Author Archive: Ha Phan

So why am I posting a Consultant Thursday blog late? Just because I haven’t posted in two weeks, I haven’t lost track of time. I just think the reason for my absence is a good blog topic: Burn Out. I’ve been juggling four different projects for the last two months. In order to make it work, I had to be very disciplined, efficient, and organized. My calendar was color blocked from 8:00 a.m. til 11:00 p.m on most days. If something doesn’t go according to plan, or if there’s a shift in schedule, then I’d work until the wee morning hours. There were a couple of days where I worked a straight 14 hours, sleep 3 hours, then get up and do it again. There are also days where I did nothing to give my brain a rest.

This is not out of the ordinary, really. It’s just part of being a consultant.

Projects never come in a steady rate. It’s either feast or famine. When times are good, you juggle multiple projects. You have to be able to switch gears from one moment to the next; all the requirements and production issues competing for attention in your head.

So why don’t I just turn down work?

I never turn down projects where:

• The team is stellar
• I have a chance to learn something new
• There’s an opportunity to develop a new relationship with a high profile company.

When you work for yourself, every relationship, everything you do is a business development opportunity.

Hearing all this talk about my crazy life as a consultant, most people would say why I do it. I don’t mind working hard as long as I’m learning. The money is good, but it’s not about the money for me. The sole reason why I am a contractor is because I own my time. I can work really hard when it counts. When there is down time, I can truly give my brain a rest, have the luxury of researching creative solutions, and not dwell in bureaucracy land. Or I can just take two weeks off without filling out a vacation request.

I believe that you have to work hard to be lucky. It’s a lot like karma.

This comes by courtesy of BoingBoing. Check out the IHam 5JS , an Apple spoof site by Shackleton, a PR firm in Spain. Absolutely hilarious! It gives me the same satisfaction as when Apple lowered the price of the Iphone after 3 months on the market and made hordes of early adopters “IRate.” Don’t get me wrong. I love Apple products, but the smugness of some Apple-philes drive me nuts. Just goes to prove that even the ridiculous (in this case, a ham) can be cool, if packaged in the sleek Apple grey and presented by an ultra geek in black glasses.

So Sam’s Club is now selling milk and orange juice in these new squarish Frankensteinian bottles. The problem is these new containers don’t have any spouts, so spills are almost inevitable. The reason behind this new packaging makeover is green. Green as in cash and green as in eco-friendly. Supposedly, these square containers are easier and quicker to ship. The result is less fuel, less money, less carbon footprint. Unfortunately, this is isn’t form follows function. It’s more like form follows shipment.

There’s still the fundamental usability problem of spilled milk and orange juice. The invention of spouts go back hundreds may be even thousands of years. I mean half of the Greek statues I studied in Art History was of a naked person pouring wine from pitchers. And yes, these pitchers all had spouts on them. Last I heard, Sam’s Club is launching a marketing campaign to teach consumers to tilt the bottle and not pour it. Tell this to a six year old kid who wants milk and cookies and their moms who have to clean up after them. I think the money that Sam’s Club saved on shipping these new bottles will go to a marketing and user adoption campaign, at least initially. It remains to be seen if you can teach an old dog new tricks. May be the dog has no choice if the choice is green and the company is Sam’s Club who’s also part of Walmart’s evil empire. That’s the inconvenient truth.

In the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman described inmates who have been in the prison system too long as being ”institutionalized.” In my opinion, this phenomenon also occurs at large corporations, where departments become silos and team members use bureaucracy to hide their shortcomings and inefficiencies. In a word, everyone has become institutionalized. People forget how to work together and function as flexible, dynamic project teams. In these instances, clients don’t really hire UX consultants to solve a design problem. Rather, these companies get into a rut and they just want some fresh blood to shake things up a bit.

From my experience, the best products don’t come from one individual or department. Rather, it takes an iterative process with input from various angles of expertise. Even if a forward thinking manager proposes a scrum approach, it becomes like a begrudging behavior change and not a true conversion in attitude. This type of situation can be volatile for a consultant. You have no idea of the political landmines you’re walking into or whose toes you’re stepping on, and those with crushed toes are too willing to throw you under the bus.

So what’s a consultant to do in these situations?

• Do your homework. Conduct careful analysis and research to justify your design decisions, because they will drill you and throw you under the bus. Get ready to be roadkill!
• Provide the service you were paid to do and sidestep the politics.
• Be a consumate professional, but speak your mind. There’s a reason why you were hired. I am known to be very direct and I believe companies hire me for my brutal honesty.
• Have a sense of humor. Sometimes humor is needed is to buffer egos from constructive criticism and makes for easier negotiation.

Don’t expect that your design will prevail in the end. Realize that you may just be the catalyst that change the process. When in doubt, tell yourself, “At least I don’t have to work here full time. At least I’m not institutionalized.”

How many of us have conceptualize our designs this way? How many chicken scratches and doodles actually grow up to become a real product? Here are the paper sketches that were the beginnings of Twitter from Jack Dorsey’s Flickr.

Some of us work for in-house UX groups and others work for agencies. Having been both an “innie” and an “outie,” I can vouch for the fact that I learned a lot more during my experience working for an agency. Here are the pros and cons.

Pros:

1) The variety of projects makes the work interesting and keeps you on your toes. You never work on one project at one time. You juggle multiple. You learn the nuances of many different kinds of technology and use models.

2) You sharpen your ability to think strategically in your design approach as well as selling your ideas. Since you are presenting your work to new stakeholders on a regular basis, you must justify design decisions with usability goals, business objectives, and/or metric indicators. Everything you put out there has to be polished and your best work. It’s like being a new employee every couple week and you have to prove yourself to a new set of bosses.

3) You learn to work and adapt with many different organizations and teams. Every organization has a different working style and organizational structure. That affects communication and approvals. This requires that you are quick on your feet, since you’ll be constantly drilled by clients. Even when they love what you do, they still drill you.

4) You become a walking encyclopedia of the best on the web. Because of the variety of projects you are exposed to, regular research and analysis are part of the job, even when you are not on the job.

5) Shorter time lines means quicker decisions and launches. After working at an agency, I get impatient at how slow decisions are made and how long it takes in-house groups to develop.

Cons:

1) Lots of pressure to always deliver the best work. When large companies pay tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, they expect you to bring your A game and think outside the box EVERYTIME, so the pressure is intense.

2) A shorter time line and finite budget creates pressure to be extremely efficient. Agencies make their money by being billable, therefore most of your time should be billable. There’s little down time to try out different ideas. Also, when companies hire an agency, they need it done yesterday, so you’re expected to be super creative at breakneck speed.

3) Pay is not as good as working for a large corporation with an in-house group.
I no longer work for an agency, because now I can charge more working for myself. However, I think the experience is valuable. I’m so glad that I did it. Best learning experience I ever had.