Save icon, is the floppy disk icon dead?
This Twitter post sparked me to ask the question:
totally! RT @damienguard: Dear UI
designers everywhere. Stop using
floppy disk icons for save. Too many
people have no idea what it is now.
So, is the floppy dis…
friendly version of date formats
The users of my application have the ability to choose their prefered date format between:
dd/mm/yyyy
mm/dd/yyyy
yyyy-mm-dd
The 1st one (which has the Java pattern dd/MM/yyyy) produces 31/12/2011.
I’ve decided that a mor…
What are the differences between UX, Interaction, UI and graphic/visual designers? Are these distinctions helpful or damaging to our field?
The new term going forward is likely to be Product Designer.
If you want to qualify it, you could say Digital Product Designer, but since nearly everything we make and buy in the future will have some sort of technology and code component, that is probably redundant.
I’ve renamed my team to the Product Design team and moved all their titles to product designers, and many other tech companies are now making that transition as well. The Facebook design team call themselves product designers, and many new startups and VCs are asking for product design. It’s a term that is better suited than UX, UI, UED, IA or IxD inside the corporate structure, and is a term that requires the designer to be focused and held accountable on the thing that they make: a product. It’s a term that also allows one to be multi-skilled or multi-faceted for their design work, so it creates a nice transition path for those whose skills may have been too siloed or walled off over the past decade. And yet the term is forgiving enough to not require those skills today while still being able to evolve as time moves on and people get better at this thing we call design.
It puts the designer on par with product managers as well for those in larger corporations, and while a lot of people say engineering or development, they really mean product engineering or product development, so it levels the playing field for designers in that context as well.
It allows business folks and recruiters to easily understand what you do while being broad enough to mean you can make something like software apps for desktop or mobile, design the Kinect, or build something like a robotic vacuum cleaner.
People get products, and in the end, product designers will be beholden to businesses in the same way that graphic designers are beholden to advertising. Our jobs exist to make money, and we exist in a corporate or capitalist environment. Otherwise we’d simply be artists.
What is the most designer-friendly and intuitive wireframing and/or UX app?
Andrew PetersNEW ANSWERSketch!Bohemian Coding – Sketch 3….OLD ANSWER: ADOBE FIREWORKS – without a doubt is the best wireframe and prototype design app. Unlike all the other tools, it was designed specifically for screen design and prototyping. It is…
What is the most designer-friendly and intuitive wireframing and/or UX app?
Mark LittlewoodBalsamiq just rocks. Anything more polished or complicated just seems to be a waste of focused effort – why spend time polishing something that is never going to be used. Spend the extra resource making real products.See Questions On Quora
What is the most designer-friendly and intuitive wireframing and/or UX app?
Omnigraffle, because it’s the one that gives a huge amount of tools in a very efficient, fast and cost-effective package, with an impressive flexibility:
- You can use it for IA
- You can use it for Wireframes, from high-level to detailed ones
- You can use it for prototypes
- You can use it for presentations
- You can use it to draw diagrams and graphs
- You can import seamlessly data into Keynote
- You can export do clickable PDF
- You can export to hierarchic HTML (and then you can add note-taking javascript)
- You can build your shapes, patterns, stencils
- You can use it to build any PDF
Basically, any User Experience Designer or Interaction Designer need is covered with just one tool. 😉
However, even if I usually suggest this to every UXD/IxD, sometimes other tools are better for the environment they are put in:
- Balsamiq: great for collaboration and integration of early prototypes, it’s harder to go into details
- Axure: great for quick sketches, it’s harder to build custom interfaces outside the “normal” widgets
- Keynote: very effective for visuals and interactive demos, it’s harder when you need to move on from its constraints and you need to keep somewhere the stencils you keep using
- HTML/CSS: very effective when there’s a strong knowledge of programming within the team, it’s slower than a proper prototyping/wireframing tool when comparing two experts head-to-head
- Illustrator: great for its flexibility, but it’s harder when you need to create long and exhaustive documents.
- Fireworks: excellent tool for moving from prototype to visual, works marvels if the same person is doing these two phases, good support for symbols abstraction, adherent to the Adobe UI, it a little complex exactly because it covers a wide range of tasks and has the risk of making “too good” visuals.
Each one of these tools is usually preferred to Omnigraffle when there’s already some kind of proficiency: if you already know a software, you usually work in that software.
I’d however suggest to any UX designer to get skilled in Omnigraffle too (and maybe a couple more) to have always the best alternative. 😉
What books can help me become well versed in UI, UX and usability standards?
Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think” (http://amzn.to/dOHEfI) and Donald Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things” (http://amzn.to/ertWm7) are the two best books to start with in my opinion. Both have reached ‘required reading’ status within the usability and UX fields.
What’s the best way to recruit great UI/UX designers to an enterprise software startup?
For the last 5 years, I’ve been working at Salesforce.com as a designer and design manager. In that time, our team has grown from 8 UX people to nearly 40 highly qualified and highly productive UX professionals. There are several factors that I believe are key to attracting great designers in the enterprise space:
- Find designers that thrive on challenging design problems. Enterprise software offers a cornucopia of complex problems to solve.
- Create a collaborative atmosphere where designers can learn from each other and where they play a significant role in the product development lifecycle from product definition through to production.
- Seek out recent graduates from top schools. We have had great candidates from CMU, Stanford and Berkeley. Consider taking on summer interns to help develop a relationship with the school and its students.
- Don’t settle for “B” players. Top talent attracts top talent. Keep your standards high and don’t compromise.
- Ship great products often! Great designers want to build a portfolio of work that actually made it to market. Too many enterprise companies have release cycles measured in years, not weeks or months.
These are just a few of the things that I think help Salesforce.com attract great UX talent. There are many more factors such as company culture, being a leader in your space, and having a clear company objective that also play a big part in attracting top talent. Best of luck to you.
What’s the best way to recruit great UI/UX designers to an enterprise software startup?
Enterprise is quite simply where great Interaction Design happens. Most junior level ux professionals, with the help of a couple decent pattern libraries, can crank out your average web 2.0 application in short order, look good, and never burn more than a few brain cells – it just isn’t that hard, and most are me-too applications anyway.
Enterprise is different. Enterprise apps, especially large scale, important, collaborative and conversational apps require a unique and deep understanding of user-centered design, design research, business domain expertise, contextual inquiry expertise, political prowess, business strategy expertise – all on top of basic design skills like problem space definition, exploration, abductive reasoning, prototyping and usability testing.
Some might say that consumer application ux design is where *it’s at* because the median iq/domain expertise for your average (is there such a thing?) user is considerably lower and therefore requires a stricter discipline to make things elegant, understandable, engaging, and persuasive (in the BJ Fogg sense of the word). I would say the assumption is false, and further it’s just as important in enterprise application design.
I don’t know if I accept your premise that enterprise is where designers tend to shy away – if this is true – it might simply be because it’s harder. Most of the problems involve really complex business rules, large amounts of corporate value resting on the success (as opposed to venture vending that cares a lot less, since they are simply looking for a 10x – 100x from 1 of the 15 companies they invested in within the exact same problem space.)
Am I biased? Not really – I spent years inside 2 large enterprises doing knowledge management (groupware) design and risk modeling software design. I also spent plenty of time designing consumer applications and experiences. Both worlds carry their own challenges and opportunities – but because most enterprise software is accomplishing complex business objectives instead of the “It’s twitter for ER Nurses” or “It’s Tungle.me for gangstas,” – and because many consumer apps are frankly easier – they will always attract the low-hanging ux designers looking for an easy job and the promise of fame, glory, drug addiction and hookers.
Okay – so back to the initial question. “How do you recruit great ux/ixd into an enterprise”
1. Focus on the design challenges and the opportunities to engage in a number of different ux related activities, methods, and processes to hone their skills.
2. Differentiate Start-up life from Enterprise life: sometimes, start-ups are so lean, they have little to no budget to do the following:
- User research
- Mental Models
- Mood Maps
- Stakeholder Interviews
- Design Studios
- Sketching and Critique
- Iterative Prototyping
- Usability testing – both formal lab testing as well as remote.
- Analytics (also because, if they are launching a completely new thing, there are no analytics from which to glean insights to feed back into the design process).
Theoretically, enterprises should have the cash flow from operations to support all the various elements of human centered design as well as other important aspects like:
3. High probability that your check will clear;
4. Formal review process; well-designed career path with goal setting and “visioning your future” as well as moneys for education and training including attendance to relevant conferences. (This may have been curtailed during the recent economic downturn, but it actually provides an opportunity to treat career paths and learning as a unique problem requiring innovative solutions – so for instance internal book clubs across team functions. I recently joined one where people from a couple of different teams are coming together to collaboratively read and discuss behavioral economics, persuasive technology, and influence.
5. Start-ups are often stressful – they can be fun, energizing, amazing experiences, but they are also fraught with stress, anxiety, and long, long hours. Having worked on a number of start-ups, this is more the rule than exception. Clearly articulate the work-life balance to them to potential designers interested in an opportunity in your enterprise.
6. Opportunity to learn from top-notch talent that has been around the block a few times. Many start-ups barely have moneys for more than a single UX designer, and they are looking for that unicorn that can do solid ux, visual design, and front end coding because their budgets are tight. Enterprise organizations are more likely to have at least a few, if not an entire team of ux talent across some of the many sub-disciplines like user research, content strategy, seo, ia, ixd, and usability testing – these people will be on the team providing many learning opportunities to expand skill sets.
If your enterprise doesn’t have those things – you can always simply pay more. It’s a relatively free marketplace in the US meaning – sell all those great aspects of your company, and if you don’t have those things, pay 30% more than the going market rate for similarly skilled ux professional. Start-ups are cash lean, and intentionally offer lower than market salaries combined with options granted that are, for the most part, paper – and should be treated as such. The probability that your 100,000 shares at a $0.001/per or 0.05% of the company shares will ever be worth more than it’s equivalent weight in toilet paper is less than 1%.
Just my opinion. YMMV
What should IxDA become, do, change, evaluate, or otherwise consider?
Dan Saffer‘s answer is really generous towards the IxDA; like the asker, it assumes IxDA can be fixed. I’d like to take a step back and take the antagonistic point of view and say the best thing the IxDA can do is dissolve itself. Not that it “should” dissolve, but that the problems it has are terminal and irreparable, so all it can do is dissolve.
I’ll draw a line in the sand. In order of importance:
- The IxDA can’t stand for me as a designer because it doesn’t stand for anything.
- The IxDA has no value proposition.
- The IxDA has a marketing problem.
The IxDA can’t stand for me as a designer because it doesn’t stand for anything.
What does it mean to be an interaction designer? What do you have to know? What do you have to be able to do? A national organization that is supposed to represent me, can’t, if it can’t answer that question. It doesn’t actually matter what checkboxes you’re supposed to check, it only matters that there are checkboxes to check at all. Right now, there aren’t any.
IxDA needs to draw a line in the sand and say, these are the skill sets you need to have in order to be an interaction designer.
It doesn’t matter what falls on either side of the line; that can be up for discussion after they’ve set an arbitrary standard for the next, oh, I don’t know, 24 months? No grandfathering. Either you’re an interaction designer by the 2011-2012 standard, or you’re not.
But, it can’t, and it won’t, because it’s entirely volunteer-run and donation-supported, so it can’t afford to alienate anyone. That’s a shame, because that’s the only way it can truly claim to represent anyone.
The IxDA has no value proposition.
What do you get out of being a “member” of the IxDA? What do you get out of “leading” it? Or speaking at Interaction? Solomon Bisker spoke at Interaction within three years of discovering IxDA. Is he amazingly skilled? Or was he merely motivated and that’s enough when the organization is volunteer-run?
I put “member” and “leader” in scare-quotes because it’s meaningless to be a member of an organization with no barrier to entry. Anyone can be an IxDA member, designer or not. You’re only a name on a mailing list with a bad web interface, and I don’t see a value in that. I am not subscribed.
What does it mean to be a “leader” of an organization with no ability to set policy and a terminal fear of losing the donations it does get by alienating people? How many “leaders” sign up with the intention to “change things” and realize they’re mostly impotent?
The role of any organization is to do what individuals cannot.
The role of any organization is to help individuals do what they cannot do alone. A year ago, after Jesse James Garrett’s IA Summit talk, I went digging into all of the mailing list archives and reading up on as many local groups as I could find to see if there were any initiatives to provide “workshops” and “exercises” for interaction design, something like a Toastmasters, and there were two posts on a mailing list from a year before that, and nothing else. National IxDA membership doesn’t help me. It provides neither direction, nor standards, nor recommendations, nor best practices, nor introductions, nor funding.
What about local IxDA membership? Without national support (direction, funding, marketing, introductions, sponsorships, etc.), local IxDA is a meetup. Saying I’m with the local IxDA chapter doesn’t mean anything to potential clients, future employers, bosses, coworkers, and sometimes even other designers.
I do help run my local IxDA chapter. But, because there’s no intrinsic value in doing so, it’s mostly to help the other people running it. I’m helping the people, not the organization. If the group name changed to “Designers Only – New Group System,” nothing else would be different, and that’s the problem. The lack of value is why I’ve started two different local design organizations, one a hands-on design workshop http://vi.to/workshop/ and the other a local chapter of Xianhang Zhang‘s Product Design Guild, in an effort to create something more meaningful and relevant.
The IxDA has a marketing problem.
Meeting designers who have never heard of the IxDA is not uncommon. I have lunch once a month with a dozen designers and every time, there’s 3-6 new subscribers to the local IxDA list, because they have only just discovered that there’s a whole group of people like them out there.
I haven’t been a designer for fifteen years (five? six?), but I only heard of the IxDA 18-24 months ago. Hiring managers don’t look for IxDA membership. They’re not a standards and practices body, so all of the new Masters in Interaction Design programs aren’t “IxDA approved.” All of the art students at the local university know about AIGA but not IxDA, and I’d bet the IA students haven’t heard of it, either.
tl;dr:
Paying for membership is only the start. The goals of the organization have to center around providing national- and local-level value for the interaction designers, from standards and practices to awareness and marketing. It can’t do that with its current structure and “membership,” and rather than alienate 20,000 people on a mailing list, the most effective “we’re serious about this” move would be to shut down and start over. Consider IxDA your “one to throw away.”