Collaboration is key to the UX process, but it becomes increasingly difficult across locations. Working remotely with engineers, product managers and other UX’ers is challenging. Learn how members of the Google UX team work with other offices and team members domestically and internationally to create the best user experiences possible.

Let’s face it: freelancing is pretty great. No more dealing with annoying coworkers or shoveling your car out of a snow drift to get to work. What could be better than being your own boss? Well, at times, not being your own boss! As with every job, there are pros and cons that make up your daily list of responsibilities and obligations. Here is a list of the most common problems freelancers face and how to deal with them.

Read on…

But should they?

That’s a hard question to answer, especially with the ever changing landscape of the industry.

The answer: it really depends on where you live and what you are looking to do. Many employers are looking for jack of all trades, while others are looking for specialists. Some are willing to give up deep skill sets in one area versus knowledge in all areas, or are looking for people of unique skill sets to build teams around.

A UX Designer in San Francisco is going to have a much different working experience than one in Columbus, Ohio because they will be much different companies.

I’m lucky to have worked in both generalist and specialist environments, and to be honest, I like getting my hands dirty sometimes. That includes building prototypes, doing my own guerrilla usability testing, and even throwing in some design to make it high fidelity. Other user experience designers like to focus on specific areas, like user research. It just depends.

If you know something about code, you’re less likely to design something that can’t be built.

The plus — there’s nothing worse than designing a solution that you think makes it really easy for the user, and then the programmers come back to you and say, “Well, that’s nice, but it’s going to take two months and we have only a month.” It’s like designing a car: if you design an engine that’s too big for the frame, the engine design has to be reworked.

The minus — that said, if you get too heads down in the code, you are going to be less effective as a user experience designer. Or, worse, you could limit your imagination and design a solution that would be more effective if you knew less about what was under the hood.

Specialists get paid more, but have fewer opportunities.

The plus — Everyone loves a big paycheck, and specialists are always going to have deeper knowledge of a particular topic. If you’re good, being a specialist means that you’re sought after. I have a lot of experience in e-commerce systems, for example, and somehow manage to improve those user experiences that lead to improved revenue. That’s a skill worth having that will make you valuable just about anytime of the day.

The minus — If they think you are too much of a specialist, it becomes really hard to get a job (“I didn’t know you could do that”), and in a bad economy, the last thing you want to do is fence yourself in. Those that were working in the field during the early 2000′s remember the day when being a project manager or a psuedo-programmer was a good thing. There’s nothing worse than being “just” a user researcher when they are looking for an Interaction Designer with research experience.

Sometimes it’s just about setting expectations.

Pros — Even if you don’t call yourself a specialist, putting a wider net out there for jobs is better because there may be a position that requires several different skills (Knowledge of JQuery, CSS, XHTML and some light design on top of doing the usual User Experience tasks like wireframes). This could translate into where you build functioning prototypes that the developers can use to build the finished product, but during the interview process. That said, I just recently started learning SketchFlow, a wonderful product that’s part of the Microsoft Expression Suite. There’s no way I could have picked it up as fast as I did without some knowledge of other prototyping tools like Flash, Axure and Visio.

Cons — Some skills required for the roles are so divergent that what they are looking for is a unicorn i.e. that one person that knows all of the above, plus ActionScript 3.0, plus .NET. The people that know all of those technologies either are a) getting paid much more than just being a User Experience Designers, b) do all of them poorly or c) are full of shit. You can only be good at so much.

The real answer? Look at the market and act accordingly.

Do what you have to do, and where you want to drive your career to, to succeed. Talk to other designers in the area to get an idea what they are doing. And remember, it’s a changing landscape — that requires some flexibility.

I love the overuse of the word “fuck”.

That’s about right.

Uh, no. Most clients are prepared to really handle a website, and don’t limit themselves to what they are capable of within a budget.

Here’s the first 10 of 72 questions to ask web clients from bonfx.

1. How does your company handle email?
2. Do you need any password protected areas?
3. Do you have the Pantone numbers for your current company colors?
4. Did you take a look at our portfolio?
5. What is your time frame?
6. Is this a brochure site, or a blog?
7. Who is your audience?
8. Do you have any specifications?
9. What are the website addresses of your competitors?
10. How many other companies have you talked to?

Read the complete list here.

Hello,

Someone I work for has a strange enhancement request which I do not agree with, but this person is the boss. I think in my gut, this is wrong.

Website: a user management system for secure student data. Clients are a little paranoid about passwords and user names getting out.

Behavior: when you select a user and want to reset his or her password, the resulting screen shows the user name, but then blanks out the password which you can only see by printing the page.

Blanking out the password seems silly since you can still see it if you print it out. Do people agree this is poor functionality? If so, is there any evidence to support my feeling that this is a bad idea?

I think the writer is smart to be asking for ways to back up his gut feelings about this particular client request. I would agree that the printing of passwords is not best practice, but I’m curious as to why this specific approach is being requested.

I’ve worked with clients who have made suggestions for solutions which didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but upon a deeper dive of their company culture and/or process, I was able to understand why that particular approach made sense to the client. As a consultant, I’m often brought in to solve or address a problem that the client can’t address completely on their own.

So while an outsider’s point of view can be valuable, it’s also important for consultants to listen carefully to requests and understand the underlying reasons for some of those requests. It’s pretty easy to walk into a situation and cite “best practices are xyz,” but sometimes best practices do not make sense for a particular organization. In fact, sometimes the “crazy” approach is the right one, for the right situation and the right company.

But then again, sometimes “crazy” really is just “crazy!”

Just like any profession that’s out there where the people that are being sold to don’t know exactly what they are buying (other than their website or web application is screwed up and they don’t why), there are always rouges selling snake oil, talking about mental models, dancing about personas who know nothing about them, or wouldn’t know how to do one to save their life.

Sometimes it’s hard distinguishing someone who know what an annotation is, and one who knows how to do it right. Rebranding yourself as a User Experience professional after three meetup meetings and an project management talk is a dangerous thing, and I’m sure we all think we are better at what we do than we actually are.

What’s a client to do when vetting firms and consultants?

Since there is no certification process, it just all depends.

Remember this: Selling User Experience is not the same as doing User Experience, and as the field matures, the pretenders will be sorted out.

Ask for the process

If they don’t have example deliverables or some kind of document that shows all the elements they could use in the User Experience process during working with their clients. Remember that not all processes are created equal, but there should be some similarity to the processes of other companies. If there’s no research portion, worry out loud.

If they can’t come back with some kind of list or adequately explain it, especially if you ask some questions like, “So what is the benefit of personas?” or “Should we do wireframes or prototypes?” Either or should provoke some kind of answer that shows they stand for something. If they waffle or give an answer that doesn’t make sense, if might be time to check out.

Ask for case studies

In the end, most User Experience projects should lend themselves well to some kind of case study where the consultant or the agency can show definate results of a product, and how their skills improved the User Experience, either stastically or from better customer satisfaction.

The case studies don’t have to be overly formal, but there should be some kind of walkthrough of cause and effect i.e. agency or consultant did this, and the results increased X percent. Most User Experience firms have several of these with clients, large and small.

Ask for reference clients

Any good User Experience consultant should be a few reference projects that they can show off as something they are very proud of. The pitfalls of software development means that a lof of projects they may have done aren’t as polished, professional or complete was they were set out to be, because either there are development issues, or the client makes a bunch of changes because other business needs, or the site has changed eight times since the User Experience consultant or agency has worked on it.

There should be at least one or two projects that they can point and say, “this is really, really close to what we did, and the client played along,” and that their involvement is more than just selecting a certain color. A lot of consulting firms I know of list all kinds of clients they did work, even if they did work in a completely different field than User Experience. They should be able to list URLs of projects that included significant effort.

Ask for results

The only deliverable that counts is the final product, in most cases or personals are great, but you can’t use them on a website. In the very end there should be some kind of guarantee that what they are going to deliver is going to be a high quality product, but that means giving over a fair amount of control over to them. But remember that they should be paid for their time and services, because there’s a value to their skills.

Seriously, though, that’s what you are hiring them for, right, to use their skills? Specify exactly what you’re going to get as a final deliverable, and what the results should be. That firm should be able to stand behind it. Period.

I was tempted to publish this for Silly Saturdays, but this so accurately describes the Vendor Client relationship I moved it to this category.

Here’s an article that I spotted over at Freelance Switch about landing more gigs. The concise list is:

1. Keep a Polished Resume & Portfolio
2. Write Effective Emails
3. Use Gmail’s “Canned Responses” Feature
4. Personalize and Tailor Your Message for Each Job
5. The Importance of Email Subject Lines
6. Maximize Your Job Search With RSS
7. Extend Your Reach Beyond Local Jobs
8. Persistent, but Respectful Follow-up Emails
9. Don’t Stop Hunting For Your Next Gig
10. Professionalism, Honesty, and Confidence

I can personally vouch for 4 — I had a chance at an interview for a good agency, and the indication I got was I hadn’t included a formal cover letter (a previous email to them had come up with blank content, and I didn’t resend with that note). In times of more applicants with greater experience, clients and companies look for reasons not to look at candidates who aren’t the best fits, and good communication skills are required of any employee or contractor.

Read on…

This was originally published in the IA-55 Meetup list by Ha Phan, an author here at Usability Counts. This seemed good to share:

I would ask questions that probe the person’s ability to think strategically about design. Also important is understanding their process and their role in specific projects.

Here are some sample questions I’d ask a senior UX candidate:

• What is your process for gathering requirements?
• How do you determine or prioritize features and requirements that are to incorporated in the design?
• If there are no user analysis data or personae available, what methods, (if any) do you use to get a better understanding of your end user and to assure that your design meets strategic goals?
• How do you measure the success and failure of your design?
• Please show us a project where you’ve executed the User Centered Process
• In the past, how have you worked with visual designers? Where does UX end and skin design begin?
• How do you address scope creep?

What questions do you think should be added?

What should I look for in hiring a user experience designer?

It is a combination of deliverables and people skills. Not only do the user experience designer have to have the skills to design a solution, he/she must have the skills to sell that solution to multiple stakeholders. Due to the salary levels available to skilled user experience professionals, the market also has become a breeding ground to project managers, bad designers and other people with good sales skills and not much else. This not only creates the “Well, I don’t have much money because the last guy screwed it up”-situations, but this also creates a sense of mistrust of the next candidates. But, when you meet a real user experience designer, you’ll know.

• Look at his/her wireframes. Are they clear? Do they make sense? Can you walk through them?
• Ask to see personae. Is there data backing it up?
• Have them give a presentation. Is his/her thinking structured? Can he/she speak well.

A user experience designer should be able to explain the reasoning behind his/her thinking (e.g. we tested the solution, it’s best practices, statistics backed it up.)

What should I look for in hiring a user experience manager?

Hiring a manager is a much different task than hiring an individual contributor, and the roles require much different skill sets. I’ve seen situations where companies had manager positions open for months, or years, and this happens because there are a few internal team members that shoot down any decent candidates that come in.

Remember, you are hiring for a leader (read: former President William J. Clinton) versus someone that just maintains status quo or screws it worse (read: former President George W. Bush). Managing a set of wireframes is a much different task than managing a group of user experience professionals, all of whom are used to having their own way because that’s the way it’s been.

Corporate culture affects how people manage, so factor this into the type of manager you hire. Joel On Software has a wonderful post about this. I recommend having other managers in the organization interview versus the people that are going to be managed. A senior user experience architect may not realize that the skills to manage people are much different than the skills to build a wireframe and usually don’t judge the candidate accordingly.

The level of candidate may differ, depending on the size of the team. If the team consists of four members, you will want more of a working manager who is more tactical versus one who manages a division of 25. This is because strategy is more important.

Why can’t I find good candidates?

As much as user experience professionals are motivated by pay, they are not necessarily motivated by pay. It could be a combination of several factors, like the type of work your organization does (In one place I worked at we did intranets, — try attracting talent for that — and we were still able to grow the team to 25.), the size of your company or the project lacks integrity.

Outside of pay, what is most important to a user experience professional is the environment, because that is where people are going to be spending at least 40 hours a week. User experience professionals are in the industry of categorizing and judging people’s skill level, so they quickly detect whether or not they are going to do well in an environment.

A few questions to ask yourself before moving forward:

• Do the interviewees get a sense the hiring manager is qualified? There is nothing worse than interviewing with someone who isn’t qualified for the job you are interviewing for, much less being a manager. The hiring manager should be forced to go through questions that are not on a prepared list, because interviewees pick up on lack of experience. There is nothing worse than the a hiring manager who requests, “We’ve had this business problem for six months, solve it in 15 minutes.”
• Are the company politics evident during the interview? In some agencies, the politics are so deep, it is like having two jobs: dealing with the client and dealing with the internal personalities. Some people like that. Think whether or not your company is slow-moving with micro-managers galore, will it turn candidates off?
• Is your company a comfortable place to work at? If you are placed in the back corner or have a cubicle that is the middle of everything, that is not a place you probably want to work. Why expect a candidate to do the same?
• Are the projects interesting enough? Certain people are suited to certain environments. While you might want to attract the best talent, you may not be able to keep them because the work is not fast-paced.

How much should I pay them?

This also depends on what you have to offer and which market you are in. At the end of the day, it is what the market can bear. As the economy recovers, this will change.

If the job can be performed mostly offsite, they might be willing to trade some flexibility for pay. Same goes for a the project is interesting and has a lot of upside. Boring, less glamorous projects may actually cost your organization more to attract talent; because while it is boring, it is also very profitable.

The real answer:

• Look at the market. What costs you $100 per hour in the Bay Area might cost $40 per hour in Omaha. Talent that is also too cheap is a bad sign. Whomever you hire should have the track record to go with the pay.
• Talk to candidates that might be willing to do the onsite/offsite thing. It might not seem like a lot but, in certain metropolitan areas, that two hours of commute each day translates into 10 hours a week, which could be used doing other things.
• Most importantly, construct the job so it fits real-world people. If you are trying to hire senior level people and the pay does not match, good luck. Also, if you have to overpay to get anyone in the door because decent candidates are avoiding you, read some of the tips in previous questions.

Constructing the right team is hard. Take your time with it. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your team shouldn’t be either.

I like the tips even better.

Here are some ways you too can avoid bad clients:

• Thoroughly research your prospective clients before working with them
• Discuss and outline all project details before accepting a client
• Be honest with yourself, and don’t take on new clients out of desperation
• Follow your instincts, and don’t take on clients that give you a bad feeling
• Watch out for catch-phrases, under or over communication, and other potential clues of a bad client

The tools are much easier to use to build websites, and there’s a lot of talent that’s on the market to help you do it. Of course, money will be an issue, but it’s even less of an issue than during boom times. I’m working with a few startups, and there’s a certain exhilaration of creating something  new.

This is something I forgot then remembered going through Startup Weekend LA, and it was interesting seeing the mix of people interact in a creative environment. All six teams got a project out the door, but each with varying levels of quality and efficiency.

There are a few caveats. I’ve been there many times before, and they aren’t all rosy dreams and promises. Startups depend heavily on having the right mix of talent; ideas of cheap, but execution usually isn’t, and it takes more high value people than truckloads of cash.

(Or, ask Microsoft about Sidewalk. Ouch.)

Some of this is written with a company in mind, but many startups now may be just one or two guys in a garage. Really, there is no better time. Read on.

There’s no such thing as first to market

Remember Excite? Web Crawler? Altavista? Shopping.com? Sidewalk?

They were first to market, but they didn’t have a product that was effective as Google. Google was very, very late in the search game. Facebook was late in the Social Media game. Who’s standing now?

Building and growing businesses is also about creative destruction. Products die and rise again. If you have a compelling story and feature set, people will flock to your site like bees on honey. It means you are serving a market that’s under served, and that you’re first to the market with something.

One person that has an idea can be a startup

All you need for a startup is the people with skills that can get it out the door. That means you need can do people that have the right attitude about being hands-on and getting things done, because at the beginning, there isn’t going to be enough money to hire a branding company, or even less to hire writers for the website.

You don’t even need a company structure: you can get it going just enough to start generating revenue, show it off to venture capitalists, and voila, you’re the next Jason Calcanis!

For example, to get a project out the door, the customers (or even better venture capitalists) aren’t going to be looking under the hood of the programming, or much less caring about the perfect user experience; what they will be looking for is a product they can use. Having the right mix of people (for example, a designer, developer, sales person and product person, with a 25 percent emphasis on each) is a great place to start. But it can be just you and a friend — or just you.

How do I know? A new client I just met with. Two people. Internet business, profitable, five years running. And now they’re looking to improve the user interface to increase revenues more.

Don’t hire your friends, it’s bad for business

As the company grows, so does the team. Founders go by the wayside (read: you’ve just been promoted to Director of Special Projects after working 80 hours a week?). Sometimes, the person that really helped out in the beginning can’t help out  later because they don’t have the particular skill set to adequately drive the product or help the company.

Sometimes, founders shouldn’t run the company after the company reaches about 100 people. This is happening with one company right now that I know of, where one of the founders is actually hurting the company.

The end goal in any startup is to get to the right size of the business, and if that means you have to fire friends or let the adults take over, do it. It’s about money, and most founders have a sizable piece of the business where they shouldn’t have to worry about cashing out if the right people are brought in.

Most founders also wouldn’t get hired at their own company, because frankly the people hired after that were brought in for the purpose of building something, while the founders had the idea.

Hire people you trust that can get the job done, but you are disconnected enough to if the time comes, you have to let them go. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t ever work with your friends, but what I’m saying when the time comes, and money’s on the table, there’s a good chance they won’t be your friend.

Do hire people you know and trust

In a startup, someone that isn’t pulling their weight is so obvious, you’ll see complaints for months. If you bring people into the startup, investigate their background throughly, including whether they can handle a startup environment. That means if their last four jobs were with large Fortune 500 corporations with education reimbursement and 40-hour work weeks, they won’t like a startup.

Read their LinkedIn profile, talk to their friends, reach out to the community to see if anyone else knows about them. Remember that you’ll be seeing more of this person for a while than your signifcant other, so if you have to work with them that much, you better be able to work with them that much.

Who has the money makes the rules

If you have reached out to angel funding or venture capital, or one of the founders is funding the project out of their pockets or their parents’ pockets, they’re driving the bus.

In fact, I’m going to make a crazy recommendation: at least one person on your team should be the sales or business development driving force, and they should have a track record to driving deals to completion.

I’ve seen many of company that was driven by the technology team or another team that wasn’t sales related, and that’s just a bad mix: developers aren’t trained in business, and it’s really all about the focus on the customer.

Why?

That person in the startup will be the driving force to getting customers because 1) they will know what the customers want, and 2) their primary, first, only and last concern is figuring out how to build product that actually makes money. That said, the sales person or money person should be reigned in once in a while, especially when proposing features that will help one small client instead of scaling the greater client base.

In any case, you’ll get the occasional stupid feature because the venture capitalist wanted it, or dad with the trust fund it was a good idea. That’s okay, just limit the damage.

Think Harry S Truman: the buck has to stop somewhere.

There’s never enough money, so plan for it

Jason Calcanis sent out a great note earlier this week about money relating to startups (and few know better than him). His key points were, “what ever you have, stretch it.” That means cutting deeply, cutting swiftly, and showing the investors, one of them you, that you’re serious.

There’s this thought process that everyone internet company should be be big, and that, frankly, shouldn’t be the case. He stated in his email that some companies seems to get more done with 25 people than 40. I remember working for Stamps.com when we were at 550 people, and I kept thinking, “There’s too many people here.”

Lo and behold. They cut.

If I had one piece of truth for every entrepreneur out there, this is it: don’t over hire. Focus your energies on hiring people can run as fast as possible, and focus only on the most important features. If you don’t have enough people, don’t build it, because if you hire too many people, you’ll be cutting those people later.

If you really, really need people, hire contractors that you know are going to leave sooner or later. How do you know there’s too many people? You’ll know. When you have four or five non-performers, you’ll really know.

Every startup has a ramp up phase and a ramp down phase to the real business. Startups should be structured and planned accordingly.

Your carpenter shouldn’t be designing the house

While everyone has an opinion about web design, user experience, product management, and other marketing points, that doesn’t make them uniquely qualified to manage a project through 38 iterations of a logo design (except, of course, if I’m the consultant). There’s a reason you’ve brought together the people on your team, and they should be allowed to do their jobs.

That doesn’t mean their shouldn’t be opinion; if you’ve hired some good people, though, ideas that aren’t as effective will be shown as so through discourse and disagreement, and well thought out answers will lead to the path of the righteous product.

It’s about everyone realizing their role in the company and not interfering to a negative aspect other people’s roles. Someone has to be the drummer or the base player, and it just might be you.

There are a few drummers that come to mind (Guy Kawasaki, Ringo Starr, Adam Clayton), and they seem to be doing okay, right?

Don’t build on some exotic platform

Every once in a while, I hear of a startup of that builds on some exotic software platform like OpenLazlo. That platform might have some advantages, especially in a rich media environment, but here’s a couple points to remember:

• If it were so good, everyone would be converting to it. Software likes a good stampede, and while there may be caveats to using .NET and Java, there’s a reason it’s everywhere: there are a lot of developers using it or with experience in it.
• It’s going to be really hard to find developers if the site’s built in Python and Ruby on Rails. Developers love a new technology, and startups are the green field of using it. That means all those maintenance projects using other languages go by the wayside, there are no tools, but there’s this promise of building it really fast. Until, of course, you have to hire more people outside of your circle of friends. It’s a really bad idea to set your sights on a technology that you’re going to be paying developers a premium later.

There’s no harm on developing on PHP if it gets you out the door and beyond, and there’s no harm also developing a site as throwaway code if you know and plan for it.

Focus on features people will use, instead of silly administration tools used by five people once a month

The best thing about a recession and a lack of money is that companies do more research on figuring out exactly what their customers need or the product features that are required to get the project out the door, instead of just throwing stuff against the wall (read: Google). This is because money is tight, and every dollar counts.

If you are building features, focus on the ones that help the greatest number of people — for example, a feature that helps 100,000 people is better than one that’s going to help 100 people once over a year, and it has a lot higher return on investment — because that’s where the value is.

Make a big long list of features, write them up on a whiteboard, and guess (really, guess) how many people will be using a feature, what percentage of the time, and if it can be done by hand.

This could mean going into the database directly to enter information, or relying on less than automated tools. If it’s more of serving a small group of people some manual work that can easily be done, don’t do the feature.

Don’t let perfect stand in the way of good

Thinking that you’re going to have every feature perfect on the first version is an unrealistic expectation; that’s why it’s the first version, and the early versions of most software usually suck (read: Microsoft Windows). That said, that gives you a lot of room to get better, and that should be your goal — do just good enough today to improve upon later. Your users will excuse a few issues at the beginning if you’re upfront with them.

The first rule: work in iterations.

Agile development is an awesome culture for startup development, because the team knows there are going to be areas to refactor, and parts of the software that just aren’t going to be working. Knowing that is a huge release of stress, and allows the team to move forward.

The most important goal should be getting something out there that accomplishes to goal 80 percent of the time, and keep working on it.

Lastly, remember, 90 percent of startups fail, learn from it

There’s a reason only three startup ideas have survived Startup Weekend around the country: most startups don’t see the light of day for all kinds of reasons, mostly because there wasn’t enough thought put into developing the product. That goes the same in the real world, sometimes for not having enough cash, sometimes for having a poor product strategy.

It all depends on your attitude — if you remember that it’s the ride of the lifetime, you can live it and enjoy it. Forget about the money, and remember the joy of creating.

1. “I tried doing it myself, but…”
2. There’s No Real Deadline
3. “Somebody Told Me I Should…”
4. Multiple Points Of Contact
5. “Trust Me, This Is Going To Be Huge!”
6. Repeated Meeting Cancellations

At a time when traders are losing their shirts, Midwesterners are losing their homes, and most investors are tightening their purse strings, Silicon Valley remains its ever-chipper self. Well…sort of.

My company, unlike many, has a sustainable revenue model. We’re doing fine.

Call me a doomsayer, but when you look at the number of non-marketing or business development employees attending networking events, you know something is amiss. Have coders learned to cope with their social anxieties or are they purposely making themselves available to salivating recruiters?

The exit strategy

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark regularly makes the statement, “death is my exit strategy”. Few entrepreneurs and founding team members share the same sentiment. I for instance would like to quit working pre-death in order to obtain the Guinness World Record for peeled grape spitting. My grandfather had an amazing talent for grape spitting in his last days of senility and I’d like to continue on in his footsteps.

In any case, yesterday, after speaking at length with a fairly high ranking CTO about infrastructure, I asked the inevitable question:

Who are you taking with you on your next project?

He replied diplomatically, but he knew exactly what I was talking about. The end is (possibly) nigh. When the engineers start networking in Silicon Valley meat life, you know something is afoot. When planning for a major market crash and layoffs, employees tend to make one of four decisions:

1. Ride out the Storm: Now is as good a time as any to enjoy a steady income and a veritable rent freeze.

2. Abandon Ship for Business School: Now is as good a time as any to get that MBA and quadruple earning power for the next boom.

3. Take Flight to S.E.Asia or Africa: Now is as good a time as any to plunge down the rabbit hole of a developing country after more than 5 years of typing in a homogenous environment.

4. Bootstrap a New Idea: Now is as good a time as any to lock yourself in your home office, collect employment insurance, and launch something you couldn’t work on during your day job.

So you’re Canadian — ah shit…

You know how your company was the one that sponsored you into this wonderful land of typing and unlimited soda? Yeah, that could be an issue. Grad school will get you a student visa, but Uncle Sam is definitely taking care of his own before he gives a handout to us illegals. That being said, you no longer have to be in the Valley to get funding, incubate a company, or gain exposure.

I’ve already featured Boulder-based TechStars, but feast your eyes on our very own homegrown incubator – Bootup Labs.

Based out of Vancouver, land of the country’s first safe injection site, first failed NBA franchise team and where I had my first car accident, Bootup Labs spends 9 months making companies presentable for first round funding. The lovely Rebecca Reeve and I will be planning a party at the end of this month with Bootup Labs cofounders Boris Mann and Danny Robinson. Bring your startup ideas, your beer cozies and your healthy hatred for Nickelback.

90 Percent Of Everything has a great post about this, about placing some skin into the game, profiting off of the results of UX. There are also some dangers, like not every change has an ROI tied to it that’s obvious or evident (or, how do you measure the touch interface changes with an iPhone?).

Read on…

It’s over at Freelance Folder, check it out.

Most clients should appreciate signing a contract; like in Jerry Maquire, no handshake is as strong as oak.

I’ve lost thousands of dollars and a lot of sleep over this. Now with most of the clients I work with, there’s some kind of contract in place. It almost never gets to the details, but usually it ensures there’s some kind of understanding in place of who’s going to do what.

24 Ways has a great post in what needs to go into the perfect contract. Read on. He even includes a sample to use as a starting point.

User Experience at Persona is a cost effective and more produtive alternative to using freelance information architects and freelance user centred designers. A growing number of clients and digital agencies are choosing to work with Persona instead of freelancers and for good reason – just take a look at the points below and if you feel compelled by any of them, give us a ring. Simple.

Send this page as a link to your boss / project manager / HR department and take away the hassle of using freelance IA’s.

I get it.

We’re all evil, we over-bill, we under-deliver and should join agencies right now.

Never mind even with all their resources, they have a freakin’ typo on their site.

Pay for a copy editor, dammit, if you’re so freakin’ successful as an agency, yo!

A few truths across both:

• Freelancers and agencies are always looking toward their next client.
• Good freelancers and good agencies are always overbooked and hard to schedule.
• No freelancer or agency will be a perfect fit for who you need.
• Quality is an issue everywhere — full-timers, agencies and freelancers alike.

There are definite advantages of using an agency versus using freelance information architects (e.g. insurance, not knowing who you are getting, etc.), but the article is pretty much a bash session for freelance user experience folks. This, I find troubling because a) I’m a freelance user experience folk right now, and b) I used to manage a UX group about the size of Persona.

Some of their assertions are incorrect. Regarding rates, there is no way in hell they can charge less than a freelance information architect because they have far more overhead than freelancers do. The approach of trying to save its business is very dishonest to customers and probably will lose them a few clients and, more importantly, resources willing to work at a company like this in today’s free agent economy.

The real truth: as a resource manager, there’s always this game of providing the client with just enough of a resource, even knowing that the resource maybe junior. Quality will always be suspect from an agency, because the people they sell you are always that — sold to you. Scheduling is always an issue, quality of team members is another and even managing the billing is always an issue. Firms bill for services not performed all the time. Who’s fault is that?

Many firms are started by a rock-star user experience expert, or someone who thinks they are, but the expert is never the resource the client gets.

How often does the firm bring in the black belt, super ninja user experience grand poobah? Once the contract has started, a new group has arrived, and the new group can’t even pronounce information architect?

Oh, that was your last project!

When to use a freelancer

• If you don’t know what you’re building. There are so many clients I’ve worked with where they had absolutely no idea where to start. The best way to get started is to bring in one person (exactly, one person) to start work on an idea.
• If you know exactly what you’re building. One of the clients I’m currently talking to is looking at some agencies in addition to me. He’s doing a great job at coming up with a first stab at the application. The owner of one of the firms he was considering was someone who I had managed as a contractor and who had built part of her client list off of the company I worked for. In this case, there really is not enough work to support a whole agency, and it doesn’t make sense to use them when they don’t know the resource, especially when a senior resource is available for less money and can be more or less dedicated to the cause.
• If you have an existing application and development team. Sometimes an application has already been built and needs a number of improvements or another set of eyes. Bringing in someone as a singleton to help guide the team to better results is a great way of improving ROI and keeping costs down. I can absolutely state in this scenario that a good freelance information architect will pay for themselves in improvements to the application, making it a worthwhile choice.
• If you want to control costs. If you have the project management pieces in place and are looking to fill a few specific needs such as wireframes for improving an application, a freelancer is the way to go. This is because you will see a 30 to 60 percent reduction in resources hiring cost. For example, if I bill out at $90 per hour, I’m still going to be cheaper than some of the agencies and development firms that bill out at $200 per hour; and the quality of the work might actually be better.

When to use an agency

• If it’s a really, really big brand and they have oodles of budget to spend. I truly believe in the law of diminishing user experience returns, but sometimes when you get a collective group of people together in one room, or one building, a truly outstanding idea comes out of the group, something off the charts. If the client is looking for that kind of agency experience, that’s great. The same idea could come out of a freelancer; but by the pure number of resources (one), the odds are against it.
• When you need help with project management because you have no one internal to run it. If the project is really, really, really big, working with an agency might be a better idea, because you might need multiple resources, which comes with the overhead of managing all those resources. Working with an agency can mean outsourcing all that management and all the issues that come with it, like handling the hours and such. The only issue to watch for is how the agency manages the project. A plot of agencies that say they have some kind of methodology often don’t. If you want a primer, send me an email.
• When you need the full lifecycle of user experience deliverables. If you have this pressing need to go through everything in the user experience arsenal, than the agency approach might be the way to go. I don’t do every part of the process as well as I would like, and it’s because I don’t have all the time in the day required to be good at it. Parts of the process now, I might outsource to people who I know can do better. The hope is that the agency would have enough of those resources to do it well, but to go through the whole process exceeds my user experience law of diminishing returns.

While I’m getting my stuff together, here’s a great post over at FreelanceSwitch about web design projects that can easily be applied to user experience projects.

Six Valuable Things Web Design Clients Won’t Tell You

• We’re not prepared
• Our deadline is unrealistic
• Getting content from us will be nearly impossible
• We’re not very computer-savvy
• Our expectations are unrealistic
• We’re considering many other proposals

Why?

Seventy percent of all IT projects die an evil death, that’s why.

Not all of them attributed to to poor project management (some of them are because of too many Starbucks runs), but I would guess that it may be a good part of it. You might be the project manager, or asked to be (because most project managers can be used only in larger projects), or just want to know if a project is in trouble, but it’s good knowledge to have in your belt when you encounter typical project situations so at least you can see the red flags.

We are brought in as hired guns to provide one piece of the puzzle, but what’s usually missing is a holistic view, one where all team members understand the scope of development.

Not all team members want to understand, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked on a project and it didn’t come out any where close to the wireframes because of a lack of understanding of what was to be built. It’s partially my fault because I didn’t followup with the developers consistently to force them to communicate, and I think it’s all our responsibility for literally force communication.

The need for project management

As altruistic as we all are, someone’s gotta be running the ship, and that’s were project managers come in. They’re the one that have the target requirements, report status, clear roadblocks, control scope and at the end of the day, know what’s going on. Many times, they are the information architect’s best friend because they work together on what should and what shouldn’t be built.

Good project managers (and hate to say it, I’ve meet exactly one excellent one, and that goes to Carl Bailey, a project manager I worked with on BidRx) can deftly control the client and the project team with efficient and effective communication. Someone has to be held accountable to make sure the project is success, and it’s not necessarily just the project manager; everyone on the team contributes to getting the product out the door, and everyone needs to be sane about expectations.

The reason most project managers get a bad rap is they don’t have an understanding of their role (are more often than not, are too busy covering their own ass). They get the keys to the car, but many times it’s their responsibility for them to actually make sure everything’s running smoothly, and that means doing a lot of tasks that are menial, like writing down information for communication purposes.

Project managers keep task lists, keep track of progress, understand the budget and estimate productivity. There should be some kind of list that documents exactly what’s going on so communication can go in all directions.

It’s art, literally.

The metrics of project management

Here they are — bet you were expecting more:

• Resources
• Time
• Money
• Scope

Most software development projects realistically focus on three, because most projects have no concept of money (or for that matter, return on investment):

• Resources
• Time
• Scope

When managing a project, you can change two at a time — if the scope increases, you either have to add more resources, or add more time — but if you change all three, that’s a sign of a project in trouble. Run, baby, run.

To determine what’s needed of all three, you can either 1) determine the scope up front and decide how much time and resources you need, or 2) determine the resources, and set the scope and time based on this, or 3) determine how much time you have, and build around that. You ways start with one of the variables (we have to deliver something in two weeks or a month), and go from there.

Information Architects have a great influence of scope and do the project manager a great service by cooperating with them on not only focusing the scope, but discussing with developers on ways to limiting implementation time by making slight changes to the scope that don’t have a significant impact on the user experience.

Project Management Methodologies

Now that you have an idea what key metrics of a project are, how are we going to organize the project?

It’s better to start with some process than to have no process at all, because if you have something to fix, you can alter it to best fit the team i.e. change the requirements gathering process to make it faster or generate more documents for clarify communication.

There over a dozen of different methodologies, most with highly paid authors pitching their own, but two come up consistently in today’s environment: waterfall and scrum. The rest are more for elaborate projects with strict development requirements; you can look those up at wikipedia.

Waterfall Process

Exactly as it sounds, waterfall moves through the phases of requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, integration, and maintenance. It’s generally used for big, large implementations of an ERP system, software application packages and games that are burned to a CD or have an executable install.

We’re involved in a lot of these because information architects are viewed as a resource that costs money (true) but sometimes doesn’t provide a lot of value if we’re just hanging around to answer questions (not true).

The pros of waterfall:

• A significant amount of time is spent on a design even before development begins
• Scope is fairly well defined, making it easier to estimate implementation time and hence, the cost — companies working with consultants love trying to control the cost
• It’s phases are easily understandable (I mean Fisher-Price easy, really), and roles are defined

The cons of waterfall:

• By the time you’re done, what you’ve designed might be obsolete or the wrong solution because there wasn’t the opportunity to make changes
• It’s very hard to make changes during the implementation phase
• The amount of documentation to communicate an idea is enormous (i once write 1,200 pages of documentation for a project), and there’s sometimes a disconnect between the requirements gathering team and the implementation team
• Teams are forced into silos, and there has to be an encouragement of communication
• Stakeholders have to wait months, maybe even years, before knowing what they are spending their money on is going to work

I’m not a huge fan of waterfall, basically because I don’t get the feedback loop I need to design a better project, and in many cases the stakeholders have no idea what they are designing.

Scrum or Agile Process

The project management flavor of the month, Scrum is a development methodology that focuses on short iterations (two to four weeks) of development time to produce measurable software results, and a very visisble scope of where the developers are in the process. Scrum works great for web development projects because of the single code base, and the ease most code can be changed.

One of the key components of a scrum project is that while everyone’s working in the trees, someone has to be seeing the forest iterations out, and that’s where the architects and project managers (named scrummasters in scrum) come un; it’s about the spirit and direction of the application, little grasshopper.

Software development teams I’ve seen run Scrum or Agile have had a much better time getting software out the door and get a handle on the process than a waterfall approach (who wants to work to a goal several months out?), and it provides a framework to get started.

The pros of scrum:

• Short measurable results and always a product that can be shown to stakeholders, which results in this constant feedback loop (and I love feedback!)
• Great for small teams fo 10 or less, or breaking up larger teams into smaller teams
• Encourages communication of issues without retribution, but does hold the entire team accountable for the process and the results
• The framework allows for changing the project management process for purposes of streamlining development i.e. throwing out what you don’t need and doing only what you do need to keep the ball moving

The cons of scrum:

• The design process up front is very limited; sometimes information architects have only two to three weeks of analysis time before development is itching to get started
• There’s a lot of re-factoring because of changes
• Architecture? Better have a kick ass architect or it’s going to be a mess
• Costs are not tied to scope but to the time it takes to build the project, so companies are uncomfortable with trusting the development team
• Requires a more mature, senior (and sometimes expensive) development team; the idea of throwing someone under the bus has to be controlled, and there should be someone acting at the architect

I’m a big fan of scrum (obviously), because I’ve run it and seen it work very effectively. But I was working in a small development team, and it really depends on your needs.

Resources

• At the very least, if you need a workshop or an evaluation of how to change your project management processes, contact us at pat@usabilitycounts.com.
• Amanda Abelove in Los Angeles is running a non-profit club called Scrum Club. It’s free public education and hands-on training. Pretty cool stuff.
• Paul Hodgetts, a colleague of mine, runs a consulting group called Agile Logic. They do coaching because just handing over a bible of how it works sometimes isn’t enough.
• Joel Spolsky runs something called the Fog Creek MBA, where they teach you about all aspects of software development, including project management. He’s got an even better article called Evidence Based Scheduling.

We do:

• The normal UX stuff: requirements gathering, wireframes, use cases, etc.
• Section 508 compliance workshops: how do you keep legal heat off your website if people with disabilities can’t use it?
• User Experience process workshops: is your process as good as it could be?

I might be a bit slow about this (I’m taking care of a medical condition), but send an email to pat@usabilitycounts.com telling us what you need. We’ll go to anywhere on the West Coast, and if there’s a contracting job in Vacnouver, Canada, even better.

• Are you solving their problems?
• Is your work memorable?
• Is your offer obvious and clear?
• Should they believe you?

I personally have a three year plan for this blog, and I know it’s a journey, not a destination. It’s about the quality of the traffic for me (and who I want to promote to), not the quantity.

Along the same lines, proBlogger has a great post about the psychology of blogging. Read on…

He made a few really good points that resonate. You should take a job only if:

• If makes you better at what you do
• If it makes you more marketable
• If you can learn something there

The best quote from his article:

Great marketing involves having a great product, and not every job (or every client) is worth your time or attention or love.

One of the things to remember is just because you work from home, that’s not a license to have the flexibility to leave at any minute of the day. You still have to sit down and concentrate on work.

A List Apart has a list of great tips submitted by readers about working from home.

Noise Between Stations has some helpful tips that cover talking strategy with your clients, and in effect redefining the relationship.

Remember what the purpose is. And if you remember why you’re writing your blog (it’s to make money doing other things, like consulting), you’re better off.

Problogger, who actually makes a decent living off of blogging, has a great (archived) post about making money off of blogging through indirect methods. It’s really about having a purpose, yo.

The article is entitled 12 Tips On Improving Work, Life And The Work-Life Balance.

Here’s how I work with clients to help define what they need instead of they want, and I’ve included an Use Case Prioritization Excel Template to start with. It’s simple, and meant to be that way, because long documents aren’t read.

Make a list of use cases that are relevant to the implementation

This is where I always start — what are all the percieved use cases the client needs for system success? When you develop requirements, there will always be additional use cases that will come out of disccusions,  the client’s going to have a pretty good idea of what they need to start with, because they called you, right?

Keep the assembly of this list simple, like an Excel document, and that document would have such fields as the use case, who the use case sponsor is, the opportunity, the cost (do a rough swag on this, and more often than not you are going to be 50 percent off because of unstated requirements), the priority (high, medium, low, or an agreed on numbering system as in the example document), and other notes. The sponsor’s important because like it or not, a CEO’s much more important to the project than a QA lackey.

Rank use cases based on importance

Some of the use cases will be absolutely necessary (i.e. if you are working on SharePoint, editing of pages and user permissions would be an absolute requirement). Some requirements, however, may not be as important, such as localization.

Even if that is a requirement, you can have two stages of implementation, planning for localization as a stub and setting up URLs for this versus a full implementation. Because of this, I would list this as two separate use cases, judging this as the simple versus complex implementation.

The importance should be judged on the opportunity, cost, and whether or not it’s an important feature for launch. One of the things to remember when developing use cases is that some can be accomplished through manual processes, like having the database administrator change data through raw SQL if the task doesn’t happen very often. No feature that has only an impact of making or saving $500 a year should be implemented, period.

Develop the system based on that list

The list is your bible for development, and if you stray from it, the development process goes awry. This list can also change; if you get a few iterations down the path, you can reorder items based on changing priorities of the client (or your project sponsor). Remember, this idea is to keep the features light and iterative so changing requirements don’t mean reordering the whole list or building a completely new system.

Keep track of progress with the list

Sometimes with software development, progress is the invisible path that no one sees. If you use the use case prioritzation list of keep track of where you are at (hopefully with honest developers giving you feedback), both the development team and the client will get a true nature of where they are at. In some situations, several use cases might be co-dependent on the same development components, and that should be noted.

I can already feel it.

It started last year when I began getting interested in analytics, but it’s really transforming. now. I’m not a web analyst, nowhere near. But more and more clients are hiring me to help with product roadmapping. More and more, I’m looking at product design and marketing strategy from a chicken and the egg perspective.

Recently, for several projects, I’ve started with the analytics, the traffic, the market research, search volume, then work backwards to define the solution, the return on investment. So I have the egg, I have to figure what kind of chicken lays that egg.

Usually, clients will build a solution, then develop campaigns to drive traffic to it, but lately, I’ve been getting projects that are reverse. It’s not, “If you build it, they will come.” It’s more like, “They’re here. Now build something that they need.” I’m not just designing some test feature. I’m designing actual new sites with little more than a domain name as a requirement.

My role initially, is to conduct excersises with my client to clearly define the following:

1. Market sector
2. Value proposition
3. Business Objectives
4. Strategy and brand for the user experience
5. Marketing Strategy

After this excersise, my goal is to have a mission for the user experience, because a deep user experience will brand the solution. At heart, I’m still an interactive designer. It’s what I love to do. But building a sound business foundation for your design is critical to its success. If you don’t do this, then if you build it, they will not come.

Here’s a few tips to get started without spending a lot of cash:

Don’t spend a lot on new computer equipment

Clients don’t care about shiny, they just want the job done, so a lot of times it’s better to bite the bullet and use what you have before making a big investment in the latest and greatest. Look for services that are more expensive than owning, but less of a cash outlay up front until the cash flow kicks in. Ironically, some of the web-based services are more expensive and more time consuming than real-world based services.

Start a blog

You should start one before you have to hit the pavement because it is personal branding, but one of the great things about WordPress (the blog software this blog uses), it’s free, it’s an excellent content management system for small websites, it’s easy to use and very easy to install.

Even if you don’t have a webhost, many of them, including Dreamhost, have wonderful one-click installs and upgrades that are easy, and Dreamhost is cheap — around $120 a year for as many domains (read blogs) as you want.

Get business cards

When you’re going to all those wonderful events, you need something to hand out, right? VistaPrint does a great job of providing four-color business cards from either a set of templates or a design you provide on your own, and they deliver them in a resonable time. It’s cheaper than Kinko’s, and you can design them in your shorts (while you’re enjoy your unscheduled vacation.

Look at the market

Craigslist.org is a good starting point, because there are a ton of jobs on there that can get you some quick cash. We’re not saying you should be doing websites for $50, but you can at least gauge what the supply and demand is for what you do, and plan your search for gainful employment accordingly. Going after gigs on some of the freelance sites is more successful than you would think, and it’s free.

Price your services accordingly

If you have to work 40 hours a week as a consultant to match the same hourly rate as a full-time employee, don’t do it. You should price your hourly rate at least 30 percent higher than what a full-time employee makes to take care of all the benefits and other things you have to do yourself.

You also need to leave yourself time for marketing your services — if you have to work 80 hours a week to make ends meet, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Figure out your value proposition

If you’re just another counter person at a fast-food restaurant, you don’t have much value other than how they train you. What makes you special? What’s work that you enjoy?

I’m not saying go out and start a second career, but something along the lines of what you are currently doing, especially if you’ve been doing it for a while, would be your best bet. There’s always something in your resume that makes you stand out from your competition.

Cheers.

Whatever you do to reach your target audience for consulting, it should be something fun, interesting, and have a personal touch. It’s not just about handing out a business card, it’s more about personal branding, making them notice you, and it doesn’t have to be overly expensive, but it should represent what you are trying to get across.

For example, the bright green on this site isn’t particularly attractive — a few people have brought up the point that they hate it — but people remember it, just like they remember the Google home page, or the eBay logo. Sometimes, branding is about generating conversation. Just today, I received the cards for the site, and they are also bright green, matching in the most obnoxious way. They might not like my card, but they’ll remember my card.

Truly creative and innovative creative directors don’t just send a resume, they send a package of who they are, and what they can do for a company. Anyone can send a resume, right? I’ve heard to people sending reels that were hilarious. They may have missed the point, but they get noticed.

What are you doing to brand yourself?

Read on…

I’ve had this disscussion a few times with companies, sometimes with lawyers involved because of faulty NDAs and other work contracts, and the result was a common sense three point discussion as listed below. Non-disclosure and non-compete agreements are a different topic, which I’ll probably cover at some later point after a hard drinks.

This is a quick guide to the topic.

If you work for them as a full-time employee, they own the work and the copyright

For example, if you are a programmer, and there’s a bunch of this nifty code that you’re writing up, and you want to use it on your own application, there’s a good chance that you could get sued or cause a lot of problems at your work. Since most of us are on laptops nowadays, even using their equipment to design and build puts you at risk, and I would recommend that you do any of that work on your own time and on your own system.

Some companies, like Apple, go so far as emphasizing that even during your off time they own your ideas (for the chance that you are going to solve world hunger while watching Letterman), so if you are working for one of those companies, it might be a good idea to limit your ideas to sleeping. The smart companies discuss plans for you to profit off of those ideas in a business startup environment.

If you work for them as a contractor, and you haven’t signed a work-for-hire agreement, you own the work and copyright, are giving them implicit license to use it

Wikipedia has a great article about work-for-hire, but the best description I can think of is this: If you develop this new system that solves world hunger, and you develop this system on your client’s dime, there’s nothing stopping you from selling your system that solves world hunger down the street, and even more so, your competitors.

If you have designed something that is really cool, and you want to protect it, I recommend that you register it with the U.S. Copyright Office even if you don’t intend on reselling it. It’s more to protect yourself from the client.

If you work for them as a contractor, and you have signed a work-for-hire agreement, they own it

Signing that agreement gives them all copyright ownership to it and the right to control whatever you do. Smart consulting and development companies make you sign this contract. For most applications, signing one of these agreements isn’t that much of an issue because, frankly, what we do probably replicates some business process or application that isn’t terribly unique, so even if we were to own the copyright, it wouldn’t really matter, because it applies specifically to that work.

However, if there was something you invented that was unique and valuable as a business process (and I don’t mean inventing a shopping cart), you could patent it, and prevent others from using it only if you haven’t signed the work-for-hire agreement.

If you have any questions, speak with a lawyer

there are many experts in copyright and patent law that have much knowledge than I do, and if you are working on an idea that’s got a lot of potential, it’s best to talk to them. the money is worth it.

They approach you about joining their start up, and they have money sticking out of their pockets, just waiting to be given to you as a (gasp!) full-time employee where you can enjoy in the fruits of their idea that’s going to stop traffic and replace sliced bread as the next great invention.

As soon as you take off the rose-colored glasses, start ups are not all they are cracked up to be. I’ve been connected to a few of them, and they are your basic kill-your-own, do-it-yourself places where nothing is set up correctly, from the office cubicles down to the process of developing software. If you need structure, this isn’t the environment for it.

Here’s a few things I’ve learned over the years, some of them I learned by turning down jobs, some I learned through painful first hand experience. Start ups can be rewarding, at least what you learn, and maybe financially. Here’s a few tips.

Make Sure They Have Money

Very few businesses make money right away (we’re talking one in a million), so there needs to be some runway time to execute the idea. Whatever money they have, they probably need double to do it right, and most venture capitalists intentionally don’t give start ups enough money just to see how resourceful their management is, or to see how dedicated they are in making the idea work.

Make Sure They Have Money To Pay You

What that means is even if they have a decent sized budget, if they are offering you the low base salary and the high percentage commission or bonus (or a high number of stock options), the start up probably doesn’t have enough money to pay you.

If you do decide to join a start up with a high upside, get whatever agreement you have with them in writing, and pay for a lawyer to review it. Have them poke holes in it, just to make sure that you are going to get rewarded for your time, because you are going to be spending a lot of your time on their idea.

If they offer you something low, and they’re not going to show you a list of what everyone else is making, there’s a good chance they are low-balling you.

Make Sure That There’s A Market For It

There’s nothing worse with coming up with this really great idea, and there’s no market for it. Or they come up with this really great idea, and the market’s too crowded. Or they come up with this great idea, and you have three friends that have worked with start ups that have had the same great idea, and all three of their start ups have failed for the same general season.

Unless you’re Apple (and let me tell you, the idea for the iPod was not original), there are no more original ideas, just a twist or two on existing ideas. Having competitors that are profitable in the market is a good thing, because it proves that the basic idea works, and can make money.

Make Sure The Idea Can Work With A One Percent Penetration Rate

Really, really, really big ideas take really, really, really big bank accounts, so whatever idea they have should be reflected in the amount of money they have to spend. Even if they have the money to spend, there should be some thought put into, “will this idea work with a smaller market penetration rate.” If it can’t, or you don’t think the company can be made profitable if their penetration is half of what they are projecting (and they should be doing some market research, regardless), it’s time to run the other way.

There’s no shame in working for a smaller start up that’s poised to be a double instead of a home run, especially if the team is smaller, and you see a larger portion of the riches.

Make Sure The Team Can Execute

Look at the team you’ll be working with — do you think they can execute? There’s nothing worse than working for a startup that has a few people that just can’t get it done, because that affects everyone’s bottom line. Additionally, most startups have friends of the founders they wanted to give jobs, but aren’t qualified to do those jobs. If you don’t think the team can execute, it’s not the right startup for you. There’s always the good first impression, but be realistic: can they get the job done and ship product?

Make Sure You Share Their Vision

There’s nothing worse than joining a start up, and finding out three weeks in you share a completely different philosophy than the founders. And you know what? No matter how much you are right, it’s their baby, and until the VC’s come in and replace them, it will still be their baby. Like any corporate environment, if you don’t share the vision (read this account of what’s going on over at Facebook), you’re going to be uncomfortable the whole time.

When you’re uncomfortable, it’s worse when you are working 60 hours a week, trust me.

At the end of the day, it’s just a job, maybe one where you can make a lot of money, but the reason they want there is that you can make a lot of money for them, and it will only flow downhill if they value your skills.

This is not out of the ordinary, really. It’s just part of being a consultant.

Projects never come in a steady rate. It’s either feast or famine. When times are good, you juggle multiple projects. You have to be able to switch gears from one moment to the next; all the requirements and production issues competing for attention in your head.

So why don’t I just turn down work?

I never turn down projects where:

• The team is stellar
• I have a chance to learn something new
• There’s an opportunity to develop a new relationship with a high profile company.

When you work for yourself, every relationship, everything you do is a business development opportunity.

Hearing all this talk about my crazy life as a consultant, most people would say why I do it. I don’t mind working hard as long as I’m learning. The money is good, but it’s not about the money for me. The sole reason why I am a contractor is because I own my time. I can work really hard when it counts. When there is down time, I can truly give my brain a rest, have the luxury of researching creative solutions, and not dwell in bureaucracy land. Or I can just take two weeks off without filling out a vacation request.

I believe that you have to work hard to be lucky. It’s a lot like karma.

Good Experience has a great read on writing a book, and all the things no one tells you when you do it. Seth Godin also has some tips.

Smashing Magazine has an article on this too, but here’s a few truths to live with:

The clients don’t always pick the best design

The design you are presenting might be something rich and inviting, with all the bells and whistles you throw on there. The other design might be something clean and sharp, but not exciting. Not exciting sells, especially in certain less progressive environments, like governments or large corporations. The stakeholder or final decision maker probably isn’t a designer, so they really can’t tell the difference between rich and not rich, just what they like or don’t like. Some of the sites I’ve designed I hate, but the client loved, because it hit their target audience.

The clients are influenced by a local designer

There’s nothing like being there in person when showing off a design, and if you can’t do this, you’re already at a disadvantage — you can’t discuss some of your motivations for doing a particular design, or taking a particular angle. Sometimes you are set up to fail from the very start, and it’s best to recognize it and put your best foot forward, even if you know you aren’t going to be the winning design.

Sometimes the best design isn’t the most usable design

When I was working at Escrow.com, eBay was one of our partners. We redesigned the user interface of the site, and on every iteration, we made it look more like eBay. On every iteration, revenue increased. As much as the user interface designer I worked with hated it, we had to keep going that way. Many users might consider eBay one of the ugliest sites on the web, but when revenue rises, you keep going that direction. If you don’t, you are ignoring your users. Follow the obvious roadsigns.

Design is subjective

Totally true, but the best argument I’ve set for some of the clients is, “let’s try some A/B testing.” If it’s a simple website, and the site gets a fair amount of traffic, you’ll know quickly which design works better. Changing the colors of certain buttons in a design can affect the conversion rate. As much as you would like to tell the stakeholder they aren’t the audience, sometimes it’s best to do just that by involing end users.

• And cause I was a gazillionaire, and I liked doin it so much, I cut that grass for free.
• I’m not a smart man… but I know what love is.
• Stupid is as stupid does.
• When I got tired, I slept. When I got hungry, I ate. When I had to go… you know… I went.
• Momma always had a way of explaining things so I could understand them.
• I gotta save Bubba!
• Jenny taught me how to climb. And I taught her how to dangle.

Click here for the full list.

It also pays well. Very well.

A lot of consultants want to work on only the most exciting projects, where I’m trying to angle for less exciting government and corporate clients, because they have work no one else wants to do. Smart consulting companies do well with these clients, because they aren’t competing with many other clients.

For example, tons of agencies pitch websites for Paramount movies.

Few agencies or firms pitch intranets at Paramount because, well, it’s boring. No one’s going to see it. Yet, on my company’s client list, we list Paramount as a client, and our work may be more important to Paramount than a website for a single movie.

The website for the movie has to be built only twice.

That intranet for Paramount goes on forever.

However, travelling for work usually isn’t as enjoyable as it would seem.

If you think it’s all globetrotting, here’s a few truths:

More often than not, you are going to go somewhere that isn’t so much fun.

I’ve been to New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Anchorage, Seattle and Boston for work trips, and I even moved to Philadelphia and San Francisco for short periods of time. However, the inbetween trips included Wisconsin (not so bad), Phoenix (I’ll pass) and the yawn of all yawns, Connecticut.

How bad is Connecticut? I asked a co-worker what was fun to do there, and he said drive to New York.

I’ve been to Alaska in winter, Chicago in zero degree weather, Sarasota in 100 degree weather. Which would you pick?

You never get to choose where you get to go, and sometimes, it’s not the vacation spot you would want it to be.

More often than not, the hotel you picked isn’t going to be a bed of roses.

The Howard Johnson I stayed in Alaska, which was a scramble spot because all the hotels were booked, had all of the excitement of the Bakersfield bus station at $170 per night. I can’t say enough bad things about the Westmark in Anchorage, and there’s a Red Roof Inn near Shelton, Connecticut that was better served as a drug dealing spot than a hotel.

Occasionally, that flight you picked won’t get there on time.

Do you really want to spend four hours in Sea-Tac? How about six hours at Atlanta-Hartsfield? The best way to describe the experience of flying across the country is to watch the first 30 minutes of the movie Fight Club. I have a list of airlines that I’ll never fly again (America West was at the top of the list), and a list of favorites, but there’s always delays.

Travelling is hard on your health.

Where are you going to eat?

It’s probably going to be a decent restaurant, but all the food has to go somewhere, and it’s not nearly as healthy as eating (and cooking for yourself) at home. Depending on your company’s travel policy, stretching the dollar so you aren’t eating at a Denny’s or your hotel’s breakfast buffet is sometimes tough.

This is in addition to usually having to fly on a day off and getting up early to catch a flight that usually has at least one or two layovers before you get to your destination. There’s the usual sleep deprived moments

The clients are usually pretty cool.

I don’t know why, but every time I’ve done the traveling thing, the clients were grateful to be paying consultant rates plus travel expenses for us. I’ve always been treated much better traveling out of state than at local clients (go figure), maybe because they are paying more for your services.

From my experience, the best products don’t come from one individual or department. Rather, it takes an iterative process with input from various angles of expertise. Even if a forward thinking manager proposes a scrum approach, it becomes like a begrudging behavior change and not a true conversion in attitude. This type of situation can be volatile for a consultant. You have no idea of the political landmines you’re walking into or whose toes you’re stepping on, and those with crushed toes are too willing to throw you under the bus.

So what’s a consultant to do in these situations?

• Do your homework. Conduct careful analysis and research to justify your design decisions, because they will drill you and throw you under the bus. Get ready to be roadkill!
• Provide the service you were paid to do and sidestep the politics.
• Be a consumate professional, but speak your mind. There’s a reason why you were hired. I am known to be very direct and I believe companies hire me for my brutal honesty.
• Have a sense of humor. Sometimes humor is needed is to buffer egos from constructive criticism and makes for easier negotiation.

Don’t expect that your design will prevail in the end. Realize that you may just be the catalyst that change the process. When in doubt, tell yourself, “At least I don’t have to work here full time. At least I’m not institutionalized.”

Pros:

1) The variety of projects makes the work interesting and keeps you on your toes. You never work on one project at one time. You juggle multiple. You learn the nuances of many different kinds of technology and use models.

2) You sharpen your ability to think strategically in your design approach as well as selling your ideas. Since you are presenting your work to new stakeholders on a regular basis, you must justify design decisions with usability goals, business objectives, and/or metric indicators. Everything you put out there has to be polished and your best work. It’s like being a new employee every couple week and you have to prove yourself to a new set of bosses.

3) You learn to work and adapt with many different organizations and teams. Every organization has a different working style and organizational structure. That affects communication and approvals. This requires that you are quick on your feet, since you’ll be constantly drilled by clients. Even when they love what you do, they still drill you.

4) You become a walking encyclopedia of the best on the web. Because of the variety of projects you are exposed to, regular research and analysis are part of the job, even when you are not on the job.

5) Shorter time lines means quicker decisions and launches. After working at an agency, I get impatient at how slow decisions are made and how long it takes in-house groups to develop.

Cons:

1) Lots of pressure to always deliver the best work. When large companies pay tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars, they expect you to bring your A game and think outside the box EVERYTIME, so the pressure is intense.

2) A shorter time line and finite budget creates pressure to be extremely efficient. Agencies make their money by being billable, therefore most of your time should be billable. There’s little down time to try out different ideas. Also, when companies hire an agency, they need it done yesterday, so you’re expected to be super creative at breakneck speed.

3) Pay is not as good as working for a large corporation with an in-house group.
I no longer work for an agency, because now I can charge more working for myself. However, I think the experience is valuable. I’m so glad that I did it. Best learning experience I ever had.

• Consulting outside their area of expertise.
• Believing that as a consultant they are also a coach.
• Believing they know more without ever hearing the client.
• Believing their client is nodding because they understand, and wanting to appease the client instead of helping the client.

I would like to hear experience and suggestions on how to work with non-creative management and/or clients, and how to design without requirement document, and how to work with someone who don’t know or don’t want to follow creative process due to time and budget restraint or lack of understanding of the importance of following the process.

Good question. Usually, I say “run”. One of the readers referred to this post, which is really good.

They list questions you should ask as such:

1. Will I or my team be allowed to bring our best work to the final result?
2. Is the client prepared to engage in the project appropriately?
3. Is the client prepared to begin this project?
4. Is the client prepared to invest trust in my or my team’s ideas?
5. Am I or is my team prepared to fulfill or exceed the project requirements?

If you can’t get to those five with the client, it’s not going to be a fun project.

Usually the clients like this fall into two camps:

• Clients with money
• Clients without a lot of money, or don’t want to spend money

The clients with money track is easier, because at least you can educate them and get paid for your time. I’ve worked in environments where the client just wanted to build something, anything, and didn’t really have a concrete idea of what they were building.

It’s difficult because at some point there has to be an established finish line, but that doesn’t happen overnight. But if they are willing to pay for it, you can eventually narrow down the requirements to where all parties are happy if the client allows themselves to be managed.

The reality? In this situation, a bad client is sometimes better than a good client for the pocketbook, because the project is guaranteed to go over budget because the requirements aren’t defined well or in a buildable fashion, or the project isn’t scoped correctly. The other reality is that working with that client will damage all relationships, and that client will never be a good reference.

The clients without money? Don’t even bother. Those clients are more difficult, because they don’t want to pay for anything — requirements, wireframes, design. They usually figure the developer should be able to do all those roles, and whatever doesn’t fall under development should be a pre-sales exercise in their mind.

• Not delivering
• Involving himself in the customer’s company internal issues
• Not listening
• Thinking the project might last forever
• Not thinking to learn for the next project
• Thinking it’s over when he leaves the customer

I’m going to go one further: sometimes it’s about a lot of small features instead of doing one large feature.

Example: when I was working at Escrow.com, the application was receiving a lot of bad reviews by the users, and the customer service department was working 20 or so overtime hours a week. I did an analysis of the customer service emails, and found that a full 20 percent of the emails and calls were related to the URLs in the emails — they were too long. All we had to do was design shorter URLs.

Two days of work by the developer, and in three weeks, the overtime was gone.

Over the next few months, we did a lot of small changes, like rewriting the customer service emails, making small improvements in the application, making small user interface tweaks. None of them took more than a couple of days, but over the long haul, we saw month to month improvements in both conversion rates and revenue generated. The return customers doubled, because they found the site to be easier to use.

This was all done without spending any marketing dollars.

We did do a redesign four months later, but the design was based on the small changes and user feedback collected from emails and focus groups selected from our more frequent users. They told us to make small changes, because it was the details that made it a better user experience.

Think small, then big. If you have to think big, there should be a big reason to justify it.

What are your success stories?

• Not doing your homework: proactively learning about the client, their business, etc without expecting them to give you all of this info.
  
• Not building trust, don’t assume you already have it.
  
• Forgetting something the client has told you.
• If you are on a consulting team, not being on the same page with your team members, or playing good cop/bad cop.
• Not being prepared for meetings, even to the smallest detail.
  
• Wasting a client’s time when you could have gotten some answers on your own, through combining meetings or doing additional research.
• Not educating the client as you go along.
  
• Acting like a robot, not acting like a person they might actually like.
  
• Not keeping good communication, status information, etc.

The conversation went a little like this:

“Bob (I won’t hide the names of the innocent), you aren’t charging enough.”

“But I want my services to be affordable, and I want the right kind of clients.”

“What are the right kind of clients?”

“Clients that will value the services that I provide, I want them to show up to appointments, and work on their personal health.”

“But do you really care if they are about their personal health or not? Isn’t it more profitable to take clients with health insurance, instead of providing services to only those that don’t want to go through their insurance?”

“Yes, but those clients cost more because of the paperwork, and a lot of those clients don’t really appreciate the services. They just want the massage, and won’t take steps to help themselves.”

He’s taken a step to providing services for a particular market segment. He might not make as much money, but he’s carving out a niche in his market that he hopes will make him successful in the long term.

That’s a decision that we all have to make at some point — I’ve tried the “lower price, to build a relationship” route, and in my experience in the tech industry, it doesn’t work. My feeling is that those are the same people that will threaten to take their business to China or India or somewhere else, and they’ll never be happy, so I choose to stay in a high priced category. Because of that (whatever rate you are charging), the clients seem to value you more because they know they are paying a higher rate.

Whatever you do, all successful businesses pick their target audience — not trying to be everything to everyone. Apple does it. Microsoft does it. MySpace and Facebook do it. Why should you?

Thoughts, comments?

Just gathering requirements is a bad idea. Advising on requirements is a better idea, because that’s how you add value.

Sure it’s like herding cats, but the reason many consultants are valuable is there’s some wonderful insight that they may have, however small it may seem, that adds phenominal value for the client. That’s why they are paying consultants what they do.

How so? We start the conversation about what the direction should be, even if it’s the wrong direction at the start. One of the essential points that the article makes is that in many cases, the customer has no idea what they want (a car), and what they may get may be anything from a Hummer or a Prius.

Our job is to ask questions that will lead to developing a better product, and not necessarily questions that lead to what we think the product should be. Many scenarios, it’s impossible to satisfy all parties, because they may ask for a car that is great for the environment (the Prius) and can run over people (the Hummer), because the requirements are conflicting. Our job is to find the best solution, not the solution that meets the needs of everyone.

Or what do they say — trying to make everyone happy will make no one happy?

I asked this question over at LinkedIn (I’ve grown to like the site, and it really is a powerful networking tool). I’m going to publish some of the answers every week, and you can respond to them, or not. Sometimes the answers will repeat — my apoligies. I will give credit where credit is due, and I’m going to try to live by some of these.

This was submitted by Chelsea Wyatt:

• Having no respect for the organization’s knowledge and expertise
  
• Applying typical solutions or software packages without accounting for each organization’s specifications, needs, hierarchy, culture, and business processes
• Not being ‘present’ at meetings (i.e. e-mailing, texting, and generally not paying attention, especially in front of the client)
• Having internal conflict or questioning a colleagues’ or project managers’ decisions in front of the client
• Extending a project (scope or timeline) and not telling the team or key organization representatives
• The all consuming cardinal sin: Inadequate resources! Especially not staffing a project correctly, as it’s truly all about the people.

Attached is a list of 12 cardinal sins in ERP Consulting, her prior field.

I asked this question over at LinkedIn (I’ve grown to like the site, and it really is a powerful networking tool). I’m going to publish some of the answers every week, and you can respond to them, or not. Sometimes the answers will repeat — my apoligies. I will give credit where credit is due, and I’m going to try to live by some of these.

This was submitted by David Coerchon:

• Not delivering
• Involving himself in the customer’s company internal issues
  
• Not listening
  
• Thinking the project might last forever
  
• Not thinking to learn for the next project
  
• Thinking it’s over when he leaves the customer

I asked this question over at LinkedIn (I’ve grown to like the site, and it really is a powerful networking tool). I’m going to publish some of the answers every week, and you can respond to them, or not. Sometimes the answers will repeat — my apoligies. I will give credit where credit is due, and I’m going to try to live by some of these.

This was submitted by Anurag Purohit:

This is a piece by a former Accenture consultant that I often use to set the basics right. These are the things a consultant can do right. Conversely, not following these basics will land consultant in a soup:

• Always travel on your own time, not client time.
• Always dress one notch better than client’s do. Dressing the same or worse than clients is sure to draw unneeded attention to you.
• Concise, frank, honest communication will win more client loyalty and referrals over time than evasion, obfuscation or avoidance will ever net.
• Never accept work that is unnecessary or work you are not qualified to complete. Smart consultants stick to their core competencies.
• Always keep the big picture in mind. Just because the arrangement letter says one thing, doesn’t mean you should blindly follow it.
• Always be a diplomat. I try hard to understand everyone’s viewpoint but, in the end, when the CEO or client sponsor wants to know my findings, I have to give them. I state the facts. I give clients facts and unless specifically asked for my opinion, I stick with positions firmly supported by cold hard facts. There are, though, good, bad and better ways of breaking news. Great consultants think about the delivery as well as the content.
• People are always in the heart of every project and great consultants learn to make the most of them.
• Solid ethics are not situational. Just because some businessmen get ‘massages’ during lunch in some countries, that doesn’t make it an appropriate behaviour for you to embark upon.
• Always seek second party review. No one can come up with 100% of a great idea by themselves. Always socialize new ideas with colleagues.
• Lastly, always travel in business attire.