Mohu™

I recently attended an event sponsored by Adobe and this was their big push to introduce Edge Tools: their new suite of web design and development software. The demos were insightful and got a few murmurs from the crowd. At lunch I decided to duck out as I couldn't see myself sitting in a cinema chair all day. On the way back to the office it got me thinking how much the role of the designer and developer are merging.

I've fallen in (bro) love with 37 signals all over again. I first found out about them back in 2008 where I had briefly trialed their Basecamp web tool to manage a small design project. Nowadays I'm rarely off it as it forms a core part of our day-to-day running of Mohu.

For every one of us that handily absorbs knowledge from good ol’ book-learnin’, there are ten of us who learn more effectively by trying things out with our own hands. Today I decided to get my hands dirty by fashioning a wee graphing app to visualise chaos, in an attempt to understand emberjs a little better, get started with my first canvas app and most importantly figure out what on earth my good friend Roche was on about last week. Rather vocally. In the middle of a restaurant.

A user experience team design the flow the customer/reader/player takes through a site/app/game taking extra thought to make sure that the goals of the business are catered for and balanced with customer needs within the experience. In many agencies UX determines the flow and structure of the sites. This has good and not-so-good repercussions.

We live in an age of outsourcing. Outsource your customer support, outsource your receptionist, outsource your whole business. These days you can outsource almost anything, and if your inbox is anything like mine you'll regularly be reminded of this fact by a slew of unsolicited emails from eager salespeople.

At mohu we've always been advocates of open source software. Choosing popular open source products lets us deploy rapidly and reliably and most issues we might encounter have already been dealt with by the community. Sometimes, though, the requirements of a project mean that we can't use the system we would like to. Towards the end of last year one such situation arose where open source just wasn't the best solution, thus our custom CMS/Framework 'Chuck Norris' was born.

Last week I made the journey from Shoreditch to Hammersmith, the reason being to see one of my favourite female vocalists in concert. Who she is isn't necessarily important, but what I experienced during that concert was.

I've seen many of multi-channel strategies that consist of orbiting circles and perfectly connecting lines that show how Persona 1 will watch an ad whilst accessing extra content on their iPad/iPhone and the then signs up to the website, then downloads the app and finally "likes" a page on Facebook…or thereabouts. Now this looks great on a powerpoint presentation but we know the reality is quite rare for people to feel compelled enough to experience all this in different places and formats.

After clawing through last year and finally coming out the other side, we've learnt to keep things very lean when it comes to growth - relying on re/training rather than just hiring in capability from the outside (expending time rather than money). I wondered if there were other ways of achieving a healthy rate of growth without needing to heavily invest in management infrastructure, larger offices and generally larger overheads.

You may have to wait a bit longer for your “I know kung fu!” moment than Neo, but through the efforts of author’s like Malcolm Gladwell and Phyllis Lane, the idea that anyone can master pretty much any skill is making it into the mainstream.