From StuffThatHappens.com.

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If you’re in User Experience, there’s no other place like the Bay Area.

There are thousands and thousands of jobs and, seemingly, that many job openings. All the great product stuff gets done here — which means you won’t have to do silly micro sites or get as many stupid questions like, “Hey, can you write code too?” The Bay Area is a manageable size, more so than a Los Angeles or New York.

That’s read: If I have never have to sit on the 405 at Manchester Avenue trying to get to Santa Monica in under two hours, it won’t be too soon.

It’s not my dream place. Vancouver or Portland are, but for different reasons. I’m living the true San Francisco experience — my apartment was built in 1915; I’m two blocks from Golden Gate Park; and I live in a neighborhood that you only enjoy if you love fog and hate sunlight, which eternally pleases me.

It’s not for everyone, or maybe it is.  If your New Year’s resolution is to settle on the Left Coast, here’s a few tips and things to consider before you pack up the U-Haul and leave for the city by the bay.

There are a lot of jobs here and a huge shortage of truly talented people.

About two and a half years ago, I was interviewing with Microsoft for the typical social media/user experience consulting gig. I asked them, “So, where would you like me to move?” They hinted toward San Francisco, and it took me three milliseconds to make the choice.

I moved, and it was the best decision I have ever made.

The recruiters were literally begging me to move. So move, I did. I really wanted out of Los Angeles pretty badly. There’s not a lot of product work down there, the user experience environment is built more toward agencies, and the culture is kind of less about doing great work.

Other than being total A-list talent, it wasn’t as hard to stand out (and get interviews) as you would think.  You do have to bring your A-game; but as long as you have a solid resume and a decent portfolio, it’s easy to get in the door. You won’t be able to fake your way through it, or if you do, you’ll have a series of one year gigs. There are plenty of places willing to take these people, but they aren’t very stable.

As an agency professional once told me, “The best people are in-house now.” That’s true. The agencies struggle up here to keep talent, because the payoff to work for a startup  is so strong.

A few Los Angeles user experience professionals called me, and I recommended they should get up here as quickly as possible. Some of my ex-Angelino peeps are at some really cool companies or founded their own (Yammer, Blurb, Oink, Gogobot)… or, “So how’s MySpace hangin’?”

The hardest thing was getting in the door at the first place. After you establish street cred, you’re golden to stay here as long as you want.

Sunnyvale is not San Francisco, and eBay isn’t a startup.

Deciding where to live in the Bay Area is almost as important to your career as it is to your personal life. Are you looking to break into Yahoo or eBay, or do you want to join some hot startup? The rules are bit like this: most of the large companies are down on the peninsula; and the hipper startups are closer to San Francisco. A younger crowd tends to gravitate to San Francisco as a city, and companies build their talent pools and company cultures around this.

It is quite a culture difference.

Last weekend, I was down in Sunnyvale, which is fine for a lot of people. However, it’s surburbia. Leaving the party I was at, I was matching street corners to places in Orange County or the San Fernando Valley. Some people like suburbs, but it’s not for me at this time in my life.

Decide what kind of company you want to work with, and where you get to live will kind of match. San Francisco is way too far from most of the larger companies to make the commute, but you’re probably looking for different things.

If you decide to move to San Francisco, there’s a neighborhood for you.

I live in Inner Sunset, which is  best known as the former world headquarters for Craigslist. They moved, but the site literally reflected the neighborhood — an unpretentious place where you have everything you would ever need and would forget why to go to other places. A lot of doctors in training live here because UCSF is up the hill, so it makes for a comfortable, smart neighborhood.

The standard joke is you can just look at someone and figure out what neighborhood they should live in. I’m more of a North Beach guy (I lived there for a year and a half just to say I lived there). Inner Sunset is a slower place but still has all the  conveniences  I like: easy cab access, decent parking and a good enough pizza after 9pm. There’s a bus stop (I kid you not) downstairs from my place, and the N-Judah is a block away.

When you visit, get a local to give you a tour of the city. Ask them to bring them to neighborhoods you would like.  Request to visit their favorite haunts. Everyone has one or two (mine is Tony Nik’s). It’s a town that you can lose yourself in.

That said, San Francisco isn’t perfect. This a city that isn’t as clean as it could be, and the city government seems to waste more money than it spends wisely. The homeless population makes walks through certain neighborhoods an obstacle course. Muni, the mass transit system, varies from amazing (I can get into downtown in 20 minutes) to the absurd (There are fights, and it’s unreliable at times). And don’t get me started on the cabs.

It all depends on what you want. If you want a city, San Francisco is one in spades. But if you want the suburbs, better to move down to San Mateo or Mountain View. You can always visit the city and retreat back safely.

Tolerance is key, both in culture and ideas.

You’ll hear a lot of startup ideas: good ones, bad ones, copycat ones. But everyone has an idea. Everyone has come here to reinvent themselves; and if you want to do it, this is as good of a place to do it than anywhere else.

It reflects what San Francisco and the Bay Area is: a place where people can be almost anything they want to be. That’s why San Francisco is such a city of neighborhoods because each one fits a person perfectly in their time of life.

Each neighborhood is also much more diverse than you would think: Castro isn’t always about the LGBT population; the Tenderloin is gentrifying; and there’s at least one person that didn’t go to Stanford that lives in the Marina. But the neighborhoods do have their constituencies, and they demand respect.

It’s not as expensive as you would think.

This is not a cheap place to live.

San Francisco is one of the few places where’s it’s normal to have roommates well into your late 30’s because apartments are so expensive here. Average home prices on the  peninsula  have survived much of the housing slump. Because of the current tech boom, finding an apartment in the city is a combat sport (be first or be gone). When I moved up here in 1996, I had to go through ten apartment interviews to find a  roommate, and I hear those times are back.

Once you get past some of the high rents and the need to budget for parking tickets, it’s not that much more expensive. In fact, going out to get a great meal can be sometimes cheap; and if you move to the right neighborhood, there’s no need to have a car.

You’ll see a pay increase from just about anywhere in the United States unless you’re in some cushy job where you are now. And when you move here, you’ll be renting anyway. If you decide to settle here, you’ll get a real taste of California real estate, but that can wait after you’ve made your first million, right?

Check out the meetups, but look to Twitter to do the real networking.

I was at a meetup about a year ago having a beer with one of the attendees. He was a smart guy. About mid-way into the conversation. He paused.

“You know, if you had a full tank of gas, you could eat and drink for free for a month by going to meetups and events. That’s if you could put up with the people.”

I did a search on meetup.com and found a staggering 210 events in the next month matching a search for “technology,” But your mileage may vary.  Most of the meetups seem to be attended by a) people hiring (which is good), b) people looking to break into the industry (which may not be good), and c) people that hold the meetups on the oft chance they’ll get the next great gig and it’s more about them than building the community (which sucks).

The people that are super  talented are a) too busy to go to meetups or b) can’t figure out the return on investment.  The valley also is relatively spread out, so you never see everyone you want to meet.

In the Bay Area, I would look to Twitter to network. The real leaders in the space here seem to use Twitter as their broadcast channel, and it’s much easier to engage in conversations. What makes this easier is that you can engage in conversations like, “Hey, I would like to move there, what’s it like?” and “Are you hiring?”  before you get here. It’s cheaper. And trust me, this works. I hired a designer this way

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I look at a lot of resumes…

…and not just for people that I interview. I’ve seen a couple hundred in the last year, mostly because I work at Jobvite, I figure out how they parse and look at better ways of displaying them. Resumes are the first things most recruiters and hiring managers look at to see if you are qualified for a job (I tend to look at a portfolio first).

Because of my day job and my constant banter with recruiters I talk to during job interviews, I do a lot of research about the hiring process. Now is a good time to start looking (new budgets, improving economy and cool start-ups on the Jobvite Facebook application).

I can’t speak to everyone’s preferences but in this post I’ll describe some of the patterns I see over and over again regarding what recruiters want and a few tips to avoid the pitfalls of getting the wrong job interviews. This stuff isn’t rocket science and getting a job shouldn’t be. First and foremost, make sure that your resume and LinkedIn profile are in tip top shape.

Include the basics

Your odds go up exponentially if there’s a way to contact you.

Even the SAT test awards you 200 points for writing your name correctly. Consider the basics as an extra bonus point. The following items are required at the very top of your resume:

• Name
• Email Address
• Phone Number
• LinkedIn Profile

Optionally, I would include a Twitter Feed and Blog addresses, if you have them. They should be work related (i.e. not 35 photos of you getting drunk in Tijuana).

Including only an email address is annoying when I have to get a quick clarification on your background. Picking up the phone is still the best way of reaching people (sorry,  millennials). Most hiring managers use the phone as a primary means of communication.

This information should be a standard format (periods between numbers in a phone number don’t parse well). Applicant tracking systems that parse email addresses and phone numbers are looking for patterns, not creativity.

Also, make sure hyperlinks go to the right place. I sent my resume format to a friend, and I was getting her emails because one of the systems parsed out my email address in a hyperlink and used it as her primary email address.

Don’t be cute

Just because you can design an infographic doesn’t mean it belongs in a resume.

Most companies use applicant tracking systems, which keep track of candidates in the interview process. These systems are parsing your resume so they are searchable, so if you upload the resume with tons of graphics, it’s not going to parse. The wackier the layout, the worse the text is going to appear in the system. Combine that with how PDFs can be structured (or not, if a designer uses a PNG that can’t be parsed at all), and you get the idea.

My resume has a very top down approach that’s similar to the inverted pyramid: the most important information is listed at the top, next the positions and then other relevant information. Inverted pyramids work well for the web (ask Jakob, take a drink). They also parse well and are great for search engine optimization (SEO).

Do not include any wacky graphics or some over-designed timeline that is a hopeless copy of Facebook’s timeline.  When I interview people, I might want to see a gracefully designed infographic if you’re a visual designer. However, unless you’re Nicholas Felton, you probably don’t have the skills to come up with something that’s going to wow them. Leave that to your portfolio.

In a pinch, I would have a resume formatted in plain text so it looks good even in a plain text email.

List skills and who you’ve worked with first

I list Previous Clients and my Skill Set before the position so recruiters and hiring managers don’t have to read further down the resume. That’s an instant winner, winner, chicken dinner.

Most people don’t really understand what User Experience is. At all.

Here’s what they equate it to: Wireframes, Usability Testing and Personas. Throw in some HTML/CSS prototyping, and voila, you’re a user experience designer.

If you have the skills at the very top of your resume, the recruiter will know exactly what you can do. They will copy and paste that list into an email straight to the hiring manager. The person viewing your resume might look at a couple of the most recent positions, but they have to know that your skill-set matches something that the hiring manager has told them. The very best recruiters will understand.

Frankly, it will also help you avoid jobs you don’t want, like if they’re looking for someone who can also code Java (Drink).

Even better, list some of the brands you’ve worked with at the very top because it works. When recruiters and hiring managers have to ask who you’ve worked with and what projects you’ve been on because they can’t find it, your resume has failed.

Don’t list every position

I summarize who I’ve worked with as a consultant and use a bullet point for previous client I want to focus on. Brief and to the point.

User experience designers tend to have a lot of contract gigs, which make for very long resumes.

One of my favorites is Karl Smith in the United Kingdom, because I use him as an extreme use case for Jobvite. He tends to work a lot of short stints because he’s a high level consultant, and it’s important to his clients that they see the breadth of his experience.

If you aren’t Karl, that can work against you, especially if you’re under five years of experience.

I compress the contract gigs that I’ve worked at under “being a consultant” because that was what I was: brought in to work on very specific projects with a contained time frame to achieve a specific result. I list what I did in condensed format, and what I accomplished. It gives the recruiters and hiring managers a good overview of your experience without overwhelming them with information.

Going forward, It’s also best to work on projects that launch. When you’re choosing your contracts, you’ll have to use your spidey sense (we all have it), if the founders are nuts or if the idea will result only in poor execution. There’s nothing worse than having a resume full of projects that fail (I interviewed someone that was on three failed projects in a row) because that reflects directly on your skills.

List projects with URLs

The first thing I want to do is see your work. I can only do that if I have URLs.

Sometimes that’s not possible, because you’re working at Cisco on an internal project, or the project was killed either before or after launch (I have a couple of Move.com projects that went by the wayside). But it’s always interesting to compare the wireframes and user research to the final product.

This is also really effective if you’ve worked at the same company a long time (defined as over three years in my mind) and need to show more than one or two positions on your resume. You can also list the projects as separate entries under the same job position to show breadth of experience.

Use real numbers whenever possible

Each position highlights my responsibilities and the real numbers behind them.

The best thing about this job is when we’re done, we should have something to show.  

Wireframes, research and other artifacts — most of those play well in Peoria with hiring managers.  The next best thing is that if you are able to do a great job, you’ll be able to say, “Hey, resume went up 300 percent because of my changes.”  If you have numbers, use them. That’s the best way to back up you know what you’re doing.

Because our field is so new, there are a lot of snake oil salespeople that don’t have the skills to back up what they say. If you have something to back up your work, it’s awesome. I list what my responsibilities were, and how it translated into real results.

Don’t lie

User experience design is a very small field, and there’s a good chance you’re going to run into someone. It’s even better not to lie, because someone will call you on it.

True story: one place I worked at, I was interviewing a candidate. During the interview, I figured out that a previous hiring manager was someone that worked with me, and we “made the introduction.” We didn’t hire the candidate.

And then their significant other submitted the same portfolio.

Another true story: Two separate project managers I was considering managed the same project at the same time. There’s no possible way I could interview either of them.

Be honest about your impact on projects. It’s fine to say you were on a team, but don’t tell people you are the lead if you aren’t.

Hire a copy editor

They’re inexpensive for what the return on investment is — $200 for two hours when you’re applying for positions that could be well into the six figures. There’s no excuse not to, especially since that’s our occupation.  Why wouldn’t you do it for the resume?

Need a resume to start with?

Download one here. It works really well.

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This is a Chrome extension I worked on with a developer, Dean Sofer.

You can download it now.

Find My Bookmarks is a Chrome Extension that locates all your bookmarks for the current domain. If bookmarks are found, the icon appears and you can just click on it to get a list. It’s super-beta, but try it out and give feedback on what you think it should be.

Features:

• Share bookmarks on Facebook and Twitter
• Delete bookmarks

Download it now.

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Some User Experience designers think they are entitled to great jobs out of the gate.

They think that just going to college and getting the degree is enough. That presenting the wireframes from a college project represents a portfolio. That it’s okay to ask for $100 per hour when you really have nothing to show except for a few prototypes.  That just showing up gets you a one percent raise every year, if it gets you a job at all.

For those people that think that, I don’t want to hire them.

As a hiring manager, I want people that show up AND do amazing work.

I want someone that has worked at a startup and failed. I want someone who gets excited talking about building iPhone application ideas on the side. I want conversations about the rule of thirds, food porn, and why the movie Helvetica left you speechless.

I want to ask you what you think of Jeffery Veen, Jeffery Zeldman and Dan Saffer. I want to fill a wall of inspiration with you and talk design on a Sunday afternoon over a latte at Caffe Greco.  I want you to tell me the differences between Visio, Omnigraffle, Basalmiq and Axure, and which is your favorite.

Being a great designer takes motivation and going the extra mile. The best are there. You should join us.

Read On…

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There’s been a lot of articles written  about this, but there are a lot of people who ignore some very important details.

I’ve worked at enough startups to know the drill: get something out the door quickly, get feedback, repeat. But great startups only succeed when they have great teams.

They work when people are dedicated to an end goal: a great idea executed well. So many things can go wrong because startups are supposed to be risky. How well your team works together is only one part of the equation. If they don’t work together well, they’re bound to fail. That means you have to be part of the team.

No one person in a startup is more important any other; if someone acts this way, they stand out like a sore thumb.

If you want to be a startup junkie, here’s a few tips I’ll hand out for free.

Work like it’s your own money.

I used to work for a consultancy, and  the owner once said, “When I see everyone walking around,  I see dollar signs over their head of how much they are costing me.” After that moment, I had a spreadsheet where I could see everyone’s salary; and I knew exactly what day of the month they went profitable. That made him very, very happy.

If you’re working at a startup, look at the people around you. Figure out how much they are probably costing.

Ask yourself, “Who’s paying for all of this?”  It’s probably not you.

Investment dollars were made off the hard work of someone else.  You’re depending on Angel investors or a VC firm. Everything takes away from that — the $5,000 coffee machine, the free cokes, the team outings to Great America. Morale is great, but that all costs money. Every decision contributes to the bottom line (or lack there of). Every dollar saved contributes to a longer runway.

Figure out how you contribute to the bottom line and act accordingly.  Look at the process and see how you can improve it instead of increasing headcount. No company needs a team of designers or front end engineers if there’s a solid foundation for doing work. Work together to make it work smoother.

Every decision counts. Don’t do them alone.

The cool thing about startups is that everyone generally gets to either work together, or has close communication channels. You can get co-workers to come over to your desk or on Skype and ask them, “What do you think of this?” before executing the idea.

Any party in a startup that goes off and builds a feature alone doesn’t understand that most great products come from great teams. Apple might have one Steve Jobs, but they also have people like Jonathan Ive and other designers that tirelessly re-hash ideas to make sure they haven’t missed anything in designing a product.

Show your work to everyone and collect feedback. That’s why startups have open environments — to encourage communication and collaboration.

Don’t be a gatekeeper.

I’ve worked at a few places where there was one person that controlled access to too many things. One place, I couldn’t so much as install an instant messenger without a blood sample, note from my mom, and a notarized form. In good situations, gatekeepers provide checks and balances. In bad situations, they are dictators that can kill a startup with their self-righteous ways.

Gatekeepers take all forms: system administrators that hold you hostage, developers that won’t develop features without spec’ing them out in triplicate, designers that move things “just because.” All can be  detrimental  to an environment.

Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean you are the only opinion. If you are the sole person blocking something, not only do you have too much power, you are blocking a collaborative environment and could potentially kill a startup.

Don’t be an idiot.

The No Asshole rule goes like this: don’t hire assholes.

Weak links stand out like sore thumbs in startup environments. They’re the ones that don’t want to collaborate, that think they’re ideas are vastly superior, that are roadblocks to getting things done. They insist on doing things their own way when they actually cost the company time and money. They don’t act like they’re part of the team.

Don’t be an asshole — a team should work toward a common goal. Treat someone like you want to be treated.

You don’t own the work. Remember, it’s not your money (see above). It’s not for your portfolio. It’s for the livelihood of the other 10 to 50 people with whom you are working. They have rents, mortgages and car payments.  If you’re an asshole, there’s a good chance someone’s going to miss a car payment because of your selfish actions.

When the culture isn’t a fit and you can’t commit to working with people, go somewhere else. It’s a much better situation for everyone involved.

Make mistakes for the right reasons.

Startups make all kinds of mistakes: bad platform decisions, wrong markets to target, wrong people to hire. The best one’s succeed, in spite of themselves.

We’ll take MySpace, for example. The original version of MySpace was built on the Cold Fusion platform in ten days  and survived well. The original mistake was building it on Cold Fusion. It’s a platform that doesn’t scale, but they made the decision for the right reasons: it’s a platform that’s easy to learn and great for elaborate proof of concepts.

The second mistake was bad. Someone should have said, “Ya know, we really have to plan for the future.”

No one ever did.

The initial mistake didn’t harm MySpace early on; and in the end, it was able to scale the platform to a point where NewsCorp bought it for $580 million. The fatal mistake was planning for a migration when traffic spiked or to allow them more flexibility in product design. While .NET and Cold Fusion were initially blamed, it’s really management’s fault for not planning ahead.

Mistakes are okay, if you have contingency plans. Strategize accordingly and plan to correct them as soon as possible.

Take ownership.

When you’re working for a startup, the organization is fairly flat: there’s a good chance that the CEO is going to be emptying the trashcan and vacuuming the place. That said, you have to realize that you are building something really cool; and that means having an impact now and for years to come.

That means it’s not a McJob.

Take ownership and pride in everything you do. Spend an extra hour cleaning up some HTML and making the user  experience  that much better. Proofread the marketing copy. Clean up your desk. Learn another job so you can help someone else.

It also means owning up to your mistakes. If there’s something that didn’t work out the way that you want, or something was rushed out, it’s okay to say, “My Fault.” Taking ownership means preventing the same issue from happening again.

People should take personal responsibility in the greater goal. While it may not be your money, you are so much more of a part of the company than working at somewhere larger like eBay. Act accordingly.

Don’t forget to download the Startup Drinking Game iPhone app.

It’s free. Click here to download.

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I posted this over on Quora too. It’ll be interesting to see what responses we’ll get.

We’re starting the see the usual cracks in a tech boom where startups are living high on someone else’s money. Evaluating potential opportunities carefully is important especially because of the  volatility  of our current economy — not all of us are lucky to have great paying jobs.

I’ve seen this dance before.  Most of us User Experience types had to do something else after 2000 — I played a programmer on television for a while). Some of the kids I’ve seen running around at the meetups here in San Francisco, not so. I personally don’t want to see another geo-located photosharing app until they have solved the revenue piece.

Now, I go out of my way to make sure  wherever  I work is a sound idea, if it’s not the equivalent of shipping a 50 pound of dog food cross country for free.

Where I’m working at now, Jobvite, has a great business model — someday I’ll educate you on the advantages of SaaS, and why SalesForce.com has a license to print money. I’ve also turned down other opportunities that were boring, but very, very profitable.

This begs the question — when a designer joins a startup other than own (and maybe especially their own), what should that designer be asking?

Here are the questions I always have:

• Who’s funding it? (Some of the larger VC firms may not always be the best sign.)
• What’s the customer acquisition model? (Notice I didn’t say user acquisition model.)
• What’s the revenue model?
• How quickly can the startup gain and lose market share?
• How crowded is the space? (Having competitors is not a bad thing)
• What are potential pivots?
• How long does the startup give something away for free before it starts collecting money?
• How much runway does the startup have?

For that final statement, if it’s less than a year I would think long and hard about how much savings I have in the bank, because you’re probably going to be looking for a job after it.

How much do you look at the business model? How much should we? And, should it be evaluated during future job interviews?

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The title isn’t the title of the article, but should be. Every UX designer (and probably everyone who works for your company) must read this article:

Warren Buffett talks about  building a moat  around your business to make it untouchable. The strongest moat you can build is one based on strong relationships. Low prices can always be beaten. Stunning design ages quickly and can easily be copied. Impeccable uptime can be matched, and your features copied. However,  a good customer relationship is unique, and  loyal customers are hard to steal.

…

Great experiences are about getting everything right; it goes well beyond fancy sign-up forms, cute mails and game-ified tutorials. Sure, all those things help, but the customer experience has to be comprehensive.  Quality is fractal. Your customers will judge your company based on all of the experiences they have with it, not just those dripping with CSS3 effects. Using a touchpoint matrix such as the one above will help ensure that you’re considering all of the experiences your customers will have.

It’s almost never about price, because it’s so hard to change to a competitor (especially in SaaS software environments). If you start making decisions that are contradict what the customers want, you’ll lose them.

Every touch point is important — from features you build to  unparalleled  customer service.

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Classic.

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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 one of the discussions we have about searching for candidates is the quality of LinkedIn profiles.

The best job opportunities often appear when you aren’t looking for them. Recruiters look for both passive and active candidates and may be looking for someone like you. Keeping your LinkedIn profile updated with well-written, relevant, and professional content can help you attract interesting career opportunities, even if you aren’t actively looking.

There are a lot of people that give advice on what a great LinkedIn profile is. The important distinction between “social media consultants” and this blog post is that the tips here are from real recruiting professionals who work with Jobvite and ones who I know and trust. We trade stories and tips about LinkedIn profiles and talk about great people we have seen. Here are some of the best tips:

Have a Clear Headline and Summary

Most recruiters make their initial decision of whom they’re going to look at right on the search results page. They have a position have to fill, and their focus is pretty narrow to start.

Do you really think they’re going to click on a profile that’s titled “UX Ninja?”

(And can we please retire the word “ninja” from the English language when describing anything career related, unless you wield a sword?)

The headline should be clear, concise, and describe exactly what your chosen goal is for using LinkedIn as a professional. It should communicate the type of opportunity you would want at any size company.

Ideal headlines are “Social Media Consultant” or “Java Software Developer.” It could also be “Marketing Professional” or “Health Domain Expert.” Each of those headlines describes exactly what the person is and what kind of position they are looking for. It can stand out, but it doesn’t have to stand out too much.

Your summary should also be short, snappy, and explain exactly how you can help your ideal employer or client.

Have a Professional Photo

LinkedIn is not Facebook.

It’s a network where professionals connect and recruiters look to make sure the person they hiring isn’t Jabba the Hut. Image isn’t everything, but it does count for a lot; and those images do appear in search results.

It’s also important to emphasize that even if you are attractive, that trip you took to Cabo San Lucas has exactly zero photos that should be used on LinkedIn.

How do you get professional photos?

It’s really easy. Visit your local photo studio and ask how much it costs for a one-hour session where you can wear something appropriate to your line of your work. If you’re unemployed, do a trade for photos or request on Craigslist.

For User Experience, it might be just a nice collar shirt. For Sales, it might include a tie. You don’t have to be overly made up. Look good enough with great lighting so people will get a good impression.

List Only Relevant Positions

I’ve been going through the hiring process for Visual and User Experience Designers and have seen a lot of LinkedIn profiles. Most of them were in pretty good share, but there was the occasional “I worked at Joe’s Pizza Place” in the profile. It may seem cool to list every non-profit and coffee shop you have worked for, but here’s the reality: it isn’t.

Recruiters scan through your resume, and they want to see positions relevant to your field of experience. Hiring managers need to see a clear progression from position to position. There are allowances for moving around (especially in this economy), but recruiters want to see career growth, especially for professional positions.

For that, DJ’ing at the local dance hall doesn’t apply.

You have extracurricular activities you think may be good? Great, put that on your resume after education but not in your professional profile. Show the progression in your career, and you’ll get a better response rate in calls and interviews.

Be Realistic about What You Can Do

I’ve gone through a lot of profiles that the typical “User Experience/Web Design/Social Media/Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing/Programming Expert” job descriptions. If you were really skilled at all of those positions, you would never, EVER need a LinkedIn profile.

Aim for a level higher than you could achieve, but don’t reach for the moon. Recruiters are looking for candidates that fit the position they are filling right now, not where that position could be five years from now. If you’re currently a Product Manager, aim for Senior Product Manager positions. If your a sales professional, aim for Sales Manager. It’s all about advancing in your career, but not too much to look like you’re really reaching up the ladder.

One candidate I found was good product management type, but there was nothing in his resume that indicated what his intended goal was: “Vice President of Product Management.” His track record had nothing to indicate he should have been higher than a Senior Product Manager or User Experience professional.

Recruiters pick up on that. Quickly.

Make Sure Your Resume Matches Your LinkedIn Profile

Several times I’ve found a great candidate on LinkedIn, and it looks like he has the experience I’ve needed for a position. We go through the interview process, and the resume says something different.

True, people should spend much more time on resumes than they’re LinkedIn profile. The irony is that tools like Jobvite integrate LinkedIn profiles into the application process, and it’s viewed before the resume, especially for sourcing passive candidates.

I follow a very simple formula for writing my profile and resume: I have two to three sentences about what my responsibilities at the position were, and three clear bullet points about my accomplishments. It’s easy: explain what you did, how it affected the bottom line of the company.

Everyone from a low paid customer service position from CEO should have some idea of how you contributed to the company, and can explain it succinctly in your profile.

For example, a friend of mine worked at You Tube. It might have been “just” a position around customer support, but she did it for a major brand. The quality of the work saved the company thousands of dollars in extra support costs. That’s huge and something very valuable to most companies.

Use Keywords that Are Relevant to Your Job

It all goes down to the way people search in the web. Recruiters enter keywords like User Experience, Product Manager, Developer, and Java to look for skill sets or job titles. They have to do that, because recruiters don’t understand most positions unless they are really embedded in a team.

Generally, recruiters work with hiring managers to define the requisitions and search other requisitions on the web to figure out what experiences the perfect candidate should have.
Having an obscure job title like “UX Ninja” or “Superstar” won’t help your chances, and I would even go so far in talking about specifics. For example, I use Wireframes, Personas, and Use Cases in my profile, because recruiters search against that. Several recruiters have found me that way. I also don’t list skills that I have, but I don’t want to do anymore, like Creative Direction.

Don’t Have Too Many Recommendations

It goes both ways, but when I talk to most recruiters, the number of recommendations that a candidate has on LinkedIn doesn’t really influence their decision. In fact, they’ll question the value of them if the candidate has too many of them.

What they really want to see is the quality of recommendations.

Having a few is good, and I’ve even used them in my resume. This makes it easier for the recruiter or hiring manager to gauge the quality of a candidate without having to pull up their profile. Recruiters and hiring managers want to know in what kind of environment the person best fits, the quality of the work, and how the person works with teams. Cultural fit is so important these days, especially in smaller teams.

What they don’t want to see is the typical stuff: “He comes in on time,” “She’s motivated,” or “Loves working in teams.” These don’t mean anything.

The more concrete the recommendation is on working style, the better.

Patrick Neeman is the Director of User Experience with Jobvite. His previous experience includes working with startups to launch their product, User Experience and Social Media consulting with Microsoft, and managing a team of 25 User Experience professionals for a technology consultancy. He also runs a blog,  Usability Counts, that covers topics such as User Experience, Social Media, and Web Marketing.

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Both Visual and User Experience Designers are important, but most don’t have the skillset to really do interaction work. Just like how many User Experience Designers don’t have a visual skill set, it works the other way:

This ambiguity can lead many visual designers to misunderstand what user experience design is, especially if they've never worked alongside a dedicated user experience designer. This has also led a lot of visual designers to mistakenly believe that because the work they create results in some kind of user experience, that makes them a user experience designer.

…

Over the last 12 months I've come across far too many visual designers describing themselves as user experience designers because they don't fully understand the term. Instead they've seen a few articles that explain how UX is the new black and decided to rebrand themselves.

I've also come across many fantastic visual designers who feel pressured into becoming user experience designers because they think this is the only way to progress their careers. It seems that due to a lack of supply, user experience design has somehow come to represent a higher order of design, or design done right. At best this is nonsense and at worst this is actually damaging to peoples careers.

I agree. both parties are just as important.

Visual designers don’t have to rebrand themselves — they’re a shortage of both good visual and User Experience Designers. Hone your craft. Both of us will be in shortage for a very long time.

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People will read great content if it’s written on butcher paper (much to the dismay of visual designers and user experience professionals everywhere) but that takes talent and practice. And great  content is great content, no matter its length.

I know that some of this seems repetitive because Twitter’s been around for a while, but sometimes it’s good to get back to the basics.  Just because it’s only 140 characters doesn’t mean it has to be boring; some of the best content ever has been clever, clear and concise.

One of the truths of about writing copy is that the shorter it is, the harder it is. That’s one of the reasons Twitter is so compelling — great, short copy is hard to find, and there’s so much of it there.

Be  140 Characters 110 Characters or Less

Just because you have 140 characters doesn’t mean you should use them.

Services like Klout  look for retweets to gauge influence, and the best way to get that is write content that’s short enough so the retweeter can keep your @username in the message.

For example, “RT @usabilitycounts ” is what my handle looks like in a retweet when someone passes along content.  That’s 20 characters.  For the lazy twitters out there, I have to write tweets of no more than 110 or 115 characters that allow for easy retweeting.  TweetDeck is a great tool for this. It’ll give me a character count as I type. When I get to 30 or less, it’s getting long.

The last thing people want to do is edit a retweet. That’s an extra 20 seconds, and if it already takes less than a second to capture their attention, they might just forget the retweet altogether or delete your username, which is worse.

Retweets should be a frictionless, one click like an impulse buy, except it’s free.

Be Relevant

There’s nothing better than useful, relevant content.

I don’t have time to look for it and RSS Feeds take too much time (sorry @davewiner). Twitter users are the news ticker because they collectively curate content that helps the masses filter what they want to read.

One of Monday’s useful tweets was shared by @rsarver:  Twitter and Facebook share  statistics.  I wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. Ryan Sarver’s opinion matters because he’s on the Twitter API Team. Every once in a while he’s going to send something across that I find very interesting.

There’s another 280,000 users that feel the same.

Be Clever

Twitter is for business and pleasure. It’s OK to be clever.

Just recently, I started a thread called the  #uxdrinkinggame.

It consists of silly and/or fun situations that happen in my every day work (My favorite: “#uxdrinkinggame #ux if a client says they can get a better design off of @99designs, do a drink”). I saw interest from the feed in the form of retweets and comments.

Silly, but when you’re staring at the same wireframe for hours, it’s good to take a break.

I love following user experience folks that are both informative and funny (@semanticwill comes to mind, even when he talks about testing his hair cuts).

I have  a list of people I follow that’s separate of the general feed (the best 50 or so), and each one of them says something funny at least once a day.

Be Sensational

Twitter is the modern equivalent of a tabloid newspaper cover.

You have less than a second to catch the reader’s attention before they’re catching the next tweet,  similar  to a  newsstand  in a subway station.

Which gets more traffic: “Man Murdered in a Bar” or “Headless Body in Topless Bar?”

Clever and thought provoking headlines get the user to click. Remember A/B testing? Tweets should be descriptive and interesting,  so readers know what they are clicking on and that it’ll be a good read.

Not every tweet is going to be a winner, but every once in a while, you’ll write the right headline that will get over 100 retweets.  The best way to get there is to learn from other sources.  I would look to the New York Post or New York Daily News for ideas, because they are the class of the business.

Be Tagged

People also follow search terms.

When I started reweeting the #uxdrinkinggame with the #ux tag, I instantly saw an increase in traffic.

Don’t forget to use tags that will have a large enough audience for retweets, but small enough where your tweet is broadcasting by an attentive audience. (Justin Bieber’s tag is probably not going to get a lot of traffic.)

Occasionally if you use a tag that’s related to a search term, you’ll get a bot retweeting — Sunday one of my posts about Radio Shack got picked up and replied by two separate bots.

Be Conversational

Tweeting shouldn’t be a one-way conversation.

The best users I follow include something that’s about their personal lives (sometimes good, sometimes bad). They reveal information about themselves that shows they are real people versus auto-follow bots.

What’s better is if you reply to them, they reply back.

Twitter channels should be treated as a true feedback loop. View comments as a positive way to interact with your audience. It’s a public forum, after all.

You don’t even need a lot of followers to generate conversation.  Alan Cooper is a good example, because he has a higher measured influence than fellow user experience expert Jared Spool, even with only one-fifth the followers.

That’s because Cooper has more retweets than Spool, even with 20 percent of the following.

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It’s easy to criticize the user experience of an application or website, because we’re all end users.

But sometimes we use it once, while many have to use it day after day as a part of their job. We talk about how we like using some sites, but there’s always the “I wish it was this way.”

We are our own worst enemies.

We constantly pick at sites and snipe on Twitter how certain missing features are UX 101, but we don’t offer constructive feedback. We don’t understand that some decisions are based on conscious business decisions. Worst of all, we don’t get that company culture, most of all, plays a part in the final product.

Not every company is Apple where design is king. Trade offs are made all the time, sometimes without any input from the user experience stakeholders.  All good user experience designers make decisions regarding what they can live with and what they can’t.

What do you forget when you comment?

The User Experience Designer Is the Wrong Fit

All user experience designers aren’t created equal.

For most of my career, I’ve been involved in large projects. One site redesign over 300,000 pieces of content. The current application I work on has hundreds of screens, many with complex interactions.

Because of my past experience, I could tell you a lot about content management, Internet Postage and consumer level escrow transactions.

But please, please don’t ask me to design a microsite.

I tried once. After two weeks, my client and I mutually agreed it wasn’t a fit.

There’s a reason why job descriptions read: “Must have 3 years of mobile experience.” There’s all these nuances and details that come only when you work on projects. If you go from one type of site or application to another, you’re going to make mistakes. And in the end, users suffer.

I’ve made conscious decisions now to tell recruiters up front that I’m not a fit but will refer someone that’s a better candidate. Not everyone does that.  Many User Experience and Visual Designers are “out of position,” because they are working at companies or on projects that aren’t in their sweet spot. Other User Experience Designers have to come in behind them to clean up the mess.

Often, this cleanup lasts longer than the initial development because of migrating legacy user experience issues and redesigning the technical implementation with users in mind.

Technical Debt Affects User Experience

There’s a lot of truth in Joel Spolsky’s statement: “All applications suck until version 3.” It takes a lot of time to learn the users, build the features and fix all the crap that you broke in the first place.

All of the startups where I have worked functioned on the “just good enough” philosophy of development. Some places where I worked, tasks that should have been automated were done by hand, because the system didn’t support it.

I worked at one startup where we were up against the wall.

One month before launch, and nowhere near complete.

They had to launch.

On time.

No questions asked.

The development team was in a meeting room late at night trying to figure out all the features that absolutely had to be done. There was a bunch of arguing, a bunch of negotiating, and then someone brought up something completely unthinkable.

“When we launch, we don’t have to bill the customers for at least a month. That would buy us some time,” a developer said.

So they launched the product without billing. Absolutely amazing. Later on, we had to pay the technical debt because the billing system they did write was written by developers that had been working 14 hour days for months. But that was a business decision that at the time seemed worth it.

Why? We shipped on time.

Many startups begin without a user experience designer, and that affects every decision that is made. That forces the incoming user experience expert to be a janitor — something that’s not really seen until the redesign is complete.

Culture Puts User Experience at the Back of the Bus

There’s a famous tale of a web designer that called out American Airlines for how bad their site was. He redesigned their home page, doing a great job creating a very clean design. Easy to do, right?

He got a response from a user experience designer that worked there, a very talented one at that (and one that eventually got fired). The designer listed all the divisions that were stakeholders on the site and explained the interactions that lie outside of user experience but made it in the final product. He mentioned that one group might have control of the pages, user experience designers get overriden by executives and, in the end, the visual designers might have final say, affecting the shipped product.

The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including, for example, QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the siteand a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality.

I’ve been in many places where user experience is back of the bus to the direct  opposite  of what they sell. Some places, creative runs the shop. It really just depends.

A culture has to value user experience and product management to let it lead. The best organizations I have seen have been collaborative, but in the end, product and user experience had the final call. If that isn’t the case, then it’s a culture issue.

Resources Are Constrained

I was at a meetup a few months ago, and a few people I met worked at a company that recently IPO’ed. We were talking about the size of teams. In their company, they had 60 visual and interaction designers. Most of the places where I have worked, I was on a team of one. Sometimes, I’ve been lucky enough to have a visual designer.

That’s a pretty big gap.

When you’re working with smaller teams, you make a lot of decisions that you would never make if you had unlimited resources. You know that drag and drop WSYISYG editor you’d like to drop in? Can’t do it, but we can create something on a smaller scale. The site-wide redesign? Don’t have the resources, but we could do it on a rolling basis. Rewrite every email that gets sent out? Sure, but we’ll have to do it over two months.

All of the situations above I’ve gone through. Multiple times.

Not everyone works at really large companies with unlimited resources.

Nor do we work at startups trying to solve very specific business cases. One project I worked on, there wasn’t a product manager for a single screen.  The majority of us work at companies were there’s job security for three years, because you’ll be redesigning the application one section at a time.

Because of this, we all make decisions on which battles to fight. Often, it’s the difference between shipping and not shipping a product. Not shipping leaves one year gaps in your resume.  You ask yourself the following: Is digging in worth that one year gap? Do you want to own the decision that could negatively affect the profitability of the company?

Do you want to put your job on the line because you want something cooler?

Business Goals Trump User Experience Goals

If I was working at some software services, the last thing I would do is improve the user experience too much.

There are a lot of services companies that sell great software. But what they really sell is services to install, maintain and extend the software. It’s going to be easy enough so sales engineers, most of them making much, much more than user experience designers, can show how customizable it is, but hard enough so anyone without experience can customize it.

Because at the end of the day, the business value of user experience hits the bottom line.

Great user experiences for consumer products not only sell the product, they prevent customer support and save money. The reason Mint.com had to be so easy to use is because customer support representatives cost money, and that’s something you can’t charge for with their business model. What you can charge for is solution architects, because there’s a perceived need.

I worked for a consulting company, and we did a lot of customizations. We played this game all the time, and none of it was about User Experience. It was about the bottom line. We billed by the hour, and the easier the package was, the less we could bill.

Any software consultant can tell you the best thing about open source is the lack of real support.

To really learn what matters for the product, talk to everyone else in the company and ask where they fit in the bottom line. You’ll realize that your wireframes are a very small part of the big picture.

You Aren’t the Target Market

There are a few things I don’t like about 37signals.

I wish it had auto-numbering.

The lack of categories annoys me.

I wish the permissions system was better.

However, say want you want to say, they’re doing something cool over there. They’ve invented the perfect lifestyle company. They have a solid team. They’re making a virtual team work across multiple time zones, using their own products to manage product development. They are contributing to a very profitable SAAS product that has an enthusiastic community behind them. Their process works.

Who am I to criticize?

I’m a power user of project management tools.

I’m always going to ask for more features.

I’m not their target audience.

They have filled a very specific need that serves millions of users well, and they are making money on it. I could make suggestions all day long, but they have a good handle on their target market. They get their users. They understand the personas. They will be king of the hill until someone makes something better.

The same goes for any product. I look at products on which I’ve worked, and I always see features we can improve. But then the users (remember, “user” experience? Not “what you want” experience.) rave about the product, and it’s profitable. Or almost so.

It works for them, and the users are happy even if it’s not perfect.

Who am I to criticize?

The End Game

There’s no such such thing as an ideal situation.

It’s easy for someone like 37signals to talk about how a product can be improved, and it’s another thing to actually do it when you’re not driving the bus. Not all companies have the luxuries a small startup does, with a clean codebase and clear objective.

The real world isn’t some startup where people will run through walls to launch a product, or some college product. The developer you work with wants to work realistic hours, and that means making realistic choices. We all want to see our family and friends; a satisfying work/life balance might mean shipping a feature in the next sprint.

If you have feedback, here’s a better approach: reach out to someone personally and give your feedback.

More often than not, you’ll get an honest response. Taking this approach is a very professional way that, hopefully,  can be easily achieved by using LinkedIn or Twitter, and both make it easy to find that person who’s designing the product. I’ve done so several times (I have to dig up that email to Quora), and I’ve enjoy the conversation immensely. Having that conversation publicly through Twitter is something that is bound to come up with people evaluate you for other positions. Social Media is forever.

Doing so privately also doesn’t get the designer fired for talking frankly about the issues they encounter.

It takes a certain amount of maturity and mutual respect for the designer to have that conversation. We are all after the same end goal: great user experiences.

But that’s easy to forget, isn’t it?

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I’m applying.

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I answered this question over at Quora, and thought it might make a great post here (plus I’ve been busy). Read on…

Having a bad UX designer can kill a startup, or seriously hinder a product. I’ve worked on several products past and present that had a lot of catchup to do because the previous UX designers and product types were brought on because they were cheap.

Remember, developers will build what’s designed, and if what is designed has issues, that’s going to be the result.

Money and Options That’s Appropriate To Finding Great Talent

There’s nothing worse than hearing the sentence, “We pay less than other places and we think the option package is fair.” While UX Designers are not completely driven by money, they want to be rewarded for what they bring to the table. In that sense, their talent can sometimes make or break a startup.

I love what I do, but I also have to pay rent on my posh mansion in North Beach (sarcasm). Unless the idea is going to cure cancer, the business folks should have the funding in place to pay for talent.

Great development talent is finite, but so is great UX talent. Both should be compensated accordingly.

A Great Idea To Start

UX Designers are in tune with what works and what doesn’t (well, the good ones, anyway). If a UX Designer interviews, looks at the idea, and screams at the founder, “This will work only if hell freezes over,” and the founder is STILL insistent on the approach as described, that company doesn’t want a UX Designer, they want a wireframe monkey.

We as a group get to work on very few ideas that are truly special, and I’m going to put effort into something I want to believe in.

A Champion In Management

Most UX Designers that are good aren’t necessarily the most politically correct, so they need someone in management to give them the support to run the UX Process so it’s about finding the best solution and not have it be design of one or design by committee.

The best clients I’ve had and wanted to work with wanted to test over and over, because that’s when you got the best feedback.

Freedom From A Cubicle

I believe that the best UX doesn’t come on a 9-to-5 schedule — it may happen in a bar, or walking, or at 11pm at home.  It may happen 1,000 miles away. You never know. Collaboration is important, but like any great company, there should be freedom to work away from people and let ideas percolate.

I’ve been told a few times, “your job is to sit in a coffee house and think up shit.” That’s what UX designers do — they think up ideas. They watch people. They observe their surroundings. And they come up with amazing solutions to really tough problems. You cannot do that in a cubicle.

This is probably why so many UX Designers like to work remote (like me) — because that’s how they work the best.

Look To Products You Like — And Steal That Designer

The good UX designers are on LinkedIn, Coroflot, and usually can be found hidden in plain sight. They write blogs. They surf Quora. Do reference checks with other UX designers to ask how good they are.

Contact them directly. Tell them about your idea. If it’s a really good idea, they’ll listen. If the idea isn’t so good, they’ll tell you why.

Best of all, you’ll learn if they are easy to collaborate with, because the idea you started with is not the idea that’s going to launch.

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I’ve worked in this field for a very long time, yet explaining how User Experience works to my parents is one of the most frustrating conversations I always have.

They consistently get asked by friends what their sons do. My brother is easy, he owns a bowling pro shop.  Me, not so.

Everyone understands what we do

I’ve tried explaining my job to my friends.  The conversation goes sort of like this:

“So I design really large websites. Name some sites. I’ve had a hand in at least one of them (my favorite bar bet).”

“Do you do web design?”

“Not quite.”

“Do you build them?”

“No.”

“Do you write for them?”

“Sometimes, but from a content strategy standpoint.”

“What do you do then?”

“I craft how they work.”

That ends the conversation, and they want to talk about the latest Vince Vaughn film. I had this conversation once on an airplane — another passenger asked a few questions before we took off. He didn’t respond until we landed three hours later, saying, “Wow, that sounds cool.”

Now I flash my Pick An Excuse application, and they get all giddy because I have an iPhone application.

It’s really not that hard. The analogy I use is that I’m like an architect for houses. I design the structure of the house, the three rooms, and where the kitchen is so that it’s livable. Someone builds the structure (programmers), wires the house for water and power (database architects), paints the walls (visual designers), and determines the value of the house and how to sell it (those pesky product people that think they are UX designers ;) ).

Everyone has a say on how the house is built (Can we move the hallway over there? I don’t like that color of red.); but at the end of the day, if the people occupying the house don’t like how the house works, they move. Period.

Or as my friends say, I get paid for doing nothing and having no say.

It’s awesome.

We are Visual Designers or HTML Programmers

Sure, I have a visual design background. I used to be a print designer back in the day and still have those skills in my backpocket for some work. However, it’s something I don’t advertise. I don’t advertise a lot of things, like my knowledge of HTML and CSS. I see a lot of jobs that ask for the unicorn (Interaction + Visual + Front End Development). These are three separate skill sets.

In conversations with with many UX professionals, I’ve heard they come from a variety of fields like sales (one used to be a car salesman) or programming. A lot of them were writers, because communication is key to this position. We are in this field because we’re good at interaction design or user experience design, not because we can code. We might be able to put together a quick  prototype but most likely not a full website.

Interaction designers come from a variety of backgrounds because it is a jack of all trades position. You have to understand programming, design, business needs, user needs, and have communication skills.

That’s about three more skills than most people have.

We have all the answers

During a meeting, I made a wisecrack that “User Experience Designers can’t tell you how it should work, but they can tell you what’s currently broken and why.”

It’s really true. We don’t have all the answers, but we do know where to find them.

We draw on our previous experience on what’s worked at other companies or on other projects.  We do user research and  competitive  analysis on other products.  We make gut decisions based on the style of User Experience we have practiced for years.

Every audience has a slightly different take on how an application or website should work, and that’s something you can’t really plan for. For example, the needs my mother has for a email client are much different than someone like me (or maybe not). The statement, “We did this at the last place I worked at” is a good starting point but shouldn’t be the final product.

When I design an application, and I have to take that into consideration. I do user testing to validate my assumptions, and if I’m wrong, I change the design.

We have (or even want) final say over a product

There’s a famous post over Oatmeal about how a website design goes straight to hell. It’s indicative of how the process can go.

When I design a feature, I usually start by looking around the web for other examples and interviewing users. The interviews can take place over the phone, or even better, at a bar (specifically Tony Nik’s in San Francisco). I get feedback and design wireframes.

Here’s where the real fun starts:

• Product Managers will chime in, pointing out user stories that I missed.
• The front end developer  mocks it up, miss three hover-overs, and make a comment that one of the design patterns was incorrect.
• The development team will point out the feature is impossible to build or will bring the servers down to their knees.
• The visual designer uses a color that violates Section 508 standards or moves a button to a different part of the page I know isn’t going to test well.
• User testing performed on the mockups or the final prototypes finds an issue that is a showstopper.

Why do they get a say? They’re users, sometimes right in the core audience. They have received different feedback. Or maybe they just want a say, which is valid. Or sometimes, it’s just bullshit, as Joel Spolsky says.

We take all of that feedback, and make changes. We aren’t so much of a gatekeeper, but rather a collector of information to construct the final approach. In a house. sometimes a wall has to be moved, a color changed, a faucet is too expensive, etc.

Based on all of this, it shows how little of the product we control. Yet some of the results (the $300 million button, for example) shows the immense value User Experience Designers can add to the process.

That’s why they have a voice, but not the final one. It’s really the user’s product, especially if they are footing the bill.

We want all the control

Follow my thinking.

Most of the design I start with is based on design patterns I follow on the web, and look for other best practices. I watch a lot of the large websites (Amazon, eBay, Google), figuring they have much more money than most of my clients to spend on User Research.

I use patterns that have tested well at other clients, and I try to deliver solutions efficiently because: a) not working efficiently costs clients money and time and b) working past six cuts into the time I can spend on a barstool. And there’s nothing that stands in the way of my Macallan at Tony Niks.

Patterns make my life easy, because I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There’s one specific design pattern (web forms) that I’ve used for 10 years, because it’s never, ever, ever failed me.

Always, I try to use what works within the context of a client. I also complain occasionally, but have learned to pick my battles better. Well, on good days.

Many outside of the process try to exercise a lot of control over the design, determining where every checkbox and every hyperlink goes. They ask about color schemes (totally outside of my realm) and navigation patterns in terms they don’t quite understand.

Yet, the more this happens and they fight over the wrong things, the more I want to dig my heels in. The more they follow my lead or approach that I want to have a collaboration. Most User Experience Designers give the middle bird to authority, because that’s what make them what they are: professionals who ask “why” at the right time.

Joel Spolsky has a great post about Program Managers and working with developers:

Of course, when programmers are peers of the program managers, the programmers tend to have the upper hand. Here’s something that has happened several times; a programmer asks me to intervene in some debate he is having with a program manager:

“Who is going to write the code?” I ask.

“I am…”

“OK, who checks things into source control?”

“Me, I guess, …”

“So what’s the problem, exactly?” I ask. “You have absolute control over the state of each and every bit in the final product. What else do you need? A tiara?”

Where I work best is coming up with high level patterns and working with developers that want to polish and shine every single detail. I can’t think of everything (especially when I’m out-numbered by developers five or seven to one), so I need people dedicated to great User Experience. Software development is a collaboration, not a dictatorship.

Data drives every decision

It goes back to what a friend of mine said to me while I was a print designer.

He said if someone notices a design, it’s over-designed.

I’m all for assigning return on investment for every single feature, but sometimes the value of user experience is more holistic than that. That’s why it’s called User Experience and not Widget Design. It’s about the experience of the product which contributes to the overall value.

Sometimes it’s the parts of a whole.

Apple has the same value with designing their products. Their AirBooks are  phenomenal pieces of equipment, yet there’s not a single feature you can point that makes you want to buy it. There are tons of tablets that have the same featureset as the iPad, yet Tech Crunch said it has no competition. Filemaker Pro is a great product, but there isn’t a single feature that other databases don’t have.

You can’t replicate all of this by analyzing data, but you can optimize as much with what you have, using data to get there. Do the basics first, then worry about changing the world.

There’s an interesting post by Douglas Bowman about design at Google, specifically the 41 shades of blue.  There are also other opinions that sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and create something totally new. Truly great teams realize the answer might be in the tea leaves that you have to try something different.

I firmly believe this dedication to data-driven design at Google has been the reason they don’t get people. People aren’t numbers, and you have to understrand their core needs outside of a return on investment analysis.

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This was originally published on the Jobvite blog (I’m working with them on a redesign). I thought it was also appropriate here.

Writing a great job requisition is hard but not as hard as you would think.

It’s exactly like writing a marketing email. You get a few seconds for the job seekers to make a decision if this is a job they want to apply for or not based on your job description of 400 words or less.

Constructing requisitions is sometimes an afterthought with a company in startup mode, or gets lost in the world of corporate standards and communications. What your job requisition says is the best marketing your company can do for finding amazing talent for your culture.

I’ve managed and recruited large teams and consistently refer candidates that get hired to recruiters. Here are the strategies I used to find people I wanted to work with in putting together great requisitions. Some of them worked so well, recruiters have asked me for my secrets.

Read On…

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Immediately after I posted the previous entry, a good friend of mine mentioned a few more ways to be a respected member of the community. It really is a positive. People call you for your opinion, the number of twitter followers you have is a clear distinction that you’re working at your craft.

One recruiter called my “marketing” materials a clear  indication  that I “got” it. And employers love consultants and employees that “get” it.

Get Published Somewhere Else Than Your Blog (And Get Paid For It)

Anyone can start a blog.

Not just anyone can get paid to write a blog post on someone else’s dime, and I’m not including content farms like Demand Media. That’s the difference between being a writer just promoting yourself and being a published author who’s respected for their opinion.

I’m not saying I’m getting rich selling articles to Freelance Switch, but there’s a big difference between user-generated content that a blog needs and being considered a respected voice in the community that is paid to write for a blog. For the amount of time I spent thinking of this article, I’m getting paid way below market rate for my services.

That doesn’t matter.

I’m getting paid, and that’s a clear line of distinction. Advertisers are paying for my services. Yadda yadda yadda.

Be Interviewed for an Article

There’s nothing more of an ego boost than someone contacting you to ask, “I’d like to interview you for this article I’m writing. Are you available?” Of course you are. When can we schedule the call?

This bit of promotion is amazing for Search Engine Optimization. If you’re being interviewed, citied as a source, and they’re linking to your site, that’s free publicity! When potential clients call and ask how important you are, all you have to do is send them links of people that have written proof that you’re a big wheel in your small corner of the World Wide Web.

Best of all, it’s not your mom that’s writing about that odd career you have inbetween art conservation postings. It’s someone else that’s claiming themselves as an expert in your field. Instant validation.

Think of it as a Foursquare badge that actually means something. Not only have you checked in with knowledge, the bartender vouches that you’re a nice guy and is offering to buy you a drink.

Write a Book

Scott Berkun, author of three best-selling books, has some great comments about writing a book. The reality is that anyone can do it:

Here’s the short honest truth: 20% of the people who ask me are hoping to hear this –Anyone can write a book. They want permission. Truth is you don’t need any. There is no license required. No test to take. Writing, as opposed to publishing, requires almost no financial or physical resources. A pen, a paper, and effort are all that has been required for hundreds of years. If  Voltaire and  Marquis de Sade could write in prison, then you can do it in suburbia, at lunch at work, or after your kids go to sleep.

Writing a book is much more time consuming that writing a blog.

I’m writing this entry from Caffe Greco in San Francisco, and it’s going to take me an hour. It’s special treat, pounding out about 800, er, 900 words, er 1,000 words. I enjoy writing the blog; because I worked in Journalism in my past, and it’s the only chance I get to use semi-colons.

Now imagine doing this for next 125 days over the next year. Writing when you’re happy. Writing when you’re bored. Writing when the words don’t come out anymore. Writing when your publisher is screaming at you because the book is three weeks late and you’re 500 pages away.

Dan Saffer has a great post about writing fiction (and why he won’t do it again). There were some core truths there, but I had the same conversation with J. Ambrose Little. You don’t write technology books to become rich, you write them so when you interview, the interviewer says, “So you wrote a book — when can you start?”

That sentence alone trumps a lot of things, like “I learned all my absolute statements from Jacob Nielsen” and “I have a masters in HCI.”

It doesn’t even have to sell — at all. It’s a great portfolio piece than speaks to your dedication to the field, even if the book sucks (and I’ve received a few books that have absolutely sucked).

Speak at a Conference or an Event

Public speaking is hard. Real hard. I’ve done it a few times (I’m not great at it and tend to do better on panels versus sole presentations).

What’s the best way to learn?

Start small.

Pick topics that are different enough that no one’s repeated it but interesting enough not to bore 50 people. Call local User Experience event organizers, local Marketing organizations, anyone that would benefit from having a user experience professional speak at the event.

I would also have a blog or a Twitter feed, because a presenter that’s only presenting themselves at an event is Big Hat, No Cattle — nothing to back up their reputation. I spoke at an event and there was someone sitting next to me on a panel that had no experience in the topic they were speaking about. That’s just frustrating. I want to be surrounded by speakers than put in as much work in the field as I do.

Construct a PowerPoint that is entertaining but could be understood by your mom (seriously). Don’t use UX speak — use English. Short sentences that are easy to understand.

And practice, practice, practice.

It’s best to do a dry run in front of about five to seven people. Co-workers are perfect during a lunch you buy them, and then do it in front of the group. The first few times you do it, you’ll get two feelings: am I a good public speaker, and do I want to do this again?

I’ll speak occasionally, but there are much better public speakers than me. I enjoy my corner of the World Wide Web. Do you?

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It always shocks me when someone says, “Hey, I read your blog.”

Three people  read my blog (one is my mother), but there’s a substantial number of followers that recognize me from time to time — plus sporting a goatee and wearing a lime green sweater to events help too.  Thing of beauty, baby!  I love lime green.

The blog is self-defense. When things aren’t going so well, it’s free marketing and takes my mind off my ever-dwindling checking account. When things are going well, it can only make things better. People do value your opinions, good or bad, and the way they value it is with their feet.

I’ve gotten work through the blog, which only happens when you have a blog.

It’s also a great way to grow a career.

Most recruiters with the best jobs are looking for some kind of verification that you know what you are doing. Social recruiting platforms like Jobvite look at all kinds of things like your social profile on the web.  All kinds of things come up during web search results, and recruiters aren’t looking just for your resume. They want to see where you are on the web. Social is now an important piece of the search.

(How do I know this? I work there. Duh. CareerBuilder has me as the number #2 search result for User Experience in the United States. How?)

This list isn’t all inclusive, but also doesn’t involve looking like an idiot on Quora.

Here’s a few things I would do if I wanted to increase my influence as a User Experience professional:

Start A Twitter Feed

I run a feed on Twitter. I don’t get a ton of followers. I think it’s close to 1,700 or so. Most of them are here for my good looks and rather dry, but understood by people living north of Columbus Avenue, sense of humor.

Running a Twitter feed is much easier than writing really, really long blog posts, which I tend to do (read: this one).

Whenever you find an interesting article, tweet it.  Whenever you see an interesting tweet, retweet.  If you have something really funny to say, say it.

I’ve been running the gag of “Internet, definitely a fad” for the last twelve years or so. I’ve lost followers because they complained about my inane posts.  I’m also the number one result on Google for it. That’s great SEO.

People will find you if you tweet interesting content. The best part: you don’t even write it. Other people will supply the content. It isn’t the amount of followers you have (geez, Ryan Seacrest has close to 3,900,000 followers, and how could he — or his producers — have anything interesting to say?), it’s the quality of followers.

Dan Saffer runs a really funny feed that occasionally has great content. He’s got a lot of UX followers.

Semantic Will is even funnier.

Jared Spool is funny in Europe. Kind of like the Hoff, except with less hair and wears glasses.

People love funny, especially when you’re talking about radio buttons and multi-select menus. It’s when they’re laughing you can stick some truth down their throat (who’s the comedian that said it?).

Start A Blog

It’s easy. Go to Dreamhost, pay the hosting, and install. Smashing Magazine has a ton of great WordPress themes that will look great yet out of context for your opinions online.

You don’t have to post all the time (I post something of substance about once a week). But it’s out there because it’s great SEO.  Post something. Post anything. It could be other content. It could be something you retweeted (Even better! Free content!). It might be a short note about your dog. But blog, blog, blog.

Why?

Being able to communicate in some kind of written form is an awesome skill to have.

Coding Horror has a great blog post about programmer communication skills. I think this applies to everyone in the technical field, because it’s hard communicating ideas  concisely. Writing reinforces that. It you want to move your career ahead, write a lot and learn how to express your thoughts.

Need more examples?

One of the best writers I’ve ever read is Joel Spolsky. He writes Joel On Software. His is some of the best prose I’ve ever seen on software development. He’s influenced thousands of people. He’s sold a book, which is almost exact copy of his blog (smart man!).

I’m convinced good writing is easier that public speaking, so a great way to get your ideas out there is starting a blog. Sometimes, the blog is picked up by someone cool (I’m listed in Alltop under User Interface and Social Media). Sometimes I appear on other blogs.

Go To Meetups

I hate networking.

I really, really hate networking.

Did I mention I hate networking?

I was at an event the other day, and I remembered how much I hate it because I’m not extroverted. I’ve learned how to fake it (a friend of mine called it “turning it on”), so I could at least hand out a business card shamelessly and start a conversation with someone.

There’s a number of different conversations you could start at the events: “So do you follow the school of Cooper (‘personas rock!’) or Nielsen (‘Flash is 128 percent bad’)?” You can talk about travel or even talk about projects you’re working on. The more knowledge you pass on, the more people respect you.

The more things you do selflessly (I sponsor events like UX Eye for the Developer Guy and Barcamp LA), people will also respect you.

Eventually, it will lead to great employment and consulting opportunities.

For me, it’s lead to both getting work and finding work for people that needed it. For UX consultants now, I go to meetups in San Francisco and there will be four or five companies looking for professionals to help them out.

Develop An Idea

The need to invest in your career doesn’t end in college.

Very few of us get to work on ideas that involve technology outside of our core skill set without some client blindly trusting us to do it well. The best way to do something cool — ya know — do mobile, for example, do the unthinkable.

Come up with something and get it built.

If you manage the project correctly and do something simple, you can do some really, really cool stuff without going broke. My Pick An Excuse application is an example of something that was simple, didn’t cost me a lot (relatively), and got what I needed — experience in mobile.

The idea is kind of lame, but I’ve done something thousands of other user experience professionals haven’t done: released an application on the Apple iPhone Store. It brings chuckles at events, but it also brings something else:

More projects.

The application has already paid for itself.

What have you done for your career lately?

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