If it is of even the slightest interest to you I still suggest you take all points with a generous pinch of salt.

Many thanks for reading.

- Was never meant to be taken literally and was meant to be taken very much in general
- Some people did take it far too literally and even thought I was talking directly about them and a particular company and a particular job
- Was meant to spur on anyone to Do something about the work they are doing if it was making them unhappy (if they wanted it, only if they were looking for some kind of push). No one is much use to either themselves or their employer (if they have one) if they are unhappy. It is easy to rant/rail/moan/gossip about a job but if it ain’t working out and you are doing something that is wasting your – and other’s – time, then you really owe it to yourself to do something else.
- Believing you can change most things is the easy bit. To keep believing is where it gets harder.
- It’s not the fact that it’s work, it’s the fact of what the work is.
- And contrary to popular believe, you probably build better relationships with clients when you are contracting/providing services.
- Recruiters when trying to hire and not explaining what the work involves (and more often than not having no understanding of the work itself) encapsulates everything wrong with UX recruitment.
- If your not passionate go do something else.
- The previous post really seemed to hit a spot with quite a lot of people as though I had single handedly encouraged a dismantling of all responsibility.
- The previous post wasn’t directing people to walk straight out the door. It was a reminder to always think carefully about what you are doing, where you are and how your working life is working out for you. Small adjustments can make the differences.
- No piece of writing let alone some inconsequential blog post is for everyone. If you don’t need encouragement, if you are happy, then it wasn’t for you. But there are some people who have itches and itches that keep itching and these people need to keep moving, doing their own thing. (Maybe the post was for them, maybe it wasn’t.)
- No need to complain about encouraging folk to do their own thing. Some folk are cut for the long haul and some get those itches. Everyone needs to encourage people flows. Itches shouldn’t be allowed to bleed. You don’t need to get up people noses. There maybe unsettling periods as different people find their comfortable positions and their place in the world. Reward the right people with the right things for them. It is no simpler than that. Hostility rarely attracts loyalty. We are all different and we all have different skills. There isn’t just one solution.
- In terms of the UX design community in London, you can’t have everyone in a full time job and in the same way you can’t have everyone contracting, running their own little shows. Balances have to be struck.
- Great people come in many many different shades and don’t always work/operate exactly the way you want them to. Don’t try and box them in.
- You should go it alone/start your own thing up for the right reasons. Don’t just leave a job to coomand higher rates. That’s a shit reason. Don’t do it for money and less responsbility. Do it because you want to make something, create something. Do it because you want to be able to select projects where you can make a difference, take responsbility, work hard. Deliver.
- Don’t expect everything to just be delivered to you on a plate. Nothing comes easy, least of all being worthwhile, doing something worthwhile (either on your own or in collaboration with others).
- The action is to start something, be something, take risks, don’t panic, don’t fear, explore, think beyond your horizon, don’t be dominated by money don’t think in terms of money. Try it.

//@solle
//London

Think about all *the internets* you frequent on a regular basis on desktops, laptops, smart phones, mobile phones, tablets, games consoles, TVs, projected on the wall. All the contexts you are used to. Then take away all these contexts and think of all those websites and web services again. Think of them with no *limited* context, no limits. Think of them anywhere, everywhere, everything. No obvious seams, beginningend.

What would you do if the work you usually did was only a minuscule part of the potential of your skills?

Are you thinking beyond your understanding of what actually constitutes interaction design/user experience/information architecture work? Are you creating constraints where none should exist?

For a minute, just think what would you do if there was no more website work? No more mobile applications to design. Have you started thinking about the interconnected city and services around you, your interface with the city, town around you? The one you work in, the one you live in, the ones you pass through. Do you care? Or is it someone else’s problem? Who is this someone else? Some of us need to be that someone else.

The ‘internet’ as we understand it is just … a small island in an ocean. And the tip of the rock on that island … A vastness beyond present human comprehension. There are ideas and notions attempting to gain comprehension – every grain of sand with its own IP address? – but really smart people have only tasked themselves with indicating to others that we really have no idea except that things will just get exponentially weird and every part of your life is going to be strange. I think Moore’s Law may just become a lot less of a law.

So interaction designer/user experience designer/information architect…

We all need to think more in terms of networks and less in terms of DESKtops, LAPtops, MOBILEphones, SMARTphones. Limited differentiation is dead, we need to start thinking in terms of input and output, the city as interface and network in front of you, as part of you, operating alongside you. A balanced approach is vital though to ensure “the interface doesn’t become our experience of the city, but helps to enhance it”

What are you doing about it two dimensional interaction designer, information architect? Are you sitting forward, alert listening or are you slumped in your seat, eyes glazed over “someone else’s problem”? You might just be the person that is needed. This might just be your calling. Take an interest, this affects us all.

We are limiting ourselves by only thinking in current terms. The way we approach things/problems now will be ineffective for future problems. In fact there is no way we can comprehend the scope of future design problems, begin to comprehend solution paths from our current approach to problem solving. We shouldn’t necessarily try believing that we have to know now how to solve them. We just have to be prepared that it is all going to get very different and not a little bit weird.

Expect nothing. Be prepared for anything and everything.

In the next post we will begin discussing some specifics.

Please do consider joining us on one of our #walkshops around London. Keep an eye on #londonia and @london_ia

Thank you to @agpublic @byekick @bashford @clurr @nicprice and of course @pixeldiva

//@solle
//London

If you are unhappy in your job – leave and if you aren’t excited about work every morning – stop whatever you’re doing and do something else.

This is what we need to live by.

If you aren’t being challenged in your job – leave.

If you are cruising in your current work – leave.

If you aren’t sweating it at present and feeling under pressure – leave.

If you think you understand everything that you are doing where you are currently working – leave.

If you aren’t failing enough – leave and go find somewhere where you fail before you succeed. When you find yourself succeeding too often – leave again.

If you think you are successful – leave and find something or somewhere where you aren’t. When you become successful again – leave again.

If everyone likes you and wants to work with you – leave and go work somewhere where they don’t (and then get them to want to).

If your work is winning awards and it feels like you win most pitches – leave and go somewhere where no one has won anything and there is a low rate of success at pitches. Help them turn it around.

If you think you know a product inside out – leave and go find a product that you don’t.

If you think you understand the value of all your influences and feel that you have challenged them from all the directions you can find – leave and go find somewhere where there are different (or unheard of) influences that maybe you don’t even understand why they are influences.

If your manager is not influencing you to ultimately leave and go onto bigger and better things – leave.

If someone is standing in the way of your progress (either internally or externally) – leave.

If someone is trying to make you stay in your job – leave.

If your manager is trying to make you stay, they aren’t a good manager – leave.

If the days go too smoothly and there is too much time for idle chatter (or you are surrounded by people with too much time for idle chatter) – leave.

If you don’t work with people who put the same amount of thought and effort into teamwork and collaboration as you do – leave and find people who do.

If there is a culture of persuading people to stay in their jobs by offering them more money – leave.

If where you work there is a business culture of holding on to people to prevent them working for competitors – leave.

If where you work there is a business culture of trying to make competitors fail – leave.

If there isn’t a culture (or understanding) of creating working relationships between the right people and that not everyone works well together – leave.

And if in this work culture there is not the understanding that a certain degree of tension between these great working relationships produces greater work – leave.

“Doctor, doctor I need a break from The Internets” is often a chant that rings around my head. On some days I’m overwhelmed and struggle to concentrate on the important things. My mind a grid of content, links, pictures, feeds all churning on and on, never stopping. There is only impatience and crushed concentration (and often pitiful constructive output). I feel an intense need to brush all the screens aside and get my day in order. To relearn how to concentrate and to (really) get things done.

When online we are impatient searchers (obsessive, clicking, hopping, lurking) often going nowhere fast, but when offline we are more inclined towards waiting, letting things happen, letting connections be made. Offline we are more patient, and maybe more constructive. “Are meaningful connections easier to recognize when the fog of the Internet is lifted?” (2,3)

The case for the internet rewiring our brains has already been made by Nicolas Carr (4) and is well documented, supported and challenged – “Whether or not the internet has made a difference to how we use our brains, it has certainly begun to make a difference to how we think about our brains” Ed Bullmore. “Sometimes I think my ability to concentrate is being nibbled away by the internet; other times I think it’s being gulped down in huge, Jaws-shaped chunks” Geoff Dyer. Also Steven Pinker’s well-documented scepticism: “New forms of media have always caused moral panics… but such panics often fail basic reality checks. If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting”. (5)

He may be right. But many people are exhausted. There are recent descriptions by James Sturn (2) and Juan Rodriguez (6) of taking breaks or cutting back on the internet. They describe how they have reclaimed parts of their lives and have rediscovered the joy of reading books and talking to people that they had felt they had forgotten and undervalued. There is also Rebecca Traister’s battle with being ‘reachable’ at any time: “To not be reachable if called upon at any time, except perhaps the dead of night, feels sinful; unavailability betrays disconnectedness, and disconnectedness has come to stand for idleness and indolence.” (7)

Absence (or abstinence) benefits almost every other part of human life (relationships and diet), but how would it help us with tackling our “online addictions”? (1). First you need to recognise that you can benefit from a break. It is not for everyone (many people co-exist with most things in life with no ill effects, disability, or loss of productivity – in fact some are propelled by it), but many are less fortunate. This connectedness keeps them from sleeping, concentrating, working and actually living. (7)

There are huge long-term benefits in educating people to consider these problems and find solutions that suit them (though please avoid reactive behaviour – this needs to be planned to work).

To start patterns can help: One day off, one day on. No internet at home. No computer at home. No use of internet or computer at home at weekend. Only use wifi in the local coffee shop. There are multiple ways to make it work. You just need to chose the method that works for you. The most important thing is to build up a variation of interests. Over time, if you are not careful, the internet can suck you dry of ‘other’ interests. Cast your net wide. Revisit things you did before screens were so omnipresent (or things you now do online/using a screen that you used to do without a screen). Screen-based interests are ultimately not going to work (too much temptation). Interests that feed a screen (but are produced without a screen) can be fine. Remember – you need to be looking at the world around you through viewfinders, not LCDs. Rather than always be looking for inspiration from those around you online, connected to you, book out time to refuel on external inspiration – fill up the tank.

Taking a break from the internet by choice helps to clear the mind and rediscover the ability to “recognise meaningful connections”. (2) But it’s not always as straightforward as just switching off and going to sit in the other room. You need a plan. A method. A structure. And it’s not just taking a holiday and having a break whilst camping in Northern France. This is about taking a break in your day-to-day existence. In your work life. To get started should we break it out into manageable chunks?

1 day – Start
3 days – Challenge
5 Days – Work Week
7 Days – Full Week
31 Days – Month.

But how do I get started?

Many of us have jobs where we need to be online most of the time which makes taking a full break nigh on impossible without leaving/changing your job. Try taking breaks at weekends, trial removing the internet or even computers from your home. Or just begin by trying to write out that next blog post in longhand. (Though it may be more a case of ‘Can you continue to carry out your job effectively and still be plugged into the internets the way you are at present?’)

There are questions to address, like – why? And what do you expect to achieve, want to achieve, hope to achieve, need to achieve? Especially if it is going to impact your work in one way or another you have to plan it. Don’t just hit shut down and walk away. Plan it. What period of time will make a difference? It is important to decide on a period of time in one block and keep to it. Think of all the consequences. Make sure someone knows you are doing it as it will effect your ability to do many things the way people expect you to do things. How will it effect my ability to work? Will it in fact improve my work, the ability to focus, solve problems, interpret, communicate, feel more secure and genuinely confident. Not to mention improved concentration, productivity, patience, reading, temperament to name but a few.

But how do I really get started?

Like starting out on the road to being a writer so well described by Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird you have to carve out the space for it to happen. You have to train yourself. You have to ignore the voices that whisper what you are missing. You have to persist and believe that it is worthwhile. You have to want to really do it and believe it’s going to improve your life – and, remember, you can go back. It is more than likely that once you’ve started it will get easier. It just depends on what you’ve set yourself.

As Anne says ” You might as well go ahead and get started”, because one day the choice may not be so straightforward.

1 Paul Graham, The acceleration of addictiveness
2 James Sturn, I’m quitting the internet. Will I be liberated or left behind?
3 Liz Danzico, Bobulate 24 June 2010
4 John Naughton, The internet: is it changing the way we think?
5 Steven Pinker, Mind of mass media
6 Juan Rodriguez, Off-Line, I Reconnected
7 Rebecca Traister, No more vacation: How technology is stealing our lives

I’m increasingly coming into contact with people who refer (with the nonchalant ease of those that rarely question their convictions) to interaction designers, information architects, experience architects &etc (there is plenty of froth already here) with the word/abbreviation/label (delete as you think appropriate) “UX”

What on earth do they mean?

UX isn’t a designer, it isn’t even an interaction designer, it isn’t an information architect or an experience architect or a usability consultant – it is none of these job titles.

It isn’t a job.

The simplest description is that it is the perception of a product, a service, a brand and the experience of interacting physically with any interface of said product, service, brand. It is not a vocation.

We have always been designers, we haven’t suddenly become the experience of the user.

Where has this come from?

Is it the propensity for (particularly) non-designers to brushstroke areas of expertise they struggle to comprehend in business areas where UX Design is new or being introduced and is often misunderstood. There seems to be a habit to sell in, particularly on Agile projects, this magic “UX” with the believe that somehow it will fix up poor design.

UX doesn’t fix anything, designers do.

As Milton Glaser said: “Can you imagine calling someone a creative?”

No one sketches enough (apart from maybe Eva-Lotta herself, Dave Gray and Mike Rohde) and many don’t sketch at all. (Can you call yourself a designer if you don’t sketch?) You have to do it, there is not an excuse in the world that is reasonable. There is no rhyme or reason that sketching won’t improve your design process and the work you produce. Thinking is easier, expression is easier, communication of ideas is easier – and best of all (and I can promise this) you will feel better, in fact you will feel great. There may well be an initial pain barrier to get through but persevere and it will be worth it. You will feel proud and a real sense of achievement. You may well begin feeling deeply unsatisfied staring at your efforts but sooner or later you will begin crafting stuff that you will be happy with and will be useful. And I can again promise that you will improve – how can you not?

No one is too big, important, or busy to sketch. This is important to remember.

I hope more agencies, companies, organisations (&etc) will take the initiative that UX designers at Lab49 have taken after attending last week. (Yes I do work there, yes I may have influenced them slightly, but no it is not my proposal). Straight away they have organised fortnightly sketching workshops for everyone in the UX team (they have made it compulsory). It is initially for just the UX team but the intention is to then include developers and all members of the agile teams. The thinking is that sketching will provide everyone with better communication skills. I say so.

I’m calling it sketchedelity

I view other people’s CVs on a daily basis and am always refreshed by folk who cut to the quick and deliver to your inbox a one pager with the basic information. One glance back and forth and you get the picture.

(This also touches on the issue of work examples which has been discussed at length recently and is a subject that requires further clarification.)

There is no doubt that a growing number of design types (especially those more at the beginning and development of careers – where ultimately a strong CV is most relevant) have realised that they have got to increase chances of being ‘noticed’ whatever it might be for and the starting point is obviously been to visually enhance their CVs.

The conversation has picked up with the growing interest and spread of infographics. Fine examples are Michael Anderson’s and Greg Dizzia’s. Web Designer Depot added to the discussion with a recent post 30 Artistic and Creative Résumés that garned plenty of discussion regarding readability and inappropriateness of overkill design – ‘a CV is meant to be a document not a poster’ ‘a CV is meant to convey information… your portfolio is for showing off your creativity’. And as one creative director writes quite scathingly ‘I mostly ignore these types of vanity projects when I get them. They look like some school assignment. I want to know about you in 5 seconds. And, that comes from the text.’

There’s no doubt that hiring folk when looking through CVs look for well organised and easily skimmable documents that a decision can be quickly made on.

So what to do? How do you create a balance?

The discussion has also started to appear on Twitter where some good ideas have cropped up such as Bob van Vliet and Clement Boutignon’s innovative use of Daytum.

My advice is pull out a grid and ensure that the written words describing your successes, experiences and deeds are easily readable. If you feel you can add some visual accoutrement to it without obscuring the main information then go ahead though a good barometer is to get as much feedback as you can from recruiters and HR professionals. Some will love innovation, some will be more than non plussed.

Conclusion

words not images, easy to read, easy to scan, 1 sheet, leave fancy footwork for your portfolio

Recently the Interaction Design Studio required a full-time employee in addition to our contractors and placed an ad on You the User. It was my privilege to meet so many enthusiastic candidates and due to the high quality of applicants we have now decided to take on two people. You the User also makes it easy for project managers, creative directors, agency owners etc. to source user experience personnel and service providers such as ixdStudio directly which means money gets spent on actual projects rather than on recruitment costs.

Thanks again,

Diarmad McNally
Interaction Design Studio

t: (+44) 07808 297289
e: diarmad at ixdStudio dot com
w: www.ixdStudio.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/ixdStudio