As a trade for that great series, I wrote a post over at Nomad Chique about travel applications for the iPhone. Enjoy.

I want mobile applications to fill a very specific need. I might have several applications on my phone like that. When you consider how much traveling costs, I think spending $25 for a few applications is worth the investment for a better trip.

The best applications are designed with the user experience in mind, by filling needs within the context of your trip. For example:

• Is my flight delayed?
• How much does it cost for a taxi to my hotel from the airport?
• Where do I get something to eat that's inexpensive, but recommended by locals?
• How do I get to a neighborhood?
• How do I call a taxi?
• Where's free WiFi if I'm out of the country?

Read on…

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Great ideas come from collaborative teams working as one:

The reason the studios were so important for Hitchcock is that they allowed him to cultivate the right kind of creative team. While the director relied on many longstanding partners, such as his decade-long relationship with the editor George Tomasini and cinematographer Robert Burks, he also routinely brought in new talent, including John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler and Salvador Dali.

For instance, on  North by Northwest, a classic Cary Grant thriller, Hitchcock insisted on working with Ernest Lehman, a screenwriter best known for  Sabrina. It was, at first glance, a peculiar choice:  Sabrina  was a romantic comedy, and Hitchcock had been hired to create a dark suspense movie. But Hitchcock knew what he was doing. In fact, he gave Lehman a tremendous amount of creative freedom. (Hitchcock's only requirement was that the plot contain three elements: a case of mistaken identity, the United Nations building and a chase scene across the face of Mt. Rushmore.) Although it took Lehman more than a year to write the script, the wait was worth it. "I wanted to write the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures," Lehman said.

And that's exactly what he did.

Great read…

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Today we “close” our series on the IDEATE Design Loop with  “E” – “Evaluate the Results.”

At this point we have either:
1. Finished usability testing of the designs with our target users or
2. Implemented our visual designs and have gone live with our site or application.

User experience design is an ongoing living and breathing process that can only be improved upon if we have measurable metrics and a clear plan for regularly checking how we’re doing so we can keep steering the ship in the right direction. Usually we can’t fix everything and completely change the world in the first launch, so we break it down and create new targets to the future. Evaluating the results of our major UI design revamps can help keep us on track and even give us ideas on how to make our site more meaningful and useful to our users.

In this evaluation part of the process, we can begin choosing what metrics we will use to track our progress and begin installing them now that the site is live. We should also set goals on how frequently we will monitor and re-analyze our stats whether it be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually.

Some Useful Types of Metrics

• Google Analytics or other  Web Analytics tools that show data on traffic sources, entry and exit pages, popular content, length of visits and bounce rates. We can easily see how certain pages are performing and how users are responding on days when marketing campaigns are launched by cross referencing with launch dates and times.
• Feedback Surveys – We can send post-launch and regularly scheduled surveys with end-users or customers about their satisfaction and user experience with the site. Or we can offer persistent ways for customers to provide feedback when they feel like giving it, using widgets like the  GetSatisfaction widget.
• Conversion Analytics – Deeper analytics from content management systems and other website management platforms can help us understand how well users successfully completed a task, or purchased that product, or acted upon that call-to-action, like submitting a contact form or calling your toll-free number.

Once we’ve chosen our metrics and set benchmarks for the site, we should assign team members to be the keepers of this data and set up times to review them together with the whole team.

The Good, Bad & The Ugly

Our evaluation should assess not only our successes, but also our failures and areas to be improved on for next time. We should report on things like:

• How well we  fulfilled the design specs  and design brief – our original goals
• Strengths & weaknesses of the  final site  or application
• Strengths & weaknesses of  our process  and how well it worked for all our key players – end-users, management team, content contributors, usability analysts, designers, and developers
• Recommendations for improvements
• Any  new ideas  for adding on or enhancing the site or application in future phases, especially if a product roadmap has been started and needs to be completed

Remember, get real, don’t just be a cheerleader. The point of this is to be objective and honest about what worked well and what didn’t, so we can make measurable improvements over time.

Truly, each and every website or application is unique with its own set of users, problems, constraints and goals. And yes, there are similarities and patterns that can lead to best practices but it’s important to approach each new project with a fresh set of eyes and ears because what works for one site, may not work for the next one. This is why the  IDEATE Design Loop is so helpful as a guiding process that ensures we cover all our bases along the way. You can see how investing even a little bit of time in planning and user testing can save us LOTS of headaches down the road.

Happy designing!

Read it from the very beginning here –  A Day in the Life of (this) User Experience Designer.

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Jobvite is the full-time gig, and they’re nice enough to let me blog. I talk all the time to recruiters, and one of the discussions we have about searching for candidates is the quality of LinkedIn profiles.

The best job opportunities often appear when you aren’t looking for them. Recruiters look for both passive and active candidates and may be looking for someone like you. Keeping your LinkedIn profile updated with well-written, relevant, and professional content can help you attract interesting career opportunities, even if you aren’t actively looking.

There are a lot of people that give advice on what a great LinkedIn profile is. The important distinction between “social media consultants” and this blog post is that the tips here are from real recruiting professionals who work with Jobvite and ones who I know and trust. We trade stories and tips about LinkedIn profiles and talk about great people we have seen. Here are some of the best tips:

Have a Clear Headline and Summary

Most recruiters make their initial decision of whom they’re going to look at right on the search results page. They have a position have to fill, and their focus is pretty narrow to start.

Do you really think they’re going to click on a profile that’s titled “UX Ninja?”

(And can we please retire the word “ninja” from the English language when describing anything career related, unless you wield a sword?)

The headline should be clear, concise, and describe exactly what your chosen goal is for using LinkedIn as a professional. It should communicate the type of opportunity you would want at any size company.

Ideal headlines are “Social Media Consultant” or “Java Software Developer.” It could also be “Marketing Professional” or “Health Domain Expert.” Each of those headlines describes exactly what the person is and what kind of position they are looking for. It can stand out, but it doesn’t have to stand out too much.

Your summary should also be short, snappy, and explain exactly how you can help your ideal employer or client.

Have a Professional Photo

LinkedIn is not Facebook.

It’s a network where professionals connect and recruiters look to make sure the person they hiring isn’t Jabba the Hut. Image isn’t everything, but it does count for a lot; and those images do appear in search results.

It’s also important to emphasize that even if you are attractive, that trip you took to Cabo San Lucas has exactly zero photos that should be used on LinkedIn.

How do you get professional photos?

It’s really easy. Visit your local photo studio and ask how much it costs for a one-hour session where you can wear something appropriate to your line of your work. If you’re unemployed, do a trade for photos or request on Craigslist.

For User Experience, it might be just a nice collar shirt. For Sales, it might include a tie. You don’t have to be overly made up. Look good enough with great lighting so people will get a good impression.

List Only Relevant Positions

I’ve been going through the hiring process for Visual and User Experience Designers and have seen a lot of LinkedIn profiles. Most of them were in pretty good share, but there was the occasional “I worked at Joe’s Pizza Place” in the profile. It may seem cool to list every non-profit and coffee shop you have worked for, but here’s the reality: it isn’t.

Recruiters scan through your resume, and they want to see positions relevant to your field of experience. Hiring managers need to see a clear progression from position to position. There are allowances for moving around (especially in this economy), but recruiters want to see career growth, especially for professional positions.

For that, DJ’ing at the local dance hall doesn’t apply.

You have extracurricular activities you think may be good? Great, put that on your resume after education but not in your professional profile. Show the progression in your career, and you’ll get a better response rate in calls and interviews.

Be Realistic about What You Can Do

I’ve gone through a lot of profiles that the typical “User Experience/Web Design/Social Media/Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing/Programming Expert” job descriptions. If you were really skilled at all of those positions, you would never, EVER need a LinkedIn profile.

Aim for a level higher than you could achieve, but don’t reach for the moon. Recruiters are looking for candidates that fit the position they are filling right now, not where that position could be five years from now. If you’re currently a Product Manager, aim for Senior Product Manager positions. If your a sales professional, aim for Sales Manager. It’s all about advancing in your career, but not too much to look like you’re really reaching up the ladder.

One candidate I found was good product management type, but there was nothing in his resume that indicated what his intended goal was: “Vice President of Product Management.” His track record had nothing to indicate he should have been higher than a Senior Product Manager or User Experience professional.

Recruiters pick up on that. Quickly.

Make Sure Your Resume Matches Your LinkedIn Profile

Several times I’ve found a great candidate on LinkedIn, and it looks like he has the experience I’ve needed for a position. We go through the interview process, and the resume says something different.

True, people should spend much more time on resumes than they’re LinkedIn profile. The irony is that tools like Jobvite integrate LinkedIn profiles into the application process, and it’s viewed before the resume, especially for sourcing passive candidates.

I follow a very simple formula for writing my profile and resume: I have two to three sentences about what my responsibilities at the position were, and three clear bullet points about my accomplishments. It’s easy: explain what you did, how it affected the bottom line of the company.

Everyone from a low paid customer service position from CEO should have some idea of how you contributed to the company, and can explain it succinctly in your profile.

For example, a friend of mine worked at You Tube. It might have been “just” a position around customer support, but she did it for a major brand. The quality of the work saved the company thousands of dollars in extra support costs. That’s huge and something very valuable to most companies.

Use Keywords that Are Relevant to Your Job

It all goes down to the way people search in the web. Recruiters enter keywords like User Experience, Product Manager, Developer, and Java to look for skill sets or job titles. They have to do that, because recruiters don’t understand most positions unless they are really embedded in a team.

Generally, recruiters work with hiring managers to define the requisitions and search other requisitions on the web to figure out what experiences the perfect candidate should have.
Having an obscure job title like “UX Ninja” or “Superstar” won’t help your chances, and I would even go so far in talking about specifics. For example, I use Wireframes, Personas, and Use Cases in my profile, because recruiters search against that. Several recruiters have found me that way. I also don’t list skills that I have, but I don’t want to do anymore, like Creative Direction.

Don’t Have Too Many Recommendations

It goes both ways, but when I talk to most recruiters, the number of recommendations that a candidate has on LinkedIn doesn’t really influence their decision. In fact, they’ll question the value of them if the candidate has too many of them.

What they really want to see is the quality of recommendations.

Having a few is good, and I’ve even used them in my resume. This makes it easier for the recruiter or hiring manager to gauge the quality of a candidate without having to pull up their profile. Recruiters and hiring managers want to know in what kind of environment the person best fits, the quality of the work, and how the person works with teams. Cultural fit is so important these days, especially in smaller teams.

What they don’t want to see is the typical stuff: “He comes in on time,” “She’s motivated,” or “Loves working in teams.” These don’t mean anything.

The more concrete the recommendation is on working style, the better.

Patrick Neeman is the Director of User Experience with Jobvite. His previous experience includes working with startups to launch their product, User Experience and Social Media consulting with Microsoft, and managing a team of 25 User Experience professionals for a technology consultancy. He also runs a blog,  Usability Counts, that covers topics such as User Experience, Social Media, and Web Marketing.

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With Tom Anderson from MySpace. Really.

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It’s here.

The iPhone app is coming soon.

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Classic:

“One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.”

I wish I had something that was worth $100 million.

Even $30 million.

I wouldn’t be suing, I’d be enjoying my life.

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Both Visual and User Experience Designers are important, but most don’t have the skillset to really do interaction work. Just like how many User Experience Designers don’t have a visual skill set, it works the other way:

This ambiguity can lead many visual designers to misunderstand what user experience design is, especially if they've never worked alongside a dedicated user experience designer. This has also led a lot of visual designers to mistakenly believe that because the work they create results in some kind of user experience, that makes them a user experience designer.

…

Over the last 12 months I've come across far too many visual designers describing themselves as user experience designers because they don't fully understand the term. Instead they've seen a few articles that explain how UX is the new black and decided to rebrand themselves.

I've also come across many fantastic visual designers who feel pressured into becoming user experience designers because they think this is the only way to progress their careers. It seems that due to a lack of supply, user experience design has somehow come to represent a higher order of design, or design done right. At best this is nonsense and at worst this is actually damaging to peoples careers.

I agree. both parties are just as important.

Visual designers don’t have to rebrand themselves — they’re a shortage of both good visual and User Experience Designers. Hone your craft. Both of us will be in shortage for a very long time.

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This is a five-part series written by Karen Fojas Lee, the owner of Nomad Chique. I thought it was so good this would be a good place to republish. Each part will publish on Wednesdays. Cheers.

The second to last step in the IDEATE Design Loop is

"T" – Try out the alternatives.

For my process, this usually means we are ready to either:
A. Prepare designs for usability testing
OR,
B. Move into production

Preparing For Usability Testing

If we need to prepare visually treated designs for usability testing, then our designs do not necessarily need to be completely accurate for slicing up and programming, but they need to be clean. What I mean by "clean" is that the layouts are crisp, spelling is accurate, and persistent items (like navigation menus, headers, footers, global navigation) are positioned consistently across all pages to be tested. This ensures that the user will not be distracted by tiny layout changes and can focus on navigating the site and completing the tasks being tested.

The ultimate goal of usability testing is to confirm whether the visual designs meet our original criteria and whether they resolve the problems we had in the first place – ex). "User's can't find this feature", "Shoppers get lost in the checkout process", "The site doesn't excite users or feel like our brand."

Now, testing doesn't have to be a big, daunting, expensive endeavor. As mentioned in the last article, it's important to "Test Often and Test Early" so do take the time to test, or stop and review the visual designs against best practices by an unbiased eye during your process even if it's at a smaller scale than your ideal. Much formal usability testing is conducted in a relatively controlled environment with an analyst working side by side with pre-screened users, or remotely using software and web capturing devices that allow the analyst and user to communicate.

But usability testing can be as simple as asking a few folks in the cubicle down the hall some simple questions to test a screen. A great book that I think is quite helpful in making usability more approachable for designers and business owners alike is  Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug. Check out the chapter called "Usability Testing on 10 Cents A Day" for a good read on how to make usability testing an easier part of the process without breaking the bank.

Moving Into Production

If we're ready for production, this means we are at a point where we've finished refining designs and these designs have met or exceeded our initial design requirements, creating a compelling user experience for our audience. To cross-check our work we can ask ourselves these 4 questions:

••  Have we explored enough screens to establish an overall design language that can be applied to most any other pages that might come later? This is where that sitemap or information architecture diagram comes in handy again to cross-check my work where I had outlined all the critical screens or page types needed.
••  Is the design language clear enough to be easily translated to CSS styles or other global styling? In my experience, the best way to communicate the important features of the final visual design is to create a style guide document that specifies dimensions, fonts, colors and any unique elements that will need to be built. Here's a sample of one style guide element I've created that shows layout dimensions for one screen. Other pages within the style guide specify color codes and text styles. To view more samples or other style guides I've created, send me a comment or DM me on Twitter.

• Have all technical notes or key interaction functions been demonstrated in our desired interaction flows? This can be accomplished by appending engineering notes to each screen or layout. Or for particularly intricate designs, a simple interactive (clickable) mockup can help tremendously in communicating the desired effect to our developers.
• Does the development team have all the graphical assets needed to move forward? As a designer, this can mean providing clean, layered Photoshop, Fireworks or Illustrator files or just the flattened layouts as JPEGs or PNGs.

If we've successfully answered yes to these key questions, then your design is ready for handover to your client and their development team.

Next week we will come full circle to the last step of our  IDEATE Design Loop with the second  "E" – Evaluate the Results.

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