“Too many CIOs get lost in the thicket of what platforms are hot today, what buzzwords are ascendant, what tool got the reviews here, or there, and never take time to sit down with a user and observe, and listen, and talk.”
From Mark Hurst on Good Experience. Helpful quote as I prepare to host a training session on conducting customer interviews next week. Good dialog illustrating why it’s important for management to buy in to user-centered principles.
Yesterday this poster was donated to the Church History Museum with the hope that it becomes part of the permanent archives. The poster was designed for our 2008 First Annual Design Review and is signed by the designers in attendance.
Donating the artwork to its rightful owner was my final “task” as a church employee. As of today, I’m no longer part of the North Temple crew. I return to self-employment with excitement for what the future holds, and gratitude for spending the last three years with talented people whom I now call friends.
One reason for the chirping crickets around here is the insane amount of work we have going on here at the LDS Church. We have major projects going on in every department of the church, and its keeping the 40 or so of us pretty busy.
So busy, in fact, that we’ve been able to shed the pesky hiring freeze and open up several spots. If you’re an active member of the LDS Church, are willing to work in Salt Lake City, and match up with the following requirements, send me an email at [email protected].
Design Manager
Our Design Manager role coordinates all user experience design in one of our many portfolios of projects. You’ll need experience managing people (read: geeks), and experience in a Creative Director or similar role. Check out this really formal job description for more info.
HTML/CSS Coder
We’re looking for contractors who can work 30-40 hours a week, on-site, cutting our Photoshop files into standards-compliant HTML and CSS. Send me an email if you know your stuff, and especially if you have experience interacting with or supporting development teams.
Why Stylesheet Abstraction Matters (just realized that I didn’t post a link to the previous quote by Chris Eppstein) – interesting information for those who design and develop with CSS.
“CSS is the weakest link in the web developers toolbox. The problem goes deeper than CSS’s lack of variables. Unlike the “function” in programming, CSS has no fundamental building block.”
Chris Eppstein, the author of Compass writes up a solid argument for the need of abstraction in stylesheets. I’ve been toying around with Compass and the Sass language over the past few weeks and things look very promising.
In a recent team meeting, we talked about how our circle of influence is different—wider—than our circle of responsibility. This reminded me of something I posted three years ago almost to the day, so I decided to re-post it here, to remind myself to “speak up” outside my role—but to do so appropriately.
Beyond the initial PC vs. Mac appearance of this article, it really points to how a great design team has worked to unify a company and present a unified message. No matter the size of your company, I think every design team struggles with focusing the company in one direction, especially when there are many people contributing to product development and content.
Great interview from Mark Hurst with Brian King on the re-design of Courtyard by Marriott. A great case study on segmentation, observation, user-centered design, branding, and prototyping. Fun to see these familiar concepts applied in a domain that’s less familiar (to me anyway). I loved the description of business travelers being invited to a life-size prototype of the new lobby, built out of foam core to see how they would react to Marriott’s innovations.
Nick Usborne’s summary of how to improve conversion of browsers into buyers. From Flywheels, Kinetic Energy, and Friction, a great article that still wears well, 3 years later. The trouble is getting the marketing wing of your organization to buy into it…
“Handcrafted with love by BYU design students and faculty, for the 5th Typophile Film Festival. A visual typographic feast about the five senses, and how they contribute to and enhance our creativity. Everything in the film is real—no CG effects!”
From research reported in The Mediocre Multitasker, in the NY Times, via Facebook friend, Susan Dray.
Researchers said, “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”
I find this 100% true in my own life. I do my best work when I can shut out everything else but the task at hand. Now… what was I doing?
“There’s a common misconception that visual design’s role is only to
provide a pleasing veneer on the page. In fact, visual design’s big
role is to boost overall communication.”
From Jared Spool’s recent article on the interplay between good visual design, IA, and content design. He also argues that to really succeed, it is better to have people who are strong in all three areas, not just specialists who are good at just one of them. I think I agree.
“Twitter time passes 10 times faster than email time.”
Another notable quote from Nielsen’s message on Twitter postings, noting that compared to email advertising, which continues to generate clicks for several days, Twitter “shows a drastically steeper decay function: lots of clicks the first few minutes, and then almost none.” This means, among other things, that Tweets are impacted far more negatively than email by differences in timezone…
Jakob Nielsen recently ran a Twitter post through 5 rounds of iterative design to get the impact he wanted. At first blush I was thinking, “That sounds like a lot of effort to optimize a Tweet!” But if you are using twitter as a marketing medium, I guess it makes sense. (Far as I can tell, these were just design rounds; he wasn’t running a user study or anything.)
See his article for lessons learned in each round, from concision to focus, impact, and re-tweetability. (There, I’m making up new words right and left.)
He finishes the article with a notable quote: “Text is a UI. It’s a common mistake to think that only full-fledged graphical user interfaces count as interaction design and deserve usability attention. ... In fact, the shorter it is, the more important it is to design text for usability.”
I’m an amateur singer-songwriter when I’m not at work or asleep (let’s say for now that they’re mutually exclusive), and for the last few years I’ve been writing and performing material with different bands, duos, and on my own. Throughout that time I’ve tried different things to get my songs from pen and paper to studio and stage. It’s a typical creative process – start with an idea, work, work, work, end with a performance or a recording or both. For the longest time, my process for getting from point A (“Mmmm…good idea…”) to point B (“We’re going to play a song for you called…”) was pretty straightforward.
“It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.”
Excerpt from a manifesto written by Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, published June 13, 1943, in the New York Times. Via The Footnotes of Mad Men.
In a bizarre flood of memories this morning, I recalled one of the very first websites which pointed me in the direction of using CSS for layout. Whoever you are, BlueRobot, thanks.
“The content that sits inside of our design framework is often the final arbiter of success, yet we sometimes diminish its importance and separate ourselves from it. The more we separate our design activities from content development, the greater the risk of design failure.”
Christopher Detzi writes about The Content Conundrum, a very nice and well thought out article covering a problem every web designer must face
