MailChimp UX Newsletter. How to ace the UX job application. By Philip Morton 09 Sep 2011 If you’re interested in getting a job in user experience (UX), what should you do to make a great first impression?
Here’re some top tips to think about when putting together your CV, covering letter and portfolio. Your covering letter is your executive summary Many people misunderstand the role of the covering letter. This is your sales pitch to engage the reader, while your CV provides the evidence. Provide a portfolio of previous work In addition to the usual CV and covering letter, applicants in the UX industry should also supply a portfolio. Pay attention to layout and design In our role as consultants, we strive to make products and services easy and enjoyable to use. Proofread your application Perhaps an obvious one, but straightforward spelling and grammar errors can undo all of your hard work. Be specific, not generic; understand our company, our culture Tell a story. Our Misguided Focus on Brand and User Experience.
If there is a future for designers and marketers in big business, it lies not in brand, nor in “UX”, nor in any colorful way of framing total control over a consumer, such as “brand equity”, “brand loyalty”, the “end to end customer journey”, or “experience ownership”.
The Pernicious Effects of Advertising & Marketing Agencies Trying To Deliver User Experience Design. [[UPDATE: After the remarkable traffic and response this has generated, I have written a follow-up that better explains some of the motivations behind this post.
Please read it after you read this.]] This is a glorious time for folks who work on designing for user experience. In the past couple of months, I’ve spoken at or attended conferences dedicated to mobile, converged digital media, and “the next web,” and again and again you hear from executives the importance of great user experiences. Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution. By Dieter Bohn and Ellis Hamburger Something strange and remarkable started happening at Google immediately after Larry Page took full control as CEO in 2011: it started designing good-looking apps.
Great design is not something anybody has traditionally expected from Google. Infamously, the company used to focus on A/B testing tiny, incremental changes like 41 different shades of blue for links instead of trusting its designers to create and execute on an overall vision. The “design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data” led its very first visual designer, Douglas Bowman, to leave in 2009. More recently, however, it’s been impossible to ignore a series of thoughtfully designed apps — especially on iOS, a platform that doesn’t belong to Google. We went to Google looking for the person responsible for the new design direction, but the strange answer we got is that such a person doesn’t exist.
Why You Should Hire a VP of User Experience Design. Personalized User Interfaces — I.M.H.O. Can an app experience truly be great for users while they have little choice in how they’re able to use the tools we create for them?
We cannot give users a great experience with our apps and interfaces if we do not first consider something so personal to them: What is their primary hand? How do they like to use the phone? Asking users early in their experience if they are right or left handed or have a preference either way is something I believe to be vastly overlooked in the world of mobile interface design. Yes, we have hands that look relatively the same. And yes, we have fingers, five on each hand. Blogger Dynamic Views. Best loading screen for a game ever!!!!!!!!!!! The Design of Design Studio. UX, It's Time to Define CXO. What is a Chief Experience Officer (CXO)?
We’ve been singing its praises when the title started cropping up in boardrooms. “Thank the gods, UX has finally made C-level!” Lean UX: Getting Out Of The Deliverables Business - Smashing UX Design. Advertisement User experience design for the Web (and its siblings, interaction design, UI design, et al) has traditionally been a deliverables-based practice.
Wireframes, site maps, flow diagrams, content inventories, taxonomies, mockups and the ever-sacred specifications document (aka “The Spec”) helped define the practice in its infancy. These deliverables crystallized the value that the UX discipline brought to an organization. Over time, though, this deliverables-heavy process has put UX designers in the deliverables business — measured and compensated for the depth and breadth of their deliverables instead of the quality and success of the experiences they design. Designers have become documentation subject matter experts, known for the quality of the documents they create instead of the end-state experiences being designed and developed. Engaging in long drawn-out design cycles risks paralysis by internal indecision as well as missed windows of market opportunity. UXPin: UX Design & Wireframing Tools As Beautiful As Your Work.
Branded Interactions. One or two key functions.
Well designed apps master their core interactions. The best are unique and become associated with the brand itself. You could even call them branded interactions. Clear Clear‘s primary interactions are adding and clearing to-do items. Mailbox Mailbox is the newest hyped mail client for iOS. Swiping right shows a green color with a check mark, which lets you archive the message.
This is the big innovation of Mailbox: they’ve made it fun to sort your messages in four ways with a swipe and get down to inbox zero. Sunrise Sunrise is a calendar app combining your Google Calendar and Facebook events with daily info like birthdays and weather. GDS design principles.