This blog post makes me smile  — a lot:

Startups are being bought for their design talent.  While I was traveling I heard news that  Facebook acquired Gowalla  and I had to smile. This is an obvious design talent acquisition…Gowalla has one of the most talented groups of designers around and while their service was successful, it was seen to have lost to Foursquare and was looking to reinvent itself. Now, it doesn't have to.

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Couple this with Facebook's acquisition of  Push Pop Press,Sofa, and  Daytum, and you see a clear trend here — they're pulling in as much design talent as they can.

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I've talked to friends at both Twitter and Zynga and the message is the same…they are 100% focused on design and investing heavily in it (and have been for a couple years now). I've even been asked if I know world-class design teams or agencies who want something new. Not because these companies want to work with them but because they want to buy them, because  they can't get design talent fast enough by recruiting individuals. Seriously.

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I remember not too many years ago that designers lamented of not having a "seat at the table". Well, folks, your time has come. Not only do you have a seat at the table…you've got a starring role. There is no better time to be a designer than right now.

Read on…

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Hiring is a huge challenge right now in Silicon Valley, and I think it’s starting to show in the quality of startups. Some of them look like 1999 all over again.  Companies with viable ideas and solid revenue streams (like where I work) are  competing for talent with startups that pivot multiple times so they can find something that sticks, which is stupid product development.

Very few of these ideas are sustainable for the long term. I think it’s criminal to a certain point because they’re gambling with other people’s money, some of whom shouldn’t be angel investors.

There’s nothing wrong with working for a company that has a great business model, viable revenue stream, and is either close to  profitability  or very profitable. Especially if it’s an idea that actually provides a valuable service to end users (one of the reasons I like working at Jobvite).

Not everyone’s going to hit a home run. Most strike out — that’s the reality. Making sure you’re taking good swings is what counts.

Sean Parker made some interesting comments at a conference this week.  Some of his comments:

A lot of the best talent in a particular domain is not necessarily the correct talent to be starting a company. So there’s a lot of fantastic engineers who really shouldn’t be product people, really shouldn’t be founders, and there’s a lot of founder product people who really shouldn’t be engineers.

Understanding your place in the ecosystem and the value you’re able to bring gets lost and distorted when there’s so much money sloshing around, and everyone you know is pushing you to go and start a company.

There’s a sense of entitlement that I’ve never seen before in Silicon Valley among people who work for a big company for a while and make a lot of money. They think the next step for them is to start a company. That’s often exactly the wrong thing for them to do. They will likely squander their own fortune or waste someone else’s money.

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Any great engineer these days, who has a good pedigree, can go and get a $250,000 or $500,000 check and start a business and they’re probably not qualified to do so.

They think they’re going to build a prototype and that’s enough. They need to be focused on building a team, and it doesn’t have to be a team of seasoned execs. It needs to be team of people who can perform all the functions necessary to run a business. I learned that the hard way–by starting companies that didn’t necessarily have a complete team.

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I think that the lesson in all this is that while this can sometimes work, it much more closely resembles gambling than it does investing. The result is going to be a lot of lost capital, but the most deleterious affects is the dispersion of human talent, human capital. The dispersion of human talent to a huge number of startups–none of which is executing with the right product or have the right team members to really succeed.

And the good businesses find themselves competing not just against Facebook and Google and Dropbox and Groupon for talent. They’re competing against literally thousands of startups, most of which will never succeed.

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Google bought 27 companies last quarter and a lot of them are talent acquisitions, in some cases paying $1 million an engineer. That can’t last forever. There’s way more startups getting founded now than there are companies than Google and Facebook want to buy.

Read the complete article…

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This is my favorite tip:

Worrying too much about ‘the fold' can seriously turn your user interface design from a scrollable, flowing design to a cramped and messy affair. The root of the problem is an unrealistic fear that people who use computers do not know how to scroll or that anything under the fold will never be seen.

What you need to combat ‘the fold' is a quick way of explaining what your web app is all about above the fold. What is it? Why should users care? Is there more info further down the page? If you can make your app interesting enough above the fold, users will scroll down to experience more of the page. Leave enough content below the fold to continue to satisfy the user.

Once they're at the bottom, you can be fairly confident that you have an interested user looking at your content. The bottom of the page is possibly the most valuable area of your site because the end is mostly for users who are likely to engage with your app than casual browsers who stay mostly at the top.

Read the rest of the article…

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This article is great career advice. Even though it’s written for programmers, it’s really for everyone who has a job.  

“Read ad.  Send in resume.  Go to job interview.  Receive offer.” is the exception, not the typical case, for getting employment: Most jobs are never available publicly, just like most worthwhile candidates are not available publicly (see  here).  Information about the position travels at approximately the speed of beer, sometimes lubricated by email.  The decisionmaker at a company knows he needs someone.  He tells his friends and business contacts.  One of them knows someone – family, a roommate from college, someone they met at a conference, an ex-colleague, whatever.  Introductions are made, a meeting happens, and they achieve agreement in principle on the job offer.  Then  the resume/HR department/formal offer dance comes about.

This is disproportionately true of jobs you actually  want  to get.  “First employee at a successful startup” has a certain cachet for a lot of geeks, and virtually none of those got placed by sending in a cover letter to an HR department, in part because two-man startups don’t have enough scar tissue to form HR departments yet.  (P.S. You probably don’t want to be first employee for a startup.  Be the last co-founder instead.)  Want to get a job at Googler?  They have a formal process for giving you a leg up because a Googler likes you.  (They also have multiple informal ways for a Googler who likes you an awful lot to short-circuit that process.  One example: buy the company you work for.  When you have a couple of billion lying around you have many interesting options for solving problems.)

There are many reasons why most hiring happens privately.  One is that publicly visible job offers get spammed by hundreds of resumes (particularly in this economy) from people who are stunningly inappropriate for the position.  The other is that other companies are  so  bad at hiring that, if you don’t have close personal knowledge about the candidate, you might accidentally hire a non-FizzBuzzer.

Read on…

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Great read:

Engagement marketing starts with the customer and his desire to engage with the brand. So the engagement starts when the customer seeks the engagement and the engagement stops when the customer has had enough or had his/her problem solved.

The difference that social media has brought (besides the fact that you can now directly deal with customers of different cultures, which presents another completely new set of complexity) is that a brand can engage even when they haven't been directly approached but when they are talked about.  Social Media therefore enables proactive customer service and that is the real benefit for a brand.

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The main point to remember: the engagement level is defined by the individual (customer), not by the brand.

Read on…

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Great post:

With an abundance of workers to choose from, employers are demanding more of job candidates than ever before. They want prospective workers to be able to fill a role right away, without any training or ramp-up time.

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Unfortunately, American companies don’t seem to do training anymore. Data are hard to come by, but we know that apprenticeship programs have largely disappeared, along with management-training programs. And the amount of training that the average new hire gets in the first year or so could be measured in hours and counted on the fingers of one hand. Much of that includes what vendors do when they bring in new equipment: “Here’s how to work this copier.”

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We aren’t going to get European-style apprenticeships in the U.S. They require too much cooperation among employers and bigger investments in infrastructure than any government entity is willing to provide. We’re also not going to go back to the lifetime-employment models that made years-long training programs possible.

Read on…

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The experiment: I’ll give you five bullet points why I would hire you or wouldn’t hire you.

I’ll also give you some tips on what direction you should go. I’ll respond to as many as possible, but can’t promise anything.

Since I’m doing this for free, I’m going to put a few requirements around this:

• You really should be following me on Twitter
• Prove you’re paying attention by retweeting How to Get Started in User Experience
• Bonus points for retweeting Six Things User Experience Designers Forget When They Criticize Websites
• Maybe you should add a few +1’s to my Klout score
• It might be a good idea to download the UX Drinking Game app or submit a few ideas

Send your resume and portfolios to  pat@usabilitycounts.com.

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Interesting post:

When I was at  IIW  earlier this week, I held a session called, “A  Contrarian  View of Identity: Envision a World with Only Real Names.”

The ground rules of this session were:

• There is no discussion. We are starting with the assumption that real names are the only reality.
• No  dystopian  or negative perspectives (relieved this for last 5 minutes of info gathering)

I then asked those in the room to close their eyes. Take a deep breath. Envision all of the identities that you use  online  and out in the world. See them moving to the middle and coming together, becoming one identity, and that name is your real legal name. If there is any negativity coming up with this, just put it aside for the moment. Sit with this vision of your identity as your real legal name. Take another deep breath. Pause. Now open your eyes.

And the answers are…

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I’m Generation X. Thought this was classic. Not entirely safe for work, but who cares.

Some excerpts:

But Generation X is tired of your sense of entitlement. Generation X also graduated during a recession. It had even shittier jobs, and actually had to pay for its own music. (At least, when music mattered most to it.)  Generation X is used to being fucked over. It lost its meager savings in the dot-com bust. Then came George Bush, and 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Generation X bore the brunt of all that. And then came the housing crisis.

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Generation X is beyond all that bullshit now. It quit smoking and doing coke a long time ago. It has blood pressure issues and is heavier than it would like to be.  It might still take some  ecstasy, if it knew where to get some.  But probably not. Generation X has to be up really early tomorrow morning.

Generation X is tired.

It’s a parent now, and there’s always so damn much to do. Generation X wishes it had better health insurance and a deeper savings account. It wonders where its 30s went. It wonders if it still has time to catch up.

Right now, Generation X just wants a beer and to be left alone. It just wants to sit here quietly and think for a minute. Can you just do that, okay? It knows that you are  so very special  and  so very numerous, but can you just leave it alone? Just for a little bit? Just long enough to sneak one last fucking cigarette? No?

Read on…

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Hide your whiskey in the coffee mug. Click here to visit the store.

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Great article:

Today's UX teams, whether focused on enterprise or consumer products, must be strategic to understand the business opportunities while still being tactically focused to execute pixels with precision. This requires a new cross-disciplinary approach, bringing together  business strategy,  content strategy,  interaction design, market research, data analysis, and technical expertise, among other skill sets.

The risks of not evolving UX teams to meet these needs will become quickly obvious for organizations. Brands that get it will break out of the pack with richer and more engaging experiences, proven business results, and design efficiencies that will inherently make them more successful. Brands that don't adapt will fall behind, under serving their brands, their users, and ultimately their bottom lines.

Read on…

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Shawn Capizzi was 1,000. He gets a George Foreman grill!

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Richard Dreyfuss did the final commercial. Steve Jobs did the first one.

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He made the world a better place. We should all aspire to do that.

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Click here to download.

Don’t say I haven’t warned ya.

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Classic.

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Sure would be nice if I didn’t have to type in the headline of the article.

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