Help! I need somebody… March 8, 2012

My company, Digitas Health, is looking for some help.

We need an entry-level Interaction Designer/IA/UX to work on a platform project for a key global client.  The successful candidate will be trained on iRise, a state-of-the-art prototyping and specification tool.  This is a great opportunity for an energetic, talented, and passionate designer.  Full job description below.  If you are interested in working in our Philadelphia office, contact me directly or leave a comment below.

JOB TITLE:  Interaction Designer

DEPARTMENT:  Creative Services

JOB SUMMARY:

The Interaction Designer works closely with clients and agency team to intimately understand user needs, advocate these needs throughout the project development cycle. The methods and tools used to provide this support and advocacy include:

• developing functional design documents and iRise prototypes (iRise visualization software training is provided with this position)
• planning and performing user research
• executing usability testing

Additionally, the Interaction Designer acts as a strategic partner within the agency, supporting ideation activities and creating infographics for projects and prospective new business.

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Create and present user experience solutions to internal teams and clients through sitemaps, wireframes, iRise prototypes, flowcharts and functional specifications.
• Identify user needs, values, and mental models and develop representative profiles or personas.
• Quickly understand and refine client strategy and develop content and functionality that meets both client objectives and user goals.
• Collaborate closely with copywriters, visual designers, and programmers to design the user interaction model, information architecture, and user interfaces.

SKILLS & EXPERIENCE:

• Bachelor’s degree required; any of the following areas strongly preferred: HCI, Interaction Design, Industrial Design, Computer Science, Media Studies, and/or Graphic Design.
• 1-3 years of experience developing interactive web sites and applications as information architect or interaction designer.
• A good understanding of user-centered design principles. Must be able to demonstrate an understanding of interaction design process and skills.
• Ability to provide interaction-design and usability insights on projects.
• Experience on site development projects, developing sitemaps, wireframes, flowcharts and functional specifications.
• Experience with user experience research, both to uncover user needs and to test interaction design solutions.
• Experience interacting with marketing, research and technical clients.
• Understand how to use and effectively incorporate interactive technologies.
• Expert knowledge of MS Office and Visio or other design software.
• Working understanding of interactive front-end technologies (i.e. HTML, JavaScript, Flash, CSS, DHTML), browser and platform constraints.
• Good understanding of common back-end technologies and platforms.
• Pharmaceutical and Healthcare industry experience a plus.
• Prior experience in an integrated marketing communications agency desired.
• Uncompromising attention to detail.

Note: This job specification should not be construed to imply that these requirements are the exclusive standards of the position. Performs other duties (or functions) as assigned.

Be the “1” December 12, 2010

So what does any of this have to do with UX? 

Everything.

UX professionals, for the most part, are the darkly shaded area on a Venn diagram of technology, marketing, visual design, strategy, editorial, and research professionals.  Ours is the language of translation, enabling the capabilities of a technology to deliver meaningful content in an elegant presentation to the right audience in a way that drives revenue for the client.  On any given project, there might be eight or more disciplines contributing…and there’s still only one ball.  Somebody has to make it work.

There’s no formula to it, either.  Watch the great point guards of the game…Stockton, Magic, Nash, Kidd…they all had very different styles that were suited to the players around them.  And that’s the real point of this article; the way to be successful in a team environment is not to focus on the skills you have, but to use your skills to make the people around you successful.

Face it, the behind-the-back pass is no good if your teammate isn’t expecting it.  Some guys like to get the ball on their left, some prefer the right, some like to get a bounce pass while others prefer a lob.  In basketball, it’s all about knowing the skills and preferences of your team within the context of the play.

In the UX world, it’s less about the back-screen and the pick-and-roll than it is about understanding the way each collaborators skill contributes to the experience.  It’s important to use your skills and experience to make the technology meaningful, the content accessible, the campaign valuable…without impeding the progress of your teammates with stifling best practices and limiting design principles.  Too sharp a focus on the integrity and quality of your own work can work against you.

We talk a lot about things like mental models and influence maps, but we often do a poor job of abiding our own advice.  We argue with the creative director about whether a facebook page is what the customer really wants, or bicker with the copy supervisor about how many levels there are in the content hierarchy.  We may be right; we often are.  But it doesn’t matter, and it won’t make your project successful to alienate yourself and your practice from the other guys on the team.  Just like a point guard, you can only influence the play if you have the ball and your teammates know what you’re going to do with it.

When we look at the best teams, whether it’s on the basketball court or in the world of product and service design, it all seems to work so seamlessly that we often attribute the success to the role our discipline plays.  Ask someone in the biz what makes IDEO successful, and their answer will tell you a lot about what they do for a living; an industrial designer might say that the integration of form and prototyping into the design process is the key, while a technologist might say that including tech in discovery is the secret ingredient that makes the sauce.

The reality is that the secret ingredient isn’t much of a secret at all.  It’s the dedication of each person to the success of the team, the willingness to align with the unifying philosophy, do the grunt work, and most of all put the success of others ahead of your own.  And the easiest way to make it happen is to focus not on assignments, but on opportunities.

For a while, this might feel like compromise, but it’s really a process of learning how to make the most of overlapping and evolving capabilities.  As you dedicate your skills to the success of your teammate, not only do you build trust, you also teach her how to work with you.  When she faces a challenge for which she doesn’t have the answer, she’ll look to you for help and guidance.  This is your opportunity to exert more influence, or to try something new.  The good news, you won’t be going it alone.

Just this week one of my teammates thanked me for including him in a research project.  The fact is, there’s no way the project would have been successful without his input.  Even though I was in the leadership role, I owed my thanks to him for his execution and enthusiasm.  All I had to do was to call the play and pass him the ball.  So, for their role in making the project wildly successful…and for helping me to articulate this metaphor…I say thanks to my team.

Thanks Andrew and Keith and Chris and Michael.  Let’s run it again.  Who’s got winners?

By Any Other Name August 19, 2010

Oh, how I am sick of the “you’re not a designer” crapola.  It’s a poisonous debate, one that so often divides people who should feel unified along positional statements and anecdotal experiences.

So why am I feeding this beast?

Because it’s a windmill, and I’m feeling Quixotic.

Like many of you, I’ve gone by a wide variety of titles doing essentially the same thing.  My first job in UX wasn’t really a job in UX at all, that was just the way I approached it.  Back then, I called myself a programmer.

As time wore on I was writing fewer programs and doing more analysis of data and creation of reports.  I was an analyst…but not the kind with a couch in his office.

Then came the web.  Thanks to Al Gore, I now spent a lot of time writing code, but not the kind that did anything; this code just put stuff on a page where people could see it, and maybe click on a link.  Suddenly I was…a programmer again.

It was around this time that the “polar bear book” came out, and I realized that I was an information architect.  Who knew?  I asked my boss if I could write a new job description and create a new title to match.  It was a watershed moment.  Since that moment 12 years ago, I’ve never had a job description I didn’t write myself.

In the intervening years I’ve considerably honed my craft, adding a broader understanding of design principles and business objectives.  I’ve had the opportunity to manage others who did the same thing I do.  And I’ve added an important skillset; research.

In fact, these days I probably generate more revenue for my company as a result of my research methodologies and activities than I do from making wireframes and site maps.  And in the midst of yet another dust-up over “what is a designer”, this realization caused me to question whether I really am a designer…or something MORE.

That’s right, interaction designers, the world doesn’t begin and end with us.

The good news is that most of us realize that.  We know that there are others who contribute specialized skills to the problems we solve and the products we make.  Whether we’re working with a visual designer, a software engineer, or a marketing guru, we understand and respect the input of those disciplines.

The skills these specialists perform may even be part of our repertoire, but there’s a difference.  As interaction designers, our focus is on crafting interactions that will result in an optimized experience for the user of our product or service.  We may apply typography or coding skill or an understanding of the competitive landscape, but our framing is all about interactions.

When we think more about the domain than the skills, the Venn diagram of overlapping disciplines makes a lot more sense.  Visual designers are focused on aesthetic, creating beauty or evoking a specific mood, even if they might use the same design principles I do when I create a wireframe.

Nobody owns a skill.  If you want to take ballet classes to become a better football player, do it.  Just don’t call yourself a dancer if your job is to score touchdowns.  And more importantly, don’t tell the left tackle on the team that he’s not a football player because he doesn’t know how to plie. 

This is where we so often go off the rails, telling other people what they are or are not based upon the skills we use.  It’s like saying that a person born halfway around the world isn’t really a person at all because he doesn’t speak the same language.  A person who doesn’t sketch, doesn’t write code, and can’t moderate a usability test is still an interaction designer if that’s the problem space he works in.

This is not to say that you have to hire him to work on your team.  Matching skills is important within a team or company as a means of managing expectations and mapping capabilities to career paths.  There are some who believe they have the magic formula for the work they do, and if the results bear it out, that’s great.  But it’s not the only way to skin a cat.

My preference is to focus more on the kinds of problems my team can solve than on their preferred tools and methods.  If most of the team uses Visio to create documents but one designer uses InDesign, that’s fine with me…as long as that person can train the rest of us to be at least conversant in that tool.  By hiring and training for diversity of skills and approaches, the aggregate capabilities of my team are always growing.

As a result, we’ve gone beyond the title of “interaction designer”.  Our problem domain is “user experience”, and the broad disciplines we apply to that problem space are research, design, and development.  As a result, our titling structure has three elements:

• Level: from Associate to SVP, this represents an individual’s overall level of skill and experience in the UX field
• Domain: this part is the same for all of us, and it’s the name of our department—User Experience
• Practice: this represents the disciplines in which the practitioner is most skilled—research, design, or development

So a person on my team might have the title: Director | User Experience | Research and Design.

The key to this structure is that anyone can have more than one discipline in his title, and there’s no need for permanence.  A designer now can be a researcher in the future, just as I went from being a programmer (twice!) to being a designer and researcher today.

There’s an additional skill, too.  I call it “leadership”.  It can be an expertise in a specific discipline, like a principal, it can map to people-management, or it can map to the expansion of opportunity through business development, evangelism, and advocacy.

On my team, we don’t have a 4-skill person.  Honestly, I don’t see the need.  The nature of our work allows us to collaborate, share, and grow; nobody needs to be the whole show.  There are limits to how far a person will go on just one or two skills, of course, but if you have a team of passionate and smart people (which I am fortunate to have) they will keep growing and learning, whether within the bounds of a skill or into new areas.  The key is to make sure that everyone has at least one pathway for growth.

So this is my affirmative statement of self.

I am a designer.

I am a researcher.

I am a leader.

What are you?

How to Get Hired March 10, 2010

I’ve been doing a fair amount of interviewing lately (business is good), and one thing I’ve observed is that many people do not do a very good job of selling themselves.  Since I would hate to miss out on a talented recruit, I’ve put together some simple things a candidate can do that I’ll remember…in a good way.  These aren’t the only things one should do to prepare for interview…with me or anyone else, for that matter…but I think they’re pretty essential.  I’d even dare to call them obvious…if more people did them, that is.

1. Take notes. And for God’s sake, bring your own paper and pen. (Bonus points if it’s a Livescribe.) Even if you have a photographic memory…or are wearing a wire…show me that you’re paying attention. This is especially relevant when you ask me a question, and I answer it. If you really cared what the answer was, wouldn’t you write it down?

2. Do your research. Tell me what you know about the company, the business, or the job. Unless a recruiter chloroformed you and brought you in with a bag over your head, you know the company and the job description, right? Tell me what it means to you, and why you’re interested. I promise to return the favor.

3. Converse. I don’t want a sales pitch, a stand-up routine, or 53 minutes of ass-kissing. I want to know who you are, what’s important and interesting and challenging to you. I want you to ask me “why”, to disagree with or challenge something I say…to have a PULSE. There’s a lot of work to do, and I would much rather do it with someone I like and respect than Billy Mays, Jerry Seinfeld, or Ed McMahon.

4. Draw something. Sure, your portfolio is fabulous (you did bring one, didn’t you?), but let’s see how you work. I don’t care what you draw, and there are no style points on a whiteboard. But until an idea is represented visually, it’s not tangible.

5. Follow up. A brief thanks is appreciated, but what really gets my attention is when someone says “I picked up that book you mentioned” or “here’s that article we talked about”. This is the kind of rapport I have with my colleagues…and you want to be one, don’t you?

Of course, you do still have to be smart, and passionate, and capable of doing the work…and if you are, these are the ways I’m going to get the whole picture…not by reading your resume. That only gets you in the door, it won’t be enough to keep you there.

Oh, and one last thing…which if you’re reading this blog, you already know. Stalk me. Not in the creepy park-a-van-across-the-street way, but online…check me out on LinkedIn, twitter, facebook, WordPress. If you got an interview, you can bet I did the same.