Blog | Blou Designs

January 9, 2023

The Client Intake Process

Are you sabotaging your business by making it too easy to work with you? So much of today’s business rhetoric is about “removing barriers.” But you’re introducing barriers if your client intake processes and intake forms are not, at every step of the way, helping you make meaningful progress towards a successful outcome. In practice, these barriers look like In this post,...

Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

April 4, 2022

How to write multi-select checkbox questions and analyze the results

No one is just one thing. And that matters when you’re writing things like those client personas that we’re all supposed to have. But how do you capture that nuance in a survey? One way is to use the multi-select checkbox question, e.g., check all that apply. But how do you write a checkbox question that gives you information instead...

Data Strategy

March 1, 2022

How to write open-ended questions and analyze the results

There are so many good use cases for open-ended questions, and including them as part of your surveys can really increase the insight you can glean from your respondents. But: (1) How do you write questions that get the type of answers you need? (2) How do you reduce all of that free-flowing text into something that’s manageable and usable?

Data Strategy

February 21, 2022

How to tackle a huge project | A SOP Story

TL;DR? There are four things you can do to make a huge project not only seem manageable but be manageable, even as you keep saying to yourself, “What was I thinking taking this on?!?” (1) Know what you’re trying to do and break it down into manageable steps as soon as possible. (2) Track your progress in a way that fosters...

Processes & Productivity

February 1, 2022

How information flows through a mail merge document

There are three files involved in the mail merge process: the Data Source, the Mail Merge Template, and the Review Document (which is sometimes called a merge document). In this post, I’m going to explain each one, covering where they come from, what role they play in the process and how they’re related to each other, and, finally, when it’s...

Tech Stack/Training

November 1, 2021

Analysis paralysis and the myths of being data driven and successful

Do you ever overthink or overanalyze to the point where you stop making decisions and taking action? Where you’re afraid that the choice you’re about to make isn’t the “best choice“, so you wait it out a little more, and maybe research a little more, and maybe gather together more data … just so you can be “sure“? That’s called analysis paralysis....

Data Strategy

September 15, 2021

Auditing your process improvement process | A SOP Story

TL;DR? Schedule some time to review the end results of the processes you’ve “improved,” and revise your current-day SOPs to incorporate back in anything you might have inadvertently “incrementally improved” out of your process along the way. Then again, you might just have an opportunity to pat yourself on the back for actually improving, and continue on! As a case study...

Processes & Productivity

July 1, 2021

Analyzing time spent: Time management with box and whisker plots

We all know that there are only so many minutes in a day, and that goals like being more productive and effective hinge on things like better time management, that is, working smarter not harder. This is particularly true if you think you’ve got a pretty standard process in place. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate a visualization tool called a box and...

Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

June 21, 2021

Using big data to generate content ideas | A SOP Story

TL;DR? Big data knows what questions people have, and you can capitalize on that to generate an endless list of answer-focused content ideas that draw from and showcase your experience, knowledge, and expertise. Scroll down to the section titled ‘Bringing it together’ for a quick list of the steps. Scroll back up for the nuance. There’s nothing new under the sun,...

Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

June 1, 2021

How to design dashboards for data insights for business decisions

You want data insights at a glance, but it’s hard to digest and process a large volume of data, and you’re creating and collecting more data all of the time. You’re suffering from DRIP: you’re data rich but information poor. To get information, you turn to dashboards, but, if you don’t design them correctly, you can become dashboard rich but information...

Data Strategy