Final Days to Get Your Tickets to the 3rd Annual UX Awards!

The Hired Guns on May 15, 2013

The biggest UX event of the year is just days away. The 3rd Annual International UX Awards are on Tuesday, May 21 right here in NYC! 10 exceptional submissions will be awarded prizes, so come see their awesome work and meet the winners from all over the globe!

This year’s UX Awards also features a keynote from Mashable CTO Robyn Peterson. Peterson will discuss Mashable’s recent redesign and key UX industry trends. The 2013 jury panel includes Salon.com’s CEO/CTO Cindy Jeffers, Google’s Tomer Sharon, Netflix’s Chris Jaffe from CA, Moment’s John Payne, Agile UX maestro Anders Ramsey, IXDA NY Local leader Lis Hubert, and Cory Lebson from UXPA DC!

The Hired Guns is a proud sponsor and supporter of this important event, and we’ll definitely be there. It’s going to be a very inspiring and enlightening night, so make sure to get your tickets ASAP!

Sign up here. And be sure to use the discount code “TheHiredGuns” for 20% off the ticket price.

UX Visionaries Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden talk about their new book Lean UX

Ryan Galloway on May 1, 2013

Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden are veteran User Experience designers and Managing Directors at Neo, a global product innovation company. They’re also the authors of Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience. Jeff and Josh graciously answered a few questions about their new book and the future of UX.

What, in your own words, is Lean UX?
Josh: It’s a response to the new reality of software production. Software is no longer duplicated and distributed on physical media. It’s updated and distributed continuously. Designers need a new way to work in this new reality. Lean UX is a response to this new reality. Read More →

Beverly May: Founder of The UX Awards, Advocate for Exceptional Experiences

Ryan Galloway on March 5, 2013

May 21 brings the third annual User Experience Awards, honoring outstanding UX projects and practitioners. To find out more, I sat down with Beverly May, founder and president of Oxford Technology Ventures, a UX consultancy. Beverly founded the UX Awards and remains the moderator and chief advocate. If you have a project, idea, app, site, or software that you’d like to have considered, there’s still time! The submission window is from March 15 to April 15. For more information or to submit, visit userexperienceawards.com.

Tell me a bit about you. What gets you out of bed in the morning?
I like creating and using well-designed products. I find the challenge of designing something with a serious “wow” factor to be deeply motivating. Designing a new digital experience is a lot like being an architect (the original UXers were called “Information Architects,” after all); we design something that someone else will eventually experience. Using a great app is a lot like walking into a wonderful building. When the architect has done it right, you can appreciate the skill that went into conceiving something new and refining every detail. Read More →

What is a Career in User Experience Really About?

Mark Hurst on January 17, 2013

This piece originally appeared on CreativeGood.com and is reprinted here with their kind permission.

In this new year it feels right to say something big, something about the meaning of life, and one’s career, and everything. I guess it’s been on my mind since last month, when I finished teaching a graduate class in user research. (It was here in New York, in SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design. Great program.) The class gave me a chance to get to know some very talented young designers, most of whom are just beginning their journey into the user experience field.

My main message to the class was that good user research isn’t a matter of learning the steps of some trendy methods, as though one were just following a cookbook. Instead, good UX work requires a genuine interest in observing, listening to, and learning from other people: primarily the customers themselves, but also the organization that owns the product. That observation, and that listening, must stem from a genuine human interest in people. Read More →

No One Goes There Anymore: Home Pages and the New Wisdom in Traffic Patterns

Lisa Schneider on September 24, 2012

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 →

It’s the Platform, Stupid: Why Different Devices Need Different Kinds of Content

Lisa Schneider on May 1, 2012

I was at a product manager’s gathering a while ago, and the topic of video came up. Someone threw out the idea of taking short-form video — say, 90-second clips, the kinds of video you watch on mobile phones and laptops — and having it available on internet TV, which one would navigate using a standard remote control. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” the manager said. Well, yeah, there’s actually a lot wrong with that. Read More →

Call for Submissions: the 2nd Annual User Experience Awards

The Hired Guns on April 2, 2012

This June brings the second annual User Experience Awards, which honors and celebrates outstanding UX projects and practitioners. To find out about the awards and the submission process, we checked in with the founder and president of Oxford Technology Ventures, Beverly May, who will be moderating the awards. If you have a project, idea, app, site, or software that you’d like to have considered, you still have a little time to get your ducks in a row — the deadline for submissions is May 1.

Why now? What changed about UX and design to make last year a good time to launch the awards?
UX has become more widely understood and recognized as a key differentiating factor in an ever-more-crowded digital marketplace. When there’s hundreds of thousands of apps, or dozens or even hundreds of competitors in your space, suddenly the product experience becomes very important for user adoption and retention. UX was always important, but it wasn’t as well understood as a separate discipline and approach, and its importance wasn’t as widely recognized and valued in terms of strategic differentiation. There’s been increasing recognition that a customer-centric design and product approach is really the only way to build high-impact, effective, useful, and engaging products and services. Companies who launch or, more likely, maintain legacy products with bad UX are increasingly putting themselves in a strategically weak position and are opening up the opportunity for a competitor with superior UX to gain considerable buzz and market share. Read More →

Where Are All the Mid-level UX Designers?

Jeff Gothelf on September 29, 2011

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 →

The Good Guns: Help UX Talent Get Noticed

The Hired Guns on September 1, 2011

The NYC Usability Professionals’ Association (NYC UPA) will be running a “Resume Speed Dating” event on Tuesday, September 20, from 7:45-8:15. The group is looking for talent spotters to help applicants make their resumes more targeted and useful to potential employers.

Good Gun Profile:
Are you an experienced UX hiring manager or recruiter? Want to help some talent get a leg up—and maybe get first crack at some promising workers? Ideally, NYC UPA is looking for people with at least 10 years of experience—enough time to know your way around an acronym and be comfortable estimating salaries and other aspects of typical UX jobs.

Nitty Gritty:
It’s going to be clear to candidates asking for a take on their resumes that you’re there to help, so don’t worry about getting cranky follow-up emails. That said, you’ll be able to reach out to anyone you think might be a good fit for a current or future job.

Net Net:
This is a great way to get your name (and the name of your company) out there and to connect with a deep pool of UX talent. It’s also a proactive way to help keep your industry productive and engaged. Interested? Email Jennifer Pugh at The Hired Guns.

Signal to Noise: The 80/20 Rule for Agile Product Owners

Matt Smith on August 25, 2011

One of the keys to success for a great product person is having control of your backlog; i.e. knowing where you want your product to go in the next one, three, or six months. Agile software development doesn’t mean that you don’t have a solid plan for your product, it means that you’re flexible on how you get there.

For example, I live in New York, but grew up in Boston and often visit to see my family. There are several ways I could get there:

I could walk (not the quickest solution, but it’s possible)
I could take a bus (lots of stops, but better than walking)
I could drive (faster than walking or a bus, but more expensive)
I could take a train (fast, allows me to do work, but costs more than the previous options)
or I could fly (the fastest, but getting to and from an airport and through security is a hassle)

At the end of the day I’m going to get to Boston, I just need to figure out what factors are most important to me: time, cost, or convenience. If cost were really the most important factor, then maybe I’d walk. If cost is just very important, then maybe I’d take a bus. If time is the most important factor, I will probably fly, but if it’s a combination of time and convenience, I will most likely take a train.

Deciding on your objectives first will determine how you accomplish the day-to-day steps that take you toward those goals. In other words, your objectives determine what your backlog looks like, which ultimately leads to success. Read More →

Complicating Products Is Easy; Simplifying Them Is Hard

Matt Smith on July 7, 2011

The French mathematician Blaise Pascal once wrote, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” What Pascal meant was that it’s very easy to put everything and anything into a letter, but it takes time to refine its contents with the reader’s interests in mind.

The same can be said about building great products; complicating a product is easy, but simplifying it is hard and takes time. “Feature creep,” the tendency to add features just to add features, and “cart-horsing,” (mapping out your marketing plan before you even know what your final product is going to look like—putting the cart before the horse, in other words), are caused by breaking two of the most important rules for developing projects:

Understand what problem you are solving
“Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”—Albert Einstein

Research about customers, the market, and product usage (something you should always do) will help you understand what problem you are trying to solve. Without a problem to solve, it’s impossible to keep focused; you end up guessing, throwing every feature a customer has requested into your product, and wasting time and money on an overly complicated product that doesn’t actually solves real problems. Eventually you end up with something like The Homer, the ridiculous car-with-everything that Homer Simpson designed. Read More →

Meet Our Blogger: Jeff Gothelf

Jeff Gothelf on July 6, 2011

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 →

Meet Our Blogger: Matt Smith

Matt Smith on June 14, 2011

The Hired Guns’ newest blogger, Matt Smith, is an expert at developing new products, innovative thinking, and startups. He’ll be putting his knowledge to good use for us as he writes about product management and methods to help companies innovate effectively, especially in an Agile environment. Matt sees his mission as “helping people grow, fostering ideas, and solving complicated problems in an innovative way.” We wanted to find out more . . . .

The Stats:

Hometown:
Newton, Mass.

Current ‘hood:
Upper West Side, NYC

College/Grad School:
Union College

Current Job:
Director, New Products & Innovation at Shutterstock

Where do you plan to take your column this year?
I really want to focus on success by innovation. Specifically how being Agile, in both product development and in business operations, can lead to innovation and, ultimately, success.

What do you hope to accomplish with your Hired Gun posts?
I’d like to help people understand innovation; how to find the open spaces within a business or industry, and fill them. Ultimately what we as product people are here to do is figure out how to help people, how to solve problems, and make people’s lives easier. At our core, we’re innovators. Or course, that’s much easier said than done.

Not everyone understands how to innovate, how to fill those gaps, and how to do it successfully. I’m writing these posts to help people learn and how to succeed.

Who should be checking you out?
Everyone from a new product person to a CEO who is looking to understand how to bring Agile to his or her business so that it can operate and innovate quickly and successfully.

There is a right way and a wrong way to be Agile, and it’s a slippery slope. When done the right way, Agile can help a company be incredibly successful, but when done wrong, it can really hurt a company. People who want to understand the right way to be innovative through Agile should be checking me out. Read More →

Agile: Getting Beyond the Buzzword

Matt Smith on June 7, 2011

People love buzzwords—they help make you part of the conversation. Unfortunately, they can also make you look foolish if you really don’t know what you’re talking about.

When it comes to software development, Agile has become one of those words. In the last eight months, I have interviewed over a hundred product managers, directors, and others. All of them threw “Agile” out there as a part of the conversation: “Oh yeah, we’re an Agile shop, we gave up Waterfall years ago.”

Here’s the problem with that sentence, specifically the word Agile: everyone has his or her own definition of what it means. Agile has generally been a software development word, a repositioning of development away from Waterfall. But it’s also much more than that.

To understand Agile a bit more, let’s step back and understand what Waterfall software development is and where it came from. Waterfall is based on the idea of having requirements upfront, getting design and implementation after the requirements, and doing verification and maintenance at the end. This method was a carryover from manufacturing and construction, where everything had to be very well thought out and planned ahead of time, because even the slightest change would be hugely expensive.

In these situations, the notion of a Waterfall approach makes perfect sense. If you’re going to build a bridge, you better not start without knowing where the bridge is going to connect on the other end, and you better have a huge amount of specifications for everything. But for software development, where things move quickly, and the cost of adjustments are minimal, this type of development just doesn’t make sense.

That’s where Agile comes in. Instead of planning everything out in advance, Agile favors lots of small incremental decisions, and it can also adapt to changes throughout the process. There are lots of flavors of Agile out there: there’s scrum Agile, non-scrum Agile, kanban Agile, and hundreds of others. Then there’s the kind that unfortunately tends to be the one I hear described most often when people talk to me about Agile. It’s fake Agile. Read More →

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

Jeff Gothelf on May 2, 2011

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 →

THG @SXSW: What Larry David’s Rants Reveal About “Extreme Users” and Broken UX

The Hired Guns on March 14, 2011

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.
Curb Your Experience: Pushing the UX to Extreme
Tuesday, March 15, 5:00
Presenter: Jenine Lurie

Your Twesume
(your resume in 140 characters or less).
Solutions Consultant & UX Strategist team lead for a diverse client base. I champion the user for great, intuitive exp. in product design.

Why did you want to speak at SXSW?
I am excited to speak at SXSW to share some fun ideas about the application design process.

Who should come to your talk?
My audience is people who want to learn ways to bring smart, strategic usability design into their business models and product development process.

What will people walk away learning from you?
I hope people will learn that observing how customers interact with your product is critical for creating a great experience. I also hope people will learn how to closely examine broken systems and processes, and understand that a dysfunctional system or process can be both be funny as well as frustrating.

What do you hope you learn from your SXSW experience?
I hope SXSW opens my mind and senses to the current cultural landscape of emerging trends in music, film, and interactive design. In other words, I really just want to get turned out to a lot of new stuff.

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

Jeff Gothelf on March 14, 2011

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

Gunsworthy

The Hired Guns Blog

Topics

Authors

Archive

Final Days to Get Your Tickets to the 3rd Annual UX Awards!

UX Visionaries Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden talk about their new book Lean UX

Beverly May: Founder of The UX Awards, Advocate for Exceptional Experiences

What is a Career in User Experience Really About?

No One Goes There Anymore: Home Pages and the New Wisdom in Traffic Patterns

It’s the Platform, Stupid: Why Different Devices Need Different Kinds of Content

Call for Submissions: the 2nd Annual User Experience Awards

Where Are All the Mid-level UX Designers?

The Good Guns: Help UX Talent Get Noticed

Signal to Noise: The 80/20 Rule for Agile Product Owners

Complicating Products Is Easy; Simplifying Them Is Hard

Meet Our Blogger: Jeff Gothelf

The Stats:

Meet Our Blogger: Matt Smith

The Stats:

Agile: Getting Beyond the Buzzword

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

THG @SXSW: What Larry David’s Rants Reveal About “Extreme Users” and Broken UX

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

Gunsworthy

Sara Horowitz: On Independence, the Future of Work, and Her New Book
by Ryan Galloway

Big Data in Adland: Lip Service Galore, but Little Execution
by Danny Flamberg

Three Personal Branding Tools You Should be Using Today
by Ryan Galloway

3 Convenient Illusions: The Frustrating State of Agency Innovation
by Danny Flamberg

Data Science for the Non-Scientists
by Tom Burg

About The Hired Guns

Press

Contact Us

The Hive

Topics

Authors

Archive

The Stats:

The Stats:

Gunsworthy

About The Hired Guns

Press

Contact Us

The Hive

Email To a Friend