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:
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?
Sure would be nice if I didn’t have to type in the headline of the article.
You asked for it. I designed it.
The price will be cheaper if I can find someone else to print and fulfill it.
Websites let your customers access your products and services, but as a side effect, they also access your corporate values. If your website is clumsy or slick, easy or confusing, it tells them a story.
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- If a company has a difficult or confusing website, it can mean that they have a confusing organizational structure.
- If a company has hard to use software, it can indicate that there are several politically charged constituencies within the company and each is advocating conflicting requirements.
- If a client’s website is unfocused, full of unnecessary features, and it forces users to enter superfluous information, it can mean that they are unclear on who their users are and have a corporate structure incapable of serving those users well.
Software has become like body language in the way it reveals your inner personality to a patient observer. Your body language always tells the truth, even when you are trying to hide an ugly secret, and it will give you away every time. You simply can’t create likable software if you are a dysfunctional company.
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If you want to improve the quality of your website, app, or software, you need to also improve the quality of your organization. … You need to eliminate the energy drains, systemic distortions, and toxic people that force others to act like corporate drones instead of like entrepreneurs with a vested interest in success.
Amen.
Great post. So true.
A lot of the things we read about usability and UX in regards to web-design can be applied to offline situations and business. Of course the opposite is also true—things we learn offline can be applied online.
On my own sites, I spend time analyzing traffic, audience, click through rates, page views, ad placements, search engine rankings and a bunch of other things, and I try to provide my users with a great experience (hopefully). Needless to say I’m amazed when I walk into a store or a restaurant and think that they must not care about their customers. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder how come the store I just walked in is still in business.
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Lesson #1: If you need to add unnecessary visual cues in order for your users to find their way around, you should probably rethink the whole thing. Especially if those visual cues prove to be ineffective. Your users are not stupid.
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Lesson #2: Make sure customers are happier when they leave then they were before coming into your store. If you can achieve that, they’ll come back. Same goes for the web.
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Lesson #3: Plan ahead! Make sure it’s easy to scale and try to fix problems before they even occur. There is always room for improvement. Always be on the lookout for simple and inexpensive things you can do to provide a better user experience.
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Lesson #4: If you don’t care about your users, they won’t care about you.
And not only because this blog is on it twice. Very happy about this.
Steve was the 2,500th follower.
The George Foreman Grill is on its way, Steve!
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
If you're a UX Designer in San Francisco, ping me at Twitter. I want to add you to a list I have there.
