user who has a Google cal invite set but in Notion, their status was not updated to '5. Slot booked' and/or the date/time is not shown in Notion
* A user's status is '6. To reschedule', and there is a mismatch between the Google Cal date/time and the Notion date/time -> Prompt me to reconcile this
* A user's Google Cal session has already passed AND/OR the Notion shows their status as '7. Session Complete', but their Notion 'Incentive' status is empty or still at '1. To send incentive' -> Remind me they still need to receive their incentive

4. If I prompt you to make a change that would create a scheduling conflict (e.g. two participants at the same time), flag it to me before making the change.

5. If there is any ambiguity or edge cases not covered, clarify before making changes. 

For example, 
* If my prompt was "John's rescheduled to Mon, 2 Mar" but there are two Johns, you ask me which John I mean. 
* If my prompt was "Billy rescheduled to Monday" you confirm which Monday date it is and what time.
* If my prompt included a name that is slightly different from the Notion but still has high-confidence match, e.g. I mispell "Samuel" as "Sameul" but the Notion says "Samuel Lee" (and there is only one feasible match), make a best-guess match, apply the change, then let me know in your response the guess you made to ensure you got the right person.

Instructions for Claude for generating messages for users:

1. Follow the displayed formatting (bullet points, spaces, bolds/italics) you see in the message template provided in Notion, but your output for me should be in code block form, formatted according to the platform conventions I will send it on, so that it will display the formatting as intended.

For example, if I will send it as a Whatsapp and there is a bolded bit of text, use asterisks because when pasted into Whatsapp, it will display as bold. For example, the block of text for me to copy from you would look like this:

"Hi Jane,

My name is Stephanie. I'm a researcher with Stampede Design.

Would you be available for an interview on *24 Mar, 9am-10am*?"


2. If you do not know which platform I plan to send on, verify with me first.

3. If you are not sure what the user's first name is, check with me first. Usually, in Malaysia, first names follow this convention:
* Cindy Tan (First name: Cindy, Last name: Tan)
* Tan Chee Wern (First name: Chee Wern, Last Name: Tan)
* Muhammad Abdullah (First name: Abdullah, Last name: Muhammad)
* Jacob A/L Mathew (First name: Jacob, Last name: A/L Mathew)

2. It’s go time — let’s reach out to users

Unless you need to recruit more users than you can practically contact manually, I prefer maintaining the human touch here. The first outreach is critical for building rapport and getting valuable information about your users before you’ve even met them in person – how they speak, their concerns or hesitations, adaptations they need for a successful session. Besides, if users detect an AI is talking to them, the ick-factor can throw them off before you’ve even begun.

But here’s where you can take some of the manual work out – prompt Claude to generate all the initial outreach messages for your users off your template, customised to their names and details:

3. Once the user has agreed (yay!), send the booking link

This is where Google does the heavy-lifting – users select a booking slot, then receive the calendar invite and email confirmation. Google even sends pre-session reminders based on your settings.

4. From here on, keep track of recruitment with Claude

Users, I’m afraid, have an unfortunate habit of not collectively getting together and agreeing on all their slots at once. Chances are in the past you’ve had to constantly keep track of who’s responded, who hasn’t and everything in between.

And the more users you have, the higher the risk of error.

Enter Claude:

Remember those prompts we setup back in Step 1? Now they work for you.

Prompt Claude to do a Daily Verification Check at any time and it’ll compare your Google Calendar with your Notion database to look for all possible instances of error, like:

• Users we haven’t contacted yet
• Users who haven’t picked a booking slot yet
• Users who haven’t received their incentive yet

Gone will be the days of needing to keep a running list of all your users in your brain – let Claude handle that for you.

That’s it!

With any luck, if you follow these steps or adapt them to your work, you can focus more of your energy on actually talking to your users where the human touch still matters.

So what have we gained?

Time-consuming, error-prone work was the biggest pain point in our old process, and now what used to take me 1-2 hours of cumulative back-and-forth a day I can do in 15 minutes at the start of my day. That and just the sheer weight off my mental load of having to keep track of each user.

In other words, my brain will now leave me alone at night to rest peacefully.

What’s next?

We’re still tinkering. Some parts are still manual and error-prone, one of the biggest being the non-sync between Google Calendar and Notion, requiring Claude as the ‘workaround checker’. Who knows, the next step might be recruitment driven solely by Agents (stay tuned for Part 2?).

Move fast, do better, but stay human

At the end of the day, recruitment still involves communicating with real people — and that’s a process worth designing with intention and empathy. Automate the tracking, the scheduling, the error-checking. But keep yourself in the moments that shape your research: that first conversation where you hear hesitation in someone’s voice, the small talk that tells you more about a participant than any screener could. Being intentional about where the human stays in the loop is what ensures our research always keeps the people we’re designing for at the centre.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to continue the conversation, let’s connect on LinkedIn.

The post How I turned hours of user recruitment chaos into a 15-minute morning routine appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

What is energy?

Energy can be thought of as a resource needed for constant physical or mental activities. Like many other resources, energy is finite, meaning that it will deplete throughout your day.

Keep yourself nourished

At all times, you need to keep yourself fed because food is a direct source of energy. In most work places, we are given an hour for lunch to unwind and nourish our bodies.

But when times are hectic and deadlines are crucial, have you ever felt a sense of guilt when it’s time for lunch? Sometimes you just choose to skip it and dedicate that time to completing your work. The truth is that, in the long run, this type of behavior is not sustainable. You will eventually become tired and frustrated, and eventually lose the will to work.

So make sure you make the best of your break time. Eat, socialize and take your mind off work.

Get enough sleep

While sleeping is the most common way to recharge, some of us neglect it in order to get more done in a day. Sleep plays an important role by allowing your body to go into downtime while it repairs itself. Depriving yourself from quality sleep not only affects your energy but also your health. People with insufficient sleep are at a higher risk for high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes. Also, not getting enough quality sleep also leads to a decrease in attention span and an increase in risk of accidents and injuries.

That being said, too much sleep is also a bad thing. The side-effects are similar to the deprivation of sleep. When you wake up after having a good number of hours of sleep, try to get yourself up slowly and not fall into the trap of napping. Follow a fixed sleeping schedule and stick to it. Doing so will cement your biological clock making you feel sleepy just before your sleep time and getting up naturally after hours of rest.

Master your mood

We’ve all been there. Getting stuck in a traffic jam, having a minor disagreement with a loved one, or even just getting up on the wrong side of the bed. All of these happening before work even begins. Not the best way to start the day, but one that is fairly common time to time. While events and people can bring us down, the final decider of your mood is still your own self.

It’s convenient to get swept up by everything and getting down with all that has happened. You need to be self-aware that you can indeed control how your outlook is, even if it’s for a span of time. When you’re all bummed out, the likelihood of you wanting to do anything has severely plummeted. This kind of negative behavior affects your energy as dealing with these emotions will slowly sap it all away and nothing will get done.

We’ve all been there. Getting stuck in a traffic jam, having a minor disagreement with a loved one, or even just getting up on the wrong side of the bed.

What you can do is to always keep in mind that you are the master of your own emotions; your mood. This isn’t as simple as it sounds as each of us have our own thresholds for dealing with stress. Try to think positively and keep solving problems in your mind. Eventually, the tension from all those problems will feel insignificant and you can easily brush it aside.

Quality over quantity

It’s not all just about the amount of time we work though, as quality matters just as much. What it means is that our effectiveness matters even more, and is largely influenced by our energy levels. We need to create opportunities to create more energy throughout the day.

Instead of stacking more things to do in the free-ish slots in your day, it is better to use that time to accomplish what we’ve gone through so far; staying nourished, getting enough sleep and mastering your mood. Always remember that your energy is finite, and that you can only accomplish so many things in a day.

Always remember that your energy is finite, and that you can only accomplish so many things in a day.

Prioritize the tasks that are important, that are time-sensitive, that are creating a bottleneck for others. When you have done so, stack the less important items at the end of every day, spread out during the week. By doing so allows us to focus on quality productivity instead of burning more hours trying to complete everything.

The remote side of things

If you’re a reader of our blog (thanks!), then you probably know that the team at Stampede work from various locations around Malaysia and the rest of the world. The act of managing your energy when you don’t have a physical office can be tricky. ‘Our offices’ are always at our fingertips and this means that we can move in and out of work fairly quickly.

While having flexible hours is a great, it also means drawing the line between work and personal time can be a challenge. Sometimes we get called in out of our usual work hours to get certain tasks completed due to time-sensitivity and urgency.

Thankfully this doesn’t happen very often, and the times it does is when there is a major issue, like a website going down. If we worked in a physical office, we’d have to ask one of our developers to drive into the office and problem solve the issue there and then.

We hope this article sheds some light on why you should focus on managing your energy instead of just solely managing your time. If you have something to share with us, or just want to say hi, drop us a comment down below and we’ll be glad to respond.

The post Manage Your Energy, Not Just Your Time appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

What is Zapier?

The post shares how 13 companies on their use of Zapier to connect their work apps together. At Stampede, we use a number of these apps on a daily basis due to the remote nature of our workplace, so an automation service like Zapier helps by optimizing the work process. The platform currently supports over 500 apps meaning that many combination of automated process flows can be created.

How does it work?

By all means, Zapier isn’t as complicated as you might think. How it works is that you can connect apps together to create a process flow, this is called a Zap. For example, you can tell Zapier to notify you on a specific Slack channel if a new message is posted on Basecamp. Once you get good at it, you can start doing really advanced flows like creating filters so that Zapier will only notify you after certain conditions are met. For example, if Google Analytics hits a page view milestone of 10,000 users, a message on Slack will be posted as a notification.

How we use Zapier at Stampede

At Stampede uses these apps to automate and channel tasks into Slack. If we didn’t do so, we’d have to manually transfer details from one app to another. For example, if one of our clients were to post a new task on Basecamp, we’d get an email notification, but we’d also still have to go to Basecamp and move the details manually onto Slack. Zapier eliminates that distraction for us.

Examples of how Basecamp, Gravity Forms and Facebook are integrated into out Slack channel.

You can head over to their site and read the full article here. In the meantime, we’ll keep doing what we do best, doing great work and staying awesome.

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In our workplaces, we have habits that we are quite fond off. The good ones can visibly improve your productivity while the bad ones can seem like procrastination. Here’s a list of productive habits that you should know at your workplace.

Start work early, plan your day

Get into the office earlier than usual, give or take 15-30 minutes. Using this extra time, plan what you need to do just for that day.

For many of us, the first thing we do when we come into the office is to go about our morning ritual of settling in. This usually involves making a cup of coffee, having some small chit-chat with your fellow co-workers, all while waiting for the computer to start up. This whole ordeal can sometimes take about 30-45 minutes right at the start of the day. While it is not necessarily a bad thing, it just goes to show how much time we use just to actually get something moving.

Define a goal, then break it down

Before you start your work, identify what you need to get done. Keep it focused but not too general, something like reviewing a stack of documents in two days. Once that’s nailed down, sit down and figure out how you can break this goal down into smaller goals.

One method is to split the workload across multiple days within the time frame you have to complete your main goal. When your goal is broken down into smaller ones, it lessens the impact of tackling a large endeavor and provides you a state of momentum to work at a steady pace.

As an added bonus, attach rewards to some of these goals. For example, if you complete a sub-task then you can have your next cup of coffee. If you finish the next one, go for a 5 minute walking break. This will gives you extra motivation to continue your day.

Know the difference, identify important and urgent matters

This one can be a bit tricky because when it comes to work almost everything is urgent, but not everything is important.

Enter the Eisenhower Box, a time management principle which helps you define how you should act accordingly depending where the action is sorted in the box.

Image taken from James Clear

Strategized by the famed US President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Eisenhower Box is a decision matrix which splits tasks into 4 possibilities:

• Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).
• Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).
• Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).
• Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).

The challenging part in using this principle is understanding what tasks are considered important or urgent.

When you’re in the office and a phone call comes in for you, the first reaction you’ll do is pick up the call regardless of whether it is important or otherwise; this is what we label as urgent, tasks that you feel you need to react to.

Create behavior chains, turn it into a routine

Line up all your tasks that need to be completed within a given day and chain it all together. By doing so, you’ll create a progressive tempo that will help you focus on your work and will curb other non-productive behaviors from cutting into your work flow.

Behavior chains are a series of tasks that are completed one after the other. If you are doing A, you need to complete it before moving on to B, it’s as simple as that. The difficult part is keeping it going without getting distracted. Behavior chains are not limited only to the office. You can even apply the same idea to routines you have outside of work.

Be organized at all times, carry a notebook with you

If you work at a desk, sort out the clutter (if any) on your workspace and arrange the items by its relation. For example, pens, markers, staplers and other stationery should be placed in one area. Documents and papers can be placed in another area, but ultimately the goal is to be able to access whatever you need, whenever you need it.

Carry a small notebook with you wherever you go. Whenever you have a meeting, take it out and start taking points. This is to ensure that you don’t have to ponder too long on what was said during that session. Using your notebook as well, list down your tasks for the day and refer to it often as this will keep you on track.

You’ll discover that staying organized and taking notes will vastly improve your productivity.

Get enough sleep, keep your mind ready

Don’t be this guy.

This goes without saying, if you don’t get enough sleep your brain won’t be running at maximum efficiency.

Sleep deficiency can impair your cognitive functions and negatively affect your behavior, you won’t be able to get anything done. The inability to make rational decisions and muddled body activity can be seen by others which may cause others to speak of your indifferently.

Make it a habit by setting a fixed sleeping time that gives you a minimum of 7 hours of sleep (recommended 8 by some sources).

Putting it all together

Creating a good habit is difficult, I myself deal with this on a daily basis. The only time we fail at this is when we give up, so don’t. Keep at it and eventually you’ll feel that it’ll become second-nature to you.

Do you have productive habit that you follow as part of your office routine? Drop us a comment, we’d love to hear about it!

The post Productive Workplace Habits That You Should Know appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Over here at Stampede, We ♥ Slack. This is a collaborative work platform which has been getting much attention recently. We’ve been using Slack for the past couple of years and one of its interesting features is the integration of bots. These automated chat bots have been programmed to facilitate specific tasks from scheduling meetings to keeping track of information.

While many different bots are available for download, we at Stampede have found some of the best bots that has helped us in improving our work environment.

Meekan Scheduling Assistant

When you work with a global team, it also means that your team members are working in different time zones and can have very different working hours. When you’re trying to set up a meeting with this environment it can prove to be troublesome. Enter Meekan, a chat bot who scans everyone’s calendars and finds common free times to schedule meetings.

Communicating with Meekan is just like chatting with a person.

This is our favorite bot by far because of all the things it can accomplish other than just scheduling meetings. Meekan can also find flight times making those last minute flights a breeze.

Our developer, Tony looking for a flight from Bali to Jakarta.

We’re hoping for more features to be implemented into it. Feel free to invite Meekan into your team.

Howdy

The creators of Howdy describe it as a ‘digital co-worker’ as it works alongside with you by participating in day-to-day tasks like a team member. An example of Howdy’s prowess is the ability to host meetings by engaging members of a channel personally. This bot is perfect for projects where the team is busy and only enough time to give task updates.

Starting a meeting with Howdy.

People in the meeting will receive a direct message from Howdy asking them about their progress.

Pretty cool stuff and if you’re interested you can get it here.

Statsbot

Statsbot integrates Google Analytics functionality directly onto Slack. Using simple commands, you can have it fetch any statistical data whenever you need it. This bot saves us a lot of time because it can post data directly into a Slack channel removing the need to enter Google Analytics on a daily basis.

All without needing to log into Google Analytics.

If you’re using Slack and involved in digital marketing, you might want to pick up Statsbots. It will definitely help you optimize your workflow.

Growbot

Growbot helps you appreciate your team by allowing people to send ‘kudos’  to someone who has achieved a milestone, done great work, or just being plain awesome. Over time, kudos get accumulated showing how much the individual has contributed to the team. We use Growbot as a way to know if someone has done a good job over time and deserves a reward.

An example of how @jeremy is giving props to @justin

Ready to grow your team?

Kifi

Love to share stuff with the team? We do this at Stampede all the time and more than often, these links can get lost in the flow of responses. This is where Kifi comes in, who saves and keeps links that are shared within Slack channels. Kifi will then create a full-text index of every web page shared, making them easier to find. These links are stored in ‘libraries’ and can be used as a reference point for your team whenever someones needs to retrieve a saved link from a specific channel. You can access the saved library directly on Kifi.

How Kifi looks like when it’s integrated on Slack.

To integrate Kifi into Slack, you can do so here.

So there you have it, a list of our favorite bots on Slack. Hope this summary serves to enlighten fellow Slack-ers on the use of bots. If you’re a Slack user, are bots a part of your team? Let us know if you’re using other amazing bots that make your work experience great!

The post Slack Bots We Didn’t Know We Couldn’t Live Without appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Managing your time right?

So much work, so little time. Within a day we have twenty-four hours to work with and we’re pretty much occupied two-thirds of it

What is Time Management?

Time management is what I am referring to and it is the process of applying methods to consciously control the duration spent doing specific tasks all within a set time boundary. Its goal is to efficiently use the limited hours we have in a day for accomplishing tasks in projects.

Why should I manage my time?

The following are some reasons why time management is more important than you think. It can also be applied to routines that are out of the workplace too.

Time is limited — So much work, so little time. Within a day we have twenty-four hours to work with and we’re pretty much occupied two-thirds of it. By managing it, you can accomplish relevant tasks on the dot and have enough time to go for that yoga class of yours.

Accomplish more with less effort — When you know what to do from the get-go, you can efficiently complete your tasks quickly and with less effort. The reasoning behind this is because the minutes you allocated to complete the task has been set and you’re not going to be redundant by doing non-related tasks. When you’re in ‘the zone’, you can efficiently get your job done without getting distracted.

Become a better decision maker — Because time management requires yourself to analyze and decide how you’re going to plan your tasks throughout the day, you realize that you’ll become better and more confident at deciding how much time you’ll need to complete certain tasks.

Free time is not optional — As much as you’d like to complete your work as soon as possible, some tasks are just way to big to finish up within a day. Pulling consistent long hours on it can make you lose confidence and make your goal seem further away. This is why you need to pace yourself by creating pockets of free time throughout your day. You’ll be able to give yourself that much needed breather to refresh yourself before you go on to completing that daunting task.

Develop self-discipline —  Time management requires the creation of a schedule and sticking to it. To be able to follow a schedule requires discipline and determination. It’s very easy to bail on something but harder to keep to it.

How do I manage my time?

You may be asking yourself on what you need to do exactly. Here are some suggestions that you can follow to keep your time managed.

Prioritize your tasks for the day — Before your day begins, list down all your tasks both important and less critical. Highlight the important tasks and move those items above the list. Focus on the tasks that need to be completed for that day while pushing the less important items for the next day. If you complete your tasks earlier than expected, feel free to work on one of the smaller tasks from the following day.

Assign weights to the tasks — Now with the list prepared, we can now move on to assigning weights to the tasks. By weights I mean the amount of time you think you’ll need to complete specific tasks. Make sure the time allocated is reasonable and realistic while giving yourself some minor buffers for short breathers.

Allocate time for R&R — Burnout is something that is very common in the workplace. Proper recreational time is important to prevent it from happening. Within your day, set certain pockets of time that you can use to recharge yourself. Having a proper lunch without any work distractions can help you maintain your confidence to plow through the rest of the day.

Create a schedule — By now you have your list with the assigned weights to create your schedule. Having a schedule creates a sort of pseudo end goal that we can look forward by the end of the day. Equip yourself with a small planner or notebook to draw a simple schedule that you can refer to throughout the day. For the slightly more techie readers, Google Keep is a great mobile app for creating tasks which you can tick off when you’ve done and completed it.

Stick to it — It goes without saying, if you’ve already come this far in preparing your scheduled routine you need to inject some (maybe a lot of) self-discipline in making sure you can accomplish it. In a way keeping to your schedule is also a task but one that is the predecessor in helping you complete the others efficiently.

Freedom of time

Ultimately, your time is governed by your own actions and decisions. Whatever you decide to do with it just make sure you’re doing it with wholeheartedness and with few regrets. While you can probably reference this guide as a way to maximize your productivity, make sure you spend some time doing the things you love.

The post Managing Your Time appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Wan Shariff

• 

  I have been sketching since I was still in school. Back then, I usually sketched cartoon characters I watched on TV. I have been sketching and drawing since then.

In this burst, I took a picture of a wolf – mostly the face area. With the picture as my reference, I started tracing the wolf’s fur, line by line.

Line is the most basic element in art after dot. Using only lines, we can create almost anything. In the wolf’s case, the lines actually made it easier for me as I could imitate the direction of the fur. As you can see, the lines help give sense of movement to the fur. It took a lot of time to work exclusively with lines. The space between lines and the length of every stroke play a big role in it.

Besides lines, I am also comfortable using other mediums, for example watercolor, acrylic, stencil, pencil, pens, collage and more. I’m looking forward to use different mediums next time.”

Shaza Hakim

• 

  I’m not looking to don my heavy design-thinking cap this week. Instead, I want to share what transpired from a casual chat with a good friend.

Sometimes we forget that people around us doesn’t know the difference between Arial and Helvetica or the deep hatred towards Comic Sans. We tend to think that just because we design things and spend hours perfecting every curve, people will use them. This exclusivity can make designers appear as an elitist, out-of-reach crowd.

I am guilty of this perspective sometimes and I want to correct it. In the process, I found that it’s actually fun and enlightening to listen to how everyday people react to design.

The Case in Point

I have a Swiss Helvetica moleskine pocket notebook that I carry in my handbag. I like to pen down thoughts and prepare my to-dos for the day over breakfast. The Moleskine looks like this:

Lately I’ve been enjoying the busyness of being among people at my third place, Starbucks cafe at Cenang Mall. My friend Rady Razak, who is also the store manager, saw my notebook and asked…

Is that an ambulance notebook?

He is actually correct. As a designer, I immediately associate the white cross on red with Swiss flag and the Swiss style design movement made popular in the 50s.

Newsflash for me: the public doesn’t necessarily know that.

If this was web design, I have made the cardinal error of designing for my benefit and not the user. I never thought of the cross’s other meanings: medicine, first aid kit, health. As a designer, it is my job to know which emotions or meanings people associate with symbols. To be an efficient designer, I need to be able to disregard my role as one and immerse in the role of my users. I need to be better at doing this.

One platform that I believe both designers and non-designers share is pop culture. Pop culture is conceived by graphic designers but fueled by mass public’s love. Using the cross as a starting point, I wanted to see if there are other universally recognized symbols that, due to is close association with pop culture, will mean the same thing to everyone.

I then used these symbols on the very object that started this observation – my Moleskine notebook. I rebuild the notebook in Photoshop – it amazingly took less time that I thought it would – and then treated the cover with elements from each pop culture subject.

Transformers

Geeks and non-geeks alike know about the Autobots and the Decepticons. I believe Transformers reached its point of saturation through its animated series, and then propelled forward by the success of is franchise. We may not know which robot is which (there were so many of them) or which battle ultimately belong to which faction, but the ubiquitous symbols of good and evil have amazing staying power.

Star Trek

Often believed to be inspired by the NASA logo, the Starfleet’s insignia has seen some evolution over the course of the series. The logo, while changing according to the era a ship is in operation, remains faithful to the asymmetrical, arrowhead-shaped pennants. What interests me is how Starfleet assigns uniform colors depending on divisions. The colors appear to have been subject to more revisions than the logo. I also found an Etsy illustration of Captain’s Log that I couldn’t resist from using as the back cover.

Superman

Of course, Man of Steel is coming out to cinema soon. We all know who Superman is. He is probably the one superhero whose backstory needs no retelling. You know where he comes from, you know the motivation behind his heroic acts. But it truly is the symbol S that made Superman, well, Superman. He may no longer flaunt his wardrobe malfunction, but there is no Superman without the S and the ever-billowing red cape.

I hope you have found the thought process useful. I have learnt that inspiration is always lurking. So go out today and strike a conversation with people who knows little about what you do. I promise, you’ll be surprised.”

Zana Fauzi

• 

  I am a big fan of museums and art events. Art events promotions are usually traditional in our sense – posters with dates and time, announced through websites etc.

I figured this is because mostly art enthusiasts are traditional, Luddite people who generally mingle around their circle. I notice that not many young people are not interested in going to museums and art events. It frustrated me sometimes that my friends see museums and art events as ‘boring’. It would take a whole loads of behaviour change to drag them along with me to museums.

So, I was thinking, how to get these smartphones and tablet-toting millennials to be interested in going to the museums?

Brainstorming & Associations

Over the years we hear about subliminal messages a lot e.g Chekhov’s gun, the famous vase and face illusion and the backmasking technique in music. It has been proven that these subliminal messages can somehow deliver the messages to your subconscious mind effectively.

The other day I also came through this brilliant street ad execution by advertising agency Grey. I also thought of this app called Word Lens where you could hold it over signboards in foreign language and it could translate it for you. If you look at it, QR code might be an old idea but the the concept is worth a revisit.

Solutions

Imagine a new poster advertisement of an upcoming art event. Utilising the concept of QR codes and subliminal message, every poster of the event now only show the art piece with a copy

Do you speak Art Nouveau?

In order for audience to see the real message e.g date and time of the event, they will have to encode it using a smartphone app which works along the same line as Word Lens. They will have to hold it over the poster to see the hidden message. The app icon can be placed at the far right corner of the poster, serving as a minor indicator that there is more than just a poster of a ‘boring’ art piece.

This solution hopes to serve as the first point of discovery to non-art enthusiasts so they could see that art events could also be ‘hip’ and ‘cool’, and not only frequented by old folks.

We could also have two versions of the poster – one targeted for the ready art enthusiasts which go through their traditional mediums – poster, forums etc. but this one is targeted towards
young people.

Again, this is the first step of discovery for the targeted group – the young people. What do you think?”

The post Creative Burst #20 appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

What is teleworking?

Allow me to do a little enlightenment here. In practice, “telework” is a work arrangement that allows an employee to perform work, during any part of regular, paid hours, at an approved alternative worksite. With the advancement of technology which allows every aspect of our work to be accessed via cloud, more and more digital companies opt to allow their employees to telework. In my case – aside from Star Wars-loving and quirky (and sometimes irritating) team members, teleworking is one of the perks working for Stampede which I really value.

The first impression.

My first few months were pretty tough for me to cope with the work arrangements. There are many aspects that I had to familiarize with without having a one-on-one interaction with my team members, for example – file sharing, time tracking, communications and so on.

Since we work EST, I also used to have problems adapting to the hours and my personal time. To solve this, I spend my daytime hanging out with my friends and working during the night.

Although we had been communicating through Skype, Google+ and emails as much as we could, I sometimes have trouble adapting to these means of virtual interactions. But once the guys started ‘mooning’ each other through Skype, I know we are in for a good virtual office bashing…

The personal transition

The flexible work hours for teleworking would either drive you to contemplation, or discipline you. During the transition while working in Stampede, I decided to set up some rules for myself. One of this is moving to another place just to get a bigger working space and better working environment for me.

The new place is closer to where my friends live as well, so I don’t have to travel far to go see them every day. Surprisingly, the new space also helps me to perform better at work. Since then, I’ve noticed a lot of changes on my mood, I got motivated and my performance increasing a little from the last time.

Time management

Like I said, teleworking is a good practice especially if you are not used to have constraints on yourself. The flexible work hours would either drive you to contemplation, or discipline you. I am really glad I opt for the latter, incidentally or not.

To be honest, used to be very lousy with time management and I used to get tired while working after spending the day out with my friends, which soon will affect work performance.

To solve this, I would make it a practice to sleep a few hours before work, soon after I come home from hanging out with my friends.

Working hours

Most of us in Stampede work EST hours since most of our clients are in the States and it is easier for us to interact with them during their business hours. However, it is not mandatory. For example, Iwan the front-end developer work from 4 am – 12 pm EST (4 pm – 12 am MYT). Shaza, Shaiful and Zana mostly work a lot later. This practice also makes sure that all of us have overlapping hours so that we will be able to discuss about the projects we share.

For now, I am working closely with Shaza, my (awesome yet sometimes scary) creative lead so she could guide me on my journey of becoming a lead designer in Stampede. In this learning process, it is very important for me to be prepared before I can work on my own. There is a plan for me to be able to work during MYT hours in the future, but for now I will stick to the EST work hours during this training process.

A few months later…

Teleworking is a wonderful thing.

After a few months working, I have come to realize that I’m in full control of my working environment and the time flexibility helps me to adjust my working hours to my needs whenever I need to run some errands on the day.

In a small group of team (there are 7 of us), we tend to keep things very personal and get involved and help each other as much as we can about our team. Also, from my experience from the previous company I have worked with, politics occur when there’s a big amount of staffs included. In here, we have no problem about it at all. Na da.

Apart from a few adjustments which I had to make, I have to say, (tele)working at Stampede has been a great experience so far and I look forward for something new every day.

Have I mentioned teleworking is a wonderful thing?

The post In the Cloud appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

(This post was originally written in my blog – but with a little bit of arm-twisting by Shaza, I decided to feature it here as well.)

…remote work is a major employment benefit. More than a 401k, more than a health care plan — the fact I no longer have to save up vacation time to take one or two short trips a year is huge. I don’t have to wait until someone gets married or dies before I can go see my family — I can just go see them, and work while I’m there. If my girlfriends are going to Mexico for a week but we’re slammed in customer support, I don’t have to choose between letting down my pals or letting down my team.

Reading Emily Wilder’s article made me realise how much I had always been in love with the idea of working remote itself.

Somewhat like Emily’s case, I quit my job at a telecommunications giant after 5 years due to the long hours in the office and also for the fact that my father kept falling ill back at my hometown which made me having to return to see him on a 5-hour drive almost every week. I joined Stampede a year after that as a project manager, which enabled me to work from almost anywhere in the world as long as we have a stable internet connection and a computer.

Perhaps the biggest impact was when I decided to come to London this year to further my studies, among other things. I knew I do not want to leave Stampede, yet I do not want to delay any further to come to my dream city. And also because I am greedy, I do not want to choose between any of those two things – so I decide to work and study at the same time, no biggie.

Working remote, like Emily mentioned – also allows you to be flexible with your vacation time. Our team members are known to travel a lot – and while at that, we are always reachable whenever something breaks. None of us had to save up our vacation days in order to see every nook and cranny of the world. Every team member is encouraged to travel as often as we could. Some of us sometimes work our magic in Photoshop or coding in buses and trains. As long as we are able to adjust to the EST hours with the hours of the part of the countries we go to – most of the times, it works.

Also, like Emily, I also “had an amazing time and felt beyond lucky to work for a company that lets and encourages me to work while on the move”. If I were to stay at any other company which requires me to be physically in an office all the time, there is a chance I will not be able to be here in London now. Or somewhere else in the other parts of the world, for that fact.

Does your company allow you to work remotely? (Photo via.)

(P/s: Yes, sometimes I manage projects – which includes doing Skype meetings with clients – from the comfort of my own bed, in my pyjamas. Wait, do we have clients reading this?)

The post Magic on the move appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Time tracking software is essential in the web business. Every ticking second could mean cost and revenue for us developers or the clients. We don’t want to overcharge our clients nor do we want our tracked hours to be lost in space. Hence two important rules for a time tracking app are that it must have both reliability and stability.

First page of Toggl. In-your-face and straight to the point. One click and start working.

I was working as usual with Toggl running a few months back and suddenly its load balancer suffered, causing my tracked tasks to fail when submitting to the server. I tried to submit a few more times only to find out much later at the end of the month that multiple entries had been inserted. Client was almost billed for the same tasks multiple times. That, my friend is credibility and trust lost on Toggl. Lesson learned.

I decided to give Harvest, a simple online time tracking software a try. The mission is to find out if it is a worthy opponent to Toggl, the one that we have been using for the company all these time.

So what are my first impressions and what do I think about Harvest after a week of mild usage?

First page of Harvest. Clean and informative, but at least 3 clicks to get the timer going.

First of all, the dashboard on Harvest isn’t really that dashy at all. You have to click at least 2-3 buttons to get the timer to start. I like Toggl’s in-your-face interface more where the first screen is everything you’ll want to do – start timer and work instead of clicking which task, add entry, etc.

The other functionality on Harvest like reports, invoices and estimates are definitely much better and cleaner. I feel that the reports are generated much faster, maybe it’s because I only have a few tasks tracked in Harvest thus not having a heavy database.

The eye-catching sync message that you surely cannot miss.

As for the timer, the Ajax functions are much robust and faster. The sync message is concise – it only shows you a text that it’s actually syncing instead of Toggl’s loading image without any text. I find myself not noticing the loader image in Toggl sometimes, which is bad. If you want the user to wait for the sync to finish, have a more animated sync message like Harvest is better in my opinion.

Can you tell where is the loading indicator?

However, I do like the homepage of Toggle timesheet more. It shows your tracked task in one-page Ajax timeline instead of Harvest’s multiple steps of selection before you can start tracking your time.

Recently, I also discovered that Toggl has ‘offline mode’. It is where you can track time in Toggl even when you don’t have Internet connection. All the data will be stored offline in your computer and synchronized with Toggl servers automatically once you’re back online. This is especially useful if I am working on the go without an Internet connection and I need to track my time.

The Verdict

We are sticking with Toggl, but definitely will bear in mind about the extra bits and bobs that Harvest is able to offer.

So, what about you? What time-tracking software are you using for your company?

The post Software Wars: Toggl vs Harvest appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.