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This is a great post:

I only have two rules for doing UX design. My first rule is:  be lazy.

Through years of practice I have become quite adept at following this rule. But why is being lazy a good attribute for doing UX design? Because it prevents one from doing stupid, cute, things. Sure, some of those stupid/cute things might be brilliant, but most of them would diminish the UX of the product or perhaps take a lot of your development time for no real improvement to the final result. Just like in evolution, there are lots of mutations but only a very few of them will actually be useful.

I have also found that being lazy is a sort of filter for adding new features to the UX of a product. When I think of something new to add or enhance, I usually just make a note of it and then forget about it. If a few people who are testing the product suggest the same feature, then maybe it was actually a good idea. Once I have reinforcement for the idea, I’m motivated to push through my laziness to implement the new feature.

My second rule is:  copy good UX whenever you see it.

This one is a no-brainer. Everyone does it, but I suspect that most people feel a little cheap in doing so. I say embrace your inner copycat. If you see a product that has great UX, then copy that stuff and tweak it a bit to make it yours. Every first-person shooter game is a knockoff of the original, Wolfenstein 3D. I’m so glad that no one at Bungie thought that they would be called copycats for creating Halo.

Read on…

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An excerpt:

We've proven for years that you can ship a product without a designer. Many companies have done that, and while it doesn't make for a great result, it does ship. However, it's much harder to ship a software product without a coder, if not near impossible.

That's why, right now, there are dozens of startups looking to pay big bucks to find the coding super designer. The demand is high and those designers who have proven, practiced coding skills can demand a higher salary than those who don't.

But how much of an extra salary?

What about the non-startup portion of the hiring world? Right now, the established organizations find it easier to have larger teams with separate developers and designers.

Yet, that doesn't make the designer that can code any less valuable to them. A team with two coding designers is more flexible and capable than a team with one non-coding designer and a non-designing developer. The flexible team can produce well-designed results better and faster.

I had a conversation with a recruiter about this regarding a position they were hiring for. It was a fairly large organization that was looking for someone who could do user experience, design layouts, illustrate icons, and code.

The mythical unicorn.

The pay was good, but not even close to what that person could make freelance, nor much more what most of the people with two to three of those skills are making. I told the recruiter that.

There’s nothing that’s come across my desk that would pay enough to force me use both skills. I can do visual design. I can do HTML. But I enough User Experience the most. The technical and visual skills help me understand the constraints, but I don’t go much further than that.

If a recruiter calls me about that mythical unicorn position, and isn’t paying at least a 25 percent premium over market rate, they don’t understand what they need.

What hiring managers really need is a diversity of skills:

Coding and designing are collections of skills. What we've learned is teams with a better distribution of skills, not segmented by roles, produce better results. Having a team filled with individuals who can both code and design will be more effective in the long run than a team where the skills are divided up.

Maybe we should be asking developers if they get user experience and visual design.

In today’s environment, you can get by with good but not great developers early on. You can’t get by on poor design, and that’s why user experience skills are more valuable now.

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That LinkedIn Honeymoon: it might be your professional network, but how long will that last?

Several start-ups are banking that the future of career networking is actually on Facebook Inc.

LinkedIn has established itself as a source for candidate information, recruiters say. The company made its debut on the NYSE on May 19.

These start-ups point to Facebook’s much broader user base: With 500 million users, Facebook is five times larger than LinkedIn.

But changing users’ mindsets might be a challenge. Some Facebook users are loathe to mix their personal and professional networks, fearing some private information might damage their work reputation.

Younger people are more apt to use Facebook than LinkedIn. And does everyone need a LinkedIn profile?

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