Author Archive

THG @SXSW: Revealing Design’s True Power

on February 15, 2012

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We have a bumper crop of Hired Guns presenting their ideas at next month’s SXSW Interactive. Over the next few weeks we’ll be profiling them, so that you can get a taste of their ideas — whether or not you’ll be making it to Austin yourself. Today’s selection, Jeff Gothelf, will also be cochairing next week’s AgileUX New York City conference.

Demystifying Design:
Fewer Secrets, Greater Impact
Sunday, March 11, 5:00
Presenter: Jeff Gothelf

Your Twesume
(your resume in 140 characters or less):
Interaction designer, author of upcoming book on Lean UX (O’Reilly, June 2012), founding partner at Proof.

Why did you want to speak at SXSW?
SXSW offers an international audience of creatives and technologists with whom conversations about the web, design and technology are always interesting and diverse — plus it’s one hell of a party.    Read More →

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Where Are All the Mid-level UX Designers?

on September 29, 2011

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I became a user experience designer in 1999. Now, with over 12 years of experience, I consider myself a senior practitioner. I know many other designers with similar levels of experience. As a hiring manager, I see many resumes and meet a large number of designers in person. The overwhelming majority of them have less than five years’ experience. With business’s ever-increasing demand for user experience designers, the growing understanding and appreciation for the benefits of UX design, and the fact that the discipline is in its prime, why are there so few mid-level designers?

I define mid-level as someone with five to ten years of actual work experience. They are designers on the cusp of becoming managers or team leaders. They are designers who have explored several domains (commerce, social and financial services to name just three) and who have worked in a variety of environments. They are the designers you can bring on to a team and who can hit the ground running, asking mostly process and politics questions while delivering top-notch work. They are also, in most major cities, incredibly difficult to find.    Read More →

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How to Make Sure Your Senior-Level Design Title Doesn’t Lead to a Dead End

on August 3, 2011

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Keeping your career on an upward trajectory requires some planning.You paid your dues. You put in the long nights. You suffered under bosses who never “got” design and those who thought they’d invented it. And finally, you got there. You got the director role, the VP title, or the creative director position that you worked for during your entire career.

And this was good. As the department leader, you made a name for yourself. You grew the team and tightened up the company’s design discipline. You mentored junior designers and churned out some fairly impressive work. And then it came time to move on.

It’s right at that moment that it hits you—when you were an up-and-coming designer, there were lots of entry- and mid-level jobs. As a designer near the top of the heap, the opportunities for you now are few and far between. Rarely do these positions open up, and even more rarely are new senior-design roles created. By working yourself up the corporate design ladder, you may have placed yourself in a situation where potential new gigs are scarce.    Read More →

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Meet Our Blogger: Jeff Gothelf

on July 6, 2011

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UX designer Jeff Gothelf puts his skills and knowledge to work at TheLadders.com. Previously, he has helped design at AOL, Webtrends, and Fidelity. Below, Jeff talks about the explosive growth in UX and the ways in which it can be a challenge for designers to keep up. Find out more below. . . .

The Stats:

Hometown:
Fair Lawn, NJ

Current ‘hood:
Glen Rock, NJ (right next door to Fair Lawn)

College/Grad School:
James Madison University, Bentley College

Current Job:
DIrector of User Experience at TheLadders.com

Where do you plan to take your column this year?
I plan on focusing on how design and user experience are evolving as a practice. With the influx of challenges that include Agile, Lean, and mobile, designers need to broaden their horizons and change the way they’ve been working.

What do you hope to accomplish with your Hired Gun posts?
I hope to make both designers and non-designers realize that there’s a whole lot more than pixel-pushing going on in UX. The breadth of the impact and influence that user experience has on products and sites breaks into the fields of product management and strategy. This is critical to understand and to promote.

Who should be checking you out?
UX folks, designers, product managers, startup founders, development managers, CEOs—the whole stack.    Read More →

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Hiring: Dealing with the Double-edged Sword of Specialization

on June 27, 2011

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No one excels in everything. If you’re a startup with limited funds, then you have no choice but to hire generalists. Employees who wear many hats can produce a minimally viable product faster and more cheaply. And a smaller team means a nimbler team, which takes less time to make decisions.

The downside, of course, is that rarely will someone be an excellent engineer, product person and CEO all rolled in one. Rarely is someone a great saleswoman, marketer, and financial analyst. And even more rarely is someone a great UX designer, writer, visual designer, and researcher. Everyone has a finite number of strengths, and that means that your startup will suffer from a lack of talent in the areas in which your team is weak.

Fast-forward a bit, to when your company has grown to the point at which you can start hiring for specialized positions. You can bring in the top players in all the essential disciplines and start filling out the areas in which you’ve been weak. From a hiring perspective, things get a bit easier: you know exactly what you need. However, the startup world still tends to attract players who can play multiple positions. It rarely attracts star single-position players. You may still find yourself interviewing generalists—some of whom are very talented—but the organization you’ve now created mostly needs specialists. If you hire a generalist for a specialist position, he or she is likely to feel underutilized and start branching out of the space you’ve carved out for them.    Read More →

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For Designers, Credibility Comes from Small Wins

on June 1, 2011

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Credibility is capital, and it’s crucial to your success as a designer. You earn it, save it, and spend it in order to make your work come to life. Credibility is also a way for your true talents to get exposure to the outside world through the products you design that actually launch.

As a designer, you get hired on the basis of your beautiful portfolio and strong resume. But that’s as far as those historical recaps can take you. From day one on the new job you need to start building credibility through small wins. It’s those small wins that immediately begin to earn you credibility. But there are subtle differences on how to best get those small wins, depending on if you’re a freelancer or a full-time employee.

Freelancers are expected to start performing immediately, from their first minute on the job. You’re there to fill a temporary gap, and there are likely projects that need your attention immediately. Small wins for a freelancer include asking the right questions. What are you there to do? What are the immediate fires to be put out? Who are the stakeholders? Whom will you be working with? Showing expertise at diagnosing the problem right away is a terrific small win. Next, ask questions about the timelines. Engaging clients with a quick discussion about the schedule shows that you’re conscious of their situation and want to help them meet their goals. Finally, earn credibility by getting to work. Waste as little time as possible before you get started. If you can start delivering work on your first day, you’ve shown your client that you’re serious, you’re there to help and can get the job done (win, win and win!). All of this adds up to a big chunk of credibility that will help you secure another gig with that company. It will also help spread good word of mouth about you to other clients.    Read More →

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Stand Up for Yourself: Succeeding as a Design “Team of One”

on May 2, 2011

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Jeff Gothelf, a user experience designer working for TheLadders.com, blogs for us about project management and UX careers and trends.

Several folks have written recently about how to operate a design team of one. Those posts, like this one by Leah Buley, discuss the tools, methodologies and tips/tricks for successfully pulling off a UX practice with only one practitioner. But once you’ve got the tools in place, you need to make sure your “team of one” also succeeds politically. First, you’ll need to convince the organization to fund your work and provide you with the bare essentials you need to function. Once those are in place, the onus is on you to prove that those funds were well spent. The following tactics will help keep your team funded, appreciated, and (with luck) expanding beyond its single member in the future.

Metrics: your new best friend
The beauty of online work is that it’s measurable. If it’s measurable, it’s controllable. And if it’s controllable, then you are its master. The first thing you should do is set benchmarks. Use the company’s reporting tools or free options like Google Analytics to gain a sense of where things stand now. As you begin to operate, report to the rest of the organization how the metrics are changing based on the work you’re doing. Make sure that as key performance indicators (KPIs) trend up and to the right, the UX work you’re doing gets the proper credit.    Read More →

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Last of the Heroes

on April 4, 2011

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Jeff Gothelf, a user experience designer working for TheLadders.com, blogs for us about project management and UX careers and trends.

Designers want to be heroes.

Let that soak in for a second. It’s true. Design is a hero-based practice.

To be known as the designer who conceived the iPod or the genius behind the game-changing interaction design of Mint.com is an accolade many seek. Those are product designs, but this mentality is even more prevalent inside interactive agencies. Agencies want to win awards because awards attract new business.

Hero-focused design is promoted even further because of the transient nature of employment at an interactive agency. The more successful you are as an individual designer at an agency, the easier it is for you to get that next gig or step up the design ladder.

The problem is heroes work alone. They don’t collaborate or open their work for review. They reveal work only when they feel it’s “ready,” and they typically seek to control the direction of the project very heavily. The stronger a designer’s hand in the project, the theory goes, the more he or she can lay claim to that project’s success.    Read More →

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THG @SXSW: Aim for a Great User Experience, Not Just Deliverables

on March 14, 2011

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A number of Hired Guns are presenting at SXSW Interactive this year. This series profiles a few of the proud and the brave. Please tweet and “like” this story so as a community we can build a little buzz for them.
Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business
Tuesday March 15, 3:30
Presenter: Jeff Gothelf

Your Twesume:
User Experience and Product designer, Lean UX advocate, blogger, speaker, Director of UX at TheLadders.com

What inspired you to submit this idea?
I want UX designers, product managers, and developers to work more collaboratively in a smart fashion and to be more productive.

Why are you the expert on it?
We’ve pioneered and adapted these methodologies at TheLadders to great success.

Why did you want to speak at SXSW?
It has a broad audience that can provide great perspective on this topic as well as help spread the word.

Who should come to your talk?
UX Designers, interaction designers, product managers, developers, founders, information architects, visual designers, and their friends

What will people walk away learning from you?
How to use the full spectrum of the user experience and design toolkit in the appropriate places and at the appropriate depths. In addition, they’ll learn how to get cross-functional teams to work more collaboratively and to actually like it.

What do you hope you learn from your SXSW experience?
What spring break for nerds is all about :-)

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Round Peg In A Cube Farm: Will Your Next Company Be As Innovative As You?

on March 4, 2011

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Jeff Gothelf, a user experience designer working for TheLadders.com, blogs for us about project management and UX careers and trends.

Recently I wrote an article for Smashing Magazine about how to manage a personal brand within a corporate environment. At the end of that article I mentioned that if personal brand building is one of your goals and your employer doesn’t support it, you should consider another employer–or even consider going out on your own.    Read More →

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Product Management, User Experience, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Usability Testing

Project Management, Program Management, Production, Content Production

Animation, Art Direction, Creative Direction, Corporate Identity, Flash Design/Dev, Graphic Design, Web Design

Content Strategy, Editorial, Copywriting, Copy Editing, Research, Blog Outreach

Brand Management, Business Development, Sales, Product Marketing, Event/Conference Planning, Promotions, Marcomms, Corporate Comms, Direct Marketing, E-Marketing, Public Relations, Market Research

Account Management, Account/Brand Planning, Media Strategy, Communications Planning, Media Planning/Buying, Social Media, Search (SEM, SEO), Web Metrics & Analytics

Web Development, Front End Development

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