Fixpert

Peachpit Press’s upcoming book Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices by Dan Saffer is due to hit the shelves August 2006. It looks like it’s going to be a great read for both junior and senior-level Interaction Designers and Information Architects.

Here is a nice excerpt that made me chuckle:

Interaction design as a formal discipline has been around for less than two decades. It’s a young field, still defining itself and figuring out its place among sister disciplines such as information architecture (IA), industrial design (ID), communication (or graphic) design (CD), user—experience (UX) design, user—interface engineering (UIE), human—computer interaction (HCI), usability engineering (UE), and human factors (HF).

I like this quote because it demonstrates how confusing things can get with so many titles and acronyms floating around — especially when drafting your resume or conducting a job search.

This book contains a number of interviews with experts from the field of Interaction Design, including Larry Tesler, Luke Wroblewski, and Adam Greenfield. Check out some of excerpts from these interviews on the Designing for Interaction book’s web site.

One of the biggest challenges in my professional life has always been trying to keep up with my workload while spending so much time in meetings. Take a look at the week I just had:

The white areas are time that I have to actually produce work. I tend to work well when I have 3 or more hours sectioned off just to get into a zone and be highly productive. The little 30 - 45 minute chunks between meetings usually don’t amount to much other than catching up on email.

In previous jobs, I used to be able to mark off blocks of time on my calendar as “busy” but I don’t think I’m able to do that at my new job. We’re working in a psuedo agile development style, where we are rapidly producing iterations (of wireframes in this case) and meeting at least once a day to discuss. This process has been super valuable and has resulted in a stronger final product. Less time has been wasted heading down the wrong path, but you can see the danger of losing too much time to meetings in this process.

My recommendation for a User Experience team considering an agile development process would be to emphasize quick (possibly impromptu) meetings that last no more than 30 minutes. We seem to still be caught up in “classic mode” as far as the length of our meetings — minimum 1 hour. If you block off 1 hour, the meeting will take at least 1 hour. Forcing short meetings keeps the conversation moving quickly and on-topic. Shorter meetings also are in the spirit of agile development and ideally leave reasonable chunks of time to get work done.

Has anyone else worked in an agile development environment as an Interaction Designer or Information Architect? Any ideas on battling time lost to meetings?

Hi dudes, it’s been a while. I usually don’t discuss anything related to the news or politics here on this site, but I just had a thought. The war in Iraq is very Web 2.0. All this news is floating around about Al-Zarqawi’s death and the idea that it won’t stop the war, but it will make a difference. The opposition in this war is a distributed network. There’s no head honcho, no “Hitler” in this situation because it’s distributed and in some ways it’s a bottom up approach. I know it’s weird to talk about this stuff, kind of random, but I hadn’t posted in a while, I need to get the ball rolling again.

Before I start this post, I want to make sure that everyone knows that I try my best to steer clear of rants on my site. I noticed that I don’t like to read blogs that are regularly negative. I won’t make a habit of this I promise. With that said, I want to hear if anyone else has experienced what I will call the Nerd in Denial, or NID.

Recently, I have had some experiences with this strange creature. The NID I speak of is not one specific person, but rather a portrait of a type of person. The NID is a web designer or developer, works on the computer all day every day, but the NID has yet to embrace his true inner nerd (be honest, there’s a nerd inside all of us). NID still makes fun of all things nerdy: Star Trek, D&D, podcasts, science, technology, on and on.

When people in high school made fun of nerds, that was to be expected, right? But, it boggles my mind to see folks who work in technology that actually make fun of other people for caring about…technology. This doesn’t make sense to me. The only explanation that I can come up with is that maybe the NIDs got into technical fields not out of interest, but because they thought they would make good money. What a bummer for them, because I can’t imagine doing this job if I didn’t love it. I love technology, I love that being a web designer is a challenge, that technology is constantly changing, and that your skills need to change along with it. I love that in the span of 6 months, if you haven’t been paying attention, things on the web have changed in a major way. So, I feel it’s the NIDs’ loss if they’re not engaged and don’t love what they do.

Has anyone else worked with or talked with a NID? Any thoughts or feelings on this?

It’s been far too long since I decided I was going to write this post. If you’re looking for a quick, easy way to set up an online portfolio, I highly recommend CarbonMade. Creating a nice, clean portfolio has always been a bit of a chafe for me. This Winter I was interviewing for jobs. I put together a pretty lame quick-n-dirty “portfolio” — which was just a blog post on Fixpert with links to images. Lame.

Then I heard about CarbonMade. I signed up for a free account, and within 30 minutes I had a nice clean portfolio with a friendly url to boot: http://fixpert.carbonmade.com. What’s amazing is my response rate from prospective employers went through the roof after showing them my CarbonMade portfolio. I immediately got a handful of interviews and several job offers.

Another bonus is the guys at CarbonMade are super cool. I emailed them and it turns out they are cyclists too (and they ride fixies)!! Big thumb’s up from me, go check it out.