A guest post by Jae Xavier from KnowledgeCity.com
My best time for running 2 miles is 10 minutes and 13 seconds. But before that, I did it in 15 minutes and 45 seconds. It took me 4 weeks to get that low.
I improved by monitoring and adjusting:
- Arrival times at certain waypoints
- Running strike (toe vs. mid)
- Bursting interval (burst on the last waypoint)
- Breathing pattern (deep vs. shallow)
- Cadence
I consistently drove my times down by a minute or more each week because I knew the intricacies of the route and of myself.
So how does my experience relate to you designers?
In the Information Age, obviously information flows freely. And in that flow information can take on the form of words and even visual art. Information is aggregated, channeled, packaged, repackaged, socialized, and consumed.
Here is an example flow of information:
After posting your artwork on your website it gets…
- Searched by Google, Yahoo, and Bing
- Gets Tweeted by curious web surfers
- Tweeters see the Tweet
- Gets Tweeted again by there 2000+ followers and their 2000+ followers
- Then someone emails to their friend
- Then it gets forwarded to other friends
- Spreads on FaceBook
- Blogged about by art aficionados which gets sent out by an RSS feed
- And finally someone sees and prints your design on t-shirts without your permission and makes a lot of money
From a designer’s context, when you follow and monitor this flow you’ll begin to ask questions (after all humans are curious).
- Where does the information go?
- How does my design get spread and consumed?
- What is their reaction?
- How do they feel about the design?
- What brought visitors to your client?
- What design elements are they attracted to?
- Is the design understandable?
- Will they come back for more?
- Is it popular?
- Is my client seeing favorable results?
- How does my design fare against their competitors or even my competitors?
Why is this important? Because it tells you what is or what’s not working. Just measuring revenue is not enough.
Information can be monitored especially on the web. And in each sector, market, and industry there are sets of metrics that determine successes and failures. Find out what metrics matter to your client when you consult them. Then you can draw out what metrics relate to what design elements.
If you are not doing this already, start now. AND if your client is not doing this already, it will make your job an up hill battle because the Attention Age is upon us. If you’re designs are not capable of getting attention, you’re more likely to fail.
About Jae – he has intense interests in art and business. He has founded KnowledgeCity.com, an online education company for the general market. Jae has been a designer of all sorts for 15 years, runs two other business, and has never been to college.”
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8 Comments
Wo, that means your doing each mile at 5.6 minutes, that’s pretty impressive, I myself cant run that. This is an interesting article, google and the engines work in mysterious ways in such keyword density etc.. The google algorithm is more complicated then it seems these days, but i get your point, good article.
Jeza
Oh, you don’t actually say HOW we can monitor these things. Gutted.
The only way Ive found to monitor who is using my artwork is to make sure my files have keywordy names, then use Google alerts to find them. It doesn’t work as well as I’d like, but it’s better than nothing
Cool article, never would of thought of relating a run to designing!!
Thanks for the guest post Jae!
I’ve started running a mile or so each day before work – it really does help you become more dicsiplined, more alert, and more able to spot an opportunity. Highly reccomended, infact I am experiencing such a change, I can’t reccomend it enough! Great blog BTW.
I haven’t heard about the site until I found your post.Thanks for this by the way…I am not that good on creating designs that is why it seems that it would really help me a lot.. I’m interested to get more ideas on how to create designs. of course learning without too much cost is better.
Hi Sue
You sound more energetic that me in the mornings – I walk my dog for about an hour alternate mornings (my partner does the other day) and a half an hour in the afternoon and that wears me out enough. Thanks for your kind comments. Tara
Nice work with the run, good to see some people out there exercising! and definate kudos for the comparision to designers – may have to use that with some of my clients:P
Awesome post! As always, an out-of-the-box thinking on your part makes this article an interesting read.