Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon’s retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple’s Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally — wisely — left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn’t let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they’re all still there, and Larry is not.

Just one juicy tidbit from the must-read Stevey’s Google Platforms rant.

Anybody in the business of shipping software will love this.

Easily the best thing Paul Carr has written in ages.

That kind of wealth can easily drive the most saintly of us to behave in inhuman ways — to become so remote from reality and humanity that users [like EJ] become (at best) PR problems to be solved and (at worst) irrelevant pieces of data; eyeballs or clicks or room nights to be monetized in the pursuit of an ever greater exit.

I’ve been thinking about mapping this out for a while, but couldn’t have done as good a job as this.

A current bugbear:

The insinuation that making something else in a product class that is already established is automatically competitive.

The HP TouchPad is the new iPad competitor.
Google Plus is the new Facebook competitor.
Keynoir is a Groupon competitor.

And so on.

Switch out competitor for clone and you’re more than halfway there.

You’ll notice it’s most prevalent in services that have one dominant leader and lots of copycats springing up to copy their user experience verbatim.

Cloning is the work of business people attempting to run creative businesses. Watch out for them.

NB. Cloning and copying, as any interface designer will tell you, are not necessarily the same thing.

There are too many UX roles in London right now to have enough qualified people to fill them all. I’m not the first to say it, but if you’re wondering if the grass is greener elsewhere, then now is the time to get out there.

Agency vs. Client

Don’t be too hasty to pick a side.

Agencies are in a massive state of flux. Those who have been genuinely practising a good design methodology and have been led well by a solid executive team continue to flourish. They are easy to spot. They have the luxury of cherry-picking their projects. They might have some ‘famous’ employees: well known in design and development circles. They might not pay the best salaries, but will offer fame and experience over fortune: a platform for you to build your personal brand while actually having the portfolio to back it all up.

If that’s your thing.

And then there are the rest. Those who have shoehorned ‘digital’ into a tired offering. The service design-hawkers. The tired agile manifesto documentation-bashers. The craft-obsessed former industrial designers. Those with no project managers. Those who like to ‘just go straight into PhotoShop’. Those that never get to go to conferences because their utilisation rate is their only genuine KPI. Harder to spot, but easy to discover if you ask the right questions.

Client-side there are interesting problems to solve too, and also better growth opportunities for the more senior among you who don’t really fancy going freelance. Companies large and small are skilling up in-house: largely due to the fortunes they’ve been paying for agency user experience work of vastly differing quality. This is a market-wide opportunity not to be sniffed at.

Go big

Your value and experience will be judged immediately on what basic salary you’re after. Don’t be tempted by utilisation bonuses, signing-on bonuses, profit sharing schemes or any of that nonsense. Ask big, and ask it confidently.

UX salaries have increased hugely in the last two years, especially among the shady ‘Senior’ or ‘Lead’ UX levels. Remember that very few agencies have the need or scale to implement an intricate pay hierarchy. State what you think you’re worth and add another ten grand.

If you haven’t had an annual pay-rise from your current employer, then start looking. Right this minute.

Once you’ve made the decision to start looking, then these are the guiding principles I used recently. Yours might not be the same, but it’s worthwhile thinking about them before you start interviewing.

Don’t stop learning

We all have areas of our field we’re not particularly good at, that go against our natural skills and experience. Find a job that stretches that. Skill up. Work in a business you know nothing about but don’t lose focus on what you can offer that business. And try to keep a vaguely standardised recognisable job title.

Find interesting problems to solve

When interviewing at an agency, don’t be distracted by how nice the meeting room is, or which model of iPad your interviewers have, or how many Bromptons there are neatly lined up by reception. The only thing worth focusing on is who the clients are, and what the specific projects are too. If you don’t fancy the sound of them, then don’t be beguiled by the surroundings. Focus on the work. The more detailed you are around what daily activities you’d like to be doing straightaway as well as where you’d like to be in twelve months or so will only help both parties in the long run.

Don’t judge clients by their face value though. There are interesting design challenges in even the most boring of companies. It’s what they need agencies for, after all. There seems to be a huge increase of ‘marketing communications UX work’, if there is such a thing. Make sure you know what that entails before signing up.

Don’t be the best

Being the best UXer in the room, unless you’re a contractor, is not always beneficial. Sometimes it’s not an option though. Many are bemoaning the lack of genuine seniority in our craft, especially among those who have talked their way into seniority without the chops to back up the chat. There’s a ton to be learned from business analysts, commercial folk, product managers and all sorts of non-UX people you’ll come in to contact with.

Profitability wins

There are some highly profitable digital businesses, doing great work and rewarding their staff as a result. There are also plenty of others struggling to make ends meet, some of whom will be hiring UX people as a human bandage to legacy design decisions. There is no emotional justification for joining an unprofitable business, or one that is shrouded in uncertainty and confusing share structures. Stick with the simple company that makes money from doing good work.
Therefore do a bit of background homework on potential employers. With agencies, check the obvious such as current client lists and be forceful about asking for contract values. Do they fight tooth and nail for five figure projects, or are they firmly in the six figure, long engagement leagues? With in-house roles, a quick glance at Companies House never harmed anyone.

And do a Google News search on them.

In summary, the best advice I can give right now is:

1. Make sure your portfolio is exemplary; you should be able to score an interview almost anywhere if it is. Check out Jason’s Better UX Portfolios site for more help on this.
2. Despite you, the candidate, having more bargaining power than ever before, don’t be a dick about it.
3. Take your time and interview generously. Don’t take the first offer that comes your way. Try not to be in a rush to find a new permanent role.
4. Be sensitive to little details that will make your future working life better. Environment and gear in particular are things that bother me if they’re not right.
5. Make sure your new creative leader / boss / line manager is brilliant and inspirational. Much of this will come over in how they choose to interview you. Some will be happy enough with a coffee and a chat, others will insist on the four hour half-day bootcamp approach. Therefore, pick your battles and value your own time. Turn down half-day interviews if you want. Large organisations don’t need you there for that long to make a decision if they have a great person looking after recruitment.
6. Try to get a good feel for the size and strength of the visual design and development teams. With the latter, I’ve become quite opinionated about which technologies afford me, the designer, the greatest flexibility. I’ll know whether we’ll get along based on those answers.
7. Strategic offers are brilliant. If the biggest, baddest agency in town wants to hire you, pursue that offer, even if you have no intention of working there. It’s good collateral.
8. Be wary of recruiters. Ask for recommendations from recently hired peers. Choose one agency if you must. No more.

Good luck out there.

How very disappointing. Much of the other early Cannes feedback seems to be divided.

I’ll still be seeing this one theatrically though, you don’t get to see Malick in the cinema very often.

Walt Disney’s original vision for EPCOT was a modernist utopia in the Florida swamps, half Le Corbusier and half Fordlandia, “a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American industry and research, schools, cultural and educational opportunities.” But the reality is just another theme park, albeit one employing an abundance of slogans about progress and national stereotypes. Wesley Jones jokes in Mousecatraz that the Disney College Program might justifiably be called “the Experimental Prototype ‘ College’ of Tomorrow.” One of the world’s largest internship programs—touted as a massive and wondrous experiment in experiential education—is a minimum-wage, corporate paradise, endorsed by schools and accepted by students, as much a mirage as the original EPCOT.

and from Wikipedia:

Walt Disney‘s original vision of EPCOT was for a model community, home to twenty thousand residents, which would be a test bed for city planning and organization. The community was to have been built in the shape of a circle, with businesses and commercial areas at its center, community buildings and schools and recreational complexes around it, and residential neighborhoods along the perimeter. Transportation would have been provided by monorails and PeopleMovers (like the one in the Magic Kingdom‘s Tomorrowland). Automobile traffic would be kept underground, leaving pedestrians safe above-ground. Walt Disney said, “It will be a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American industry and research, schools, cultural and educational opportunities. In EPCOT, there will be no slum areas because we won’t let them develop. There will be no landowners and therefore no voting control. People will rent houses instead of buying them, and at modest rentals. There will be no retirees; everyone must be employed.” The original model of this original vision of EPCOT can still be seen by passengers riding the Tomorrowland Transit Authority attraction in the Magic Kingdom park; when the PeopleMover enters the showhouse for Stitch’s Great Escape!, the model is visible on the left (when facing forward) behind glass. This vision was not realized. Walt Disney was not able to obtain funding and permission to start work on his Florida property until he agreed to build the Magic Kingdom first. Disney died before the Magic Kingdom opened.

Spooky.

South by South West is not a conference, nor a festival. It is a vast, exhausting attention vortex that wields global influence and remains unlike any other event I have experienced.
Unlike most other authors of posts like this, I have not been before. In fact, if you’re reading this, there’s a high chance you’re like me.

Every year, I would watch as peers from all corners of the globe would descend on Austin, shriek-tweeting their delight of endless partying and seeing big-name panelists duking it out over buzzwords we see in our RSS clients on any normal day of the week, but live. And at the same time you sit there at your desk, wondering how on earth they managed to squeeze it out of their marketing and events budget, since no dot com or old school agency MD worth their salt doesn’t know the stories of SXSW. The tales of booze and BBQ. The sporadic, perspiring schedule that engulfs an entire town. The jolly to end all jollies.

Sick of not going, we bought the earlybird tickets back in September. If I have to take holiday, pay my own expenses and profit for myself and not my employer, then so be it. Now I’ve had a few days recuperating in Los Angeles, I can say in retrospect I don’t regret the time and expense one little bit. SXSW ticks all of my boxes – amazing, exemplary American cuisine, the chance to rub shoulders with people you normally see in virtual print (in aforementioned feed reader), live music everywhere and enough free booze to sink an aircraft carrier. Not to mention hometown folks I don’t see nearly enough of, and the chance to feed off tangible creative energy; the prospect of contagious creativity, coming home with the desire to Make Stuff for yourself as well as servicing your existing clients and colleagues better.

But then it’s so irritating, right? I would selectively unfollow people at this time. Envious of their budgets, the sunshine, the knowledge, the vibe. It’s the ultimate party that you forgot about until it’s too late, and all the latest is being ploughed straight into your desktop twitter client as you sit at work promising to yourself you’ll go next year. In fact I’ve returned to colleagues apologising to me for temporary unfollowing. I completely understand.
Well, damn it, we did go. And I don’t think it will be a one-off.

UX content

Straight off the bat, I’d like to say that there is absolutely nothing content-wise that was new at SXSW. If anything, it was reassuring to hear techniques and processes that I’ve been subscribing to for years being wheeled out once again. And the audiences at these UX sessions were considerable. I get the feeling we are at the cusp of more and more money being shifted towards strategic UX in the future. It’s good to know that Trammell’s user testing lab at Twitter consists of a few Macs running silverback. It’s great to watch Hoekman Jr rant about the lack of clear customer experience strategy among his clients to a full house. It’s brilliant to see Khoi Vinh present a deck that consisted mostly of wireframes. It’s now up to us to not balls it all up, and do some decent work.
But none of it was new. At The Team we’ve long practiced the Holy Trinity (designers, developers and UXers working together as a unit, preferably harmoniously). Not only was this sexed up as Voltron at SXSW, it was presented as being a new and innovative working methodology. Perhaps I have my agency blinkers on, but this is not new to me. Am I lucky? Have I really forgotten all that client-side heartache so quickly? Plenty to reflect on, but reassuring to know that those who are considered The Authority do what you do already.

Wood panelling

The panel as a format is a horrendous thing.

After day one I swore to not attend another panel. It’s painful to see people you’ve enjoyed present before reduced to a formless, stuttering mess. What’s worse is the content is so potentially juicy too. Game design vs UX was weighted too heavily towards the AAA game designers, where the one guy who was supposed to stand up for the web barely said anything and was totally unprepared when asked to comment.

The role of panel facilitator is something else that often went horribly under-looked as blithe statements were left unchallenged, often to confused audiences. Having to listen to tired, derivative examples wheeled out (the Amazon homepage is ugly! We don’t have time for user experience due to project management timelines! Other tired project management cliché!) literally had me bouncing up and down in my seat.

I have come to learn therefore, that there is no closure in the provocatively titled panel session; only more confusion, group ego massage and a slightly bitter aftertaste when time’s up and you can’t ask any questions. Actually, sod closure, there isn’t even a payoff. Next year: more impromptu corridor chats, fewer superstars and more sessions miles away from my professional comfort zone.

The sessions I did enjoy most largely had nothing to do with design or making websites. Seeing Robert Rodriguez talking about the challenges of adapting Sin City from graphic novel to the screen was fascinating (not to mention the anecdote about writing the Predators script at Arnie’s behest in the mid-90s). The Ain’t It Cool News panel was the only good panel I saw. Having read and listened to the AICN guys for over ten years, hearing them recount the stories from the internet’s best movie site was electrifying. Pure geek joy. Only available at SXSW.

It is what you make of it.

Summer camp without any councillors. You have to find this weird balance of being super-organised about which speakers, sessions, parties and freebies you want to see, but then go with the flow and not be annoyed if serendipity leads elsewhere. This is ultimately key to having a good time; and we were blessed to have a healthily large group of friends, colleagues (both past and present) and brand new acquaintances to share it all with. Everyone experienced the joy and excitement of SXSW individually and as a group of Brits Abroad, and it was rollicking good fun to catch up and compare notes over a few Shiner Bocks at the end of each day. Foursquare was enormously helpful to track whereabouts and plan impromptu meet ups for a cheeky mid-afternoon hamburger. Yes. It was actually useful.

You can’t be everywhere at once.

I think Monday’s late afternoon session was the worse, with at least six sessions I wanted to see happening simultaneously. The agenda is so dense and confusing that not even the organisers themselves can provide anything particularly helpful to plan your day. The iPhone app is cluttered and hard to browse and the paper version has the heft of an Argos catalogue.

I can only extend enormous thanks to the Lanyrd folks for providing a free, unofficial and well thought out site to make this Herculean task a bit easier. But yes, I missed so much. Shan’t dwell on it though since the plus side of the things I did mange to see will stick long into my memory and provide inspiration for many months to come. And there’s plenty of video I hope to get round to at some point.
Even the expo is pretty good. It’s nice to meet the people behind the stuff you use every day (massive double take when Scott Berkun handed me a WordPress tshirt, and also amazing to meet Tim van Damme who is lucky enough to be working for Gowalla), and you can indeed collect more schwag than you’ll be able to stuff into your luggage.

Serious eats

The food, ohmygod the food. It’s everywhere. It’s often free and for a connoisseur of dirty American cuisine, it’s heaven on earth. This trip was as much about the food as anything else, and the BBQ is to die for. We had amazing meals at the Moonshine Patio, Frank, The Salt Lick, Casino El Camino, Jo’s Coffee, Gourdough’s, Austin Java and so many more. You’d think the extra influx of people would degrade quality, but nothing was bad. There Will Be Writeups.

Austin

The town. It’s well laid out. It’s sunny. It’s full of tattoo parlours, independent stores, great restaurants and dive bars. Most of the homogenous American crap is out of town, unlike the rest of Texas. Like the best bits of southern California squished a bit and shoved a thousand miles or so west.

Tips for next time

Only projects and budget will keep me away from SXSW for the next few years. Now we know the basics (good coffee, good breakfast, how the cabs work, where all the venues are, which local beers are best) I only expect things to improve for next year.  We are also lucky to have family in Houston to visit beforehand which really helped zap the jet lag. Arriving the night before might just kill me. None of us are prepared for the drinking, cholesterol intake and sleep deprivation that is par for the course. And hopefully they’ll liberate the Content Strategists from the Sheraton. It’s just too far away.

So if you’re considering it, or if you’ve always been on the fence, or maybe if you hate the whole thing and wish it would just go away, this is what’s stayed with me since getting back to London a few weeks ago:

Balance & Perspective

If you’re a digital professional (especially one that makes stuff on the web), it acts as a barometer for your own work. You’ll see cool demos. You’ll try new apps. You’ll quickly realise your own strengths and shortcomings. I’m not sure any other event can give you as much raw perspective of where Interactive is at that point time, and where it’s going for the next twelve months.

Culture Clash

It’s one of the few events where agencies and startups mix. In fact, agencies tend to sponsor with startups all vying for attention. This helps with the aforementioned perspective, since us agency-bound big-budget designers need to have our eyes opened to what can be put together without six figure budgets. And we all know who generates the most buzz. Sobering.

It’s really in the hands of the organisers and interactive participants to submit an exciting and relevant programme, hopefully with a few less panels. Old timers have remarked on the changes, which is something I’m ill equipped too comment on. Roll on 2012. I cannot wait.

There has been only one.

Only one single service that has done this properly, and having tried out PR-laden SXSW hype-beasties #Hashable and Ditto this week (as well as countless others, Quora included), I’ve experienced it once too many, turned incandescent with rage and this post is the result.

Stop trying to own my social graph.

Stop trying to make me add friends in your app.

There are two, and only two, services that serve it for most folks. For me, it’s Twitter. For most others, it’s Facebook.

I am your target demographic. I am your beta tester; the guy that will bother to send you feedback because I want you to make something that’s useful to me, not that satisfies your own slightly dated business goals (hey, guys, let’s build our own friending system! We need to own all our data, right?).

I tend to my Twitter followers regularly. I add, I subtract.

I imagine those of you who are in a similar line of work do the same: a carefully curated mix of the funny, the famous, the familiar and the fabulous.

It’s the only service that I do this with since it returns value for the time and attention it consumes, so when a shiny new thing comes along and asks me to sign in with Twitter, then I want that magical, pre-populated list of familiar avatars popping up.

What I don’t want to do is have to re-friend that person over and over again. Is there a more awkward digital social interaction? It’s the equivalent of texting somebody to say ‘Hey! Just checking we’re still digi-friends! After all this time! Bye!‘

The only memorable service that’s delivered on this magical potential is the quite wonderful Lanyrd.

Sign in. One click. Everybody’s there. Perfect. Immediate value. User for life.

As for the rest of you, well I’m tired of the mental torment of seeing rows and rows of ‘follow’ buttons next to avatars of people I have already been following for years. Import them all, and turn that button into a ‘mute’ if necessary, but for goodness sake don’t make me have to bother them again with another pesky email sitting in their inbox.

It leads to a terrible user experience for me and my friends.

Mute, don’t re-follow.

This hashable example was particularly disappointing. Signing in with Twitter only pre-populates a few of the fields in the registration form underneath. So, it’s not signing in, and it’s certainly not ‘maximum fun’.
Once past this screen, I’m greeted with the increasingly familiar view of re-adding or inviting people I already know.

 

Hey! France! Stop being so complacent!

Bit of a disappointing trip, this one. Lille seems to have suffered a bit from its Eurostar hub status:

The Euro is still walloping us.

Paul seems to have turned into a strange Disneyland / Starbucks hybrid (but the bread still looks OK).

It’s all a bit odd.

Fortunately there is a ray of pink, soggy light at the end of the tunnel and it’s called Le BCBG burger, and it’s available from a strangely outfitted club/bar/restaurant thing in the old town called Le 28Thiers. We stumbled in there with sore feet (too many cobbles in Lille, apparently) after clocking a business luncheoning group wrapping their chops around some rather tasty looking burgers. Certainly not the standard three course prix fixe we were looking for, but they looked good enough to make the decision to stop.

And I’m rather glad to say we did. Foie gras is a tricky beast to wedge into a burger.

It’s rich. It melts. It’s flavour can be lost when it’s not kept simple.

The classically French steak haché traditionally holds its posh, naked head high: sneering at its American counterparts that have been blackened and cloched with plastic cheese. But the French love a good burger, much as they don’t like to admit it, and this was a great find. In fact I’m glad to say this was a truly excellent burger. The patties were cooked only just enough, as you’d expect, and the tremendously generous slab of foie quickly liquified all over everything on the plate in a most satisfying manner.

Needless to say, the cheese-baked brioche was perfect, and somehow managed to encase the bloody contents without incident. Tasty too.

I did need a nap afterwards. The best non-traditional thing in a town that needs a good kick up the cul.