Today we're talking with Nick Disabato of Draft, a small interaction design consultancy in Chicago. His previous clients include Gravitytank, New Music USA, Chicago Magazine, The Wirecutter, and too many other attractive, intelligent people to count. We spent quite a bit of time talking about his work designing a delightful user experience for Cards Against Humanity.
We discuss...
- Cards Against Humanity marketing strategy
- Split-testing
- Conversion rate optimization
- And more
Links:
- Cards Against Humanity - http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/
- Cadence & Slang - http://cadence.cc/
- Draft: Revise - https://draft.nu/revise/
- Nick's newsletter - http://eepurl.com/vqJgv
- Visual Website Optimizer - https://vwo.com/
PS: Be sure to subscribe to the podcast via iTunes and write a review. iTunes is all about reviews!
Transcript
Recording: This is the Unofficial Shopify Podcast with Kurt Elster and Paul Reda, your resources for growing your Shopify business, sponsored by Ethercycle.
Kurt: Welcome to the Unofficial Shoplift Podcast. I'm your host, Kurt Elster and with me today is Nick Disabato from Draft. Nick, how are you doing?
Nick: Doing fantastic. How are you, man?
Kurt: I'm well. Where are you at?
Nick: I live and work in Logan Square, a neighborhood in Chicago and have been here for the past seven years. I've been independent for the past 3-1/2.
Kurt: That's good. I'm about right miles from you in Park Ridge. It's funny we're doing this over Skype but we're like a bus ride apart.
Nick: We are. We're probably a short L ride apart.
Kurt: Tell me, who’s Nick D?
Nick: Nick D is me as I exist on the Internet and I run a small design consultancy called Draft as you mentioned and we do a lot of things. I publish books. I do monthly A/B testing for people. I run the world's stupidest newsletter but what I think we're here to be talking about is my one-off interaction design product, just more typical client work, more consulting work. I've done it for a variety of e-commerce clients and solved a lot of really interesting problems for both mobile and desktop and I think about these sorts of things a lot. That's kind of ...
Kurt: For the lay person, what's interaction design?
Nick: Interaction design, it's the process of making something easier to use and it involves hacking out the layout and behavior of a product. That can range from prototyping something and running it by users to see how they enjoy using it or whether they're successful at completing goals within it.
It can range from promoting certain design decisions and hacking out functionality. It can involve figuring out edge cases like if you type in a really long response that doesn’t belong in a certain form field, what happens? If you click here, what happens? It's figuring out to choose your own adventure capacity of going through a technology product of any type.
I've worked...
Kurt: It sounds like you're a problem solver for your clients. Give me a good example of a problem you solved with interaction design.
Nick: We'll talk about e-commerce stuff. One of my biggest clients over the past few years was a board game company called Cards Against Humanity.
Kurt: I dearly love Cards Against Humanity. Tell us about it.
Nick: For your audience, if you do not know Cards Against Humanity, it's similar to a card game called Apples to Apples where I'm a person judging a card and everybody else plays another card only it's usually quite inappropriate. You have weird poop jokes or [scathalogical 00:03:03] things.
Kurt: The favorite combo I ever got, the winning combo I ever got out of Ca