Sheila Hoffman and her husband are environmentalists. They’ve been vegans since 1990, eat local foods, drive less than 6,000 miles per year using biodiesel fuel, and use reusable cloth bags for shopping.

In 2008, they planned to spend their vacation in New Zealand and Australia. They canceled it when they discovered the trip from their home of Seattle, WA, would quadruple their carbon footprint. Their friends were aghast. “The plane will fly anyway,” they said, and suggested the Hoffmans buy carbon offsets instead. But that’s not how the Hoffmans roll. They wanted to turn their small decision into something bigger by creating a campaign called “One Less Flight” with the aim of encouraging other people to do what they did. That’s when Sheila Hoffman contacted Miskeeto and told us their story. And that’s when we decided to help out by creating this site.

Make a small decision that’s part of something bigger.

Commit to taking one less flight.

Want to request a site to be reviewed? Contact us!

The people on this team are smart and engaged, but they’re nowhere near doing their best work. They’re not taking advantage of each other’s ideas and passions. They’re not having any fun.

During the kickoff meeting, I told them to cover several of the walls with whiteboards. Get flip pads and markers. Use sticky notes to organize ideas. Get up from their desks, head to the conference room, and brainstorm. Appoint a design lead and a devil’s advocate for each meeting, and start throwing out ideas. It would be a lot more fun, I said, and would lead to great ideas that got everyone excited and motivated and would work wonders for their users.

During the trip, I ran one such brainstorming meeting to show them how it’s done. By the end, we had overhauled two core application task flows and had a design in the works that would help the company meet its goals and would provide a vastly superior user experience than the current design. And we had a blast. One person said he could “do this all day”.

Before I left the office, I put sticky notes up on the conference room walls. Several went on a large empty wall. They said, “Whiteboard”. Others said, “Butcher paper”, “Shelves for supplies”, and “Flip pad”. I cleared some boxes out of the way in the front room and on a mirrored wall wrote, “Use this space for brainstorming.” I even stuck a note on one developer’s monitor that said, “Don’t think at your computer. Grab a team and head to the conference room.”

Design is a group activity. The small team beats the lone genius every time. No one individual will have all the best answers. The best answers come from groups. The best ideas are the result of collaboration.

Got an uninspiring office? Buy some supplies and start having fun.

Almost every time I walk into a FedEx shipping location, I do something wrong. “If you ship by ground, you can’t use that envelope,” the proverbial shipping gods seem to say to me. “If you want to ship by air, you can’t use that shipping bill. You have to use that other one. But you have to use this envelope, or this box, or that box. If you ship ground, you have to buy an envelope. We don’t give those away.”

Today, the guy behind the counter told me there used to be a poster that explained it all. FedEx told them to get rid of it. My guess is that it was making matters worse. So now, invariably, he tells me I’ve used the wrong envelope, or the wrong shipping bill, or that my t-shirt isn’t the right color. The rules are arbitrary, and FedEx does nothing to clear them up.

Go ahead, FedEx — keep your arbitrary rules. Just make sure I can use your service without learning them.

Don’t give me a poster that explains it all. The poster is a band-aid when you need to cure the disease. Instead, organize the shipping materials cabinet into three columns and label them using three signs, each with giant text, that say ”Ground”, ”Air”, and “Really Damn Fast”. Just for good measure, to each one, add a large downward-pointing arrow. In red.

More instruction never compensates for bad design. The solution is always better design. Solve the real problem.

Thanks for the blog post, FedEx. Oh, and by the way — I passed a UPS office on the way to your store. Maybe I’ll go there next time.