In the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman described inmates who have been in the prison system too long as being ”institutionalized.” In my opinion, this phenomenon also occurs at large corporations, where departments become silos and team members use bureaucracy to hide their shortcomings and inefficiencies. In a word, everyone has become institutionalized. People forget how to work together and function as flexible, dynamic project teams. In these instances, clients don’t really hire UX consultants to solve a design problem. Rather, these companies get into a rut and they just want some fresh blood to shake things up a bit.
From my experience, the best products don’t come from one individual or department. Rather, it takes an iterative process with input from various angles of expertise. Even if a forward thinking manager proposes a scrum approach, it becomes like a begrudging behavior change and not a true conversion in attitude. This type of situation can be volatile for a consultant. You have no idea of the political landmines you’re walking into or whose toes you’re stepping on, and those with crushed toes are too willing to throw you under the bus.
So what’s a consultant to do in these situations?
Don’t expect that your design will prevail in the end. Realize that you may just be the catalyst that change the process. When in doubt, tell yourself, “At least I don’t have to work here full time. At least I’m not institutionalized.”
I have this love affair with Helvetica (note, I said Helvetica, not that bastard child, Arial) and other really clean type styles. It’s one of the reason I’m kind of futzing with this site on a semi-regular basis — I’m trying to get that perfect look typographically, and it will always be a work in progress.
Along those same lines, Samantha Warren has a great blog post where she talks about the shift of the web to clean, international typographic style, which basically emphasizes simple geometrics and focuses on minimalism. They point to iA Japan as an example of gorgeous design. I agree. iA Japan has another great read about typography, how the web is 95 percent tyopgraphy. Agreed there too.
An Indian company will take over copy editing duties for some stories published in The Orange County Register and will handle page layout for a community newspaper at the company that owns the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily, the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.
Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks Global Media at the end of June, said John Fabris, a deputy editor at the Register.
Mindworks’ Web site says the company is based outside New Delhi and provides “high-quality editorial and design services to global media firms … using top-end journalistic and design talent in India.”
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Orange County Register Communications has struggled in recent months with circulation declines. The Register recently dropped from the third-largest newspaper in California to the fifth-largest, behind the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Diego Union-Tribune and Sacramento Bee.
I live in Orange County (but trying to get out as fast as I can), and the Orange County Register is just not a good publication. Somehow outsourcing editorial duties to India I don’t see as improving their product.
Okay, it’s been around for a while, but it’s one of my favorite sites, and is a good example what happens when the content is interesting, and the community really knows how to promote, online and offline.
Yelp! is a social network-y review site (okay, it’s about adding friends and comments, but that’s how most social networking sites define it, whatever) that contains thousands of reviews, mostly of local businesses. Need a lousy hotel in Anchorage? It’s there! A great restaurant in Tempe to get drunk at? It’s there!
They have all kinds of nifty widgets to add to your blog.
One lament — how about opening up a Canadian site, yo. I have a bunch of restaurants to review up there.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact