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 like everybody wants to think like a user experience designer these days. Consider this excerpt from IDEO President Tim Brown’s June 2008 Harvard Business Review article:
” … Unaffordable or unavailable health care … energy usage that outpaces the planet’s ability to support it, education systems that fail many students …
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.
Continue reading
I’m catching up on some summer reading … from four years ago. In The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, Barry Schwartz highlights some research that’s particularly relevant for the online user experience.
Good tools don’t have to be complicated. Here’s one to try next time you’ve got a group of people in need of a closer relationship with their users. Instead of getting caught up in formal requirements or dreary requirements-gathering exercises early in a project, get the team together to generate a list of short statements, each one beginning with the words “I want …”
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 wasted a good decade worrying about how badly I fit into the big nasty corporations where I worked. Gordon MacKenzie eased my pain with his book Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace. MacKenzie describes Hallmark (where he worked for 30 years) as a giant hairball:
Somebody I used to work with sent me this question in an e-mail:
I’ve only been a consultant for about seven months now and I’m already self-conscious about using Venn diagrams. So here’s one for people who hate Venn diagrams: