I answered this question over at Quora, and thought it might make a great post here (plus I’ve been busy). Read on…

Having a bad UX designer can kill a startup, or seriously hinder a product. I’ve worked on several products past and present that had a lot of catchup to do because the previous UX designers and product types were brought on because they were cheap.

Remember, developers will build what’s designed, and if what is designed has issues, that’s going to be the result.

Money and Options That’s Appropriate To Finding Great Talent

There’s nothing worse than hearing the sentence, “We pay less than other places and we think the option package is fair.” While UX Designers are not completely driven by money, they want to be rewarded for what they bring to the table. In that sense, their talent can sometimes make or break a startup.

I love what I do, but I also have to pay rent on my posh mansion in North Beach (sarcasm). Unless the idea is going to cure cancer, the business folks should have the funding in place to pay for talent.

Great development talent is finite, but so is great UX talent. Both should be compensated accordingly.

A Great Idea To Start

UX Designers are in tune with what works and what doesn’t (well, the good ones, anyway). If a UX Designer interviews, looks at the idea, and screams at the founder, “This will work only if hell freezes over,” and the founder is STILL insistent on the approach as described, that company doesn’t want a UX Designer, they want a wireframe monkey.

We as a group get to work on very few ideas that are truly special, and I’m going to put effort into something I want to believe in.

A Champion In Management

Most UX Designers that are good aren’t necessarily the most politically correct, so they need someone in management to give them the support to run the UX Process so it’s about finding the best solution and not have it be design of one or design by committee.

The best clients I’ve had and wanted to work with wanted to test over and over, because that’s when you got the best feedback.

Freedom From A Cubicle

I believe that the best UX doesn’t come on a 9-to-5 schedule — it may happen in a bar, or walking, or at 11pm at home.  It may happen 1,000 miles away. You never know. Collaboration is important, but like any great company, there should be freedom to work away from people and let ideas percolate.

I’ve been told a few times, “your job is to sit in a coffee house and think up shit.” That’s what UX designers do — they think up ideas. They watch people. They observe their surroundings. And they come up with amazing solutions to really tough problems. You cannot do that in a cubicle.

This is probably why so many UX Designers like to work remote (like me) — because that’s how they work the best.

Look To Products You Like — And Steal That Designer

The good UX designers are on LinkedIn, Coroflot, and usually can be found hidden in plain sight. They write blogs. They surf Quora. Do reference checks with other UX designers to ask how good they are.

Contact them directly. Tell them about your idea. If it’s a really good idea, they’ll listen. If the idea isn’t so good, they’ll tell you why.

Best of all, you’ll learn if they are easy to collaborate with, because the idea you started with is not the idea that’s going to launch.

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Great post:

This week I was fortunate enough to be asked to speak at ASA in regard to a Social Media workshop. The topic of discussion was Social Media – Where's The ROI? Within that discussion what I heard that was glaringly apparent is people need help with what the key things are they should know about Social Media and what can be expected.  Well, there is not an exact science (I know, not what you want to hear, right?). I can tell you like everyone else to get on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. OK – great! (You might be thinking.)

Then what Jenn? What can I expect, what do I do? One of the keys (and there are several of them…) to a successful Social Media strategy as an individual is to be comfortable within the networks you choose. You can't conquer the world if you are not even sure how to get there and forget about the fact that you are already there but didn't know.

With that being said, here's the 10 things you wanted to know to use Social Media, but your Mom never told you (because she didn't know).

And Number 8:

Don't try to do everything at once. Take it one Social Network at a time. Social overload is such a thing.

In Japan they have a term called Mixi Fatigue (Mixi is a social network there). Mixi Fatigue is the  psychological state of a Japanese youth experiencing a sense of tiring from using Mixi and voicing a desire to discontinue using Mixi and finally deciding to terminate the Mixi account. So do not get Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, or whatever other social network(s) you decide to use "fatigue".

Read on…

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From TechCrunch:

Everyone knows MySpace traffic is going the wrong way, but the accelerating decline (and big financial losses) is a serious problem. Parent company News Corp. is in the middle of a sale process, and everyone from venture firms to private equity firms to operating companies are taking a look. "It's like slowing down at the scene of an accident," says one person with knowledge of the discussions, "everyone wants to take a look at how bad things have become."

The problem with negative growth is that predictive modeling has to be thrown out the window. And an accelerating decline in audience suggests that MySpace won't be stabilizing soon. Right now, people are fleeing as fast as they can from the site.

Amazing.

The story reports that their audience dropped 14 percent in a month.

It’s soon to be the next Friendster or Tribe.net.

I had a conversation with a UX designer that worked there up until the last layoff. What it came down to is when you don’t understand the audience and try to design to it, you’re going to fail (most of the people involved bailed before the layoff, knowing what the writing on the wall was).

Other conversations with people who knew the audience said how much they hated the redesigns, but there was no way to voice for users to voice their opinion effectively.

A lot of people bailed during redesign try number one, and with this second one, they removed one of the key features that was keeping people around: customizable profiles. The demographics of that audience sucked from an advertising standpoint, but if you’re McDonalds, you don’t change the menu so everything’s over $50 when people are to Combo Meals.

Say what you want about the previous management (Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe), but at least they understood the audience.

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Most consumers in the end don’t necessarily care about features, they want experiences. The Automobile market is an excellent example of that. I drive a Saab. I don’t know what’s under the hood, but it’s a pretty fast car and is sufficiently anti-establishment for me to drive.

The leather seats are nice, too.

Mobile phones are also statements of personality, and what kind experience the user expects.

I shudder every time I hear a commercial about a mobile phone. One of them was boasting about the incredible speed and power, and it sounded like it was written by a bunch of engineers. My mom wouldn’t care. I didn’t buy an iPhone 4 for it’s incredible speed, but it is a statement that I care about the iPhone 4  experience.

From Jason Putorti:

The extranormal guy talking about features still thinks that the consumer actually cares about them, and that's often the mindset of an engineer. Engineers are very interested in making the impossible, possible- and a device and feature are expressions of that possibility. Designers focus, or at least they should, on empathy with real people, and how to use the available technology to create a solution that delights them and solves their problem.

Funny aside, there's an important insight in this clip: the cell phone market, like many other technology markets, has become an  experience market. This is why the consumer asking for the iPhone over and over again for reasons unknown makes absolutely no sense to our techie, who thinks feature parity or supremacy matters. The reason for this seemingly irrational desire of course, is the experience- that's what the consumer is after.

…

An example of a technology cemented firmly in the possible? QR Codes. Engineers have figured out how to pack a lot of data into a small image, but no designer has yet figured out how to make the experience around QR codes useful. SXSW had them on badges last year, and made a big push to get people using their scanner app, and they were notably absent this year. Engineering the technology alone doesn't make something useful or usable by the mainstream. The Segway strikes me as another cemented in the "possible".

Read on…

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Designing mobile sites is all about context and limiting choice (really, not much different than designing a regular website). This article from UX Matters points out 10 ways designing mobile websites are different than designing for a computer.

However, the design of mobile sites is still in its infancy. As Jakob Nielsen's 2009 study on mobile usability pointed out, users' success rates when using mobile devices to access mobile sites averaged only 64%, which is quite low in comparison to the 80% average success rate for users who access Web sites on a computer. The form-factor difference seems to have a dramatic impact on the success rates of users' interactions, and therefore, should impact how we design mobile sites as well.

New principles and best practices will inevitably arise as mobile site design continues to evolve. As a first step toward achieving this evolution, I've looked at how some successful mobile sites already differ from desktop Web sites. Based on my analysis of several verticals, including airlines, ecommerce, social networking and entertainment, and travel sites, I have identified 10 ways in which mobile sites should be different from desktop Web sites.

Read on…

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Funny. True.

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From Six Revisions:

The early warning signs were there from the start, and people have criticized Microsoft’s choice to include HTML5 and CSS3 (both unfinished specifications), arguing that poor rendering (which does exist) and future changes could leave the browser in an  IE6-like situation when it gets outdated. The frequent release cycles and automatic updates (by default) of other browsers will minimize this problem, but given how slow Internet Explorer has always been with major versions, it may well become the IE6 of 2020!

…

It’s true that while Microsoft’s new browser appears far from perfect, no other browser gets it quite right either. All of the other browsers have their share of flaws and bugs, missing technologies, and incomplete spec implementations.

However, the problem with Microsoft is partly due to how it portrays itself and the frustrating way it sometimes goes one step forward, two steps back.

I think some of the blame has to go to the standards’ bodies — they have to agree on something. It’s hard on agreement when you have to test how it’s going to look, but this situation makes it hard for all developers, browser and web.

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• At 11am-12pm, 51% of Twitter users are looking at tweets, but only 31% are sending them. At 4pm-5pm, 56% of Twitter users are looking at tweets, but only 39% are sending them.
• On Facebook, weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period. People are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week.

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Sometimes User Experience Designers play it too safe.

This is a great article about where innovation belongs in UX. Read on.

Usability is often viewed as being inherently risk-averse, and even at odds with innovative ideas. The usability practitioner seeks to meet users' expectations – or "mental models" – eliminate surprises rather than capitalize on them, and follow standards that provide consistency with outside interfaces. User experience designers employ design patterns that have been proven over time, and utilize prototyping tools that encourage the use of established pattern libraries. User testing also tends to focus on the first use, making it very difficult for seemingly innovative ideas to beat out the familiar and immediately recognizable user interfaces that employ well known design techniques.

As if to prove the point that usability hampers innovation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been quoted suggesting that the company best known for it's innovative products shuns market research and doesn't involve users in the design process. It seems as though these quotes are often misused to suggest that Apple doesn't perform user testing (which they certainly do), but the underlying assertion remains: don't listen to users because users don't know what they want.

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