Weekend reading, "North America through the eyes of a European"

Episode 19: 1^st customers

http://www.designatdistance.com/ was ready to go live, and our French site would soon follow, once our translators had finished their work.

To ensure our designers really knew their way around our software and procedures, they needed to get out of test mode and start designing for “real” customers. But they wouldn't be alone: we'd be accompanying them, from start to finish.

And as I knew from experience, the luxury of having like-minded people to bounce creative ideas off was invaluable. This was the real force of our concept: creating a structured design community to enable our designers to grow, and develop within...

I couldn't be more pleased with our first designs: we'd fallen on a couple of complicated projects that really showed our designers what kind of designs they could expect to be facing as trade picked up. There is nothing better than the hardest at the start: these projects were going to be great training tools. We'd be able to use them as examples, to help other designers manage all kinds of projects...and personalities.

We were being tested too: we'd planned our procedures and supporting software partly based on past designing experience, but there were a myriad of new applications, that would allow us to cope on an administrative level, with the large quantity of customers to come. These could only be proven “in action”.

So it was comforting (the word “relief” springs to mind) to see all our  “inventions” working as planned.  Our “soft launch period”, in other words, “our real time test period”, had started well.  Once each and every designer had participated, we'd be ready to go into "full launch" mode.

Then we'd be re-defining the word "busy"!