The Benefits of Flat Design

While a digital user interface can be beautifully shaded with gradients and rounded corners, there's something a little more honest about flat design, an aesthetic that eliminates drop shadows and other attempts to create a sense of three-dimensional physicality.
The desire for a tactile-seeming experience made sense in the early days of the digital revolution, when consumers needed visual guidance to understand how to use their new iPhones and other devices. But now, with near-universal gadget penetration, many companies are turning to flat design as a more practical option for their websites and mobile platforms.
"Flat scales well to smaller screens," says Bradley Falk, CTO of New York City-based beauty startup Poshly, which revamped its website with flat-design principles. "This is because use of white space is important, but buttons are uncluttered and big--easy to identify on mobile, faster to render and have smaller payloads. Flat really helps here, because I can spend less time designing pages specifically for a mobile device."
In addition to its optimization for multiple platforms, flat design's clean, modern look is appealing to many businesses. But there's more to it than that, suggests Brian Casel, a Connecticut-based designer and entrepreneur. "I don't think that ‘going flat' should be the sole reason for a redesign. Flat-design techniques should be used to support a larger set of goals. Those goals should be about meeting the needs and wants of your users," he says.
Casel's company, Restaurant Engine, provides website development to restaurants. Aiming to redesign his own website with an emphasis on ease of use, he concluded that flat design was the best approach. "I needed to find ways to simplify it and make it easier to guide restaurant owners through the aspects and benefits of our service," he says. "By utilizing flat-design techniques, such as simple monotone boxes around testimonials or use of white space to lay out the navigation, I think we achieved our goal."
While flat design can alleviate technical issues--it requires fewer images and less-complicated coding, resulting in a faster site--it does add challenges, such as color selection. For example, unlike with traditional web design, a light-colored button may not be easy to discern on top of the white space that is the norm in flat design. "I couldn't use pastels, but since we use purple a lot as part of our identity, that was easy," Falk says. "If you already have corporate colors that are not bold, flat likely won't work for you."
A major redesign can offer big wins: Poshly's site revamp has driven a 20 percent increase in user engagement. "While the look of the old site wasn't superficially dated, it wasn't always clear what the purpose of each screen was," Falk says.
What is clear? Flat design--with its emphasis on white space, bold buttons and clear typography--has the potential to let products shine, with fewer distractions to get in a customer's way.

4 Steps to Creating a Successful Job-Swapping Program

Job swap programs, which allow employees to spend time working in various departments or even in overseas offices have been successful at large companies. Allowing employees to work in various departments or divisions lets them get a big-picture view of the company and how various areas function. But with limited resources and time-strapped employees, can entrepreneurial businesses replicate such programs in their own organizations?
Yes, they can, says Caryn Goldberg, an assistant professor of management at American University. By creating systems that let employees cross-train and gain experience in various departments, smart businesses can end up with employees who are able to fulfill various roles, allowing them to find the best fit for their skills within the company. In addition, as they learn more about overall operations, they are better able to make decisions, solve problems, and conceptualize new ideas because they have a better understanding of how the business runs. She shares four tips to make job swapping a viable option for smaller firms.
1. Explain the goals.
As with most new initiatives, employee buy-in is key. Be clear about the potential up-sides to job rotation or job-swapping. If you're simply rotating a new employee from department to department, the program provides more hands on deck. If you're actually swapping employees, the department gets the benefit of new ideas and fresh insight.
Making contacts in various departments can also help troubleshoot problems and facilitate various processes in the company. For example, the sales team might benefit from having contacts in the finance department to figure out a better way to record and process expense records. In order for this to work, however, each department manager has to be willing to spend meaningful time with the employee to help him or her understand what goes on there.
2. Cross-train new hires first.
Goldberg suggests that smaller scale programs might be better focused on new hires to give them deep company insight right from the start.
"It's less resource-intensive for organizations to have people spend a little bit of time when their entry-level [employees], than it is to take somebody who's already significantly advanced in his or her career and operating at a high level to put them in a function their completely unfamiliar with," she says.
3. Decrease the duration.
While some job rotation programs may take a year or two to complete, moving an employee through various departments a month or two at a time can help accelerate the process and still give employees valuable insight.
4. Incentivize ideas.
Don't just adopt the program and let it trail off. Explain to employees who are swapping jobs or going through job rotation that you expect them to actively look for new ideas and solutions as they enter each phase of the program, Goldberg says. Sometimes, that fresh set of eyes or new way of thinking can bring tremendous value. You may even want to create incentives such as small gifts or perks, for coming up with those ideas.