I’ve met Dana Oshiro, and she’s a great writer. I’m glad to see she’s written something about UX, especially in an area we give so little attention to.

Over the weekend we had a chance to highlight Graphic.ly – a company that opted to release early (and imperfectly) in exchange for valuable user feedback. As companies look to their peers and audiences to help define product features, there’s a greater need for scalable testing platforms. Here’s a summary of 8 useful services that will help put you on the path to product greatness.

Read on…

Information abut this position, from the recruiter:

The position:

• As their Director of Interaction Design you will be integral in reshaping their strategy to focus on the future of consumer needs in the automotive marketplace and aligning their brand and products to capitalize on the strength of their current position.
• Product Focused: They are now implementing a product driven culture with strong leads in key decision-making roles.
• Customer Focused: User centered design methodologies are a key part of their product development process and investing in a comprehensive look at user needs is a central focus.
• Technology focused: They are a scrum/agile shop that utilizes the latest in Microsoft technologies.
• Investing in the Future: They are making substantial financial investments in the development of brand strategy, product strategy and product development. This role will be key to that process!

This role with have dynamic ability to influence change:

• This right candidate will play a heavy role in the future strategy of my client as well as be a key part of bringing these changes to fruition.
• Opportunities to be able to make this level of contribution at a company with this level of brand recognition are rare – this is a great challenge with tremendous resume building potential.

If you have 8-10 years of UX experience, the experience and ability to lead/manage a team of highly skilled IA’s and sell UX concepts through the organization, we should talk.

If you have previously applied for this position and would like to be considered again, reach out. If we spoke but the salary was too low, reach out, that too had changed! If you heard the buzz and side stepped the position based in old information, it’s a new year, a new role and a new process!

You might recognize this position — they are making some changes to it, and it includes better pay and a better interview process.

Send your resume to me at jobs@usabilitycounts.com. I’ll send it along.

From 25 User Experience Videos That Are Worth Your Time:

In this half-hour session held at the IA Summit 2008, Leah Buley of Adaptive Path shows what it means to be a UX team of one by telling her own story and recounting a real-life example. Leah explains the concept of generative design, which is the process of creating and sketching a lot of different ideas and then refining them. The slides are amazing because Leah drew them by hand.

Whenever I hear about the, “we really should be on a Content Management System,” there’s always the discussion of “why?” A lot of clients have no concept editing their own website (that’s why they hire you, right, to build it for them? Why should they get their hands dirty?). However, for some organizations, managing your own website makes sense.

If you need some ammunition, NetSuccess has a great article about the benefits of CMSes.

A content management system can be very helpful and save time especially when you have a website with many web pages and content that needs to be updated constantly. When trying to decide whether to add a content management system, or CMS, to your website you should consider the benefits that a CMS can offer.

Read on…

That was a question that came across one of the mailing lists — “do I have to learn how to program to be a good user experience designer?” A job posting was listed where the requirements could have been along the lines of smoking crack, and for new designers, they wouldn’t know any better because they are just trying to make a buck.

But should they?

That’s a hard question to answer, especially with the ever changing landscape of the industry.

The answer: it really depends on where you live and what you are looking to do. Many employers are looking for jack of all trades, while others are looking for specialists. Some are willing to give up deep skill sets in one area versus knowledge in all areas, or are looking for people of unique skill sets to build teams around.

A UX Designer in San Francisco is going to have a much different working experience than one in Columbus, Ohio because they will be much different companies.

I’m lucky to have worked in both generalist and specialist environments, and to be honest, I like getting my hands dirty sometimes. That includes building prototypes, doing my own guerrilla usability testing, and even throwing in some design to make it high fidelity. Other user experience designers like to focus on specific areas, like user research. It just depends.

If you know something about code, you’re less likely to design something that can’t be built.

The plus — there’s nothing worse than designing a solution that you think makes it really easy for the user, and then the programmers come back to you and say, “Well, that’s nice, but it’s going to take two months and we have only a month.” It’s like designing a car: if you design an engine that’s too big for the frame, the engine design has to be reworked.

The minus — that said, if you get too heads down in the code, you are going to be less effective as a user experience designer. Or, worse, you could limit your imagination and design a solution that would be more effective if you knew less about what was under the hood.

Specialists get paid more, but have fewer opportunities.

The plus — Everyone loves a big paycheck, and specialists are always going to have deeper knowledge of a particular topic. If you’re good, being a specialist means that you’re sought after. I have a lot of experience in e-commerce systems, for example, and somehow manage to improve those user experiences that lead to improved revenue. That’s a skill worth having that will make you valuable just about anytime of the day.

The minus — If they think you are too much of a specialist, it becomes really hard to get a job (“I didn’t know you could do that”), and in a bad economy, the last thing you want to do is fence yourself in. Those that were working in the field during the early 2000’s remember the day when being a project manager or a psuedo-programmer was a good thing. There’s nothing worse than being “just” a user researcher when they are looking for an Interaction Designer with research experience.

Sometimes it’s just about setting expectations.

Pros — Even if you don’t call yourself a specialist, putting a wider net out there for jobs is better because there may be a position that requires several different skills (Knowledge of JQuery, CSS, XHTML and some light design on top of doing the usual User Experience tasks like wireframes). This could translate into where you build functioning prototypes that the developers can use to build the finished product, but during the interview process. That said, I just recently started learning SketchFlow, a wonderful product that’s part of the Microsoft Expression Suite. There’s no way I could have picked it up as fast as I did without some knowledge of other prototyping tools like Flash, Axure and Visio.

Cons — Some skills required for the roles are so divergent that what they are looking for is a unicorn i.e. that one person that knows all of the above, plus ActionScript 3.0, plus .NET. The people that know all of those technologies either are a) getting paid much more than just being a User Experience Designers, b) do all of them poorly or c) are full of shit. You can only be good at so much.

The real answer? Look at the market and act accordingly.

Do what you have to do, and where you want to drive your career to, to succeed. Talk to other designers in the area to get an idea what they are doing. And remember, it’s a changing landscape — that requires some flexibility.

One of the friends runs an online marketing education conference. Social Media is the new hot thing (I think a couple of years ago, it was search engine optimization, and please don’t ask about my opinion on that), so their blog network is teeming with posts about Social Media, and the top request for education is that new fangled “Twitter thing” and tips about “Facebook”.

I met one of the characters at one of their events (which I thought was the coolest thing), but the mass market in indifferent, and still doesn’t get the whole CNN call for tweets.

Whatever.

Nobody cares.

Right?

I like posting on Facebook as much as the next social media geek (I think last Monday, I talked about my new haircut), but I recognize that posting about what I’m going to eat on Twitter doesn’t make me some kind of expert.

It just means I use it. I don’t charge an arm and a leg for my advice, and I’m still amazed at the impact of Social Media on sites even though some of my friends consider me ahead of the curve. Myself and some of my friends have been lucky to work in some Social Media environments (MySpace, for example), and even we don’t consider ourselves experts.

Social Media (and even User Experience) experts shouldn’t be able to call themselves that if they’ve been on one or two panels and read a book. They should have some successes (and failures) behind them, and grown to tell the story. But the truly great experts not only know how to leverage their personal brand, but point out the obvious while doing it, for free.

Here are some ways to tell if your Social Media Expert is full of crap:

Your Social Media Expert spends more time blogging than working

Self promotion can be high art on the web (Tila Tequila? Dane Cook? I mean, who really laughs at Dane Cook’s jokes?). My friends talk about all the Ringo Starrs out there — you know them, they were with one company as someone inconsequential. The company made it big, and found a way to parlay it into selling several books and evangelizing ideas. They are their own personal brand.

That said, there’s a really bad sign if your Social Media Expert spends more time blogging than working.

Think about this — one post of this length takes about an hour of write. It’s like the cook with the great cookies: the last thing they are going to do is tell everyone the recipe right?

If they are spending all their time writing blog posts about how much they know about Social Media, they aren’t helping your company do Social Media.

Your Social Media Expert thinks social media started with Facebook and Twitter

The reality is that the core foundation of social media has been around since two people talked around the campfire about inventing the wheel. It’s just moved to a different medium, and that medium as we know it, the internet, started on October 29, 1969. A lot of us older people (you know, the one’s that had jobs before an email address) remember bulletin board systems, and technically my first social media message that I sent to a friend of mine on Usenet was in 1987. Seriously, that’s longer ago than the age some of the experts I’ve seen.

It took four days to get there.

The distance traveled was from Irvine, California to Claremont, California.

Real Social Media Experts understand conversations, and how those conversations interact on whatever medium they are on. That could mean a letter to the editor sent via a mail carrier in the 1950’s, or a page established on Facebook in 2009. It’s the conversation that’s important.

Your Social Media Expert thinks that Twitter is the start of your brand

One of the great aspects of Social Media is that if you do it right, your customers have the conversation for you, promote your business, and make you lots of money, all for the cost of good service. One of the biggest mistakes we all make is where brand starts.

What is brand? Is your your name, and the experiences tied to your name. It’s not a twitter post, or a blog entry, or the color you have, or the logo you are designing. It’s the name of your company, and how every representative of your company is associated with it.

That said, if a stupid Twitter post goes out about how Memphis sucks, or 15,000 people complain on Facebook that your company uses slave labor, that hurts your brand. Social Media conversations shouldn’t be measured in just metrics, but also in quality of the conversation because that relates back to your brand. That article is a good example, because it talks about the success of Comcast — ask any of their customers.

Your Social Media Expert always has a clown in the pocket

This a famous phrase I’m going to attribute to a friend of mine. Whenever a company was going down the drain, especially during the late 1990’s, there was always a skunkworks project that was shown off in front of the venture capitalists. This was to distract them from the fact that the company was burning $15 million a month, they were surrounded by $1,000 Herman Miller Aeron chairs, and the core product still hadn’t launched, and the CEO was doing coke.

Look, online video! We can put that on our Geocities pages!

Real consultants offer some kind of roadmap of these are what the deliverables are, this is what they are going to do, and this should be the result. Hopefully. It doesn’t always have to succeed, and sometimes you can’t always measure it (even the biggest agencies have a hard time generating good numbers around social media). At the end of the day, if sales go up, it’s a good campaign.

It’s about the strategy kids. Plan. Plan. Plan, again. It’s not rocket science, and it doesn’t take a 25-year-old to tell you otherwise.

Your Social Media Expert speaks in 140 character sentences

If the only way they promote themselves is through Twitter, fire them.

Yesterday.

Why?

Twitter is the Apple of the Internet, without the cool products. Their market reach is under two percent, which is interesting, because MySpace is still in the 30’s and Facebook is way, way over that in the 50’s. I look at it as the mom test — if my mom has heard about it, it’s gone mainstream. We had dinner a few weeks ago, and the conversation started something like, “They wanted me to get on Facebook, but I don’t see time for it. I wish they would have called me up.”

Twitter never entered the conversation.

The truth is that Twitter has some great uses, most of it around it being the new RSS feed, and a great way to watch conversations around specific topics or events.

Your Social Media Expert recommends Delicious and Stumble Upon for an audience of seniors

It’s all about the audience, right? If your consultant doesn’t know who to talk to, then how can they have a conversation.

That’s what blow my mind about some of the people that recommend Twitter for everyone. The first question asked should be, “Where can I have a conversation with this audience?” For example, Email is still relevant (46 percent of all embedded links are still through email), yet the Social Media Expert wants you to use hashtags.

Figure out where your audience is, and talk to it. For some, it’s Foursquare. For others, it’s Facebook. For even other people, it’s Etsy.

For every audience  there’s a proper venue, and your Social Media Expert should know to look there.

What to do? What to do?

If you really need a Social Media Expert that is one, email me. Even if they don’t call themselves one.

Need to track where your users are pointing at, but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg? Want to record movies of what your users are doing? Looking for something that’s a bit more than Google Analytics, but not Omniture?

Then try out ClickTale, a new analytics tool that I test drove a month ago.

ClickTale gives you a good idea of what your users are doing so you can correct site issues fast. It records complete sessions, allows you to throttle usage so you don’t record every session, and gives you those nifty heat maps that wow and amaze executives.

The price is about right — $99 a month gets you started — but the only complaint I have is that their freemium levels don’t give you enough of a taste of what the tool can do (really, I need a better idea if the heat maps are worth it.

After talking to a bunch of recruiters and other managers, it looks like User Experience is going to making a comeback in hiring. We’re the leading indicator for a lot of things (you can’t start a website application project with proper user experience, right?), so this is a good thing for all technology workers.

However, if you have questions on what to look for, or how certain factors play into people’s interest level in your organization, here’s a few answers that I can think of.

What should I look for in hiring a user experience designer?

It’s a combination of deliverables and people skills.

Not only do they have to have the skills to design a solution, they have the skills to sell that solution to multiple stakeholders. Due to the salary levels available to skilled user experience professionals, it also has become a breeding ground to project managers, bad designers and other people with good sales skills and not much else. That not only creates the “well, I don’t have much money because the last guy screwed it up” situations, it creates a sense of mistrust of the next candidates, but when you meet a real user experience designer, you’ll know.

• Look at their wireframes — are they clear? Do they make sense? Can you walk through them?
• Ask to see personas — is there data backing it up?
• Have them give a presentation — is their thinking structured? Can they speak well.

They should be able to explain the reasoning behind their thinking i.e. we tested the solution, it’s best practices, statistics backed it up.

What should I look for in hiring a user experience manager?

Hiring a manager is a much different task than hiring an individual contributor, and the roles require much different skill sets. I’ve seen situations where companies had manager positions open for months (or years), and this happens because there are a few internal team members that shoot down any decent candidates that come in.

Remember, you are hiring for a leader (read President William J. Clinton) versus someone that just maintains status quo or screws it worse (read President George W. Bush). Managing a set of wireframes is a much different tasks than managing a group of user experience professionals, all of whom are used to having their own way because that’s the way it’s been. Corporate culture affects how people manage (Joel On Software has a wonderful post about this), so factor this into the type of manager you hire.

I recommend having other managers in the organization interview versus the people that are going to be managed. A senior user experience architect may not realize that the skills to manage people are much different than the skills to build a wireframe, and usually don’t judge the candidate accordingly.

The level of candidate may differ depending on the size of the team. You’ll want more of a working manager if the team is four who’s more tactical versus managing a division of 25 because strategy is more important.

Why can’t I find good candidates?

As much as user experience professionals are motivated by pay, they aren’t necessarily motivated by pay. It could be a combination of several factors, like the type of work your organization does (one place I worked at, we did intranets — try attracting talent for that, and we were still able to grow the team to 25), the size of your company, or the project lacks integrity.

Outside of pay, most important is the environment because that’s where people are going to be spending 40 hours a week, at least. User experience professionals are in the industry of categorizing and judging people’s skill level, so they quickly detect whether or not they are to do well in an environment.

A few questions to ask yourself before moving forward:

• Do the interviewees get a sense the hiring manager is qualified? There’s nothing worse than interviewing with someone who isn’t qualified for the job you are interviewing with, much less being a manager. The hiring manager should be forced to go through questions that are not on a prepared list, because interviewees pick up on lack of experience. There’s nothing worse than the “we’ve had this business problem for six months, solve it in 15 minutes
• Are the company politics evident during the interview? In some agencies, the politics are so deep, it’s like having two jobs — dealing with the client, and dealing with the internal personalities. Some people like that. Or, if it’s a slow moving company with micro-managers galore, will it turn them off?
• Is your company a comfortable place to work at? If you are placed in the back corner, or have a cubicle that is the middle of everything, that’s not a place you probably want to work. Why expect a candidate to do the same?
• Are the projects interesting enough? Certain people are suited to certain environments, and while you might want to attract the best talent, you may not be able to keep them because the work isn’t fast-paced enough.

How much should I pay them?

That also depends on what you have to offer and which market you are in. At the end of the day, it’s what the market can bear, and as the economy recovers that will change.

If the job can be performed mostly offsite, they might be willing to trade some flexibility for pay. Same if the project is interesting and has a lot of upside. Boring, less glamorous projects may actually cost your organization more to attract talent because while it’s boring, it’s also very profitable.

The real answer:

• Look at the market. What costs you $100 per hour in the Bay Area might cost $40 per hour in Omaha. Talent that is also too cheap is a bad sign. Whomever you hire should have the track record to go with the pay.
• Talk to candidates that might be willing to do the onsite, offsite thing. It might not seem like a lot, but in certain metropolitan areas, that 2 hours of commute each day translates into 10 hours a week — which could be used doing other things.
• Most importantly, construct the job so it fits real world people. If you are trying to hire senior level people, and the pay doesn’t match, good luck. Also, if you have to overpay to get anyone in the door because decent candidates are avoiding you, read some of the tips in previous questions.

Constructing the right team is hard — take your time with it. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your team shouldn’t be either.