[00:00:00.500] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.240] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.320] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:12.090] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.990] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast, where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And thank you so much for joining us.
[00:00:25.260] - Taylor
Yeah, welcome.
[00:00:25.940] - Gordon
Yeah. So I don't have any news. I don't think. No, I don't think I've got any news. Any news from your end?
[00:00:33.990] - Taylor
No, nothing from me.
[00:00:35.380] - Gordon
All right, let's get straight into our topics then. Would you like to go first or shall I?
[00:00:39.650] - Taylor
I'm going to go first.
[00:00:40.510] - Gordon
Right, go for it.
[00:00:41.700] - Taylor
So I found a website called Mobbin. Now, this was actually recommended, or someone recommended it in a video that I think they were sponsored. Essentially what Mobbin does is they take all of the big popular branded websites, apps, and they create screenshots of every single step. So, an example of this is you open an app. So let's take the Airbnb app, for example. Open the app. You then are presented with a screen that says sign up or log in. And then obviously, depending on if you have an account or not, you will select the relevant option. And what happens is they take screenshots at every single step of the way. So you hit the sign up button, they take a screenshot, they fill their details in, they take a screenshot of what the error, if you've incorrectly filled in a field, for example, what the error state looks like. You hit sign up, then you have an onboarding welcome screen. And they do this for lots and lots of, hundreds and thousands, of different apps, different websites. And it's essentially a way to see how companies are designing their websites and apps, and basically allowing you to get inspiration and see, "okay, what are these apps doing? How are they handling a certain flow?" So it could be signing up, it could be creating a new post on LinkedIn. It could just be the dashboard area of Vimeo, for example. And it has thousands and thousands of screenshots that you can then, which are then categorised by type. So if it's a dashboard, if it's a sign in screen, if it's a UI element. And they basically categorise the entire database to be searchable, to be filterable. And yeah, there's just lots and lots of great resources on there for you to think about how you could display something. If you're looking for an 'About' section with team members, for example, or if you're looking for a 'testimonials' block or a 'contact' section, you can go and just view hundreds of different websites that have done similar things. And then you can just gauge inspiration from it and go, "which one fits my website?" Or "how do I want to handle a certain state when someone tries to submit a form and there's an error? How are different companies handling that state? Are they putting the label or the error message below that field? Or is there a big box at the top of the page that says all of the different errors?" Lots of different types of examples of essentially the same type of stuff.
[00:03:35.890] - Gordon
What's interesting about that, because it's the first time I've heard about it, is that not only are you getting inspiration from what other people have done, but for some of the big companies, you get an idea of what a visitor is being trained to do. So if they are being shown and trained into knowing that something that they do is going to do this, then you can then take that knowledge and put it into your site so that when visitors come to your site, they possibly already have an idea of how it's going to work based on other sites they've been to.
[00:04:15.270] - Taylor
Yeah, you'll find that a lot of the big companies do their user experience very very similar, purely for the fact that users know that experience. And so you don't want to change too much what they're expecting to happen. Otherwise, they will get confused, they'll get lost, they won't know where to find things. So we've been taught that normally in the top right corner or something like that, there'll be an avatar if you're logged in, and it will say profile or say your name, and you know clicking on that is going to take you to the settings area, some sort of settings. And we're all trained to know that. And so that's why you'll find a lot of companies do that exact same thing, because everyone's been trained on that. Same with a hamburger menu. People know that it's going to be at the top of the page next to a logo because that's just what we're used to. So why change something and make the user experience harder for people? Now, you don't have to use Mobbin. I was talking to a guy called A, who is a Twitch streamer and also a designer, and he said at his old job, he used to do that, but as a manual process. And he's a quite big designer, quite big on user experience. So he enjoyed going to the App Store, downloading the top 10 apps from the day, and going through that exact process, taking screenshots and then doing his own research. "Okay, what do these all have in common? What situations are people designing for?" And he used to do that himself. So you don't have to do it. But for me, I would prefer just to have that done for me because I, again, I'm not the designer. I want just quick examples and be able to find stuff when I want it.
[00:06:01.840] - Gordon
And is this a free resource or is it a paid for service?
[00:06:04.640] - Taylor
They have a free tier and you can browse their website and see quite a lot, but then to unlock the entire library, you have to pay.
[00:06:12.930] - Gordon
And what is the web address? Do you know off the top of your head?
[00:06:15.720] - Taylor
I don't. Something like mobbin.com, but it'll be in the show notes.
[00:06:19.250] - Gordon
We'll put it in the show notes yeah, so we can see. I've not heard that term Mobbin before. I wonder where that came from. I don't know. Anything else you want to say on that? Sounds very interesting.
[00:06:29.160] - Taylor
I don't think so, but it was very interesting to see that even though websites are pretty much completely different in terms of design and style, fundamentally, they are all the same with the same user experience, regardless of how it looks.
[00:06:44.650] - Gordon
Yeah, making it easy for the visitor to navigate around the site and do what they want to do and find the information they need to find, which is the reason for having a website in the first place, isn't it?
[00:06:56.650] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:06:57.260] - Gordon
Yeah. So my topic today is getting professionals to do a job that you're not a professional in. So what do I mean by that? Well, I have an accountant and my accountant does my accounts. Now, that sounds like it's very normal and very easy, but there are a lot of people out there who aren't accountants, who do their own accounts, and they're saving some money. So why don't I do that? Well, the reason I don't do that is because I don't know enough about it. I'm not an expert in accounts and accounting and submitting my taxes and anything like that, that can have a repercussion in the future, like a fine or extra tax to pay, plus interest. Well, I don't want to take that on for myself with the knowledge or lack of knowledge that I have. So I get a professional to do it. We spoke about this when I talked about my dash cam and the fact that the company that I went to to fit it, could do it in 2 hours, because that's what they do. They deal with cars and fitting audio equipment day in, day out. They've seen it all. They've probably done it all. They know the different cars, they know the different equipment, they know how the fuse board works and how to link in to the battery without giving you problems in the future. And I don't. I'm not a professional. I'm not even interested in it personally. But I find it much better to pay a professional to do these sort of jobs than to do it myself. Now, there are some things that I'll do myself, and they're the things that I either have an interest in and want to learn about, or they're things that I feel like I should know because it's important for my business. So things, just trying to think off top of my head, things like maintenance of props and things like that. I should know how to do that. It's the sort of thing I could do, I don't need to go to a professional prop maker to maintain my props. I can normally do it myself. And if I can't because it needs a bit of extra work or there's metal or wood involved that I don't have an experience with, I know people who do, and I'll go to them and get them to do it because they have more knowledge. And I think there's a lot of people who use false economy in saying, "I don't want to pay someone £200 to do that job because I can do it and it'll be so much cheaper for me." But if it takes you a week to do that job, my time is worth more than that. I can't spend a week doing something when I can pay someone £200 to do it. My time is better spent elsewhere working on other projects that I am good at, and make sure that I leave the work for professionals to professionals. Do you have any experience of this in your line?
[00:10:22.000] - Taylor
Yeah. So the way I always choose or decide whether or not something is, should be outsourced to a professional or whether it's something I should do myself is usually two questions I ask myself. First one is the time. Do I have the time to do this? So I could, for example, clean my car, but I don't have the time. Like you were saying, I have-
[00:10:52.640] - Gordon
You can make time, but you know what your hourly rate is.
[00:10:55.380] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:10:55.730] - Gordon
And you know that for the hour, hour and half that it's going to take to clean your car, that's going to be X amount of money that you would be effectively losing because you're not working that time because you're doing your car. And there's an actual figure there involved, whereas you know how much it's going to cost to have your car cleaned by someone who does it all the time. They're going to do a better job. And the chances are, on this particular example, that the cleaning of the car is going to be cheaper.
[00:11:28.470] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:11:29.560] - Gordon
So that's a good first example.
[00:11:31.860] - Taylor
For me, the time is, is it going to cost me more in my hourly rate than it would cost to pay someone? And two is quality. Again, it partly links into the time. How long would it take me to get to the same level of quality and standard that it would take a professional? So for example, how long would it take me to become qualified and be able to do a tax return to the quality that is legally accepted? And again, isn't going to have any repercussions with fines and things like that. And again, that is going to be a lot higher than it is to pay an accountant.
[00:12:17.850] - Gordon
Well, the other thing is, from your two examples, once you know how to clean a car, well, you know how to clean a car, and then it's just a cost decision, isn't it? Is my time going to be spent better elsewhere earning money than the amount it's going to cost to get the car done? But the other thing with tax advisors and accountants and so forth is that the rules keep changing. So it's not like you just need to learn how to do it and that's it. You've got to keep up with all the changes because they change every year and new things are allowed and some things that were allowed are now not allowed. And these aren't things that I've got either the time or the inclination to learn. So I don't. I'll give it to someone else to do. I don't know if it saves me money in the long run. I suspect it probably does, but it will definitely be done better and professionally. And that's where we came into this, getting professionals to do a job professionally that you're not a professional at.
[00:13:23.170] - Taylor
I think it also frees up brain space because I think we've all done jobs that we don't enjoy doing, doing jobs that you just don't enjoy doing. And so by passing it out, you're saving yourself that mental brain space to having to actually sit down and do it, but also it's draining and it takes up not just time, but your own brain capacity to focus on other things because you've done 2 hours of that and that's the equivalent of doing six hours of something you enjoy, for example. And so the price you pay for having to stress about something, having to worry about doing this job where you could just pass it to someone that knows what they're doing. And you know that at the end of it it's going to have, the job is going to be complete and ready to go whatever it is, really.
[00:14:22.810] - Gordon
So that's the third criteria for you. The third criteria is, do you actually want to do that job? Because if it's not something you want to do, then you have the option of getting someone else to do it for you. Now, it's not always possible. We do have to do boring jobs that we don't want to do sometimes, and it's not always cost-effective to get someone else to do it for you. One of the rules that I had when you were growing up was, do the jobs you have to do, then you can do the jobs you want to do. At the time, it referred to things like homework and stuff like that because you have to do your homework. You can't outsource that. You could, but I don't recommend it.
[00:15:09.900] - Taylor
It wouldn't be ethical.
[00:15:10.780] - Gordon
But you have to do that. Do the jobs you have to do. If you've got phone calls that need deadlines or you need to contact someone, send them an email, and you've got to do it because that's part of a bigger process, then just get in and do it. Then once you've done it, then you can do the things you want to do. That way, you don't push them out the way and they get forgotten, because that's when some businesses get into real problems because they're just ignoring all the basics. There's a company that I know that had an entertainment agency, and they would ring up lots of different entertainers. They'd ask them to go and do jobs. They'd send them out to do these jobs. But the problem is they forgot to then invoice people, because that was the bit they didn't enjoy. They didn't enjoy sending out invoices, chasing for the money. And the problem is that they were ending up not being able to pay the entertainers because they didn't have the cash flow. And so the entertainers were waiting for months and months, sometimes years, and they were being paid from new jobs that were just happening, which meant that the new entertainers that needed to be paid weren't getting paid because their money was going to previous people.
[00:16:33.370] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:16:34.060] - Gordon
So, yeah, it's not a great job. In that sort of situation, if you can afford to do so, get someone in to do the invoicing for you. You do all the bits you enjoy doing, the selling of the show, the booking of the entertainers, get someone in to do the admin part of it that you don't enjoy, you don't like to do, you don't want to do. I think if he was to do that, he would probably have still been able to keep his good name because he lost his good name due to this issue. And an awful lot of entertainers just refused to work for him because they knew they were unlikely to get paid in any reasonable time. And that's the problem. So there you go. Third criteria, do you want to do it?
[00:17:22.030] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:17:22.240] - Gordon
I hope that helps because it's something I've been thinking about recently with the various jobs that I do, because you've only got a certain number of hours in a day and you have to make a decision as to what to best spend that time on. And if it's things you don't want to do, if it's things that you can't do because you don't have the knowledge or the ability, and if it's things that you can afford to get someone else to do, do that; because your life will become so much nicer and you'll end up with a better work-life-time experience. You know what I mean?
[00:17:59.370] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:17:59.760] - Gordon
That wasn't said very well, but I think we know what we mean. That's everything I want to say on that.
[00:18:04.850] - Taylor
Me too.
[00:18:06.020] - Gordon
Thank you very much for joining us. As always, you can like, share, and subscribe. You'll find us on Facebook and on YouTube.
[00:18:13.790] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk.
[00:18:17.980] - Gordon
And of course, you can listen to the podcast. I don't think we ever mention that, but we're on the main platform. So if you prefer to listen to us in the car or on a walk or a run, we can be found on most of the platforms. Just search for 'This Week With Taylor and Gordon' and you'll find us. And subscribe and then all of our new episodes will just drop into your app every week. Well, every week that we do them. We do try and do them every week, but it doesn't always work out that way. Until next week, Friday at 1pm. We'll see you then. My name is Gordon, and I am from Drayson Design.
[00:18:53.840] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:18:56.650] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:18:56.960] - Taylor
Bye.
