When you design something, who’s time are you thinking about, your time or your user’s time?

Great post from Contents Magazine — “10 timeframes”:

You are, as a class of human beings, responsible for more pure raw time, broken into more units, than almost anyone else. You spent two years learning, focusing, exploring, but that was your time; now you are about to spend whole decades, whole centuries, of cumulative moments, of other people’s time. People using your systems, playing with your toys, fiddling with your abstractions. And I want you to ask yourself when you make things, when you prototype interactions, am I thinking about my own clock, or the user’s? Am I going to help someone make order in his or her life, or am I going to send that person to a commune in Vermont?

There is an immense opportunity—maybe it’s even a business opportunity—to look at our temporal world and think about calendars and clocks and human behavior, to think about each interaction as a specific unit, to take careful note of how we parcel out moments. Whether a mouse moving across a screen or the progress of a Facebook post through a thousand different servers, the way we value time seems to have altered, as if the earth tilted on its axis, as if the seasons are different and new.

So that is my question for all of you: What is the new calendar? What are the new seasons? The new weeks and months and decades? As a class of individuals, we make the schedule. What can we do to help others understand it?

Read on…

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Nadyne Richmond writes a wonderful blog called Go Ahead, Mac My Day. She published this post a couple of days ago, and I thought it was very relevant to the content that I push out here because of the day job. I asked her if I could republish in entirety, and she was gracious enough to give permission. Read on.

Every once in awhile, I get an unsolicited resume from someone who is in user experience and is looking for a new job.  I don’t mind this — I know that finding a job is hard, and reaching out to people who have previously said that they’re hiring for a position in your field is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

If your resume is unsolicited, you’ve got to do an even better job than usual of telling me why I should hire you.  If I’ve posted here on my blog or on Twitter that we’re looking for a new researcher or designer, you’ve got a pretty easy opener for your email to me indicating interest and how you would fit into the team and meet the requirements laid out in the job ad. But if I haven’t posted anything like that lately, or if you’re responding to a very old post, you’ve got to work harder.

I’ve had a rash of unsolicited resumes recently.  All of them have consisted of 2 or 3 sentences asking me to consider them for a position on my team.  And I’ll be honest: I don’t even bother opening the attached resume or looking up their LinkedIn profile.  I do respond to say that we don’t currently have any openings that match the type of position they’ve told me that they’re interested in in those 2-3 sentences, but I don’t look at the resume.  If you can’t be bothered to tell me why I should hire you, I can’t be bothered to find out why I should hire you.

Writing a cover letter is hard.  It’s hard enough when it’s for an actual advertised position.  I understand that it’s doubly hard when you’re sending out a blind resume.  But if you don’t even attempt to do so, then I have no reason to consider you.

When I’m hiring, here are a few of the things that I’m looking for:

• Articulate
• Great communication skills
• Can express how their experience and expertise would fit into VMware

If you’re sending me an unsolicited resume with only a couple of sentences, you’re not meeting any of these requirements.  If you don’t meet any of these requirements, it’s not worth my time to try to dig deeper to see if you might meet other requirements.  If I don’t have a position open but I have a great candidate, there’s a lot that I can do to try to create an open headcount.  I can have a conversation with my management about why we should go to upper management or to HR to fight for a headcount.  I can make sure that they understand how awesome the candidate is and that they would add a lot to our team, and that we should try to figure out a way to make this happen.  But this is quite a lot of effort on my part, and it’s probably a lot of effort on the part of my manager too, and it’s all effort that we weren’t planning on expending.

If you’re going to essentially cold call me, you’ve got to have a very convincing story.  If we talk and have a great conversation but I don’t have a position open now, and I can’t shake loose a headcount from my VP, I’ll remember you in the future.  That means that when I do get a headcount, you’ll be one of the first people who I contact to let you know that my team has an opening that might be a good fit for you.  Without that convincing story, you won’t stick in my memory, and I’ll never remember to contact you when a relevant position does come available.

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This sounds like a massive opportunity for Twitter, which plays well with mobile and has a few possible revenue channels with it (read: more than Facebook). Maybe Mark Zuckerberg should ask Tom Anderson for tips.

Regardless of who got played in the deal (read: small investors, as usual), the market is actually responding appropriately to Facebook’s current situation: the site is be a behemoth of traffic and attention, a platform underlying the very fabric of the Web, and an indispensable part of the lives of millions, but that doesn’t meant it’s safe. Sure, Facebook has conquered the Web, but the Web as we know it may be a dying medium. The Facebook killer won’t be a Website at all: it’ll be born mobile, just like the generation who will use it.

…

Traffic from mobile devices is growing at an astounding rate — by some estimates, mobile visits now account for fully 20 percent of Web traffic. Every measure of mobile growth borders on exponential: Cisco estimates that global mobile data traffic will increase 18 times over between 2011 and 2016, the amount of mobile data consumed will go up 17-fold in the same time frame; mobile video will account for 70 percent of mobile traffic by 2016, 25 times more than in 2011. Global mobile data traffic more than doubled in 2011, for the fourth year in a row.

Read on…

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He wins a George Foreman Grill. Your grill is on its way!

Who’s going to be number 4,500?

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I’m going on vacation. Watch this video while I’m gone.

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I wrote this originally for Onward Search, a blog I’m going to be writing for occasionally. It seemed fairly popular, so I’m reposting it here.

Most hiring managers don’t understand the skills needed for great websites and web applications because the field is still relatively new. They understand that skilled designers can lead to amazing successes (read: they want to be like Apple), but they don’t grasp what the process is, for or which skillset they should be hiring. It’s not entirely their fault.

User Experience still isn’t well defined (think of our industry as television when color first came out) so it’s especially hard to come up with a job description that’s still being written. Even most college programs are still in flux, meaning that some degrees in the field aren’t worth the paper on which they’re written.

As a User Experience designer, you can help employers shape the jobs they advertise. Educate them, and you pay it forward for the designers of the future.

What’s the Lay of the Land?

During the interview process, ask a lot of questions:

• How many developers do you have?
• Do you have a visual designer?
• Is there a front-end coder?
• How big is the team?
• Is there a product manager?
• Have you had a UX designer before?
• What’s your development process?
• Is your team talking to the customers?
• Who’s writing the requirements?
• Are there requirements?

These questions give you clues about whether or not the organization has the right makeup for success, and whether you have the tools available to effect change. For example, if this is the first UX position among ten developers and the team lacks even a project manager, it probably won’t work.

Double down if a previous hire went sour. If they’ve had firsthand experience with one who’s spent two to three months there and couldn’t even deliver a wireframe, hiring managers become especially suspicious of people in the field.

Reach out to other people at the company through social media channels to get their assessment. This is a very effective way to find out if User Experience will work there, because you can make judgments on more than just the hiring manager’s viewpoint.

Read On…

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Commencement speeches are wasted on the young — everyone should watch them.

I love his bit about his life goals as a “mountain,” and his mission to do only work that would bring him closer to the mountain. Of course, we should all be so lucky to work only when jobs are adventurous and stop when they become work, but there are some wonderful nuggets of artistic wisdom throughout Gaiman’s speech.

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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 Jobvite UX Resume and Portfolio Bootcamp on June 19, 2012 in Burlingame, California covers all aspects of getting that UX job you love:

• Using social media to connect with great companies
• Presenting a great resume
• Crafting a portfolio that tells your story
• What to expect during an in person interview

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

As a bonus, we’ll be having a networking happy hour with recruiters from Jobvite customers who are hiring great user experience talent!

Read On…

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A/B Tests are great if you’re focused on the right issues. However, many teams focus on the wrong problem. Even worse, they’ll focus on the wrong concept altogether, opting for incremental improvements instead of dramatic changes for the better.

More often than not, A/B tests are used to are a dog and pony show for the executives than to solve real problems.

Jared Spool has written a great article about this over at UIE:

In our study, we watched more than a dozen of the presenters’ company’s own customers attempt to buy products. While many were successful, a surprising number weren’t, even though this company is the biggest in its industry (and hailed by many as the most successful). Their site looks slick, but when folks sat down to use it for its primary goal, it’s design put up a ton of frustrating obstacles.

In many cases, the users thought they ordered the product they wanted, only to discover upon receipt that it wasn’t at all what they wanted. As we watched those shoppers make their orders, we could see that they would not get what they wanted.

…

The A/B tests they presented showed they were applying a ton of effort to optimize things that weren’t close to the things we saw preventing sales on their site. If the message was that A/B testing helps, I didn’t get that because I saw them futzing around with tweaking insignificant button text when there were huge deficiencies in the design that they still haven’t resolved.

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From Fast Company. We knew it.

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One of the most important things about any job search is knowing the companies that you are applying to. Jessica Greco has crafted a great post about researching your way into a new UX Job. Some very good points:

Research comparable jobs. If you’re the type to take on more responsibilities as they become necessary, you may be working at a higher level than your title indicates. Apply those research skills to publicly available job descriptions and salary surveys. How does your experience compare? You may be surprised to find out you’re being underpaid. Check out the data on DesignSalaries.org for information to sink your teeth into.

Prioritize your needs and wants. Is money most crucial, or do you have some wiggle room? Is it more important to be part of a team, or to work on more diverse projects? Do you want to work more closely with developers? Are you focused on making new connections, so you can eventually go freelance? Do you want to be part of a growing team that can provide you with a future management position?

Be honest with yourself. What’s essential, and what’s just nice to have? What do you really want out of your future? Any indecision on your part will effect lackluster results. Try to articulate what you really want before you begin your job hunt.

Read on.

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Need that resume and career advice to get the UX job you love?

I’m offering the Usability Counts UX Resume Template in Microsoft Word format. It includes comments and annotations to give you tips on how to write your resume.

You also get a list of 30 other recommended articles for developing your User Experience career. It might not get you a job right away, but it should give you ideas on how to better structure your career history and accomplishments. You just have to fill out a 30-second form.

I’ll be involved an event where we give you tips on how to write your resume, and interview for great UX Jobs. We may contact you to see if you’re interested, and for no other purpose.

I promise I won’t spam you with Luxury Watch advertisements or sell your email address to Jared Spool. Just download the UX Drinking Game to make me feel better.

Download Now

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Nothing needs to be said. Click here to view all the videos.

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I’ve got quite a few responses, but I want more. Click here to answer the survey.

Here are some quotes from the survey:

Very timely survey. Organizational challenges seem to loom over everything we do. I find myself designing things that never get built, or things that get built but never implemented, or being left out of the process entirely and seeing things implemented that have never been designed.

…

Our relatively new UX team is struggling to settle into a comfortable rhythm of working. And it’s been a challenge to not only sell UX to other departments, but also to develop a process for assigning UX resources to projects. Top management is committed to UX being a key market differentiator for us, though, so I feel confident we’ll get there.

 …

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Does your company even come close to something like this?

There’s work and there’s your life’s work.

The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over all. The kind of work that you’d never compromise on. That you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t come here to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end.

They want their work to add up to something.

Something big. Something that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

Welcome to Apple.

We should all work like this.

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So why is the initial user experience always rough in self-designed products?

A big problem with self design is that it doesn’t deal with things that you won’t do frequently with the design. One of those things is using the design for the first time, because, well, you can only do that once.

You see this in a lot of self-designed products: the initial user experience is rough, never explaining why you’d use any of the key functions, and hardly ever giving the user a great way to get started. Because self-designers rarely are working from a blank slate, the initial process of populating the application with data is not as smooth as the usage patterns once you get going. The entire getting-started process is really difficult.

Great Read. Also, read this: Actually, You Might Be Your User.

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We’ve scheduled this — holding a free workshop for UX Designers to help them build their resume, provide education on how to use social media to engage with great companies, and meet potential employers to learn of opportunities. It would be a short workshop (2 to 3 hours), but after designers would have the tools they needed to get a great job.

What would you like to see?

And of course, there would be a happy hour where any designer could come check out the opportunities.

We’re also going to be looking for speakers for this. Interested?

Comment below with your thoughts.

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I. Hate. Email.

So I’m glad to see social is making the jump from consumer to enterprise, because social platforms that take convesations in context are more effective communication channels. How many times have you searched for that email thread you weren’t on?

This is a great article.

Our entire company is sharing on a constant basis. Important files, observations, questions answered — all shared in a way that everyone can see and reference. I can jump in and provide feedback and ideas, interacting with all parts of my team in real-time, and so can the rest of the company. We have even included our customers in this line of communication. We recently held a meeting with our largest customers and used a Chatter group to solicit content and planning ideas for the event. It was a fantastic meeting and the agenda was spot on. Chatter and similar technologies facilitate amazing collaboration and visibility.

…

Atos, a 70,000 employee IT services firm based in France, has committed to eliminating all internal email by 2014 in favor of social technologies. The CEO claims that only 15 percent of their internal email was useful and the rest contributed to lost time.

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Here’s the trailer. Please share.

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Jobvite is the full-time gig, and they’re nice enough to let me blog. I talk all the time to recruiters and how they recruit. One of the most recent topics was Facebook, and how it’s a great platform for building out your network to find great jobs. Here’s the repost.

Facebook isn’t just a place for friends anymore.

Job seekers are using this social network to look past personal photos and friends’ status updates for their next big opportunity. Jobvite research shows that over 44 percent of all job seeking activity is happening on Facebook, and that much of the conversation is happening with trusted friends on the network.

These are active job seekers connecting on Facebook, because they see it as one more channel. However, as a recruiter, you have to approach it much differently than Twitter, and it requires users to be more active than other social networks. But it’s not hard, as the Super Socials are finding out.

Here’s how to improve your Facebook to find your next great gig.

Complete Your Profile.

Your chances of finding a job go up significantly when companies know what you do. Fill out your Facebook profile using the information from LinkedIn. For more tips about LinkedIn social profiles, read How to Build a Great Profile on LinkedIn. Every single tip is also relevant for Facebook.

Jobvite and other companies have built Facebook applications tailored for career searches. The application matches your profile information to jobs in their networks, and this allows the tools to better target job seekers and for job seekers to better target companies. Think of it like search engine optimization for your profile: the more relevant the information like using keywords that would match job descriptions, the better your profile matches.

Facebook also targets advertising based on where people have worked and their job titles. Employers can target location, educational background, age range and other demographics to reach candidates. Jobvite is one of the many platforms that can track candidate applications from Facebook, further showing that the platform is a valid place to reach future employees.

It works.

One of the senior product managers here at Jobvite, Lucinda Foss, had filled out her profile and Jobvite used Facebook’s advertising platform to target Product Managers from certain industries. She clicked, applied, and now she’s the lead on several projects here at Jobvite.

Follow Companies You Want to Work At.

Great companies that understand social networks are a great place to find employees – all you have to do it search.

Over 80 percent of employers use social media to find candidates, which means they’re looking for you. And it’s a really easy two-step process: search for companies you want to work at and like their Facebook Fan pages. Once your “Like” is registered, you receive news about the company directly in your news stream.

One of the companies that does it best is Yelp!  On its Facebook Fan page they have a Work With Us icon that links directly to its job listings, searchable by region and job title. Through Facebook, you are just a couple of clicks away from applying.

Yelp! does a great job of showcasing their company culture through Facebook with their “Day in the Life” series. They profile employees at all levels of the company and what they do in a typical day so people can get an idea what the company culture is like. These posts are featured directly on the fan page and will arrive in your newsfeed.

Find Common Interest Groups and Conferences.

Facebook is a great place for professional interest groups and alumni networks. The number of these groups is growing, and they’re increasingly being used for more professional reasons.

Here’s an example: I’m involved a group called the Product Design Guild, an invite-only professional group in San Francisco for User Experience Designers. Jobvite needed a freelance front-end coder for a while, so I used the group to reach out to several resources, including Pete Fecteau, a designer with coding experience. Pete’s passion for design, shown through his newsfeed, kept him in front of mind. When we needed someone like him, we brought him in; and within a couple of weeks he was working at Jobvite.

Many conferences also set up very robust Facebook presences to advertise the event, which is an awesome way to grow your networking reach. San Francisco Design Week, a conference designed for visual and user experience designers, is a very active group page on Facebook where both the event organizers and fans have a very robust dialog about the wealth of design resources available to them.

The events are also great because you get public access to the people attending the event – you can see everyone that’s joined the group – and use this to build your professional Facebook networks after the event.

Stretch the definition of “friend” to people you work with and the potential for future opportunities will grow with each connection. You spend more time at work than anywhere else. And people change jobs today more than ever – on average of four years, according to a Jobvite Infographic.

Each person that changes a job could open a world of possibilities for you. Reach out and ask if they have opportunities that fit your experience.

Build Your Network.

Don’t limit your Facebook network to professional and personal contacts. Become friends with people in your social circles, follow pundits that allow subscriptions and talk to people with similar professional interests that are half a world away.  Like my friend and colleague, Kenneth James Hamer  – it’s about the conversation with people that may not help you now but will help you down the road.

Post on the newsfeeds of people you subscribe to and your friends about what you want to do. Recruiters and companies will want to see passion in what you talk about, and that conversation keeps you in the front of mind of those that might be looking for someone like you.

Seriously, you never know where your next opportunity is coming from, and all you need is one.

Ask Your Friends for Help.

There’s nothing wrong with saying, “Hey, I’m looking for new opportunities” on Facebook. Most people on Facebook have networks between 100 and 300 people, and when you think about the networks they have, you’re now reaching approximately 90,000 people.

It’s important to remember that you’re not only using your friends but also their friends to find your next next gig. At least one of them works for a company that has a job just for you.

How to Approach It?

It depends on your situation:

• If you’re an active job seeker, tell people you’re looking. Talk about what you like about your career and what kind of position you are looking for. Talk about how you’re keeping busy with activities related to your career and post interesting articles that might attract attention of recruiters. Post early and often, because the more you post, the more you appear in your friend’s newsfeeds.
• If you’re a passive job seeker, message people that can help you privately. Remember you might have people that you’re working with now (like, uh, your boss) as friends on Facebook, so it has to be a private job search. Your updated information isn’t broadcasted to your wall.

When you craft the message, don’t sound desperate – talk about the great opportunities you are looking at, and how the job market is growing. Also talk about how you are working on your skills.

Also remember that over 40 percent of Facebook’s activity happens on mobile, so you aren’t only reaching people when they log in, you’re reaching them at work, with friends or even at networking events. This allows you to cast a wide net, possibly within the context of future opportunities. It’s the best way of maximizing who you’re talking to.

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