I’ve never worked in an environment that I would call user experience friendly. That doesn’t mean I’ve had bad employers or clients. In fact, I’ve been lucky over the years to work at some pretty great places. But if you mapped my resume based on how highly each organization valued user experience expertise, the spectrum would be narrow and range from “somewhat tolerant” to “nearly hostile.”
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Dear Professional Life:
First, I want you to know that it’s not you, you’re great. It’s me.
We’ve had some crazy times together over the last 21 years and you’re an important part of who I am, but we’ve always been honest with one another so I need to tell you something that’s really going to be hard to say.
It seems to me that the trick in writing trade books, articles and blog entries is to know enough that you have something to say, without knowing so much that you can completely comprehend just how unimportant what you have to say is.
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I bombed the first time I interviewed at washingtonpost.com, although luckily I didn’t know it until about a year later. I met something like a dozen people over a couple days and I thought I’d nailed every one of those interviews.
While the phrase “think outside of the box” is trite, it is true that humans tend to group similar things together. That’s something to take advantage of when designing interfaces, but it can be a problem when developing products with functionally defined teams (Tech, Marketing, etc.)
I don’t know about you, but big chunks of my career seem to be defined by punctuation.
Like when I worked on the night desk of a print newspaper for four years. There were simple, recurring goals. Those goals were satisfied by a limited number of tasks in a set span of time. It was a time for periods.
Have you ever been a YehButter? You know, somebody who other people say things about like “Aw yeh, they’re really talented/smart/creative” and somebody else says “yeh, but they’re so intense/angry/moody” and everybody listening nods their heads in agreement and just like that you’ve been marginalized.
I feel sorry for control freaks. I’ve been mistaken for one in the past, and while I admit that I enjoy a good, fully developed process now and then, I’m not driven by any powerful urge to control the world around me. In fact, I think chaos can produce some interesting opportunities.
One of the many things about fatherhood that I haven’t adjusted to yet is that sometimes you’re the one who’s supposed to know the right thing to do. The kid’s nose is drippy, should we keep her out of day care today? Should we let the her watch Batman cartoons? Should we force her to eat something other than the chips, Chicken McNuggets and parmesan cheese she wants?
Most poetry goes right over my head and it’s not until somebody explains it to me that I really enjoy it. I’m not proud of this, but what are you going to do? I guess I love the idea of poetry more than the reality of it. It seems like poetry uniquely intertwines emotion and imagery and format and syntax. I love the idea that poets describe things in a way that couldn’t be described in any other way. And I think that not all poets actually write poetry.