You knew it was coming.

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This is the new myspace. Any questions?

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As Jon Fox said, spread the gospel.

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The process of getting a great user experience job that you love isn’t as hard as you would think — you just have to tell your story.

The Usability Counts UX Resume and Portfolio Bootcamp will happen November 13, 2012 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in San Francisco, California. The event covers all aspects of getting that UX job you love:

• Presenting a great resume
• How to properly present your experience
• Crafting a portfolio that tells your story

Also covered are questions to ask and what to look for, so you can find the right culture for your skills and career.

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Great article. So true.

When your car breaks down, you take it to a mechanic. You need a new roof, you call a roofer. Yet, for some reason a lot of people think they can design their own website.

Your website is your #1 marketing tool. Don’t ruin it by designing it yourself. And don’t hire the cheapest provider or your cousin. The site will suck. Can’t afford it? It’s a matter of priorities. You can always find a way to pay for things that are truly important to you.

We live in the era of design. Good design sells, bad design doesn’t. There’s lots of research out there saying that people trust beautiful websites more. Heck, people trust beautiful everything more. Beautiful people make more money, are more successful and and just have it better. We like pretty cars, houses and clothes. The same goes for websites.

Read on…

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This is in response to UX amateurism and why I’m not a UX designer anymore. Being a UX Designer isn’t hard, but we forget to some of the low hanging fruit that is invaluable to our role.

Anyone can wireframe.

When my friends ask about building their own ideas, I encourage them to start sketching. My friends love doing it, because it’s taking something in their head and making it real.

Because. Anyone. Can. Wireframe.

However, that doesn’t make them a User Experience Designer.

What does make them a User Experience Designer is when they get feedback. They test the ideas with friends. They do research. They iterate.

Real User Experience Designers understand wireframes and sketches are only one part of the process. They result from research needed to design a product. Research may make it into Powerpoints to be communicated to product and engineering teams, rough notes during usability tests may be taken on paper prototypes, and screencasts might be recorded during remote usability testing. Each of these are as equally important as a wireframe.

If you’re following some kind of constant improvement process to make your product better, you are a User Experience Designer.

There is no one true process for User Experience, just a framework. That framework is the intersection people, business and technology, and our job is to understand all three so they work in harmony.

Communicate Without Using A Mouse

I’ve watched a lot of User Experience Designers break out their tools and go straight to wireframes. Then they save them as a PDF, send them to the client, and wonder, “Why can’t the clients understand the wireframes?”

One simple statement — it’s about context. Wireframes are only one communication tool that User Experience Designers have in their toolbox. More important is the ability to give context and talk through solutions with the clients and engineers.

Even better tools are paper and pencil, or whiteboards. Both of them are amazing because the designer can iterate and communicate with the users and stakeholders in a way that’s very collaborative and effective. I love whiteboards because we can sketch, erase and sketch again quickly while walking through the idea. Jonathan Korman calls it the “five step test”: can they take the five steps to the whiteboard.

Designers should own the experience, but they also should realize they are creating the experience in collaboration with the users who have to use it.

Hit The Road

Have you visited your customers? Have you performed a focus group? Have you watched them in action? Are you designing just for yourself?

Most User Experience Designers work on products that we would never want or have to buy. I will probably never write a check for Jobvite, yet I’m responsible for designing an Applicant Tracking System for many companies I won’t ever work for. That means I’m going to spend a lot of time talking to recruiters, the primary users of our system.

Seldom are you the target audience for the product you are designing. So why do most designers jump straight into wireframes?

There’s always time for user research, because wireframes should be so little of your time. You should make it a point even before sketching to schedule at least 5 calls with customers and discuss their needs. If you can, schedule two in person visits of at least two hours to watch them use the products that are related.

You have to understand the needs of your users in the context of their environment — only then can you design the product. I hate hearing the most is the words, “I think.” What it really should be is, “If I were this target user, this is how I think the process would go for using this.”

Show Early and Often

Do you print out your wireframes and throw them on the wall? Do you schedule usability tests? Do you ask people at work, “How would you use this?” Do you use any kind of prototype to get results? Have you ever used a half done prototype to test?

Testing your assumptions is the most important thing you could do as a User Experience Designer. Again, it’s back to “I think,” the two most dangerous and overused words in the English language. You aren’t paid to design something for yourself, you’re paid to design for the users of the system, and as a by product be tremendously profitable for your organization.

Usability testing ain’t rocket surgery. Ask someone you work with, “Do you have a few minutes to go over something I’m working on?” Most people love to do this, because they feel like they are part of the process. For B2B applications, the end users will volunteer without compensation their own time because it will make their life easier.

Carl Nelson, a designer I saw present, said the easiest tests were done at coffee shops in San Francisco. Leave a few donuts out, ask people to come over and ask a few questions. The feedback you’ll get we’ll be priceless.

Makin’ It A Habit

How are you going to design the product? How are you performing research? Do you have a step by step process you can put on the wall that talks about what you do? Are you using a project management tool like Basecamp or Asana to track where you are at?

User Experience Designers more so than anyone else should have a stake in how a product gets designed and developed. It’s up to them to be involved organically in establishing the process within an organization by building support with product managers, engineers and customer support. When a process is in place is when a User Experience Designer can relax.

I explain it simply as User Interviews, Personas, User Stories, Wireframes, Mockups, and the launch of an iteration. Repeat the last three to iterate. This process makes a great story where you can talk about previous successes and how you can apply it to your current situation.

When I talk with other designers about how I implement it, I just do. End of story. The process becomes just part of my day job, another tool I use to create great products. If there’s always time to wireframe, there’s always time to perform research.

Even great writers just don’t sit down and type: they have a story arc as a framework. User Experience Designers should have the same because their job is to turn the UX process into a story they can tell anyone involved in it.

Learn The Only Constant is Change

Do you just launch a product and hope it works? Do you ever have a chance to change it? Is it ever done?

One of the designers I know, Jon Fox, asked a curious question the other day: “When do you consider a product done?”

In my mind, a product is never fully complete.

And not only is it about the product itself. Iteration is also about the process. It’s hard for many User Experience Designers to build in iteration because are a lot of projects are fixed, but their great clients and great companies understand the only constant is change, and change can totally be for the better.

The Japanese language has a term for it called Kaizen, the continuous improvement of processes. Recently we develop a hair systems for men’s website  newhairline, and they turn great result on orders. When you’re building a product, you are looking to improve the process of improving the product just as much as you are trying to improve the product yourself. The most important point to the Kaizen philosophy is self improvement: it is up to ourselves to improve our process.

Scrum borrows from this with retrospectives, which is a look back at what went well (and not so well) with your last release, and what we should improve going forward. User Experience Designers should do retrospectives themselves so they can improve their processes.

You should think this about every day as a User Experience Designer: how can I improve what I’m doing in my current environment to make the product and process better.

Build in time to make changes, make tweets and test your ideas. Get feedback. Put it in the next release. Research. Design. Build. Evaluate. Repeat. That’s what makes a great User Experience Designer.

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This is a post I wrote that appeared originally over at Onward Search. It’s been fairly well received, and is a good starting point for new UX Designers. Read on.

U.S. News and World Report has named User Experience as one of the hottest careers for this decade. It’s a great job that pays well, offers a lot of interesting opportunities, and is one of the most important roles in today’s digital, connected economy. When you work in an environment that values User Experience, the rewards of great product development are amazing. In essence, you create great products, and, hopefully, earn great successes.

So what’s the best answer to, “How do I break into User Experience?”

Very few people follow the same path into User Experience. Everyone has a different story, and that reflects in the variety of skills many User Experience Designers have when you read their resumes. It’s not like becoming a surgeon, where there’s an expected path laid out for them. User Experience professionals bring all their experience to the table, and that contributes to the products they design.

User Experience isn’t for everyone, and just because you get a degree doesn’t mean you’ll be good at it. Try it out before you jump in the deep end.

Get Educated

Getting that piece of paper is the quickest way to jump start your User Experience career.

Many colleges and universities are now offering Bachelor’s level and Master’s level degrees in Interaction Design and Human Computer Interface Design. HCI is the more advanced version of this (based on design for airplane cockpits during World War II). Carnegie Mellon is recognized as the top school for their design programs.

For other schools, your mileage may vary. Because the field is so new, many of the programs out there shouldn’t be getting the credit they deserve — I’ve met many a designer that talked about how great their program was, but their work didn’t reflect it. I read the bios of some of the people teaching, and they have less experience than the mid-level designers I wouldn’t hire.

However, not all of us can move to Pittsburgh at the drop of a hat.

The alternative is university extension programs.

In this scenario, working professionals take classes and learn the basics of the field over a few months. I’m a west coast guy, so the programs I recommend are UCLA’s Extension Courses, and Cal State Fullerton’s User Experience Design certificate that I advised years ago. Many of the professionals that have taught those classes are ones whom I respect, and some have offered intern programs that require your enrollment in the class as a prerequisite. If you’re a working professional, I would try this first, because spending $600 for a class is much better than spending $30,000/year.

There are also many accelerator programs that educate professionals about usability and user experience design.

Some of the best are Nielson Norman Group’s intensive programs, Cooper’s UX Bootcamps, and Adaptive Path‘s programs. They’re taught by some of the best in the business, but they’re pricey: expect to drop $2,500 in addition to room, board and flights if you don’t live in a major metropolitan area. I’d advise finding local resources before you make this investment.

The value of these programs is more than the nuts and bolts of learning the field.

The schools partner with companies like Microsoft and General Electric so graduates have entry level opportunities to learn Interaction Design from professionals that have done it for years. Some schools, like Stanford, align themselves with alumni programs like Designer Fund to promote interaction design, and the best way to get in is to know people personally.

It’s like getting a MBA: sometimes the real value isn’t the education but the people you meet.

Pivot From Your Current Position

If you look at the careers of many User Experience designers, especially the better ones, they usually come from design or communication related careers.

Dan Saffer, a famous designer, was a writer before getting involved in UX. Two friends of mine, Coburn Hawk and Jon Fox, were in film production and illustration before making the transition. Another, Paul Sherman, was a technologist. Whitney Hess has been a UX designer since graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a double major in HCI and Professional Writing, but was a columnist for several magazines  — at the age of 13.

User Experience design is the ability to translate a story (how we engage the user) into a usable experience.

The common thread uniting all these professionals was that they knew how to tell stories, and they used previously gained talents to contribute to their User Experience skill set. Dan and Whitney also went back to school (Carnegie Mellon), to enhance their chances of succeeding in User Experience.

The three easiest careers to pivot from are Print Designer, Web Designer, and Business Analyst.

These careers already involve elements of interaction design, even if that is not immediately apparent. Usage of space, design, and the managing of requirements are very important in translating those skills to Interaction Design.

However, I’ve seen people move from these careers:

• Web Producers and Engineers have a core understanding of how websites work.
• Recruiters know the position and the market, can communicate well, and can sell.
• Copywriters already have the communication skills and understand marketing.
• Journalists have great research and writing skills.

Each has skills in other fields that translate well over to Interaction Design. All they have to do is fill in some holes.

I interviewed a candidate recently, and before she was a product manager, she worked extensively in Human Resources. That’s experience that no degree will teach you, and might even give you a leg up on other candidates. Not all User Experience jobs need a Masters, and saying that disregards the great experience many professionals have.

The advantage of pivoting is that you can use your domain knowledge into User Experience, and that makes you invaluable.

When I was editor of a community newspaper years ago (another pivot), I got a great piece of advice from a writer I worked with. He said that they didn’t have writing degrees in England because the ability to communicate was expected, but you had to have knowledge in a domain to be of value. The best journalists had degrees in Finance or Business and were able to translate that knowledge into great content.

Build Your Own Idea or Something For Someone Else

I covered this at my blog, Seven Tips How To Get Started In User Experience. What most User Experience designers need before applying for a job is a portfolio, and no one’s going to give you that. The best way to get something in that portfolio is to either build an idea yourself, or walk into a non-profit and volunteering. It could be interning, or even volunteering. Instead of getting retail rate for your skills you’re getting experience and an education, which is a long-term investment.

I have met designer after designer that followed this approach. It lead to great experiences and eventually better paying work.

My favorite is Erin Moore, who I met in a random meeting last year. She interned at Twitter after going back to school to get a masters degree in the field. She has some great stories that will lead to even better gigs. Another student, Morgan Davis, is working with a friend of mine on a competitive analysis project. For his time, we’re going to work on turning it into his first User Experience deliverable he can put in his portfolio.

When you build something yourself you can try different ideas and learn on your own time without affecting anyone else.

There’s seemingly a million blogs out there that talk about interaction design, and a wealth of resources that you can learn from. This is the golden age of self serve tools, and one of the best out there is Code Academy. They give you a bunch of courses to start with. You can learn the skills you need to build websites and get a feeling if you like it or not.

Building something for someone else is great because you have something tangible that can be used in the wild.

Craigslist, Volunteer Match and even Yelp are great places to look for opportunities with non-profits, and sometimes all it takes is a personal introduction or some networking to find the right person to talk to. Even commercial companies are always looking for talent.

Network for opportunities

User Experience designers love to talk. And talk. And talk. Kind of.

Where do they talk? Twitter.

Twitter is the new channel for business engagement.

There are thousands (literally) of User Experience designers that use it to talk about what they read, what they like, and to promote their work. Designers are an odd sort: we’re typically introverted, but see social media as a great way to interact and engage with other designers so they can learn about their field.

Going to meetups and events like SkillShare can help expose you to other designers so you can break into the field. Follow people other than designers: many companies don’t know they don’t need User Experience or don’t know what it is. If you follow marketing people, engineers and other technology types, an opportunity might present itself. Start a conversation with them, and it might lead to something cool.

And always have a story to tell, because we are storytellers.

Talk about the projects you like working on, or what you’re building. If you start a conversation with, “I don’t know how to get in the field,” that’s really a bad place to start. The first skill Interaction Designers must have is research, and you aren’t doing that, then maybe this isn’t the field for you.

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A lot of UX Designers are fooling themselves when they claim they are UX Designers.

They don’t have a process.

They don’t do testing.

They don’t do research.

They just jump straight into wireframes.

They jump straight into Photoshop mocks.

They produce shiny deliverables, not effective communication tools.

Sometimes, our environments don’t allow us to do it (i.e. the agency that has billable time for wireframes, but not for ethnographic research). Sometimes, we just don’t do it because we have so many other things to do (i.e. product development where we are working with 10 developers, and have 200 pages to wireframe). Sometimes, we don’t do it just because.

The passion is there to create great products, but it disappears when you need to gather all those details that are needed to create great products.

We have so many excuses, but not many answers.

A designer wrote a great post about this. This is an excerpt. Read on.

Just because I can imagine great user experiences doesn’t make my designs right.

Ah, where do I start? User experience, the ultimate goal. What all designers strive for. It’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot – but that ultimately is the problem. This user experience all lives in my head – and I haven’t really spent time with actual users on what *their* experiences will be like. I’m not the user, nor will I ever be one. While it’s great for coming up with ideas, my ideas still need to be tested against other people’s perspectives, and I haven’t done that.

If I blame the project or the place I work, maybe the fault is in my ability to convince or advocate for user-centeredness. Even without the support, I should still be doing guerilla testing but I admit giving way to an internal culture.

So I’ve done very little user testing. Or upfront research. Or even surveys or interviews. Or just asking people at their desks. Plus, it’s worse that I know how to do this stuff and still don’t do it.

…

But somehow, it’s not enough. Nor will it ever be. And where I’m aiming to go, unicorns and one-size-fits-all don’t seem to make sense. Maybe someday, I’ll find something I can identify with. But for now, I don’t think I can quite call myself a UX designer, because it’s getting harder to identify what I do as wholly UX. For what it’s worth, I am doing bits within UX – but I can’t claim fame to all of it.

Problem is, I’m not sure what I am anymore, or what I should be focusing on. After some thought, I think I align most with “interaction design” than any of the other disciplines (UX is not a discipline). My title as “information architect” bears some truth – I do practice IA at work (which designer that deals with information doesn’t?) but the extent to which I practice IA doesn’t give me confidence to call myself one.

Are you a real UX designer? Read on.

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I get a lot of emails from new designers asking, “Where should I start?” Getting that first job is the hardest thing in UX, because it requires you to find someone willing to take a chance on you.

But if you do find that someone, you can learn great things from your experience.

I tell new designers to go work for an agency right away because you get a lot of brands on your resume, and you learn how to do things fast. Agencies are always on deadline, and that’s a good thing for learning time management. Not everyone agrees, but it’s a good discussion point.

Christina Wodtke covers this in a blog post over at Elegant Hack. It is a great read.

Consulting makes you a fox, inhouse makes you a hedgehog.  Big companies teach you to focus on your craft, little companies teach you how to run a business.  It is incredibly useful for you, you designer, to try out as many as you can. You will learn a huge number of tools, and you will learn about yourself. And then you can make some choices about what you want to do.

…

My final piece of advice: ignore all of this if you fall in love. You see a company you adore, you frigging join it. Because you are young and you have a get-out-of-jail-free card while you don’t have a spouse and kids and a mortgage.  You cannot ruin your life unless you get thrown in jail, or alienate everyone by being a jerk (and I’m not even sure about the second, thinking of a few CEO’s I know).

There is no bad choice for you, there is only your choice.  I just recommend you give yourself a chance and find out what you love.

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Great post.

Most of the body copy and other elements that are dark on pages are actually dark grey, not black. Black overpowers. This article explains it.

Black overpowers everything else.

When you put pure black next to a set of meticulously picked colors, the black overpowers everything else. It stands out because it’s not natural. All of the “black” everyday objects around you have some amount of light bouncing off of them, which means they aren’t black, they’re dark gray. And that light probably has a tint to it, so they’re not even dark gray, they’re colored-dark gray.

Lots of the apps we use on a daily basis have blacks that aren’t really blacks, but dark grays. Twitter’s sidebar, Sublime Text 2’s sidebar if you have Soda Dark installed (which you should!), new Photoshop’s background, the calendar widget. Even Twitter Bootstrap. They all use colors close to black, but slightly muted so they don’t overpower the rest of the elements on the screen.

Read on…

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Quora turned this on, and you have to opt-out. I personally don’t want everyone knowing what I read on Quora. There’s some semi-confidential stuff posted there, and it could raise some red flags from people who are on the site.

Get this to as many people as possible.

And here’s how to turn it off:

1. Sign in.
2. Select Settings.
3. Select Views.
4. Select No under Views.

Done.

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Yeah of the egg. Bahahaha…

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Click the link to receive a Microsoft Word document with a template, plus annotations that describe how you should write your resume.

The Usability Counts Career Guide

Presentations at events

• Hunting Unicorns: What makes an effective UX Professional
• UX Portfolios: How to tell your story
• From Application To Interview: How to get a great UX job

Exploring User Experience as a career

• How to Get Started In User Experience
• A Day In The Life Of A UX Designer:
  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
• Want To Get Started As An Information Architect? These Are Last Books You Will Ever Need.

Getting a User Experience job

• From Application To Interview: How To Get A Great UX Job
• How to Get a Great Job Using Facebook
• How to Get a Great Job Using Twitter
• How to Build a Great Profile on LinkedIn
• How to Write a Great User Experience Resume
• The UX Portfolio: Telling Your Story
• A Great Way to Get Experience as an Interaction Designer? Intern.
• Six Tips Before Moving To San Francisco as a UX Professional
• Onward Search: How to Shape Your UX Job
• Five Tips For Recruiters: What To Know Before You Pitch Me

Working as a User Experience Designer

• How Much Should Designers Ask About The Business Model?
• Should User Experience Designers Know Design Or Programming?
• Six Things User Experience Designers Forget When They Criticize Websites
• The Top Six Tips on How to Be a Great Web Designer
• Just Who Owns The Work, Anyways?
• The Pros and Cons of Being a Consultant
• Eight Organizational Challenges for UX Professionals
• Hiring A User Experience Team

Working at a Startup

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to write at pat@usabilitycounts.com.

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Your most productive employees probably aren’t the squeaky wheels, says Fast Company.

Their reasoning:

• Being quiet strengthens focus. It’s hard to focus on the task at hand when you yourself are making so much noise. The other team, who participated in the clamming wars, never took their eye off the prize. Our team, on the other hand, did a happy dance in the sand every time we hit pay dirt. In retrospect, this was probably valuable time wasted.
• Being quiet calms others. Quiet people have the ability to calm those around them. For example, when everyone is stressing out because it looks like a team isn’t going to meet their deadlines, it’s usually the quiet people who are able to calm people down and carry them over the finish line.
• Being quiet conveys confidence. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone when you are confident. You know you do a good job and you believe that eventually others will take notice.
• Being quiet means you think before you speak. Quiet people are usually thoughtful thinkers. They think things through before making a statement. Something you probably wish many of your workers would do before taking up your valuable time.
• Being quiet gives you the space to dig deep. Quiet people tend to delve into issues and ideas before moving on to new ones. Compare this to the surface people in your organization, who often move onto other matters without giving thought to the gold that may be sitting right below the surface.

Read on…

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Infographic by Onlinemba.com

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I’ve been on a lot of interviews for jobs, and conducted a lot of interviews (building a team to 25 will do that for you). I had a lot of insight to the hiring process before I joined my current day job. At least getting in the door to talk to them is much easier than you think for most positions.

This article is spot on with the reasons why you didn’t get the interview, and underscores why personal referrals matter so much in getting the job you want.

About sending resumes to a general email address:

Résumés to jobs@blackholeofdeath: The problem here isn’t that your résumé or application was flawed, it’s just that nobody has read it. Sending to hr@ or jobs@ addresses is never ideal, and your résumé may be funneled to a scoring system that scans it for certain buzzwords and rates it based on the absence, presence and frequency of these words. HRbot apocalypse.

Solution: Do some research to see if you know anyone who works/worked at the company, even a friend of a friend, to submit the résumé. Protip: Chances are the internal employee at some wedding veil company like bestweddingveil.com may even get a referral bonus. LinkedIn is a valuable tool for this. Working with an agency recruiter will also help here, as recruiters are typically sending your information directly to internal HR or hiring managers.

Read on…

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This is the Official UX Drinking Game Shindig for UX Week.

It’s free except for the booze.

August 20 at 8 p.m.
Tony Nik’s
1534 Stockton Street
San Francisco, California

The back area will be reserved.

This isn’t affiliated at all with UX Week, but it’s an excuse to get together. Meet up with other designers and have a drink for all the reasons we need to drink. Hosted by Patrick Neeman, Director of User Experience at Jobvite and curator of the UX Drinking Game. The first five attendees that have downloaded the iPhone Application will get a free drink.

Other participants will be listed here as they register.

• It’s an easy cab ride from Union Square
• Tony Nik’s is a classy place, so be classy
• There’s a bunch of places nearby that are cool, because it’s North Beach

Note: The date may change.

Register here. Also, go the Facebook Page to add yourself to the event so we can talk about our favorite drinks.

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The Sparrow thread about selling to Google has been entertaining, because Sparrow’s community is complaining that they shouldn’t have sold out to Google. The deal was worth something like $25 million.

Good for Sparrow, I say.

If anyone was talking to me about selling my fledgling application, I’d take the money and run. Why? That community is a really nice group of people, but they aren’t paying the bills. And no amount of whining is worth more than $25 million.

The problem is that we have trained consumers to expect everything for free, regardless of the cost of building it.

Nadyne Richmond has a great post about it on her blog, Go Ahead, Mac My Day.

At some point, we as consumers stopped wanting to pay money for software.  Some of that is that our computers were bundled with a lot of software so that we didn’t have to pay for apps that we use every day, like mail apps and web browsers.  Some of that is that companies who don’t primarily make their money elsewhere (say, on selling you computers) started selling their software at a steep discount, which depressed the overall market.

Some of it is that some software is now supported by ads, which reduces the out-of-pocket expense for the consumer (although there’s obviously the cost of having to view ads all the time).  And some of it is just that we as consumers have become a lot of whiners who have come to think that software should just come to us magically, continue to work on any hardware that we buy, and get updated with new features regularly.

She points to another article called The Sparrow Problem, which outlines the economics of building mobile and other applications for sale. I have personal experience with this through my personal projects, Pick An Excuse and the UX Drinking Game.

About three years ago, I decided that I wanted to self publish a mobile application, so I designed Pick An Excuse. It’s basically a random content generator that allows users to sort through excuses written by category. Despite research that said it would cost roughly $30,000 to build an application, I pursued the idea anyways.

Here are the costs for Pick An Excuse:

• $200 for the first offshore team that built a really poor version that delivered just enough of a demo that I could actually use it at job interviews to say, “Look, I’m building an iPhone app!”
• $5,000 for the second offshore team to build out the first version.
• $500 for a college intern to write a bunch of content, some of which is funny.
• $1,000 or so to market it through sites like Fiverr.com.
• $1,700 to release a second version that included integration with Facebook Connect and Twitter Connect. I cut integration to Messenger Connect even through I was consulting with Microsoft because I didn’t see the ROI.

What I had to do to make this happen:

• Learn enough about JSON (I already knew PHP and MySQL well enough) to write all the code.
• Write the documentation for the JSON calls.
• Prepare pixel perfect Photoshop files to give to the developers.

In the end, that $30,000 number was about right if I was working with a client and marking up development costs. Only through careful vendor management did I keep costs down.

I designed the Pick An Excuse application as a platform — meaning I could use it for any idea — so the release of the UX Drinking Game cost me roughly $1,500, plus another $500 in marketing costs. I also released Startup Drinking Game for another $500, but that hasn’t gotten much traction.

The amount of money I’ve made from all of the mobile applications? $61 in CafePress sales.

My philosophy is I don’t work in software for “free,” even on my passion projects. For example, the UX Drinking Game might cost me money and time, but from a personal branding standpoint, it’s been huge. I’ve made a bunch of friends with really big titles, and it has increased my blog traffic. I’ll probably get a speaking gig at an IxDA conference because of it.

From an ROI perspective, it has more than paid for itself, but there’s no way I could have charged for it and I knew that going in.

I’ve been playing with the idea of creating more applications with a friend of mine. We looked at a couple of ideas that were travel related and we couldn’t figure out how to make money off of them because people are trained to pay so little for mobile applications. It blows my mind that people the same people that are willing to spend $15 for a Lonely Planet book hesitate to pay for a $6 travel application that has the same content.

Software should cost more.

Building applications is an investment in time and money. When someone complains that it should be free, I tell them nothing is free because someone is paying for it. Facebook is a really good example. And the website foxbackdrop.com also a great example. People complain every day about how hard the site is to use or about the changes Facebook makes in their favor. Facebook is for the advertisers because they are the customers. Same with LinkedIn. Same with Twitter.

We are the product.

Instagram is another example. it wasn’t free because the investors were footing the bill. Now Facebook is paying for it, and we’ll be the product once again.

We all might be undervaluing the real costs of software, and our expectations of a free driven culture are unrealistic. It’s crazy that people are complaining about the cost of an application like Sparrow that they use every day to save time because of increased usability, especially when it’s less than three Starbucks lattes. Really? $10? That’s a pizza at Domino’s.

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Which is why I’m wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

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Happy birthday to the UX Drinking Game!

I’ve been running the UX Drinking Game for a year as of tomorrow. It’s a mobile application for the iPhone, a mobile website using jQuery Mobile and a traditional website. The feature set doesn’t match between the different platforms, but you can still browse content.

I’ve created some spinoffs that haven’t taken off (Startup Drinking Game, Apple Drinking Game, Dating Drinking Game and The Big Idea List), but I’ve been collecting interesting data that has a lot of value to me learning about the audience. It’s fun creating an idea, launching it, and seeing how the users have fun with it.

Here are some stats over the last 30 days, 2,500 unique users and 17,000 page views that you might find interesting:

• There are 567 user submitted reasons to drink, and roughly 85 percent of them were submitted by people other than me. That’s a lot of drinking by User Experience Designers. Some of them are really funny.
• Over 27 percent of the visitors visit the UX Drinking Game from a mobile device. Mobile is defined as tablets and smartphones, so anything that isn’t a laptop or desktop. A lot of that traffic (it seems to be half) is consumed by Flipboard pulling content into their cache. If my numbers are right — they don’t show up in Google Analytics but I do capture my own data — about 50 percent of all mobile traffic is related to Flipboard.
• Android comprises one-fifth of the mobile users. iOS will rule the roost for a long time.
• The number of pages per visitor hovers around 8.8 pages. That’s relatively high, increased by actually decreasing usability and turning the site into a discovery platform. This is much higher than the 5 pages per visitor I was doing earlier in the year. I fiddled with the site design to get the numbers up.
• Site traffic only two pages per visitor for mobile devices. I have to work on increasing that.
• Most of the referred users come from Twitter, but only average 5 pages per visit. Ironically, those that come from Facebook average nearly 10.5 pages per visit, so I might do some things to increase Facebook engagement.
• Facebook as a mobile platform as a growing by leaps and bouns. One-third of the users that come from Facebook do so from a mobile device. For Facebook, this is non-monetized traffic. Like has been said, the next social network is going to be primarily mobile, and harder to monetize than social networks now. Scary thought.
• Visitors from Usability Counts average 12 pages per visit. That’s huge, considering how little real estate I dedicate to it from the blog.
• 50 percent of the traffic comes from referrals. Almost none of that is from Google (A total of 10 unique users). Double that to get the LinkedIn numbers, which is why I killed the LinkedIn sharing button.
• Engagement isn’t very good on the iPhone Application. People download it and forget about it. Roughly 2 percent of all site traffic is from the iPhone application. It’s cool to build an app, but hard to keep users interested unless it’s a true social game or utility like Weather. iPhone applications can be expensive if you have to hire a developer.
• Those 10 users that have a Blackberry? Time to upgrade, yo.

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