Business in Japan - Cultural Lessons

The March edition of More Magazine had an interesting feature on 'high status' vs 'low status' etiquette in an office environment. Most of it I'd heard before (give and receive a business card with two hands, always allow someone to introduce you etc) but I found this set of diagrams interesting:

It shows where to stand / sit in different situations. The high-status position is marked with a (1), number (2) is second-highest-status etc.

In summary the person furthest away from the entrance (入口 / 出口) is highest in status and the person furthest away is lowest. If you're ever attending a meeting in Japan remembering that will probably be enough but here are some other nuances:

• In the top left diagram position number 5 is furthest away from the table as well as closest to the entrance.
• In the top middle diagram position number 4 is closest to the lift/elevator buttons.
• In the diagram on the right position number 4 is riding in the front of the taxi with the driver. As people drive on the left in Japan person 1 would either get into the taxi first or have their own door to enter with.

And that's about it. I haven't bothered translating all of it as it's mostly about entrances and exits but I hope that was useful to you!

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Email redesign

Our weekly email was not displaying well across email clients - so I decided to redesign the whole email template. I've been doing research on layouts for a few months at that point - when I got an email that I thought was clear I would sketch a quick boxy-wireframe of the email message and stick it in a folder.

But when I finally got the go ahead on the redesign it turned out other people really liked the current design so all my plans were foiled.

I read a lot of documentation about designing for email (mostly using the Litmus Blog) and relearnt html tables. In the end it was really satisfying looking at all the nested tables - in the end even with our reasonably simple template we ended up with 13 tables. And then I transferred my template to MailChimp. It's actually easy to make an area editable in MailChimp - you just wrap the bit you want to be editible in a

. There are other things you have to do which MailChimp have listed.

My first design. Different tables are highlighted in different colours

I did miss a few things. That's my fault because I did a lot of research on what's popular in email design and the problems that our users were having but when I decided to remake the current template rather than design a new one I didn't spend enough time looking at the old templates. For example I used #color1 rather than #color2 for the links which I had to go back and fix.

But the new template seems to be working. All the images that were reused (such as the header and social links) have been updated and resized, everything is nested properly and W3 compliant. The colour palette was reduced so everything looks a lot more simple now. More importantly I stripped out lines and lines of header css and moved them inline. The only css in the head now is the link color, image display and some @media queries (which mobiles apparently read but desktop clients don't).

Here's the head of the old template -  see the full email

Here's the head of the new template -  see the full email

To be honest it's a lot more blocky now - I can't really explain it but I assume it's because the width is very fixed. There was also a lot of white space at the bottom of the email so I moved things around to get rid of that scrolling space that I don't think anybody was scrolling through - it was pretty obvious that the email had finished by then so items like our social links and the 'donate' button weren't getting seen.

Designing for email was pretty fun in the end! Once I got into the nested tables drama I found it really satisfying. I didn't have to use a clearfix anywhere! But unfortunately that's the end of that project and now I'm back to working with floats....

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Wireframing is fun!

Even though I haven't done any real training on it I really like wireframing. I liked reading through Google's Material Design principles and figuring out which user interactions would make the most sense.

I wireframe things for fun all the time - it helps me think about the composition and the parts of what I'm doing - but this was my first time using an editor to make it look neat.

I used NinjaMock because I'd heard of it before and it's free for personal use. It took a little getting used to though. At one point I lost all my work because I wanted to add my own assets and then found out you needed an account to add your own assets. But once I was faced with a blank screen again it was very easy to recreate what I had before now that I knew where to go for what I wanted (only having 3 views helps).

I think there was a way to show the interactions using NinjaMock but that was beyond what I needed - I just wanted to show people something that wasn't my notebook.

Original thought process and sketching

View 0 - Home screen

View 1 - Slightly different from the way I sketched it because I talked through the data-structure with the data architect

View 2 - I'm a little worried I'll create something that doesn't work but has really awesome animations

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