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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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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Let’s just say I spend a lot of time on Twitter. Occasionally, I make it on a list of other great UX types (Usercentric, UX Booth, A Better User Experience, Open The Window). For the record, I can’t even carry Luke W’s golf bag, but that’s another story. Twitter is a great resource for User Experience information and engagement with professionals in our field. It’s also one of the tools at the foundation for our customers where I work, Jobvite. I also think it’s invaluable as a professional branding tool. One of the groups that has embraced this most are user experience professionals.

I have a list of people that I respect and follow to retweet their content. The list I have is literally called Stuff I Follow. It’s not all UX types — some of them are personal friends — but it helps me keep up to date on what’s going on.

Yes, I play favorites. Yes, this may promote people I like. But it’s my list.

Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order:

• Ian Fenn (3,400 followers) — He’s a really, really sharp guy, and is really opinionated. I also like Ian because he engages instead of just broadcasts, a true example of someone who understands how Twitter should be used.
• Ian Smile (670 followers) — A great curator and editorializer of UX content, Ian brings a sharp wit and a keen eye for what’s good in the field. His tweet, “Why has “no portfolio” become a bragging right in UX? I hear it too often to not ask” was classic.
• Jared Spool (29k followers) — Whenever I want to know how bad flight delays are on United, I read his tweets. Really informative stuff about user research, and we’ve had some great conversations about organizational theory. Really funny avatar.
• Jon Fox (350 followers) — Jon’s the Director of User Experience at a new startup down in Los Angeles and has a lot of great thoughts on startup UX. We’ve traded a lot of ideas on dealing with product management. We’ve also traded war stories, and is a curator of The Big Idea List.
• Coburn Hawk (170 followers) — He’s the Director of User Experience at Magento, and another curator of The Big Idea List. We’ve drank, talked, traded war stories also. His passion project, The Middle Man.
• Winnie Lim (10,300 followers) — Winnie is the amazing designer behind Simple Honey, a travel personalization website. She’s the best example of introverted designer that uses social media to communicate. She also has some amazing stories with meeting founder types in San Francisco two weeks after touching down. The best days of her work are really ahead of her.
• Lynn Teo (750 followers) — Lynn’s the CXO over at McCann Erickson, and one of the best public speakers on UX I have ever seen. An Carnegie Mellon alum, every single one of her comments about Experience Design is insightful and informed. She also sees Twitter is a great engagement channel and a way to create tangible relationships.
• Timothy Whalin (14,200 followers) — Timothy is a great guy out of Denver that retweets a lot of awesome information about user experience and visual design (some of which I retweet). He also engages with users, which is a sign of a true Twitter enthusiast.
• Leah Reich (2,200 followers) — Leah’s is an ethnographer, and it shows with her live tweet observations of fellow commuters on BART — one of the best uses I’ve seen of Twitter. Her engagement on Twitter is solid.
• Kristen Johansen (600 followers) — She’s the Director of Product over at the gold standard for online training, lynda.com. Very straightforward, insightful commentary on the art of design.
• Paul Sherman (960 followers) — Paul’s the former leader of the Usability Professionals Association and a consultant out of one of the flyover states. Smart guy. Great at super technical solutions.
• Ha Phan (140 followers) — Designer extraordinare out of San Diego, Ha’s commentary on user experience and engineering has a sharp and pointed wit few can match.

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Who’s going to be number 4,500?

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Seth is awesome. He wrote a great post about how to work with designers. Here’s a few of the points. 

• It’s going to offend someone. If it doesn’t offend them, then it will make them nervous. The Vietnam Vets memorial offended a lot of people. The design of Google made plenty of people nervous. Great work from a design team means new work, refreshing and remarkable and bit scary.
• You can’t tell me you’ll know it when you see it. First, you won’t. Second, it wastes too much time. Instead, you’ll need to have the patience to invest twenty minutes in accurately describing the strategy. That means you need to be abstract (what is this work trying to accomplish) resistant to pleasing everyone (it needs to do this, this and that) and willing, if the work meets your strategic goal, to embrace it even if it’s not to your taste.
• Don’t get stressed about your logo.
• Get very stressed about user interface and product design. And your packaging.

Read the rest here…

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I had the pleasure of speaking on the same panel with Ambrose Little years ago. He’s Director of UX over at Infragistics, and he wrote this great article discussing skewmorphism (trying saying that five times fast) on the company blog. He illustrates that it may not be bad in certain instances. More importantly, it’s about context and user expectations.

Great post anyway you look at it. Read on.

You’ve probably heard someone say “skeuomorphic design is bad” by now, or maybe they wrote “skewomorphic” or even “skuomorphic” (who knows, maybe even “skeumorphism”)–it’s a tough word to spell. However you spell it, you can read the article on skeuomorphism on good ol’ Wikipedia to get the more or less official meaning. Also, here’s an article that lavishes you with skeuomorph screenshots from the iPad–sometimes it’s better to use examples to learn a concept. Of course, with the iPad, it’s more than just pretty pictures.  Some of their skeuomorphism uses interactions as well, because it can thanks a lot to its primary touch interface.

My colleague @brentschooley pointed out to me the other day that Apple’s new Podcasts app in iOS 6 not only looks like a reel to reel, it has realistic motion, and as the time progresses, the thickness of the tape on each roll inversely changes (as it would if really playing), in addition to a host of minute details that really make it seem pretty magical (bouncing tape guide, for instance). And I guess I’d say that more than anything, that’s what skeuomorphism does for digital interfaces–it adds a certain kind of magic.

The point is not metaphor. The point is not even strictly usability, although something could be said for that, depending on how well the original source of inspiration was designed.  It’s magic — it’s taking something you’re familiar with, maybe even seen as old and dated, and making it new, and more than it was before.

Some designers are lambasting skeuomorphic designs because they theoretically interfere with usability. But let’s think about that for a minute, and not just in terms of initial learnability (which is commonly seen as the only benefit of this kind of design). Many of the physical objects we use were designed. Not only that, they have had years, even centuries, to tinker with and improve their designs for human use.

Consider the book.  The earliest writings (that we know of) were on the walls of caves. Later came clay and stone tablets. These pose many practical challenges, so designs were improved. Papyrus. Scrolls. Parchment. Individual leaves. Still more improvements could be made–bound books.  Not all bindings are created equal–small books that fit in pockets, large books for public use in ritual. The simple, physical act of turning a page. The point is not to argue for books as the ultimate in recording and reading technology, but there are few designs as well tested and well used and well known.

If you read, for instance, The Design of Everyday Things, you begin to appreciate better the design that did (or didn’t) go into all these physical artifacts that surround us. So much of what we take for granted was designed.  Much of it was improved upon after years of use and pressure to improve. Give someone a modern hammer (with the teeth to pull nails on the back) who has never seen one, and they will wonder at what the two prongs are for. They sure look decorative, but no, they were added, designed, honed over many years.

Consider the reel to reel Podcasts example. The reels moving is feedback that it is playing. The increasing/decreasing tape thickness is feedback on progress. (You don’t see a knob for volume but rather a slider, which works better on this device than a knob.) Or take the classic page turner example–the page moving with your finger as you drag it is direct feedback. The design of the calendar, especially month and week layouts were done well before technology, tried and true ways of mapping out time. People don’t get anxious that most calendars and pickers in software try to emulate that layout.

“But but!” you’ll say, “those aren’t technically skeuomorphism, which singles out elements of design that are no longer necessary due to new material/technology.” I’d say this is both true and not true. Surely we could come up with novel ways (and have in some cases) to tackle the similar design challenges, provide such feedback in other ways that are more “digitally authentic.”

Sometimes we can find new ways that are less cumbersome (e.g., tapping the edge of a page or a flip button). Yet that doesn’t mean that the old ways have to be discarded, or even that they can’t work together (the iPad apps fuse both skeuomorphic and authentically digital designs often quite successfully). That doesn’t mean that they don’t work at all. That doesn’t mean that they are less aesthetically pleasing.

And this is in addition to the learnability win that such design brings with it.

People argue that using skeuomorphs or even just metaphors doesn’t bring much more to the table than this initial learnability, but learnability can make or break software’s success. Especially in a market flooded with so many little apps–the initial experience people have can mean everything. If you can hook someone in with a familiar design, even a metaphor that only partly works, then let them discover the more efficient “authentic” design elements in time, that can be a win-win. Consider the post above that leans towards non-skeuomorph preference:

It uses a “book” icon next to the blog label. Surely the label is enough, and what place does such an outmoded thing as a book have in digital graphic design–for a blog? Icons are notorious for this kind of “baggage.” Even just considering metaphors, it is rarely a simple binary yes or no, as to whether they are employed.

We’re not babies. We don’t need to rediscover the world completely, slowly, building little by little on new experiences. We have a wealth of learned knowledge to draw on. Even what seems “intuitive” (like touching and dragging something on a surface) is not innate knowledge.

I have five kids, and while I’m no child clinical psychologist, I have watched them learn and explore their world, first just learning that they have arms and hands, then learning to control them, then picking up more understanding of what they can do and are good for bit by bit year over year–things that we take for granted as adults.

The point is, categorically eschewing a design approach because it relies on metaphor or design elements that are no longer necessary to the material is, to put it simply, naïve.  

It is always a question of how much we draw on past experiences in the design and how much we introduce new ones.  I guarantee any new design that tries to be completely innovative first of all will be a non-starter and secondly would be completely unintelligible to those not involved in the design process.

Good design is not just about functional efficiency (and it’s certainly not just about novelty or supposed “authenticity”).  This brings me back to magic. Apple has been mocked for using “magical” as a buzzword, but there really is something to it, and the sense of magic is, at least in part, created by their fusing of skeuomorphic design with digital design (and capabilities). I don’t need to drag out the cliché Asimov quote on this, do I?  Taking something that seems ordinary and familiar and granting it new, unexpected, and to the uninformed, inexplicable powers is magical.

Sure, familiarity will eventually rub off the initial tingling sensation of awe, but the lingering sense of wonder or at least appreciation will stick with you. And if it is, for instance, a gesture that you used (or visual you have seen) all your life and have many happy memories associated with it, those happy memories will transfer quickly, creating an emotional attachment (a GOOD THING for both usability and general product success), and you’ll find yourself lingering on these design elements occasionally, long after the initial amazement wears off.

I don’t think any designer would argue that you should always use skeuomorphism, but this meme that “skeuomorphic design” is bad or “weak” is something that designers need to stop and rethink. Maybe your app could use a little magic.

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Great video. Worth watching all the way through.

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Great deck, but really hard to follow this in all environments.

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This is republished from Onward Search, where I occasionally blog. Read on.

As a UX professional, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll be working in a consultancy or contractor capacity at some point during your career. You might work for an agency, or as a solo freelancer, or you may work your way from contract to perm. Consulting is par for the course in user experience, and it’s a great skill to have.

Joining a team as a consultant is much different than coming in as a full-time employee, and has a completely different set of inherent politics. Not everyone is fit for this role, but those that do fit will find that they excel both in consultant roles and eventually back in employee roles. Being a consultant also offers you a great deal of flexibility.

To get you started, here are some tips that I’ve picked up through my years as a consultant:

Know your role

This is harder than it seems, because it changes from one client to the next. With some clients, your role may include just improving and enhancing existing documentation. For other clients, you might provide thought-leadership as you help to define the product, including conducting research that is far and beyond what is normally considered user experience.

Remember, you are the solution to the client’s needs, even if it’s outside of your core skillset.

Baseball is a great analogy: either you’re a high-priced free agent or you’re the callup filling in during the pennant stretch. Knowing where you bat in the lineup greatly helps you judge how you should interact with the client.

Whatever that role is, act accordingly. Fill in that role and fit in with the team as much as possible. The more they like you, the longer they’ll keep you around.

Listen to your client

It’s like a usability test: ask a few questions, and let them talk. That’s why they hired you – so someone will listen to them and give them solutions to their problems. They’ll tell you about everything: how the project is off the rails, politics within the company, what they had for lunch, and so on. They’ll tell you about their weekends, their dating life – I mean everything. And that’s good, because you’ll want to take notes.

As you listen to them, not only will you get information about how they want their project run, you’ll also learn how to navigate the company culture.  You’ll make better decisions – which leads to better results.

This doesn’t mean that you should do everything that the client says.

If you think that the client is going down the wrong path with the product development, it’s okay to follow up with some research. Your job is to offer your expertise to the client. When clients don’t listen, your time might be better spent elsewhere.

Make your client look good

I’ve seen this happen a few times: a user experience consultant is brought into the project, and the first thing they do is screw over the key client contact. They talk about how they don’t know user experience and/or how poorly the project is run. They talk about how the rest of the team isn’t very good. They’ll talk about bad platform choices.

That’s the wrong way the impress a client, because there are a thousand decisions that were made before you got there. You don’t understand the context of the decisions.

Your main goal should be to do everything you can to make the client look like a star.

It means:

• Fitting in with the team
• Presenting your work as a team product
• Talking about the team they have in a very positive way
• Never, ever going above their head, even if their superiors ask questions

Your secondary job is to build a relationship with the person that brought you in – because there’s a pretty good chance they’ll bring you in again if they like you. What you want is for them to endorse you to other people within the company and/or to other companies.

For example, there’s a lot of user experience work to be had with Disney in Los Angeles. If you do a good job for one part of Disney, like Parks and Resorts, there’s a good chance you’ll get recruited to work with another division, like the Disney Channel.

Many of the consultants that work with Disney have worked there for years – just for different divisions.

Clients that feel good about the experience will tell everyone they know. Those that don’t feel good about the experience will also tell everyone they know.

Document everything

I know we’re trying to get to a lean world.

Until that changes, there will be one truth of user experience: we are in the business of deliverables.

Especially if you’re a consultant, which means establishing wireframes and personas so clean you can eat off them.

When you’re brought into a project, there’s a pretty good chance you won’t be working with the developers — they’ll come by later or will be in another country. Clients will bring in resources in phases. This isn’t the most efficient way to do things, but it is the way most projects are run, because clients view this as the most cost-effective method.

This doesn’t stop with the wireframes. Document what’s said in meetings. Document your time in tools like FreshBooks. Document change requests. Document everything.

The minute you don’t document something, there’ll be questions. It might be a meeting note, an annotation — or the worst case scenario, it’s about the bill. There’s nothing worse that arguing over a bill that isn’t documented well, and that can lead to legal issues.

Clients will question everything; if you can provide them with answers, you’re protecting yourself and the client.

Know when to walk

Repeat after me: I am not a fit for every client. I am not a fit for every client. I am not a fit for every client.  Say this several times.

You’ll know when you meet the client – or, at the latest, at the beginning of the project. There are several signs: they think that your job is to document what they want verbatim: the mantra that research is for the weak, or when you see unrealistic deadlines looming. Whatever the signs are, the best way to mitigate this is to agree to a one-month trial period to see if it’s a fit. This way, you’ll get a good idea whether or not working with the client will be successful.

A couple of years ago, I worked with an agency where I was clearly the wrong fit for the project. There were a couple of other mitigating factors (the project manager wasn’t very good his job), but the account manager and I agreed that this job was not for me, and we decided to part ways. In the end, it was the best thing for their client.

One of the best pieces of advice I can give you is this: “Choose your clients wisely.” Having great clients is better than having a bunch of nasty clients whose names you curse as you pound out their coveted documentation. This, more than anything, will determine your success as a consultant.

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UXmatters has a great article about building a UX Services team, the qualities a team builder is looking for, and how consultants are “always on stage” when working with clients. When you work with a client, you never really get a second chance like you would in a company.

 I look for four qualities in a UX person working in services:

1. A willingness to travel up to 75% of the time
2. Having a true consultative nature. This means being comfortable talking to an hourly call center employee, then walking into a meeting with the CIO right afterward without skipping a beat.
3. Deep technical knowledge. In services, you are pretty useless as a UX person unless you not only know how to design a beautiful user experience, but actually know what it takes to build it.
4. A solid UX background. This can come from formal training or a lot of experience in the design world.

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My success in this area stems in no small part from the fact that a client can call me up and be assured that whoever I send from my team is going to do a quality job for them. The first time I fail to deliver on that promise, I will have effectively damaged a relationship and failed to radiate within that client. Deliver poorly on a first project, and any further projects the client is doing will not include you.

Read on…

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I love user stories. I hate PRDs. And I love this blog post, because it explains why user stories are superior.

User stories don’t just communicate to engineers what they should build, they communicate why. This is a unique advantage of user stories over PRDs. Yes, there’s nothing stopping you from writing the why into your PRD. And yes, many people write bad user stories, where they forget to clearly define the actor or leave the benefit off altogether. But let’s focus on what we, as product managers, can control.

Suppose I create a great PRD. It doesn’t just explain what the engineers should build, but it provides all the requisite customer knowledge to set the context. Let’s say it ends up at 15 pages. I hand it off to my engineers. What happens?

They might read it through once. After that, they probably will refer to screenshots, or skim for relevant technical bits as they build. What do they ignore? All the reasons why.

Now let’s suppose that instead of writing a 15 page PRD, I write 50 user stories. I hand them to my engineers. What happens? They may read through the list of 50 once. That’s fine. Because what happens next, they start with the first user story and ignore the rest. But if each and every user story, communicates information about the actor, explains the desired action, and the benefit to the user, as the engineers implement each story, they have the why right there in front of them. They never lose sight of the content of why they are building what they are building.

Read on…

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