illustration by Jon Turner

Some of you expressed some interest in what I learned from my experience interviewing, so I’m going to take a stab at that here. Sorry about the delay, but starting this new job has been both time- and mind-consuming, and has necessitated lots of other changes in my and my family’s lives that have kept me busy hustling around while the dust settles. But now that I’m a few months in I can say that I am 100% glad I made the move. The job is interesting, educational and fun, I work with great people who both appreciate and challenge me, and I see an excitingly long road of potential and possibilities ahead.

In order to get to this great new job I had many, many interviews over the course of a few months, which was quite an educational process. I learned (or re-learned) many things.

• I learned that connections are great but not everything. I got this job at Belkin through a cold drop of my resume into Belkin’s online resume submission system.
• I learned that you shouldn’t count on having internet access during your interview. That seems obvious now, but I made that mistake until I was without it in an interview—one that definitely could have gone better.
• I learned that you should always offer a copy of your resume. If your interviewers feel awkward asking for one and you don’t offer, you could leave them with the impression that you didn’t come prepared. This one I also learned the hard way.
• Most importantly, I learned that an online portfolio of shiny designs and documents is good to get you in the door, but not that great after that.

illustration by Jon Turner

Presenting Past Work
Learning how to tell a compelling story about my past work was my biggest challenge over the course of my interviews. I had read Whitney Hess’s excellent article about telling the story of your process in interviews, and thought I was prepared to do just. But I found that without specific preparation, talk would always circle back to the documents, and I would have trouble making that story as focused and clear as I wanted it to be.

What worked the best for me in the end was to create a Keynote presentation around a few specific projects. Preparing my “portfolio review” as a presentation made it easier for me to plan the arc and pacing of the story I wanted to tell. The slides provided visual anchor-points to the story for both me and my interviewers, and gave me a clear place to show mid-process artifacts like sketches, storyboards, and photos of testing. I tried to follow presentation best practices and keep the slides text-light and as support rather than the focus of my story. I was surprised how little detail about the final solutions was necessary in this context. Of course, I also had final designs and documents on my hard drive to show in case my interviewers asked to see them.

I told my project stories with the product as the protagonist and myself as a supporting character. There was exposition, action, conflict, resolution, and dénouement. Although this sounds kind of formal, everyone likes to listen to a story, and a good presentation is a fun experience. It helped me be more confident in my material and it gave ample openings for questions and discussion about the process, which is preferable to the dreaded, “Why did you choose yellow?” It also allowed my interviewers a chance to assess my presentation abilities, which are an important part of a UX design skill set.

Finding a Good Match
I also learned that the job market is pretty darn good right now for experience designers. Most companies that design interactive products not only know what “interaction design,” “UX,” and “IA” mean, they also feel an urgency to integrate these practices into their process. Although many places are still working out the best way to do this, the fact that they see it as vital to their success is a big change from 5 or 10 years ago. So it seems that there are more openings for seasoned UXers than there are seasoned UXers as the recession begins to turn around.

This means that employers need to pay close attention to how they are performing in the interview process, because it is a two-way sale. The current economy might tempt interviewers to feel they hold all the power, but waiting to begin the sales pitch until a candidate has been fully vetted would be a mistake. I know that it was important to me to feel wanted, to be excited about the role, the company, the team, and the projects—and some interviewers had given more thought to this than others. So for anyone out there looking to hire, I recommend evaluating your interview process from the candidate’s perspective and discovering what story it is telling about your company. After all, job candidates are doing their best to showcase awesome experience design; I think it’s fair for them to expect hiring UX departments to do the same. And when both parties get it right, it can feel like a match made in heaven.

This Thursday will be my last day at Yahoo! After three and a half years, I’ll be packing up my design books, dismantling my forest-cube, and turning in my purple badge. And then, after a very short break I’ll be joining the small but formidable UX team at Belkin.

I’m really excited about this new job. I’m excited to get my hands on the UX and interaction design of physical products, something I’ve been passionate about since my product design days at Stanford. I’m excited to work for a company that understands the value of UX, that wants to build products whose enjoyment and ease of use is a core differentiating feature. I’m excited to work for a company that is going to be a part of the future of green technology. And I’m excited to work for an innovative company that digs design.

My time at Yahoo has given me invaluable experience, inspiration, and friendships over the last three years. I’ve learned so many things, like how to design for global audiences, what it’s like to launch a product to millions of customers, the difference between designing for entertaining diversion versus specific tasks, and so much more. I will miss all of the incredibly smart and talented people I met there, and sincerely hope I’ll get the chance to work with them again in the future.

Hopefully once I get into the swing of things at the new job, I’ll be able to resume posting here on a reasonable schedule, now that I’m done with all of the time and effort of interviewing. (By the way, I have a lot of ideas for posts based on my experience interviewing as a UXer, so let me know if you might be interested in hearing about the things I’ve learned.) In the mean time I’ll be packing boxes, spending a few days outdoors away from the computer, and generally getting myself psyched up and ready to dive in to my new adventure. Here’s to new beginnings!

I’m hard at work on an evening design project (which you can see sneak peeks of here and here). In the meantime I thought I would share this wonderful hack I spotted in my dentist’s office this week:

Isn’t this use of dental floss somehow poetic and beautiful?

On one of my recent flights, this was the view of the tray table on the seat-back in front of me, pretty much at eye level:

Staring at it through my normal take-off angst, I found myself trying to imagine who had decided this was the right text to inscribe on every tray table. It’s hard to read in this photo, but these two sentences are, “Fasten seat belt while seated,” and “Use bottom cushion for flotation device.” The first one seems appropriate to me, as it is a helpful bit of advice that can be applied to a scenario that happens on 100% of all flights: sitting. The second, however, addresses a catastrophic scenario that is EXTRAORDINARILY rare. (My totally unscientific Google research indicates that “ditching,” the only way your plane can end up in the water with you still alive, is less than a one-in-a-million occurrence.)

I wonder if the benefit of reminding passengers of a single step they could take in a specific type of super-rare emergency really warrants constantly reminding of the possibility of such an event. My mind read those two sentences as, “We could experience turbulence,” and “We could crash into the OCEAN, OMG!” Just imagine if the home screen of your cellphone always said, “Lock your phone when not in use,” and “Text GSF to 011 in case of phone-ignited gas station fire.”

Also, how did the message about the cushions win out over other, possibly more useful safety info like, say, the emergency landing brace position? Because it’s short?
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And then, boarding a different flight, I saw that the safety information cards were stuck into the tops of the seats like this, instead of hidden away in the seat-pockets as they usually are:

I got sort of excited by this, thinking that it was a change in airline policy toward passenger engagement with the safety information. Having the cards like this, and requiring each passenger to move their own card from here to the pocket in front of them would change the act of looking at the card from opt-in (passengers have to first decide to pull it from the pocket) to forced-choice (passengers have it in their hand, and then have to decide whether to look at it or not).

The web equivalent would be changing it from this:

to this:

My nerdy excitement was for naught, however, because it turned out the cleaning crew had just accidentally left them like this, and the flight staff quickly tucked them all back into the seat pockets.

Perhaps if they could guarantee more people looked at the safety card, they wouldn’t need to inscribe scary safety messages everywhere?

It’s been almost two weeks now since I returned from Interaction ‘10 in Savannah, which was a fantastic conference packed with phenomenal people and content. Now that I’ve had some time to reflect (and recover from post-conference illness), here are some of my takeaways.

Meaning
Finding and providing meaning in the products and services we create was one of the repeated themes of the conference. Jon Kolko discussed the emergence of this theme in his post reflecting on the conference, as did IxDA board member Matt Nash-Lapidus.

This year the discussion moved from designing to affect behavior to designing to inspire. ‘Meaning’ was presented as the apex of design resonance, more central than aesthetics or emotion, and connected to a greater societal sense of ‘good.’ Nathan Shedroff said, “All design is the process of evoking meaning,” and Jon Kolko named ‘meaning’ as one of the four pillars of our profession and offered this quote from Yves Behar, “If it’s not ethical, it can’t be beautiful.”

Design as Collaboration with End-Users
Aside from debates about what to call ourselves, it seemed to me that the community has accepted the idea that we don’t design ‘experiences,’ because each person’s experience of an interaction is personal and individual. Many of the talks this year encouraged embracing the users as active participants in design. Cindy Chastain related interaction design to storytelling and made a clear point that a central component of every story is the context and expectations of the audience. Liz Danzico spoke about designing “frames” within which users can successfully improvise interactions. Allan Chochinov (in his standout presentation) said, “It’s not what you make, it’s what you facilitate.” Ezio Manzini encouraged us to “enhance people’s capabilities.”

From Screens to Physical Objects
Christopher Fahey had a slide in his talk showed a quoted from Don Norman in 2007 claiming that one of the “next UI breakthroughs” will be “the return to physical devices.” It seems that future is now. Timo Arnall and Matt Cottam both gave thoughtful and thought-provoking presentations of tangible interactions and physical computing, often in devices without a screen. Richard Banks, in his talk titled “The 40 Year Old Tweet,” spoke about the possible need to make digital objects tangible when preserving them as heirlooms.

In his FastCompany piece, Rob Tannen sees this as retrospection, but I saw it more as a sign of the inevitable seamless blending of technology into our surroundings.

Real People Are Compelling
The standout moments of the whole weekend for me were the moments in presentations that showed real-life (non UX) people. Just as our work suffers when it doesn’t have regular exposure to the people we are designing it for, some of the weekend felt a little light on perspective from outside the design world.

One of the reasons Allan Chochinov’s presentation of his students’ work was so outstanding was that most of the student pieces referenced actual people’s stories, such as the supremely touching story of a mom with cancer who wanted to make her baldness less scary to her children. Jon Kolko presented a fascinating student project which designed encouragement for college dudes to use condoms (“Man Shields”), complete with chuckle-inducing quotes and photos. Matt Cottam showed a very funny video of unsuspecting city residents taking an “abandoned” chair off the street and giving it a place in their home. Timo Arnall included captivating video and photos of a young girl delighting in toys and objects embedded with RFID chips. Richard Banks spoke of a man who had inherited a box of rocks from his grandfather, with no note or context to explain why.

These are just a few of the examples of real, non-designer people mentioned in the talks, but to me they clearly illustrate that (in presentations, anyway) people are more interesting than principles.

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Below is a slide-show of my notes from the conference. For in-depth, thoughtful recaps of all four days of the conference, see the Johnny Holland recaps.

Unless you’ve been deep in a cave for all of last week, you probably heard that Apple announced their new product yesterday, the iPad. Opinions about the device, including mine, have been somewhat split. I’m going to leave the general pros/cons discussions for somewhere else, but I wanted to discuss one aspect I find particularly interesting: In a world where devices and services are more and more socially connected, the iPad is strangely ANTIsocial.

the Apple iPad floating in its humanless world (© Apple)

By leaving out two features—multiple concurrent apps and any kind of camera—the iPad opted out of any competitive social connectedness. It is far less social than the iPhone (or any smartphone), any netbook, and any console gaming system. The iPad is supposed to be a consumption device, but isn’t consuming entertainment a social activity?

The inability to run multiple or background apps means there’s no peripheral sociability. Many of us run IM, Skype, and/or Twitter in the background on our computer (or netbook), especially when we’re more casually engaged. The iPad, on the other hand, is strictly modal. There’s no way to IM with a friend while watching a TV show, or keep an eye on Twitter while cruising around on the web.

The iPhone doesn’t run background apps either, but the iPhone is a PHONE, which is inherently social. It also does SMS. In a world where Twitter sends you texts and email and Facebook have push notifications, even if you are not directly calling someone, the phone is in constant peripheral communication. And it’s doing all of that while in your pocket.

It's all communication

It’s possible the iPad will allow apps to have push notifications with audible alerts, although right now there’s no indication that it will. But that interaction model seems more suited to a phone in your pocket than a device you are directly engaged with for hours at a time.

A web camera on the iPad could have made up for the lack of peripheral connectedness by enabling an extraordinarily deep social connection in the form of face-to-face video chat. I kept waiting during the presentation yesterday for Jobs to announce there was “one more thing,” a webcam embedded behind the screen, enabling direct eye-contact during video chat. THAT would be magical. (Also, I would bet that baby-boomers, a theorized target for this device, would adore such a feature.)

Imagining video-chatting with my son

A standard camera could also have helped. On the iPhone, photos and videos are social objects because you can digitally share them instantly. Quick poll: which would you say you share more—photos taken with your phone or photos taken with a nicer camera (especially per photo)? The iPad regards photos and videos as media for consumption only. This is made even clearer by the absence of an SD card slot, which is most useful for making photos digitally sharable in the first place.

You can use the iPad to share photos with someone standing next to you—the photos are larger and the screen is nicer than on your iPhone. But… you always have the phone on you. When you run into an old friend and want to show them pictures of your kids, what are the chances you will you pull your iPad out of your backpack?

Did Apple realize they were ruling out so much social activity? It seems strange if they truly want to compete with netbooks. Or perhaps Apple is attempting to influence society and encourage us to take time away from the constant buzz of Twitter and social networks. What do you think?

P.S. I also have to chime on the name. My guess is that Apple chose iPad, despite its U.S. cultural connotations, because it transfers more easily to other regions and languages. Regardless, I wish they’d instead named it the iPage: a name that evokes their iBooks design (see below), and if the iBook is a computer, then this isn’t this like is a thin, light slice of that?

The 67th annual Golden Globe Awards were just a little over a week ago, and within two days (Sunday and Monday) the Yahoo Golden Globes site served over half a BILLION page views. On that Monday alone, which was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and a work holiday for many, there were eleven million unique visitors, each viewing an average of 44 pages and spending almost 8 minutes on the site. I am so proud to have worked on the site that helped make those amazing numbers possible.

Problem: Prior to this project, Yahoo had some awards show coverage, but the editorial and programming effort involved in each instance was so prohibitive that only the very largest shows were covered. In addition, all of the awards show sites used completely different designs, code, and even editorial tools, which ruled out any chance of efficiency from show to show.

Project: Design a reusable site template flexible enough to be used for each of the major awards shows during the year—Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, Golden Globes—as well as a low-effort, feature-light version for any of the other smaller awards shows. The site template must also accommodate visual design flexibility, because the different awards shows need to live within different Yahoo sites: Emmys in Yahoo TV, Globes in omg!, and Oscars in Yahoo Movies.

Research: We started by mining the traffic data for insight into audience behavior, and then we did a content audit across every awards show site we could find. But our richest sources of information were our in-house experts: the editors. We conducted extensive interviews with editors from all of the Yahoo entertainment sites, and they provided us with a clear understanding of their processes, pain-points, and the opportunities they saw for both themselves and the end-user.

Process: We began sketching during the research phase, and as we worked we covered the walls and whiteboards in our war room with sketches. Visual design comps and wires were developed and refined in tandem, and the visual designer and I were in constant close communication. We had multiple reviews with the editors, both informal and formal. The most current comps were always taped to the walls.

We focused on a few key things. First, we wanted to make sure we put the content front and center. People are looking for the content—photos, nominee and winner info, opinion, and video—and not for site features. We made the photos and videos as large as possible, and tried to make the access to everything as simple as we could. Basically, we tried to keep the site out of the way of the content.

Second, we wanted to empower the editors to promote the very best content easily throughout the site. These sites are wholly powered by the editors. They know what is interesting now, and they work hard to elevate and commentate the very best from the photo and news feeds. To take advantage of this we created a highly modular home page and cross-linking right column for content pages. We decided that these promotional areas should not have fixed content placements, and that cross-linking should never be driven by what’s “related,” but rather by what’s hot right now (as determined by the editors). The editors would have the ability to create content modules of different varieties—photos, videos, blogs, news, and polls—and then place those modules however they liked on the homepage and that right column. This one “Best of…” column would appear on every page but the homepage, helping to simplify the site, keep the editorial workload down, and surface the most enticing content on every page. This modular, editorial-powered approach also meant that the awards show template could be easily modified for lower-profile awards shows.

And lastly, we wanted to enable user commentary and engagement wherever possible. We had a lot of scope-intensive ideas like bracket voting and user-created galleries, but at a basic level we wanted to allow people to express their opinions on any piece of content. People have strong opinions about almost everything related to an awards show—the nominees, the dresses, the winners, and the show—and we wanted to make sure the site included places to share those opinions. (Clearly, improving spam filtering should be a high priority in improving this experience.)

Of course, there’s usually a fair amount of hidden complexity in simple-seeming things, so we also spent time stress-testing and spec’ing the design to make sure it worked for all of the intended host sites and awards show types.

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Final Oscars and Emmys site designs

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2 pages of my functional spec doc

Successes: Our efforts to showcase the content and offer enticing cross-links paid off. We saw a 215% jump in page views per unique user over the previous year (from 20 to 45) when we rolled out this design for Oscars. Additionally, the common code, layout, and editorial tools drastically decreased the effort and time involved in building, populating, and releasing sites for new awards shows.

Areas for Improvement: There are a few pieces of the site I would love to get a chance to revise, like the person/movie/show page, and there were many great features that hit the cutting room floor. But I would say my biggest wish is that I had had more time to work on the design of the editorial tool itself. The engineer who built the tool all by himself in record time did an amazing job, but there are definitely some processes that could have been made easier for the editors.

Final Takeaways Many factors besides the design of the site contributed to this year’s fantastic Globes success, Avatar’s Best Picture win among them. The bulk of the credit goes, without a doubt, to our talented and hardworking staff of editors. Like I said, people want content—photos, opinions, news, and more photos—and our editors crafted an extraordinary set of content that kept the audience engaged and looking for more. After a year of using the new awards show tools, editors from all of Yahoo’s entertainment sites were able to work together as one large team to support the Globes, which was a huge win for both Yahoo and our audience. I’d like to salute them for their skill and effort, and I’m already looking forward to the Oscars!

Credits: Interaction Design: Sarah Mitchell (me), Jens Jonason. Visual Design: Megan O’Toole. Design Manager: Nina Ristani. Engineering: Steve Krutzler, Travis Kuhl, Eric Melkerson. Product Management: Adam Zarlengo. Project Management: Noah Kanter. 2010 Emmys Visual design by Seva Dyakov.

I’m not sure why elevators seem to be magnets for confusing interfaces (although I probably could take some guesses). To add another example to the list, my friend Scott recently sent me this picture:

How great is that button? Apparently it was on a wall all by itself, with nothing at all to indicate what happens when it is pushed. It reminds me of something from a kids’ fantasy novel—a magical, solitary button tempting you with unknown consequences.

Does it call the fire department? Does it ring the alarm? Does it send the elevator to the ground floor and lock it there? All three? Maybe it whisks you back in time or teleports you to a nearby park. Does it matter what it does? Perhaps all you truly need to know is when to press it.

I personally think it would be helpful to know what it does, in case that behavior might be useful in some circumstance other than a fire. For example, is it safe to press the fire button if there’s an earthquake? But maybe it’s just that my curiosity has gotten the best of me. If I had been in that elevator I would have been severely tempted to push that button JUST to find out what it does.

What do you think—is it fine to display only when to use the button, or should they also let people know what it does?

This is the LCD info display in the dashboard of my mom’s 2002 Toyota Avalon. (Please excuse the blurry iPhone photo.)

During my last visit, I think I spent too much time in the car, because that display really started to bug me. I just cannot for the life of me imagine a designer could look at it and think, “Yep, that’s finished. Put it into production!” Maybe no designers were involved or empowered, but that display makes no sense to me. Here’s a clearer recreation:

NOTHING in it aligns with anything else! It’s like someone just dropped things in and pushed them around until they filled up the space, leaving them tantalizingly close to lined-up, but not quite. Why on earth isn’t the temperature either left- or right-aligned with the clock? And why is the date so enormous, but yet not the same size as the time? And after dedicating so much space to the date (which only changes once a day, after all), five other features are jammed into the bottom right corner, and then not right-aligned with the date. Looking at all these odd gaps and edges makes my brain itch.

And on top of all that, the odometer is in a teensy tiny, non-backlit LCD area below this large display, which means, among other things, that you can’t read it at night. (My mom really hates that.)

So I decided to take a take a crack at fixing the large LCD display layout. This is not a true redesign. I’m giving Toyota the benefit of the doubt on the relative importance of items (except the date). Also, it doesn’t seem fair to say, “Use a better screen technology!” which would allow me to do things very differently. Not that a drastic redesign isn’t called for—as you can see here the whole dash really needs (and has probably since gotten) a ground-up rethinking. I just wanted to try to work within my understanding of the original designer’s constraints—technology, size, and (mostly) data—and bring some order to it. Here is my take:

I aligned the elements as best I could. I made the date significantly smaller and added in the odometer. This meant removing a few of the display toggle options, but I felt this was a reasonable trade-off for the increase in odometer usability and general cleanliness. Also, following Tufte’s principle of maximizing data-ink, I removed the heavy outline around the compass.

I’m sure it’s not perfect—I only worked on it for one evening. But at least it doesn’t make my brain itch.

Do you have more suggestions? A better solution? Or do you love the original? Let me know!

In one month I will head off to Interaction 2010, a fantastic UX conference put together by IxDA. I was fortunate enough to go last year, and had an overwhelmingly educational and inspiring time. One of my favorite aspects, and something I am really looking forward to again this year, was simply being surrounded by so many like-minded people. It was a treat to chat, learn, and party with hundreds of UXers—whether they called themselves interaction designers, UX designers, IAs, usability professionals, or whatever else.

I think there’s something really interesting about this group of people who felt a calling to a profession that doesn’t even have an official name. For one thing, for most of us working now, there was no UX design track in school, no standard way to progress into the profession. (This is of course changing now with great new undergraduate and graduate programs starting all the time, like the ones at SVA and CIID.) For another thing, you can pretty much guarantee that everyone in this job has a strong desire to be here. Certainly none of us were pressured to continue a family legacy of UX design. Also, a career as amorphous as ours can be rather hard to find and follow, which tends to mean that only the dedicated arrive.

I was thinking about my path to UX and wondering how similar it was to others’, so I put this question out to Twitter: “What first drew you to UX design, what were you doing before, and how did you make the switch?” I got many great responses, and saw a few themes emerge.

First, we are obsessed with helping and understanding people.

Second, we love to live in the middle between art and tech. For some it was the accessibility of web development that facilitated finding a path to that middle ground, for others it was the aforementioned desire to help the humans who have to use things we design and build.

Third, many of us discovered the field (and its various names) after we were already doing the work.

I went off on my own and built a functional prototype of an app we were working on at s&p, when a UX spot opened up, they asked me to move into that role. eventually took over UX of project. but i was originally hired as a developer.
- Jonathan Knoll (@Yoni)

… I just sort of naturally started being the “UX” person on all my projects, and became more and more interested in proper UX and IxD practice. Once I started learning more about IxD I quickly realized that it was closely related to a lot of what I did in art school, and was the first time I had seen real design practice in relation to technology and “new” media. At that point I was sold, and have dedicated myself to IxD.
- Matthew Nish-Lapidus (@emenel)

The last common thread I noticed is that for many of us it feels like a calling, that there was some click of recognition, some “aha moment” when we discovered that the field was out there, or that what we were doing had a name. I love how many people used some variation of the phrase, “and the rest is history.”

I didn’t feel that I had earned the right to call myself a User Experience Designer until I saw that what I had been doing all along was. I guess I felt that research, personas, prototyping, testing was all part of being a web designer. I think that aha came when I started participating more in PhilyCHI and realized that I “am” a UX designer and I don’t want to do anything else than what I am doing.
- Lori W. Cavallucci (@lwcavallucci)

All of these themes are echoed in my story. I majored in Product Design at Stanford, which is a major that combines mechanical engineering with industrial design. I loved my major, and know that I am lucky to have gone to a school that could give both my techie and artsy sides a welcoming home. But much of the coursework was still focused on “the product” and I didn’t even realize that I was missing something until we had a lecture by some human factors specialists. I remember that lecture vividly—they spoke about their work designing the cockpits of helicopters and airport signage, and focusing not just on the “things” but on how people interact with them. It was like an epiphany to me. I was hooked.

I graduated in ‘99 when internet companies were hiring everything that moved. There were no UX designer/IA/Interaction Designer job descriptions listed then, but I knew what I wanted to do, so I got hired as a designer, developer, project manager, and created whatever path I could towards UX work. And the rest, as they say, is history.

What about you? Please feel free to share your path to UX in the comments, or find me at Interaction ‘10 and tell me your story!

A huge thanks again to everyone who contributed answers via twitter or email. I got so many great responses that I couldn’t include them all!