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:
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?).
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.
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.
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?
There are various reasons why usability problems exist in the first place-some simple and some complex. Identifying problems and recommending solutions is not always enough. Unfortunately, the same factors that cause problems in the first place also hinder their getting fixed. The following are some of the most common reasons why usability problems don't get fixed.
“Identifying problems and recommending solutions is not always enough. Unfortunately, the same factors that cause problems in the first place also hinder their getting fixed."
Seems that we software product managers and marketers are not so different. In fact, we are way worse. If a software company has shipped product for more than 5 years, the product/package/price list probably has 100+ lines, each with its own method of calculating price and with multiple dependencies between items.
And we are thereby annoying the heck our customers. The complexity of our product lines:
- Forces repeat customers to spend time they don’t have researching purchases for products that they already know quite well
- Increases customers’ workload, by preventing them from delegating the purchase
- Makes customers feel like they’re being taken advantage of
- Makes customers feel like they’re not being respected or understood.
Seems like common sense…here’s what Don Norman says:
I found the traditional "white goods" most interesting: Refrigerators and washing machines. The store obviously had the Korean companies LG and Samsung, but also GE, Braun, and Philips. The Korean products seemed more complex than the non-Korean ones, even though the specifications and prices were essentially identical. "Why?" I asked my two guides, both of whom were usability professionals. "Because Koreans like things to look complex," they responded. It is a symbol: it shows their status.
…
Why is this? Why do we deliberately build things that confuse the people who use them?
Answer: Because the people want the features. Because simplicity is a myth whose time has past, if it ever existed.
There’s a certain audience that loves Apple’s pricing model for OS upgrades. And there’s another audience that wants to drive to the price that fits their needs (Microsoft). And they want to be told about every feature that’s in the product, whether they are going to use it or not (Check out BlackBerry’s site if you want a perfect example).
Users want a pleasurable experience, but they want things, as Don Norman points out:
Marketing rules – as it should, for a company that ignores marketing is a company soon out of business. Marketing experts know that purchase decisions are influenced by feature lists, even if the buyers realize they will probably never use most of the features. Even if the features confuse more than they help.
What’s your poison?
Or, Design Your Own Mobile Application With These Nine Easy Steps…
2011 is the year of mobile.
This year is the tipping point that’s really going to turn the World Wide Web into a “platform doesn’t matter” medium. If you’re doing User Experience and you don’t have a mobile app in your portfolio, you’d better get cracking.
We’ve been working on a few applications as prototypes (iPad, iPhone, and Android), and I’m at version 1.1 of Pick An Excuse (finally iOS 3 compatible). I’ve made a few mistakes along the way but have found that designing apps for mobile devices isn’t that difficult.
If you have even an inkling of an idea, you should work on your own application — just for the experience. Mobile applications are just that — applications — aren’t as hard to design as you would think.
I do all my best user research at the local bars here in San Francisco, California. It’s a fairly connected crowd, and there’s always someone that has a device out. They always have an opinion about their phone, because people identify with their devices more so than other technology. Think about it, when’s the last time anyone talked about what television brand they own?
Watching people use devices at Tony Nik’s is one of my favorite pastimes. They send instant messages, answer emails, and check on local restaurants, all while having a Dark and Stormy. Fascinating.
Why?
It’s because of the context. They aren’t sitting at home eating Bon Bon’s while using the phone, they’re at a bar, at a restaurant, at work, or somewhere else. The phone may not be the primary focus of their attention.
The fun thing about it is that all I have to do is ask a few questions, and they’ll tell me everything they love about their device — without having to buy them a drink.
There’s nothing worse than downloading an application that’s overly complicated. I was asked to download an application that did some really cool things, but it required quite a few clicks to get around. It was obvious the developers weren’t optimizing for the user experience and was stuffing as much functionality in the app as possible. Sometimes the best applications do one thing really well.
My advice: come up with something that’s silly or fun and that doesn’t have any profit potential whatsoever. My application is a wonderful conversation starter that compels me to grab people’s iPhones and download the application (and I’ll be doing the same for Android too!).
Additionally, set a budget for how much you want to spend. There’s nothing that makes you want to limit the feature set more than spending your own money.
It’s a phone!
It’s for talking (or texting) to people!
It’s a social device!
It’s connected to the Internet, dammit!
The Pick An Excuse application is extremely social. You can send excuses to friends, share on Facebook, tweet excuses, and send them as texts. Most of the best mobile applications have some kind of social component (Foursquare, Facebook) that allows for some kind of integration and/or mashup.
There’s also a ton of services out there that have almost open APIs that allow you to pull in interesting data. For example, Yelp! allows you to pull in reviews as long as you credit them. Foursquare has a bunch of APIs. There are many ways you can create an application that pulls data from different sources, make it fun, and have it seem complete and polished.
There’s nothing worse than pulling up a website, and you can’t read the small type on a mobile device.
You’re designing for a device that’s not much bigger than the size of a business card. Additionally, Most of the applications that should be designed for it need to be able to be used with one hand. There’s always the other hand holding the device, so designing for simple interactions is they key. Swiping is good, typing is not.
Surfing the web or using an application is a completely different experience. Certain things don’t work. For example, you can’t really hover over things, so you don’t have to design for those interactions. Lots and lots of typing is a pain in the neck on most devices too, so you have to simplify purchasing to the exact information you need. Large websites are a bad idea, because too many clicks mean pages that will never be visited.
The design has to be flexible too (Oh my god, we’re back to multiple browsers! At least most of them are using WebKit), but it’s mostly around the width of the device to make sure things line up.
One of the troubling things I find about a lot of mobile applications is the need to design a “different” user experience. Apple has provided this wonderful library of features, icons and user experience guidelines, and yet I see applications that have icons in a different location and custom actions that aren’t nearly as easy as they should be. Let’s be honest, Apple knows better.
Unless you’re designing a game that requires an immersive experience, using a paradigm that’s different from all other applications means the user is going to have to relearn your application.
That’s not necessarily a good thing.
Apple’s gone to the trouble of producing top notch guidelines that almost guarantee a good user experience. The closer you get to the standards, the better chance you have getting the application approved on the first try (I did). That’s very important in keeping the cost down.
Why reinvent the wheel (and piss off Steve Jobs in the process)?
One of the big assumptions about developing for mobile is that the applications have to be in the iPhone application store to gain traction. It helps, but it’s not true. As the mobile revolution takes place, you’ll see more and more websites that have a separate display for mobile devices.
Granted, most of them aren’t very good now (go to MSNBC now to see an example), but as time goes on, people will get better at designing for mobile.
One of the next applications I’ve been working on is actually a mix of web and native. We’re using the WebKit container to display the content and native functionality for some of the features. It creates this interesting hybrid where you have the flexibility of the web with some of the speed of a native applications. For example, we’re caching many of the images and the CSS.
Even though it’s technically a web page, it looks like a iPhone application.
And that’s cool.
The best thing about the device is that it can connect to the Internet. That means you can mock up the user experience with simple HTML pages, and test it on your phone. Apple has produced a kick-ass guide for developing for the iPhone, and you can replicate much of the experience as you would have with a native application in HTML. You can come up with the idea yourself in rough form, and then show it to a developer when done and say, “Hey, this is what I want built.” There’s nothing better than a visual example.
Mock it up.
Test it with friends.
Repeat.
Because it’s a mockup, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but you have a pretty good idea if it’s going to work or not. That way, you can work out some of the ideas before you get to development, and that will save you time and, most importantly, money.
Here’s my story:
The worst thing about new technology is there are all these small details you have to consider before implementation. I ran into that with the first application I designed, Pick An Excuse.
The implementation went well. I gave them pixel perfect mockups, and for the most part, the implementation went pretty smooth.
And then…
The application was designed for iOS 4, which cut out half of the market. There wasn’t a single iOS 4 feature. A bunch of my friends wanted to download the application, but couldn’t. The application didn’t have a single feature in it that required iOS 4, yet I had to pay my offshore firm to downgrade it.
This was because I didn’t discuss what I wanted exactly at the very beginning. It would have been nice if that was a question I was asked during development, but it wasn’t.
The solution: get a strong technical architect that you can discuss every detail with. Devil is in the details especially in the mobile world. I have one now, and we discuss everything about the experience. He’s great, because he fights for the user too.
Remember, it’s your passion project (and your money).
Have fun with it. Experiment and play, because there’s nothing better than pulling out your phone out at a bar.
Doug Bowman on Design at Google:
Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company (Google) eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. With every new design decision, critics cry foul. Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. "Is this the right move?" When a company is ï¬lled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board.
That data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.
Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.
Part of a great deck. Everyone should download it.
My editorializing — the change in CEO doesn’t really address these comments, because it seem to be inherent in the culture.
41 shades of blue is the wrong thing to test.
In his Alertbox post on "Mobile Usability," Jakob Nielsen points out a number of constraints affecting Web site use on mobile devices: small screens, awkward input, delayed downloads, and poorly designed mobile Web sites. In comparing the design of mobile Web sites with the design of Web sites for computers, I realized that complex context is another important factor that differentiates the two platforms. For Nielsen's report, controlled usability testing in a lab was one of the primary methods for studying mobile usability, so it's understandable that his report didn't consider context.
…
In addition to the four problems Nielsen wrote about, I'll cover design for complex contexts of use in my discussion of constraints on mobile Web sites. In practice, being aware of these constraints lets us approach these problems with caution and come up with better design solutions for mobile devices. Based on my analysis of more than 20 mobile Web sites, I'll point out some ways of working within these constraints.
Great article.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
