I’m helping with finding sponsors for Startup Weekend Los Angeles. Here’s a little FAQ I put together. If you are interested, send me a message at pat@usabilitycounts.com.

First off, thank you for your interest in Startup Weekend! Many of our potential sponsors have questions about the weekend, so we’ve put together a little information below that explains the weekend, and the potential benefits.

We also have sponsors such as Microsoft and Blankspaces working with us to support the event; we hope that you will too!

What is Startup Weekend?

Startup Weekend is a intense 54 hour event bringing together brilliant tech minds (developers, designers, marketers, etc.) together to create a company (or as many as the community wants) from concept to launch! The best and brightest people together in a local office space to select the concept, break into teams, and develop the product, marketing and revenue model. Sixteen ideas are refined until a group of four or five make the final cut.

Read On…

 Comments | Comment

If interested, send your resume to jobs@usabilitycounts.com.

An international specialty technology company is looking for an on-site full time Information Architect with at least two years of experience designing SharePoint (MOSS) Solutions to champion its SharePoint internet among the employees of the company. This position will ensure the proper governance structures are in place to define the administration, maintenance, and support of content through the information lifecycle. The Information Architect will work closely with business users and the Solutions Architect to develop business requirements for more complex team site applications.

Tasks

• Working within a cross-company team, define the organization, presentation, and navigation of content for the intranet site.
• Conduct one-on-one and group training for team sites. Working with individual departments to establish their team site. Work with business users and Solutions Architects to develop more complex solutions.
• Conduct group training for my sites. Develop workshops to help users establish their my sites.
• Develop and implement the governance and guidelines for how Sharepoint is utilized (content publishing, information security, archiving of content) along with the roles and responsibilities.
• Completes special projects and other duties as assigned.

Skills

• Two years experience as a Sharepoint Information Architect.
• Three years of experience managing projects with documented business benefits by leveraging collaboration technologies.

Background

• Four-year college degree, preferably in computer science or software engineering, or equivalent level of experience.
• Must be a self starter with good interpersonal and analytical skills.
• Must be able to work with both technical and non-technical employees.
• Must be detail oriented, creativity, experience working with multi-disiplinary teams.
• Ability to understand business requirements, analyze business processes and develop technical solutions to support the enterprise

 Comments | Comment

I really want to be Bill Murray.

 Comments | Comment

This article from a firm called Persona in the United Kingdom came across one of the discussion boards over at LinkedIn:

User Experience at Persona is a cost effective and more produtive alternative to using freelance information architects and freelance user centred designers. A growing number of clients and digital agencies are choosing to work with Persona instead of freelancers and for good reason – just take a look at the points below and if you feel compelled by any of them, give us a ring. Simple.

Send this page as a link to your boss / project manager / HR department and take away the hassle of using freelance IA’s.

I get it.

We’re all evil, we over-bill, we under-deliver and should join agencies right now.

Never mind even with all their resources, they have a freakin’ typo on their site.

Pay for a copy editor, dammit, if you’re so freakin’ successful as an agency, yo!

A few truths across both:

• Freelancers and agencies are always looking toward their next client.
• Good freelancers and good agencies are always overbooked and hard to schedule.
• No freelancer or agency will be a perfect fit for who you need.
• Quality is an issue everywhere — full-timers, agencies and freelancers alike.

There are definite advantages of using an agency versus using freelance information architects (e.g. insurance, not knowing who you are getting, etc.), but the article is pretty much a bash session for freelance user experience folks. This, I find troubling because a) I’m a freelance user experience folk right now, and b) I used to manage a UX group about the size of Persona.

Some of their assertions are incorrect. Regarding rates, there is no way in hell they can charge less than a freelance information architect because they have far more overhead than freelancers do. The approach of trying to save its business is very dishonest to customers and probably will lose them a few clients and, more importantly, resources willing to work at a company like this in today’s free agent economy.

The real truth: as a resource manager, there’s always this game of providing the client with just enough of a resource, even knowing that the resource maybe junior. Quality will always be suspect from an agency, because the people they sell you are always that — sold to you. Scheduling is always an issue, quality of team members is another and even managing the billing is always an issue. Firms bill for services not performed all the time. Who’s fault is that?

Many firms are started by a rock-star user experience expert, or someone who thinks they are, but the expert is never the resource the client gets.

How often does the firm bring in the black belt, super ninja user experience grand poobah? Once the contract has started, a new group has arrived, and the new group can’t even pronounce information architect?

Oh, that was your last project!

When to use a freelancer

• If you don’t know what you’re building. There are so many clients I’ve worked with where they had absolutely no idea where to start. The best way to get started is to bring in one person (exactly, one person) to start work on an idea.
• If you know exactly what you’re building. One of the clients I’m currently talking to is looking at some agencies in addition to me. He’s doing a great job at coming up with a first stab at the application. The owner of one of the firms he was considering was someone who I had managed as a contractor and who had built part of her client list off of the company I worked for. In this case, there really is not enough work to support a whole agency, and it doesn’t make sense to use them when they don’t know the resource, especially when a senior resource is available for less money and can be more or less dedicated to the cause.
• If you have an existing application and development team. Sometimes an application has already been built and needs a number of improvements or another set of eyes. Bringing in someone as a singleton to help guide the team to better results is a great way of improving ROI and keeping costs down. I can absolutely state in this scenario that a good freelance information architect will pay for themselves in improvements to the application, making it a worthwhile choice.
• If you want to control costs. If you have the project management pieces in place and are looking to fill a few specific needs such as wireframes for improving an application, a freelancer is the way to go. This is because you will see a 30 to 60 percent reduction in resources hiring cost. For example, if I bill out at $90 per hour, I’m still going to be cheaper than some of the agencies and development firms that bill out at $200 per hour; and the quality of the work might actually be better.

When to use an agency

• If it’s a really, really big brand and they have oodles of budget to spend. I truly believe in the law of diminishing user experience returns, but sometimes when you get a collective group of people together in one room, or one building, a truly outstanding idea comes out of the group, something off the charts. If the client is looking for that kind of agency experience, that’s great. The same idea could come out of a freelancer; but by the pure number of resources (one), the odds are against it.
• When you need help with project management because you have no one internal to run it. If the project is really, really, really big, working with an agency might be a better idea, because you might need multiple resources, which comes with the overhead of managing all those resources. Working with an agency can mean outsourcing all that management and all the issues that come with it, like handling the hours and such. The only issue to watch for is how the agency manages the project. A plot of agencies that say they have some kind of methodology often don’t. If you want a primer, send me an email.
• When you need the full lifecycle of user experience deliverables. If you have this pressing need to go through everything in the user experience arsenal, than the agency approach might be the way to go. I don’t do every part of the process as well as I would like, and it’s because I don’t have all the time in the day required to be good at it. Parts of the process now, I might outsource to people who I know can do better. The hope is that the agency would have enough of those resources to do it well, but to go through the whole process exceeds my user experience law of diminishing returns.

 Comments | Comment

The complete list.

Here’s the first five:

• Client asks who designed your website.
• Client shows you around the factory, introducing you to all his employees. Then, behind closed doors, tells you: "If you do a bad job with this website, I'm going to have to let these people go."
• Client takes six months to respond to your proposal, but doesn't change his due date.
• At beginning of get-acquainted meeting, client informs you that someone has just bought his company.
• Client, who manufactures Russian nesting dolls, demands to know how many Russian nesting doll sites you have designed

 Comments | Comment

More detail at Mashable.

Mainstream & Large Scale Social Networks

• Winner: Twitter
• Runner-up: Facebook

Embeddable Widgets

• Winner: Clearspring
• Runner-up: Sprout

Blog Plugins

• Winner: ShareThis
• Runner-up: AddThis

Social News

• Winner: Digg
• Runner-up: Mixx

Social Networking Applications

• Winner: Ping.fm
• Runner-up: Twitterfeed

Social Bookmarking

• Winner: Delicious
• Runner-up: StumbleUpon

Search & Social Search

• Winner: Google
• Runner-up: Scour

Sports & Fitness

• Winner: Gyminee
• Runner-up: Oneseason

Photo Sharing

• Winner: Flickr
• Runner-up: Picasa

Video Sharing

• Winner: YouTube
• Runner-up: Vimeo

Start Pages

• Winner: iGoogle
• Runner-up: Netvibes

Places & Events

• Winner: Doodle
• Runner-up: Eventbrite

Travel

• Winner: TripIt
• Runner-up: GeckoGo

Music

• Winner: Last.fm
• Runner-up: Pandora

Social Shopping

• Winner: Wishpot
• Runner-up(s): Tigerbow/Pikaba

Fashion

• Winner: Coolspotters
• Runner-up: Gift Girl

Celebrity & Gossip

• Winner: Perez Hilton
• Runner-up: Popvine

Mobile Applications

• Winner: Evernote
• Runner-up: Qik

Dating & Romance

• Winner: SpeedDate
• Runner-up: OKCupid

Wiki

• Winner: Wikipedia
• Runner-up: PBWiki

Politics

• Winner: Huffington Post
• Runner-up: CreateDebate

How-to

• Winner: eHow
• Runner-up: Howcast

Environmental

• Winner: ThinkGreen
• Runner-up: SocialVibe

Non-Profit Causes

• Winner: SocialVibe
• Runner-up: Kiva

Online Games

• Winner: Playfish
• Runner-up: Kongregate

Niche Social Networks

• Winner: Wadja
• Runner-up: Lifeblob

 Comments | Comment

This was a thread over at LinkedIn, published in CIO. My submission is number three.

Here’s a few of my favorites:

• When you see the project budget, you realize that over half of it was spent on a Web designer to create a Photoshop mock-up of the home page-with no regard to whether that design is feasible. Or with any attention to the thousands of pages of content that will exist underneath that home page.
• It is a big project and is named Project Iceberg. Or it’s the third time the company is trying to pull this off, and the project is code-named “Phoenix.” Somehow, you don’t believe this one can spring from the ashes.
• The manager of your mission-critical project (handling 80 percent of the company’s revenue) has three months exposure to the technology of choice, and is training four brand-new developers at once. The manager is given a three-month project deadline.
• Management decides to spend a million dollars on a $20,000 project. Then the managers start agreeing with computer company salespeople that the $1 million in software requires $2 million of hardware. Meanwhile, a secretary purchases an off-the-shelf PC and a shrink wrapped CD containing some new office automation packages. She implements the project during her lunch break. (Arguably, we should count this one as a success.)

 Comments | Comment

Functioning Form has a great article about Flexible Web Forms. One of the barriers of the web is when someone hits a web form, there’s usually some kind of constraint over how the information is entered (required, the format, the price of tea in China, that kind of stuff). He covers phone numbers, and in many cases for my clients, capturing the information in any format they can get it is much more important than making sure the number is formatted correctly, and spending hours overthinking the user experience.

Read on…

 Comments | Comment

Startup Weekend’s a pretty cool idea — the concept is to come up with an idea and finish a proof of concept for the startup in a weekend. Like eBay. (Half-kidding).

I’m going to be a mentor there, and they are looking for sponsors. If you’re interested in supporting a great conference, send me a note at pat@usabilitycounts.com.

 Comments | Comment

I promise, the UX jobs will come soon.

If you have any friends that fit this, send it along to jobs@usabilitycounts.com. If there’s a hit, and the person gets hired, I’ll make it worth your while.

The opportunity

An international software development company is looking for a on-site full time Java Senior Engineer with three or more years experience in the design and development of J2EE-based mobile applications to join their application development team, and will be working on applications that comprise of web content management, provisioning, billing, and data analysis applications and defining development processes. The company produces very dynamic and highly interactive applications for the web, and is looking to fill this position immediately. The position is full time, and some travel is required.

Tasks

• Design and lead the implementation of mobile and web storefront, content management, hosting, and provisioning applications
• Define software development processes and frameworks, technical documentations such as UML, use cases, and test plans
• Act as a liaison to other engineering teams working on joint projects
• Provide technical assistance and resolve development issues with external partners

Skills

• 7+ years of professional experience with J2EE software/application programming with an additional background in C/C++
• Experience with Java/J2EE specifications, application server, database schema design, Oracle and JDBC, Hibernate, Struts/Spring, source control and build software such as CVS, Subversion, and ANT
• Practical development and production experience with the wireless industry and development environment especially pertaining to the following technologies: J2ME, BREW, Symbian, Smartphone
• A Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering

Pluses

• Some development experience within the mobile gaming or content space is preferred

Background

• Good communication skills
• Well versed at working with software development teams and processes in a fast paced environment
• Experience working in a corporate environment
• Thorough knowledge of software design concepts, such as object-oriented programming, common design patterns/algorithms, and development lifecycle processes

Pay Range

• Full Time:  Depending on experience

 Comments | Comment

I use Facebook more than MySpace for some things just because I think Facebook is more “adult” — the real name thing, more people from work, et al. More often than not, i’ll update my status over there and really don’t use MySpace for that work kind of thing, because, well, I view it as more as the local bar where Facebook is Starbucks where you discuss work and business.

However, uploading photos is a bear, and it demonstrates a real need for examining the taxonomy and labeling of a site. I ran into this over the weekend when I had some professional photos taken of me. I wanted to upload one so I didn’t look like I walked in from the prehistoric period and I had just invented the mouse wheel.

From the top

Upon arriving at your home page, there’s an application called Photos that shows everyone’s photos (which is where I clicked first, figuring, hell, I’ll manage my photos in the place where it says Photos). You can select Photos of Me, you can’t upload a photo. You can create a photo album, but there’s no link to says, “Upload Photo, Yo.”

I unless have a serious need to add 1,000 photo albums to my profile without any photos, creating a new photo album is completely useless to me. I would guess that 80 percent of the users have less than 20 albums, tops, so the importance of creating new photo albums is overstated, much like my demise.

(Props to Jason Hewitt for pointing out my overzealous use of Yo.)

I click on my name on the top right corner, and I arrive at editing my profile. I see a number of links front and center:

Maybe if I go to my profile, I can find something?

There’s an Add Photos link there, but because of the labeling and taxonomy (it’s under the Wall tab), I think I’m adding photos to my Wall. Why would I do that? I just wanted to upload one photo and replace my profile photo. It has nothing to do with my Wall.

But wait, there’s more!

I hovered over the profile photo accidentally and saw an edit picture link. (Never mind there was no way to know that I could even edit the picture — that was an interesting surprise.) I was able to click on the photo, and it showed me a number of photos I could select, but I couldn’t upload photos from there either.

Note the frustration level growing, but alas the treasure hunt continues!

Let’s click on that pesky little word that says Photos

I click on the Photos tab, and I see my albums, but I still don’t see a place to add a photo. After returning to my home page by selecting the back button on the browser, I figured out the Post a Photo was how I added one. When I did figure out how to upload a photo, the default action after I had figured out how to add a photo wasn’t that, but of creating an album:

And once a photo is up, figuring out how to change the album requires a fortune teller. Can you tell me where I can move the photo to another album is?

Frankly, managing photos and albums shouldn’t be this hard, but it illustrates how labeling and placement within a tab selection is very, very important. I shouldn’t have to take eight or so clicks to get where I want.

I had no idea for months where I could upload the photos, and since this is one of the main features of Facebook (Face is in the name, for god sakes), ease of use for managing photos is important, and I could spend one day with their developers to change it. If there is a Photos tab, that should make it very clear than you can upload and manage photos from that Photos tab, and it’s difficult to find to with Facebook, because it’s under Wall.

The conclusion: It’s making it obvious, period

Placement of tabs and other links an taxonomy is very important, because there’s an implied meaning of what a link does depending on where it sits in the taxonomy. Here, I had no idea that the Post a Photo wasn’t just to The Wall, but to my profile. I’ve had friends ask how to upload photos (some of whom are Information Architects themselves!), and they couldn’t figure it out either.

It makes much more sense to me to put some of those links under Photos than the Wall.

(And seriously, someone at Facebook should be looking at the usage logs and have figured this one out, already.)

MySpace does a great job of handling this feature in its new interface, why can’t Facebook?

As a side note: I’ve messaged Mark Zuckerberg about this article — let’s see how long he takes to respond.

 Comments | Comment

Let’s bailout the GM’s of the world while we let the tech companies suffer. Ha!

Stolen from VentureBeat.

 Comments | Comment

You’ve solved the problem!

You’re implementing Drupal, SharePoint or something else that’s a “content management system”, and you’re getting the client involved in creating the content. One problem — getting them to use the content management system is impossible.

Seriously, I’m all for putting power in the client’s hands, but they have to be prepared for that power, and most of the time the person “given” that power has many more things to do than edit content in a website or extranet.

Here’s a few more truths about content management system and how they affect clients.

Sometimes what you wish for is what you get

All clients love the idea of editing their own site, but have no idea what it takes to create content. It means sitting down, opening up Microsoft Word and actually putting thought into the words that you are going to write. And that’s a lot of work, and they usually have no one on staff to do that task. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients wanting to edit their sites because it’s been sitting for months, and they’ve forgotten the password.

Once they get in, they usually get out as quickly as possible, and ask you to add the photo or make the change.

Having that power and using that power are two different things, and many a time the client just throws up their hands and expects the company that implements the CMS to add the content.

What to avoid? Write in the contract that you aren’t responsible for content until you are responsible for it when the client is footing the bill.

The client has no one adept enough to use the CMS technically

Some CMSes, like SharePoint and SilverStripe, are straightfoward to use and for the most part don’t require extensive training to get the ball moving; within five minutes of each, I can train someone on how to add a page, how to edit content, and how to upload files.

Some of the other CMSes? I would never want my mom opening up Joomla.

Ever.

The reason they’ve brought you in for the project is not only for your design skills, but for your technical skills. The reality is that most companies small enough to want to go open source are also too small to maintain a site if it gets much further than changing out some text because their staff isn’t technical enough. Open source doesn’t mean free, and that free sometimes comes with technical overhead.

What to avoid? Put in time for training. A lot of it.

Open source is still open source — buggy and sometimes hard to use

When you use “free software”, you sometimes get what you pay for, and the client will never understand why you’re using it, other than, “you’re billing me for this, why doesn’t it work?”

The open source CMSes are what they are: developed by programmers that have a love of developing software, but sometimes do things their own ways or they aren’t thoroughly tested. Some clients don’t understand this, and figure the CMS should be bug free right from the get go.

Whatever system you select, explain to the client there’s going to be an upgrade path, and associated costs with it. This may mean some kind of maintenance deal in the future that’s like dependent on the upgrades coming out.

What to avoid? Have a very real conversation with the client about what open source means, and explain to them all software is buggy. Seriously.

CMS sites don’t plan themselves, and a bad information architecture can set you back years

The client is fully engaged, learns how to use tool in a way cavemen learned how to use fire, then “burns” themselves the first way through.

Bob down the hall in accounting can barely spell information architecture, much less construct one, and a single workshop over an hour isn’t going to give someone enough training when some of us have been honing our craft for years. It’s about planning, and poor planning for some CMS implementations can be death for user adoption. Or, how’s your company intranet holding up?

What to avoid? Book an information architect all the way through the project. If they are engaged, they can give the guidance needed for the site, and it will save time and money in the long run.

 Comments | Comment

Yeah, yeah, I’m going to catch up — it’s been chaotic the last few days.

While I’m getting my stuff together, here’s a great post over at FreelanceSwitch about web design projects that can easily be applied to user experience projects.

Six Valuable Things Web Design Clients Won't Tell You

• We're not prepared
• Our deadline is unrealistic
• Getting content from us will be nearly impossible
• We're not very computer-savvy
• Our expectations are unrealistic
• We're considering many other proposals

 Comments | Comment

So I finally did it: I broke down and got an iPhone.

I like it a lot (more than I thought I was going to like it), and can definately see the koolaid drinking Applesters going gaga over it.

A few things i’ve noticed about it:

• The lack of a keyboard isn’t as nearly troublesome as I thought it would be. I’m sending emails as normal, and it’s very quick to do so.
• Getting to the contact list is a bit too far down the list — it takes more than a couple of clicks, which I think is inefficient if your device has the word phone in it’s name.
• Text messaging isn’t as efficient as I would like, but I’m just picky.

It’s definately better that the Motorola Q i’ve been using. Any thoughts?

 Comments | Comment

I’ve been receiving inquiries about posting jobs here. Because of this, I’ll be posting new opportunities every Monday. Some of them aren’t pure User Experience, but they do have some kind of User Experience or Open Source slant to them. If you see anything here, or are looking for a job, send your resume to jobs@usabilitycounts.com. Recruiters, also send along a note, I’d like to offer the blog as another channel.

The opportunity

An international entertainment company is looking for a contract UNIX or Linux Systems Administrator with four to six years experience to join their systems administration team. The company produces entertainment properties for the web and mobile networks, and is looking to fill this position in the mobile division.

The position is contract.

Requirements

• Proficient in shell scripting
• Working knowledge of Atlassian Products (JIRA, Confluence)
• Experience in versioning systems like CVS, Perforce or Subversion
• Experience in VMWare (ESX) installation and configuration
• Advanced understanding of TCP/IP and other network protocols along with working experience on firewalls, routers and load-balancers
• Collaborative work style, team oriented and good communications skills

Background

• Good communication skills
• Well versed at working with information management teams and processes in a fast paced environment
• Experience working in a corporate environment

Pay Range

• Contact:  Depending on experience

 Comments | Comment