Does your company even come close to something like this?

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

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

They want their work to add up to something.

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

Welcome to Apple.

We should all work like this.

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

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

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

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

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

What would you like to see?

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

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

Comment below with your thoughts.

I. Hate. Email.

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

This is a great article.

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

…

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

This article was originally published at UXmatters on April 2, 2012. The article was truly a collaboration. 

A great organizational culture is a necessity if we are to create great products.

Being a UX professional—whether a UX designer, a user researcher, or a UX leader—can sometimes be challenging. We often find ourselves in the midst of organizational challenges—sometimes bringing more to light than we actually solve. Because our work is customer facing, User Experience is an important part of the product development equation. We reflect our organizational cultures because we are so integral to the product development process.

In many organizations, there is a very high turnover rate for Directors of User Experience—just because an organization’s culture is broken. We recognize early on that many product problems are a direct reflection of cultural difficulties, but sometimes there is no way to change them.

A great organizational culture is a necessity if we are to create great products. In this article, I’ll discuss some ways in which organizations fail because of their cultures.

Talking to Customers Isn’t a Part of an Organization’s Culture

“No matter what your process is, your organization’s goal should be to have a clear understanding of your customers.”

Instead of finding out what customers really need, a product team goes off in a room where a lot of smart people start developing use cases, wireframes, and visual designs in a conference room. Months go by, the organization releases the final product, and it bombs. No one uses it, a lot of money has gotten wasted, and the product team gets fired.

Whose fault is it? It’s the organization’s fault.

No matter what your process is, your organization’s goal should be to have a clear understanding of your customers. This means customer visits or remote user interviews using Skype video and screen sharing or simple phone calls. If you fit the profile of the target audience, you can design for yourself, but beware of doing this if you don’t belong to the audience for a product.

There is no excuse for this organizational failing; no one should design a product in a vacuum. The assertion that “we shouldn’t show customers the product because competitors might see it” is stupid. If you’re creating a new product for which the barrier of entry is so low that a customer could steal the idea, maybe you shouldn’t be in that market.

Great organizations have a clear vision for customers. Your organization should work hand in hand with customers. This is an issue of organizational culture. It should be ingrained in your culture that talking to users is not only expected, but rewarded.

Manufacturers of physical products do extensive studies of their customers to maximize their profits. Supermarket store design is a great example of this, particularly the design of customer flows. Why don’t technology firms do this?

How to avoid this failing—Go on the road. Visit or talk to at least one customer a week. Users are your best subjects, from whom you can learn the most. Partner with your customers to grow your business.

Leadership Doesn’t Have a Clear Vision

“This week we’re going to build a product with viral features.”

“This week let’s build a comment system.”

“This week we’ll do e-commerce!”

If a company’s direction is always changing, and they don’t have a clear vision of where they are going, there’s no way that they can build great products. Achieving successful product management and user experience is highly dependent on understanding the context of the user. If that context is always changing, there’s no way to build an effective user experience.

Vision is hard to define, but not as hard as you might think. There’s an anecdote about a couple of MBAs who started a business. They did extensive research and pricing studies and spent lots of money on ever-changing priorities. Eventually, they sold the company to a small business owner who had a simplified vision of how to run the company. Under the new leadership, the company sold its products for twice as much as they cost and provided great customer service. The business became wildly successful.

Creating great products isn’t as hard as you might think: becoming clear about what you’re providing to users is about listening to them. That’s it.

How to avoid this failing—Articulate a vision, and stick to it. You may need to adjust your vision based on market changes, but the clearer your vision, the better you’re able to build products that reflect that vision.

Leadership and the Design Team Don’t Share the Same Vision

I’ve worked in a few organizations where we’d be making great progress on a product and getting really close to launch. Then we’d be asked to do a big demonstration for a Vice President or C-level executive, and our meeting would turn from strategy to “could you make this button green.” Or they might ask us to add a few more features that require a complete redesign, destroying months of work.

I’ve seen email messages from CEOs who were intent on hijacking the design process or going around design leadership to ask their go-to guy to make changes to a product design. This is toxic behavior and reflects poorly on leadership because it demonstrates that they have failed to build a design team that they can work with effectively.

If leadership doesn’t believe their design team can build a product that can grow the business, they need to make changes to the design team, not ask for a button in another color. The best designers work hand in hand with management to understand their vision and translate it into a viable product. If management can’t articulate a vision that is consistent with the needs of the market, this creates great conflict.

In truly great organizations, vision bubbles up from the lowest levels, then management synthesizes and articulates a clear product vision.

How to avoid this failing—Management must let designers do their job and recognize that they aren’t the target audience. Leaders’ responsibility is setting the vision and building their team. If they’ve done this right, they shouldn’t have to hijack the design process.

The Design Team Hasn’t Laid a Sound Foundation by Establishing a Design Process

“Let’s go straight to wireframes.”

Sometimes that might not be such a bad thing. You might need to get a feel for where you need to go by creating a bunch of wireframes. But wireframes are the end-product of a lot of other UX design tasks and are just one part of the design process. They provide documentation for your design projects, allow you to articulate your design ideas visually and functionally, and let you communicate your ideas to multiple audiences, including management and engineering.

I’ve seen design teams fail because there wasn’t a good foundation for the final design vision. Good designers should have at least a rough idea of where they are going, even if their destination could change.

A good process ensures consistency across all of your products and drives you toward a consistent product vision for your users.

How to avoid this failing—Put your design process in place. Establish your product vision and create branding standards, personas, patterns, and other design guidelines.

The Designers on a Team Aren’t on the Same Page

There’s nothing more toxic than when the designers on a team are working toward different goals. Creating a collaborative culture is very important when building a design team. When designers work together they can achieve great things. When they don’t agree on a design process or share the same design goals, arguments can ensue over the silliest things—like the color of buttons or the usage of hyperlinks. Such a team cannot achieve a consistent product vision.

I’ve worked with visual designers who refused to collaborate or whose idea of design was to throw mockups over a wall. In one particular environment where I worked, the visual designers completely changed the layouts and, thus, the workflows represented in the wireframes, disregarding the deep thought that had gone into the work.

While the personalities of the designers on a team may be very different, they should be able to work together toward one common goal: the success of their company. Here’s an example of teamwork from the world of baseball: During the early 1970’s, the Oakland As were a complete mess off the field because of personality differences. But on the field, they had one goal: winning the World Series. And they did win it three years straight, in 1972, 1973, and 1974.

How to avoid this failing—Design leadership should be able build a team that is on the same page and has shared goals. Sometimes that means firing people. Design is sometimes more subjective than we would like to think. Having an inconsistent design culture can destroy companies.

An Organization Doesn’t Allocate Its Resources Properly

Look at the product teams around you. How many product managers do you work with? How many designers? How many engineers?

Many organizations believe that the answer to building great engineering and product teams is to hire more engineers. I’ve found the opposite to be true. I’ve worked on a lot of smaller teams that were able to build great products by following streamlined processes, maintaining proper staffing levels, and hiring resources with the right skill sets.

I’ll give you an example: the best team I ever worked on had a ratio of three developers, one visual designer, one product manager—that was me—and one quality assurance engineer. We were able to do enough requirements gathering to keep the developers busy, no one worked overtime, and we created a product that is still profitable today as a small business.

If the ratios or skill sets of resources aren’t right, a team cannot work efficiently. When there are too few designers, developers sit around waiting, with nothing to do, and the designers are grossly overworked. When there are too many designers, they produce too much documentation, so the developers don’t know where to start. Finding the right balance is like tuning the engine of a racing car: too much or too little and the engine runs inefficiently. Getting the right mix means winning the race.

How to avoid this failing—Adjust your staffing levels and their skill sets for optimal performance. This doesn’t necessarily mean hiring more people: sometimes too many cooks in the kitchen can spoil the broth. Get the ratios right and your team’s performance will improve.

An Organization Encourages Feature Creep

Product management should work hand in hand with user experience. They should work together not only to decide what should be in a product, but also what shouldn’t be in a product. Most product teams don’t have the luxury of doing green-field product development with unlimited budgets. Therefore, feature creep can kill companies.

Constraints are our friends. We shouldn’t have to try to “ice skate in a phone booth,” but great teams realize the limitations and constraints of their environment and work within them. That’s the core of designing for mobile first: understand exactly what a user’s minimum needs are, then build a product to satisfy them. That’s one of the core premises of agile development: iterate to a final product within the constraints of your organization. If you force hard decisions, you’ll end up with a better product.

Poor product teams and UX teams don’t understand restraint, and they suffer because of this. Projects are rushed, wireframes undergo endless revisions, and nothing ever gets done at a level of quality that anyone is happy with. It’s in everyone’s best interest to focus on what you can do rather than some mythical and unachievable goal.

How to avoid this failing—Less is more. Iterate to a final product. Every feature that you include should provide tremendous value and be integral to the user experience. If leadership consistently asks product teams and designers to add features or make fundamental changes to a product within an unrealistic timeline, the organization’s culture needs to change.

There’s No Effort Dedicated to Fit and Finish

Would you try to sell a car with a half-finished paint job? Only three seats in the cabin? A dashboard that wasn’t cleaned?

That’s the rub: users will continually expect better and better user experiences as the Web matures. This includes the fit and finish of a product, which reflects directly on the team that built a product. Apple goes to great lengths to build products that feel complete. Most companies don’t produce products at that level, and the market reacts appropriately, declaring such products to be commodities.

Lack of attention to the details of a product reflects directly on how organizations perceive the expectations of their customers. An example: For many years, American automakers weren’t dedicated to the goal of refining the fit and finish of their products, and their customers reacted accordingly.

You must take the greatest care from the initial design of the user experience to the final implementation of its details. Customers notice when a product team doesn’t take the time to take it all the way to the finish line.

How to avoid this failing—Emphasize the expectation that your organization should be dedicated to producing products to the highest standards. Making sure a product goes out with every detail complete should always trump deadlines or any political concerns.

If you want to participate in a survey about your culture, please click here.

Here’s the trailer. Please share.

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

Facebook isn't just a place for friends anymore.

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

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

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

Complete Your Profile.

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

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

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

It works.

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

Follow Companies You Want to Work At.

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

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

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

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

Yelp!’s Facebook fan page where the jobs listing icon appears.

Find Common Interest Groups and Conferences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build Your Network.

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

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

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

Ask Your Friends for Help.

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

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

How to Approach It?

It depends on your situation:

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

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

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

Classic.

You have no idea how much I agree with the post. I wrote a post about this (“Six Reasons Why the Shortage of UI Engineers is Going to Get Worse“) a while back.

Here’s a few excerpts:

The best front-end developers think and talk using design language more than tech talk. To be sure, HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript require some technical skills. That said, most software engineers believe-but seldom say-that JavaScript is not a complex language, and very few stress their knowledge of front-end technologies. More than this, most Engineering organizations reward employees who grow their deep technology skills, not those who excel at front-end development. From a cultural perspective, great front-end developers are typically not part of Engineering's inner circle. Because people improve their skills in areas for which they're rewarded, most engineers are not great at front-end development. They focus on back-end development and their front-end skills atrophy.

…

When they report into User Experience, they'll optimize for the user experience, but if they report into Engineering, they'll optimize their code to meet Engineering's goals. It's that simple. Of course, we believe in forming deep partnerships with our peers in Engineering, and there are some companies where having front-end developers report into Engineering makes sense. However, this is the exception and is the case only in companies whose UX practice is in the top 10% of the industry in terms of UX maturity.

That’s a key point — engineering culture actually has different goals than User Experience, and in result, different goals than the business. That seems kind of backwards, right?

Read the complete article. It’s worth your time.

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

Who’s going to be 4,000?