I love the conference space, and I love startups. Thats why it keeps shocking me that startups are being extorted to present at DEMO like it’s going to make their whole business. Seriously (and I’m being 100% personal on this one), it pisses me off. And I posted about this (with Scoble agreeing) about a year ago.

Now finally, someone has the ability to actually twist the screws of DEMO - and I’m glad it was my friend Mike. Techcrunch20 will be happening in the fall, and although numbers will be restricted, you won’t have to pay a dime to show. Mike is teaming up with Calacanis to organize the conference, and more details will be out soon. But all this quick post to say: at long last - best of luck, guys.

Brainstorming is a key activity in building any product. It evolves a concept into a series of ideas, and those ideas into the necessary vision to actually get started with the real work. It is a fundamental part of any business. Here are three tips on conducting brainstorming sessions:

1) Keep things visual. You have an idea, and while between two people it may be easy to be on the same page, it doesn’t always happen. So, if at all possible, draw, document, build, to make sure your vision is the same. This is probably the most valuable tip (hence it’s the first). Only if both want the same thing will things move it that direction.

2) Don’t be afraid of ideas. Any idea is a good starting point, and in a good brainstorming session, you want to get those out (again, into paper) as much as possible. You also want to have way too many, so we can weed out the worst ones afterwards. The reason why you don’t do it in the first place is because an evolution of a bad idea can be a tremendous idea. So, no ignoring ideas. No playing “devils advocate” - anything deserves attention.

3) Bring fresh people into the idea. Maybe this doesn’t need to happen on the first meeting, but you can easily “freeze” your creative juices if you don’t keep the drum going. Fresh views into your idea will be extremely valuable. Tell people what you’re thinking about, get them at a table, give everyone pens, and hack away at ideas. Seriously, combining the experience of people with their perception of your idea will generate great output.

4) It’s never early for a prototype. If you have an idea that needs to get out, a prototype may be the best solution. This doesn’t always work out well with web applications because you’re building things presented on flat screens, but why not build a prototyping toolbox with shapes and notes, so you can actually build a physical wireframe of what you’re trying to tell the rest of the brainstorming team?

Do you have tips on how to conduct successful brainstorming sessions? Share them in the comments! Top picture by faroekat, on Flickr.

We usually don’t talk much about the work we do on this blog - as you know if you’re a regular, I usually focus on design, innovation and - sorry, have to use the meme - Web 2.0. However during the last few days I’ve been thinking and I’ll be doing a few posts on our process, work, and opportunities. Today, I’d love to talk about Webreakstuff as an identity, and I would love your input on it - I wont take much of your time.

Webreakstuff is a peculiar name. It came out of the realization that to build something new, you actually have to break and bend a few things - stand in the shoulders of giants; build from the past to improve and innovate. Having a name that implies an action (and by most people’s judgement, a negative one, too) is perhaps a tad limiting - but it’s brought us some attention from people who wondered about our approach.

How we’re tagged

I’ve done some research using del.icio.us on how people actually categorize us. We say we’re a “design, development and strategy” company, but it’s the audience’s perception of what we do that interests me. So this page collects the result of 532 people tagging (with 1989 tags total) our homepage on del.icio.us, and apparently the two opinions - what we say about us and what you say about us - aren’t that different. Here’s a shortened version of the graphic:

The image above had to be tailored to fit the constraints of this layout (full view) - only tags with over 10 results show up, and the bars have been cut to half their real size -, but it gives you (and us) a good idea of how we’re seen by the public. People relate us to css, design, usability, ajax, web 2.0 and web development. And apparently, some people seem to be inspired by us (which is humbling, to say the least).

How do you see us?

Identity isn’t a walled garden, and should never be. How you see us is much more valuable than how we see ourselves. If the two visions are a match, that’s just perfect.

I’d personally love to know what *you* think about us. If you could describe us (the blog, the site, the work, whatever comes to your mind), what would you say? What are we doing well, and what could we be doing better? Help us shape ourselves - please do leave a comment if you have an opinion on this.

The Adaptive Path weblog has a story from a few days ago on an interview Jeff Veen did with Irene Au, the director of User Experience at Google. It is an interesting interview to read if you’re interested in how User Experience plays a role at Google, but it was one of Veen’s comments that grabbed my attention:

One of the things I’ve noticed, now [that] I’ve had a small team that was working in the start-up environment (…). And then coming into Google, (…) it’s been a little bit of a shift. Like having designers involved from the very beginning, at the technology-creation stage, has been something that the engineers we’re working with have never experienced before. (…) I think that’s a unique opportunity that I’ve found here at Google that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

Jeff highlights something I think about frequently and wrote about here - how most companies ignore design until late in the product development process, usually resulting in poorer products. In fact, there doesnt’t seem to be a lot of companies working on the web willing to include design (maybe a proper definition of design is in order) in the early stages of planning.

The truth is that design at the early stage of a product helps everyone get on the same page as to what users will actually want to get out of the product and how to get there - usually resulting in better prioritization and better focus. This need for design justifies how we (here at Webreakstuff) generally start a design project by going back to understanding user goals and how those correlate to what’s actually been built by the development teams. Usually, disappointment ensues.

Fixing product development processes isn’t a difficult task if there’s the courage to pause, step back and think about these simple points:

• What does the user get out of our product?
• How does he do it?
• What do we get out of it?
• How can we combine user goals and business goals?
• Where are we now, and how does that compare to our goals?
• How does the user actually experience our product?

Usually companies believe design is the top layer of a product, and it isn’t. Products shouldn’t be built exclusively through code and embellished with “fancy graphics” (which is how most people still see design). Design, applied to web applications, is the realization of user goals and planning of how the system looks, feels and behaves. You usually can’t fix how something behaves after it’s been entrenched in the application. You need to design (read: plan) ahead.

Related Link: Web design agency services can help optimize the user experience on your website. The usability of your web design is critical.