The Build #10: Experience

Interactive Mechanics specialized in bringing the best practices from app design back into physical spaces, like museums and libraries, so patrons can enjoy rich, multi-sensory experiences.

More about today’s guests:

• Amelia Longo
• Christina Deemer
• Michael Tedeshi

Transcript

Announcer:
From 2820 in Philadelphia, it's The Build, conversations with entrepreneurs and innovators about their dreams, their triumphs and their challenges.

Joe:
Experience, every time you step into a room, you take in the sights, the sounds and sometimes even the smell. That resonates with you and informs of what you're going to do next. Now, think about a webpage or a smartphone app. If you've got a smaller frame of reference, designers' got to work even harder to round up that total experience. It's so easy to manipulate pixels instead of atoms, so you can make anything happen on a screen. As we get more familiar with how to navigate touch screens and web browsers, we're getting more picky about what we can expect to happen, and we're expecting more and more of off screen interactions to carry that same kind of punch. Imagine you're a museum curator or a chief librarian, and you want to give your exhibitions or your book stacks the same polish as a sleek app. There's a team you can call here in Philadelphia that actually specializes in this, and they're cycling knowledge from the virtual world back into our physical spaces. It's the story of interactive mechanics, coming up next on The Build.

Announcer:
The Build is made possible with support from 2820 Press, providing business consulting and content strategy services to customer obsessed companies nation-wide. More information at 2820press.com.

Joe:
It's The Build, I'm Joe Taylor Junior, joined today by the team from Interactive Mechanics. Since there's a group of you in our studio today, I thought it would be great for you to introduce yourselves to the listeners.

Mike:
Hi, I'm Mike Tedeschi, the owner and creative leader.

Amelia:
Hi, I'm Amelia Longo and I'm the director of strategic initiatives.

Christina:
Hi, I'm Christina Deemer and I'm a UX developer.

Joe:
Fantastic. To my knowledge, you started in 2012 and we love to collect origin stories here on the show so bring us to speed on how you all came to open an agency like this and come together as a team.

Mike:
Yeah, when I started the company in 2012, it was originally just me. It was a way for me to transition from what I was doing at the time which was working for another company, and start to build a team that could help me produce projects, not just do on a freelance basis. For about two years, I was the only one working on everything. I was kind of bringing in people and slowly and then organically in 2014, Amelia and I who had been working together before then started slowly doing some projects together, bringing her up to speed on the business development side of things. Jeff and Christina and Stacy, the other people in our team came in on one or two projects at a time and now have become employees, kind of colleagues on our team.

Amelia:
I think things did happen pretty organically. I came on to start helping to bring in new business and just the way that the staff came on and sort of enabled business to come in and enabled us to build new projects, I think happened in a really great way, especially over this past year.

Joe:
Michael, tell me a little bit about the transition from working as a freelancer to actually building out a company.

Mike:
I was originally working for a company here in Philadelphia called Azavea. While I was there I was freelancing, so over the past 10 years I've been an active freelancer. I was working on small projects and I made this mental shift that I wanted to work on bigger projects and I knew that I couldn't do that by myself. I didn't have all the skills to do that. I didn't have the makings or the trappings of a team to help me build a project or even get the project. I realized that it'd always been my dream to do that. That was always my goal. I decided that, why not just go for it, why not just make this switch, and start going after bigger projects and start finding people that I trust to work on these projects with me.

Joe:
Tell me a little bit about what kinds of clients you like to work with and how you add value for them?

Mike:
We work primarily with arts and culture organizations, a lot of museums, healthcare and educational institutions. One of our biggest first clients was Bryn Mawr College, they've been a returning client that we've worked with on a number of different projects. Originally we had kind of generally framed our market as anyone giving something that impacts people and anything that's kind of in the social impact space. Over the last year or so we've really narrowed that down to a couple of core groups that we want to work with. Arts and culture, education, and care.

Joe:
Did that narrowing down come pretty organically based on who you were already working with or did you all sit down and say, "Let's make a decision and get focused on who we want to serve?"

Amelia:
I'd say both of those things happened. I think that we realized this year especially how many RPs we were responding to and how sort of we felt really stretched out in terms of what we were looking for. We realized that these are the core clients that we have and sort of made a lit of them. These are the clients we would love to work with again and then we felt really positive about, and built it from there. We did sit down and say, "Okay, this means these are he buckets for us."

Joe:
Working with organizations like educational institutions, museums, those are organizations that tend to work on longer time frames than folks we typically talk to on this show which are operating in the start up space which is very rapid and very fast. How do you blend or pull together the culture of a relatively small team that operates pretty quickly, and still work on time tables of clients who are operating further out into the future?

Mike:
That's a great question. A lot of the projects that we work on are grant funded, which means that some of them don't even start for months and months down the line and it's contingent on them even getting funding. I think one of the things I've been noticing is that a lot of these teams, a lot of these organizations are excited about the idea of working agily or working on a more of like a rapid innovative approach. Not the kind of traditional, "Let's do one thing and see how it works, eventually it will get to the next step."

Mike:
We did a project recently with the Philadelphia museum of art. They're kind of slowly building this innovation team over there where they have this time one developer, one content person and then their director. We worked with them directly using slack. We use a lot of tech tools that we normally would use and they were kind of in the [wease 00:07:15] doing that with us. They used to get hub directly. We had a lot of pair programming sessions with the where we would go over, set up the touch screens that we're working on and build directly on them and show them the changes as we were producing them, which allowed us to work really really quickly. They were on a tight deadline too but I think that mentality is kind of overflowing into that industry too. It's kind of developing roots in education and museum world.

Joe:
Educators, museum curators, thinking very carefully about what kinds of new techniques and technologies they can bring into their organizations but all of this is to serve ultimately a user. I'd love I'd love if you could speak a little bit to how you bring your knowledge of the art and craft of user experience to your clients.

Mike:
That's my background. When I was at Azavea that was the team that I was looking to build. When I started there they didn't have a user experience team and that was one of the things that I was kind of brought on to lead was, developing a team, developing these practices.

Joe:
Tell me a little bit more about, what are the kinds of experiences that clients are asking you to develop or enhance.

Mike:
In the museum industry, a lot of the time they are in gallery exhibits and traditionally I think that theY've always this mentality that whatever they put out there needs to be perfect and whatever gets installed, they leave it and they don't touch it again and it's great as is. I think the museum industry in particular has realized that's not always the case, and a lot of the time because technology is changing so rapidly and people's behavior changes so frequently, they need to take a different approach for these things to be successful.

Mike:
What we're trying to bring is this kind of mentality shift that we could do things in phases, or we could take a different approach and we could test things with their users and their audiences and see how they respond to them. It doesn't need to be perfect when it gets installed. We'll get it so it's amazing and it's beautiful, but we can always come back to it and we can update it with information that we get as we do user testing, or as we get more research, or we might just see that people's behavior changes over time and they might need to make small incremental changes to keep the interactives that we produce for the apps, for websites that we produce up to date.

Joe:
Tell me a little bit about how you assure a client who might be accustomed to that way of thinking it's done, and that's it, we'll never change it again, into thinking about continuous improvement and iteration?

Christina:
`one of the things that I think helps us in that area and may set us apart from other agencies is that a lot of us on the team have backgrounds and experience in the non profit sector and particularly in arts and culture, so we're able to use that experience to sort of bridge the gap and show some compassion for where they're coming from and some of the concerns that they may have working with a constrained budget or maybe a project feels really traditional to us but is really innovative and sort of scary to them. A lot of us have sort of been in their shoes before, so we can kind of speak to that and assure them that it's going to be okay and that their users are really going to love this new experience.

Mike:
It's one thing when it's somebody on the other side of the table. Some technology person saying, "It'll be fine, it's okay," and they're kind of like, "All right, whatever. Of course you think it'll be okay but you don't know how our organization works or the constraints that we're under, and I think that's a great point that that's something we bring to the table. Having been on the other side and having really understood what these organizations go through from funding to the way the work to just generally kind of getting their mission. I think that's, Amelia and Christian have both been in their shoes, so they really understand that.

Joe:
Thinking about that in many ways, you're in the empathy business, to think about it along those lines. Thinking about both sides of the equation, on the client side, what do you think a client in the non profit sector is really looking for when they're trying to choose an agency to do the work that you're doing.

Amelia:
I think they're looking to be heard a lot of the time. The sort of flip side of what we were just talking about is not only being able to explain carefully what we think is going on but also to listen. Like you're saying, I love this empathy business. They're used to being perceived as technologically inept or assuming that they are technologically inept and sort of having to come in the room and receive all of this information. I thin what they appreciate in what we provide is saying, "You're the expert in your business and we wanna hear what your big goals are and how we can meet those with technology" rather than forcing you to come to the table and saying, "I want an app with GPS tracking" and all of these other features. We'll work out that side based on what your goals are.

Joe:
Walk me through if you can, not knowing if you're under any NDAs and what not, but walk me through a project that you've taken on recently that you're super proud and excited about. I'd love for you to walk me thorough a project that's either in the works or something you've recently done that showcases some of the things that you do that are unique to the way that you work.

Mike:
We're in development on a project with DC public library which came about organically from work that we also did in DC. They've been looking to produce this archive about the history of punk music in DC, which is just a really cool topic. We had an internal Spotify channel or playlist that was just all DC punk music which is a really good kind of primer to learning about the punk scene. Our approach in that project I think was particularly helpful for them as an organization because they haven't done too much in the digital space. They really wanted to build this archive and have it be something they can maintain, and that would be something that could be a framework for future projects. They're doing this with Go-go and with jazz, so it's the first of what will likely be a series of projects for them. When we came into the project it was important for us to educate them and help them understand what we would need to hep this project be successful. Also for us to understand what their goals were as an organization, what their goals were of the project itself.

Joe:
Were you all fans of punk when you signed on to the project or did you all have to discover the heritage that Dave Grohl would probably talk your ear off about for about three days?

Mike:
I was personally not a fan of punk. The project manager on our team, Stacey, she knew about punk, she was familiar with it, she's the one that created the playlist that we listened to. I had to do a lot of soul searching to find some interest in punk music. I actually got there. After watching the Foo Fighters documentary on HBO and Sonic Highways and we bought a lot of books to kind of immerse ourselves in what the culture was like and understanding what was the aesthetic and what were these shows like. Just kind of understanding as much as we could about it.

Joe:
The project itself, does this live entirely online or does that have a physical presence as well?

Mike:
They have a lot of artifacts, they've been collecting first hand accounts, oral histories. They've been collecting a lot of, anything that you have, tickets to shows, pamphlets, papers, flyers. A huge archive of physical materials. The don't really have a space to showcase that yet. They are in the process of redoing a lot of their library spaces. They don't have a physical exhibit. They wanted to use this as an online collection so that way they can tell the story and have it live online and then eventually in the future have a physical space for it.

Joe:
What kind of challenges do you think about when you've got a project like this that starts in a certain place and feels like it could evolve and expand over time? How do you put something on rails that way that might grow and evolve?

Mike:
I think one of the important things to do is kind of set expectations to the client on that side of things to kind of help them understand how a project would evolve over time. When we first started talking with them about this project they had a set deadline, they knew that it needed to be completed by X date and they wanted too build this template or this way for them to be able to produce other projects and part of the early discovery process for us was helping to kind of set a schedule that made sense and figure out what would need to be done for their deadlines. What were more long term planning things that we could do or set the stage for now, and what were things that they wanted to [inaudible 00:16:51] or think about in the future.

Mike:
By having a conversation with them and kind of framing it in that way of this thing doesn't need to be all done for September 31st and it's not obviously, it's December, we still have more work to do. Part of that I because we set the expectation that we could do this thing in phases and might fit your organization the way that you work a little bit better. It's always difficult to get all the research that you need and collect all the materials and produce all the content and hat stuff takes a lot of time, and by making that clear upfront, I think it makes the whole process a little less scary and it's easier to phase it out over time.

Joe:
Process like the one that you're describing seems pretty resource intensive and you're a relatively small team, what do you do to be able to compete effectively with organizations that are far larger than yours, that maybe bidding on the same proposals?

Mike:
I think that's one of the challenges that we face, as a small organization, it's finding ways to kind of help the clients or help our clients think about ways that they can do a lot of these themselves or use skills that they have internally to produce things that they may think that they may need to hire out for. In the DC punk example, they have a huge team of volunteers and interns and other people that come into their libraries that they could use to help produce this content, or they could have workshops internally to digitize something and just have them go through and put the flyers on Flatbed scanners and kind of capture all these primary source materials. Part of it is kind of building up these organizations and realizing that they have the capabilities internally to do some of this stuff, bot helpful because it helps them save money and they could do it themselves and also because we can focus on what we really do best. On the other side how we can approach it ...

Amelia:
I think there's also the fact that we also rely strongly on recommendations. We got the DC punk archive gig because of our work in theater in DC and so we established these strong relationships where our clients see the good work that we do and love the way that we work and we encourage them t be able to share that information with other folks as well so that our client base grows through that. We've increased our ability to do that by doing things like hosting monthly workshops that are a quick lunch and learn format and people can come in and sort of see hands on the way that we work and learn from us and that's led to some really great conversations that I think help make us competitive.

Christina:
One of the things that we hear from our clients is, one of the things that Amelia mentioned earlier and that's that we listen to them. Sometimes bigger shops, you're just one of a whole huge stable of clients and if you're not the biggest horse in the stable I guess, or the fastest, or the one with the biggest budget that you might sort of get lost. Each client that we have is treated with such care that and we adapt our process to what they need rather than try to ask them to fit sort of our process or our machine for like getting a project done. I think that that's something a lot of clients particularly in the non profit space are really hungry for.

Joe:
I think a misconception having spent the first half of my career in the non profit world myself, one of the big misconceptions is that budgets are necessarily strained, however I think what non profits often say. When I worked in public radio we used to joke around and say, every line item on this budget we can divide by the number of tote bags we need to move to like justify that purchase. My boss used to say, "If you buy that stapler, that's somebody's donation that went to that." It's not necessarily that they're strained they just [inaudible 00:21:30] very justified. What are some tings that you do to make clients feel like the investments that they're making with those grants and donations are really worth the investment?

Christina:
I think a lot of it comes down to the user's experience in the end. It's worth the investment if they can see that users really are attracted to their website or they're using the interactive and they're getting a response from, whether it's from their target audience or that special donor they need to impress or whoever those stakeholders are that they're having a really enhanced experience because of this thing that we built. I think that's a way that we justify the investment because it all comes back to the users or the audience, and a former fundraiser I can put myself in the shoes of the person who has to write the report for the grant to say like, "Yes, you are [William Penn 00:22:36] or Barra foundation your grant had the impact that you wanted it to have and here's how we can show you that."

Mike:
It's important why we ask the question at the very beginning of why are you doing this project and why is it important. Why does this matter to your organization? What strategies do we need to be aware of or planning big picture we need to be aware of to make sure that we're not just building, we're building a website that's actually going to meet those goals?

Joe:
Thinking about something that I hear very often when I talk to founders of service based companies. It's very easy to lose yourself in all of the client work. Tell me a little bit about how you're working on the business. What are you doing to continue to grow and improve your own experience, running and operating the company.

Mike:
We had our very first kind of internal business planning retreat a few months ago, and that was an opportunity for us to kind of reflect on how things have gone over our first real year having employees and really working on bigger projects, and a chance for us to start doing some goal setting for the future. Thinking not just about 2016 but big picture. Who do we want to be as an organization? What do we want to get out of it as people that work for this company? I think it was important for us to do that together because there was so much that came out of that that wasn't just stuff that I cold sit down and write at 2 o'clock in the morning. It was stuff that we needed to all sit down as a team and kind of brainstorm together and then incorporate hat back into our long term thinking. We're doing a number of different things other than just kind of the services side of stuff.

Mike:
We've been thinking about internal projects that we can work on to help develop our skills and also act as kind of a way to showcase things that we can do without showcasing it through a client project. Research and development time to work on things that we're interested in or educational planning to help develop new skills. Another thing that we've been thinking about recently is how can we start taking the tings that we've been doing for one client and use that bigger picture. How can we kind of turn them into a template or use that as the framework for what maybe could long term be a product or something that we could use to kind of better serve all of these audiences or all of these groups.

Joe:
Michael, tell me a little bit about what it's been like for you as the initial founder, first employee, the process of going from being a freelancer into a leader who has to delegate things to often challenging for folks to change from getting to do all the cool things to directing the actions of others. What's that process been like for you?

Mike:
It's been a struggle. It's probably been one of my biggest challenges and I think I learned really quickly having seen other founders not delegate and spend hundreds of hours each week doing everything themselves or not finding opportunities to give away responsibilities or give things to people that can do it better. That's been one of the biggest lessons I've had to learn, to reflect on the things that I'm doing and see is there somebody else who could do it better than me or for cheaper than I would do it. That way I can focus on the things that, or the reasons that is started the company, continuing to do the user experience side of things, the design and kind offload some of those other things that aren't really in my wheel house. One of the reasons why I started talking to Amelia at the very beginning was I knew that I wasn't a great salesperson and business development is her strong suite.

Mike:
It made sense at the very beginning to think about bringing on somebody who could complement what I do with those things and the later Jeff and Christina on the development side of things to keep building that our capacity in that area. Even thinking about, how can I get rid of book keeping and hire a book keeper. Those are the little things that take away from the time that I have to do the stuff that I'm really good at.

Joe:
I hear this a lot talking to folks, that it seems at least in Philadelphia that it's much easier to find an advanced user experience developer than it is to find a good book keeper.

Mike:

Joe: You’re about to go into year four and you’ve experienced some significant growth over that time, what are you looking for in the next five years? What’s your dream for the business? Mike: I would love us to stay small. I’m not looking for us to be a 40 or 50 person company, I want us to stay small and nimble and allow us to work on a set number of projects that any one time. Really want us to focus on growing internally. The skills that we have, our benefits and the things that we give to our employees. Our relationships to our clients. I have always kind of envisioned us being this small innovative team, kind of like the early days of [IDO 00:27:58] where they were able to kind of work on a handful of projects and they had people that they could bring in externally to help them but without having to have a massive team where you kind of lose the kind of innovative nature of being the small innovative team. Joe: Do you thing there are any hurdles or obstacles in your path, sometimes in the quest to stay small it means saying no to a lot of opportunities, is there something that you are afraid about that future or something that concerns you? Mike: I think I’ve seen so many services companies grow really rapidly and respond to what’s immediately in front of them and they’ll hire a huge number of employees on to take care of one project and then a couple of years later there’s a huge number of layoffs and they’re closing offices. My biggest fear is doing that. I would rather us stay small and say than grow too rapidly and having to kind of scale back down. I think we focus on the people that we have now and solely bring on more people to grow our capacity I think we’ll be in better shape or at least that’s my hope. That in itself is kind of scary. It means that there maybe projects that are huge that we might have to say to or if we can develop more partnerships with other organizations maybe we can pursue them that way, but there’s kind of a ceiling to what we can do and the size that we could be … kind of accepting that we’re going to stay small. Joe: When it is time to add someone new to the team, what are the competences and the qualities that you look for and how do the opinions and values of everyone in the organization inform that process? Amelia: The first thing to think about when you ask that question is we made a staff handbook this year, and that was something that was super important to me. I’ve read a lot about, especially start ups that get off the ground and never take the time to really reflect on something like that and the issues and the culture clash that can happen because of it. I think that we’ve laid down some clear expectations in that and that we’ve also been really reflective about our company culture so far. I’d say that one of the biggest things that we look for is not necessarily most sort of overtly skilled person but somebody who is very interested in learning. We do a lot of internal learning and teaching each other and just the way that I’ve seen everybody grow on the team in the past year and few months even has been phenomenal because we are all open to that. Joe: I’d love to hear from all three of you, what’s one thing that you learned from one of you peers that you wouldn’t have expected to learn otherwise? Mike: We just started doing these internal team talks so we realized there’s a lot of kind of internal skill that doesn’t get shared, and Amelia did the first one, and she focused on improving you email processes. I was blown away by what she could do with Gmail. Then like a 30 minute sit down where she just presented over pizza. I think I’ve just improved my Gmail experience exponentially and probably everyone else’s. I now have the ability to send emails at different times a day, which is something that you would think I would know by know, but no longer having to send emails and 2 o’clock in the morning or something like that, or late at night. I can send them at 9 AM, it’s just an improvement. Joe: Using something like Boomerang or? Mike: Yeah Joe: You don’t look like the crazy creative director that’s pushing put email at three in the morning you just look like someone that manages to get 100 messages out exactly at 9AM. Mike: Maybe I’ll stagger them and [crosstalk 00:32:05] Joe: We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. It is a tool that I use a lot as well. It’s really great. Mike: Even just like optimizing your inbox, so that way it’s more effective and using some of Gmail’s features. Those are things that I probably wouldn’t have taken the time to learn on my own or would never have found otherwise. These are things that Amelia knew and she was already doing and just by sharing them quickly, not even in a presentation format but just pulling the up and showing us where they were and how she’s using them, that I think has made me more efficient and hopefully will make me better at email. Joe: It sounds that just having the platform for shared experiences builds something into the culture where there’s a a different kind of expectation set, right? You’re level setting as you go instead of waiting for somebody to catch up or tolerating somebody that’s not operating at the same level. Sound about right? Mike: Yes. Joe: Good. What else have you all learned working together. Christina: Last yer at this time I was just starting out as an apprentice with the company. Every time Mike gives me a project, I think there’s no way that I can do it. I’m like, How can I do this on my, I have no experience with this, I don’t know about this tool or this program or whatever, and he sort of doesn’t pay any attention to my insecurities and will give me some milestones and will encourage me to do online tutorials or whatever and then in the end I did this, I finished the project and it works. Christina: There are sometimes when I keep refreshing the screen and I’m amazed that like this thing that I built works the way that it’s supposed to. I’m like, “Wow, look at what I did?” That’s been like almost like a life changing experience for me, that sort of like confidence of like, “Hey, I can do this.” There have been in my transition from the non profit sector into tech, there were a lot of people who were like, “I don’t know if you wanna do this Christina. Coding is hard.” To see that like, “Hey, there are things that I can do” and like it makes me excited about learning new things then. I don’t know if I can do this new project but I’ve done these other things in the past so maybe I can. It makes me really excited. That sort of learning about myself and having the whole team, not just Mike, but like everybody on the team sort of saying, “Oh yeah Christina, you can figure that out.” Christina: I remember there was some component of something that Amelia was saying, “Oh, the client wants this feature to work this way.” What came out of my mouth was, “I don’t know how to do that but just give me an hour.” I figured it out and we did it, and it turned out really, it was really cool. All of that is sort of like a whole bunch of gobbly-guck but it means a lot of positive things about the people that I work with. Amelia: I think one thing that I’ve learned, we have an interpretive strategist, Stacey on our team. She’s worked in the museum world specifically for years and I just remember having all these questions about, “Okay, there’s a curator, there’s an interpreter, there’s, what are all these different people doing and how?” We literally just sat down. We were at the Geekadelphia’s Geek Awards this summer and we sat down in the academy and after sciences at one point and we were in front of this exhibit and she sort of walked through who does what and that how that leads to this final thing. That’s super important to me, I love to have context in my work. I’m not doing the exhibit so that’s not my role but I can’t really work in this black box of just churn out this thing. Having her be able to tell that in a story sort of format and walk me through it was incredibly helpful. Joe: Great learns and what sounds like a fantastic culture for folks to come on board with, tell me about your dream project? What do you want to absolutely work on over the next few year. Pretend that you’re pitching that perfect client right now, maybe they’re listening. What would be a huge grand slam for you all to really dig in and get going on? Amelia: We started doing some motion based work using Microsoft Connect. We did a project with the children’s hospital here in Philadelphia for their waiting rooms and essentially there are games that you can play just by moving your body around. I think that we learned a lot form that process that we would love to be able to use again and it’s also just so, so cool. Mike: We’re hoping to talk with them more about potentially using it in rehabilitation and physical therapy. We did user testing as part of the PT sessions with a bunch of children, and it was really powerful to see the amount of confidence building that they had, just from going in and playing this little painting demo that we had. It wasn’t even a game, but just seeing them play with that kind of opened our eyes to the possibilities of this technology in that space. We’re also potentially working on a number of other projects, but some of them are really exciting large touch screen projects, motion based projects with the connects or with other software, hardware. I’m personally really excited about kind of the scale o the projects that we are working on growing over time and being able to see the things that we produce kind of live on in these museum spaces or in these galleries or in hospitals. Wherever they are, just seeing them kind of live and take life on their own. Joe: What’s the impact do you think of the shift, when we talk about user experience, we’re less and less talking about what happens on a screen and what happens in real physical space, how do you help clients navigate that kind of change? Mike: One way that we’ve been doing that lately is, we’ve been partnering with a number of exhibit design firms to help think how the technology piece will be used in the larger exhibit space. I think that’s important because it’s one thing to just put a connect in the space of the large monitor and assume that people are going to use it, but you have to think about, what are the constraints of the space itself? Are there any issues with outside lighting or other things that are going to kind of impact how you might use that system? By working working with fabricators and exhibit designers and space designers, that’s helped to frame user experience mentality and kind of the bigger picture of the space itself. It’s one thing when it’s a mobile app or a website, but when it’s something that’s going into a physical environment, there’s a lot of other things you need to be aware of. It’s nice to have a UX take on that too. Joe: Our time together is almost at a close but I want to wrap up on one piece of advice or one thing that a listener who’s an entrepreneur or a non profit even can do to immediately improve the experience on their own website. What can somebody do today, beyond pick up the phone and call you, to make their experience better? Mike: I would say show the website to five people that sue it on a daily basis, on a regular basis. Just go through inducing user testing and observe what works and what doesn’t, and then use that to help make improvements. Joe: Folks can find you all at interactivemechanics.com and you’re all on twitter. We’ll put links in the show note today. The team from interactive mechanics, thanks so much for speeding time with us today on The Build. Amelia: Thank you! Joe: The Build is a production of 2820 radio in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Our producer is Lori Taylor. Our associate producer is [inaudible 00:40:22]. Our talent coordinators are Katrina Smith and [Ghasemi Ali 00:40:25] and our post production team is led by Evan Wilder at Flowly Audio in Detroit. My name is Joe Taylor Junior, thanks for listening to the Build.