Back in the day (I’m talking 2002-ish), our sales team was keen on promoting a “home page takeover” or other home-page-based advertising executions to really give clients that WOW factor. After all, everyone comes to the home page!
Today (10 years later, if you can believe it), I still hear salespeople get all worked up about pitching a home page takeover. But no one goes there any more. Read More →
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 →
We just nabbed exactly our kind of project, a soup-to-nuts redesign of a top TV brand’s website that includes total social media reengineering, and the team will be made up entirely of Hired Guns. Here are the kind of Guns we’re looking for … make the jump for any role that sounds like you!
If you’re looking for a project where the growth story is going to be dramatic and tied directly to your ideas and innovations, this is it!
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 →
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 →
This Saturday night, designers from around the world will come together in New York’s Webster Hall for the 2nd annual Cut&Paste Global Champs Design Competition, an onstage battle that will decide who deserves the Design Emperor crown (or something like that). The contestants, who have already won in regional events, will compete in either 2D, 3D, or stop motion categories–knockouts are possible but not guaranteed.
To find out more about this and other upcoming Hired-Guns-approved happenings, head to our events page.
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 →
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
[no subcategories]
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