Sjors Timmer – thoughts on design, technology and society

At dConstruct 2011 cyberspace was declared dead. Gone are the days when we dreamed about walking in second life, uploading our brain to the net and leaving our bodies behind to float forever in an infinite virtual space. Now we’ve abandoned the long stairway to cyber-heaven, where do we find ourselves? After scaring people for too long, technology has begun to hide itself. First it shrunk clunky boxes into shiny objects, then it transformed winding cables into waves of air. Suddenly it was behind our walls, underneath our floors and our offices and kitchens, and one day, without anyone taking notice, it jumped into our pockets and has not left us since. How do you design for a world where not life, but technology has become virtual, something that can do and be anything you can imagine, but that in itself has no particular shape or place? The answer is both complex and simple. It’s a lot like living in the old days: we share stories and create memories, we hang out with our friends and family and try to make sense of the world in which we live. But it is like living in the new days too, every object has its virtual doppelgänger, every move turns into data that can be tracked and traced, at any place we can connect with anyone and anything else. In a way technology has become more like ‘the force’ – an omnipresent faceless power that can be tapped into at any moment to use for… to use for what?

One day a small itch visits you, a feeling, a hunch of something that could be changed. You start exploring what it might be, how big it is, what is part of it, what doesn’t fit, which edges are too far to see. Slowly the hunch starts to transform into an idea. First it’s very rough, its contours merely visible, then, after you beat, torture, inquire and polish it, it starts to unveil some of its potential beauty. It’s translated into another language, documented, sketched and presented. You invite people from all of the world to test and try the idea, to punch it, to build upon it, to take it for a walk or for a wild bus ride down the country side. Slowly the idea starts to alter reality, in corridors whispers can be heard, folded notes pass from hand to hand, it gains momentum, it shows up in books and presentations, children shout its name and grown ups discuss it over coffee. It starts to change the world, cathedrals and shopping centres are erected in its name, magazines and tv hosts spew it out in an endless sea of words, images and objects. For the idea this is the sign that it has to move on, it has done its duty and is free to float again, above the roofs and squares of the old city it flies until it has found yet another sleepless night.

In late 2010 I set out to find a new UX job in London. I’d like to share with you some of the things I encountered on my quest for a workplace.

1. Know yourself.

The first thing I learned was that, although the job title might be the same, User Experience Designer can mean many things depending on the environment you are looking at. A start-up might expect you to be knowledgeable in user testing whilst also capable of doing some front-end coding. An agency might expect that you’ve have created and presented pitches, whilst client-side might expect you to design email campaigns as part of your job.

Because all of these different expectations it is important to know what you want, what you can do and where you might find the most realistic fit for those two. In my case I found that what I want, –growth in my knowledge and skills in designing advanced web-applications– was quite hard to achieve with my mix of skills (best to be described as senior web-designer). This showed itself by the variety of salaries that companies were willing to pay me for roughly the same job title. Best advice would be to contact a more senior practitioner, who knows about your work, and gain a good understanding about your strengths and interests.

More to read:
How to get a job at a webdesign agency.

2. Have a portfolio

You might have a well written CV, hundreds of connections on LinkedIn and Twitter, and a well maintained blog, but without a good portfolio you’re unlikely to land an interview. I would advise to have three versions available: one pdf version that you can send out to recruiters, an online version that you can link to, and a set of printouts that you can take with you to an interview. You’d be surprised to find out how many times it’s quite a challenge to get online during a job interview.

As for what should be in your portfolio, have a look at Jason Mesut’s rant over at London IA.  As you can see from my portfolio there is still room for progress. It’s not completely clear which story I want to tell: am I a visual designer with some IxD experience, or a beginning IA with some visual design experience, also the items seem to be in a random order. The positive feedback that I received was mainly on my sketches and more conceptual work; which probably proves the point that the process is more insightful to look at than the end product.

More to read:
To portfolio or not to portfolio that is the question

3. Recruiters

As soon as you’ve uploaded your CV on Monsterboard you will get plenty of phone calls from hungry recruiters, all of them will promise you that you are exactly the right match for their inspiring position. Therefore make sure you’ve done your ‘know thyself homework’ and are able to quickly judge if the proposed job is matching your criteria. From my experience, there are some recruiters who are really good, who are interested in you and are willing to invest time to follow up on conversations. Here are some agencies that took the decency (or precaution) to ask me to come over for a talk: ZebraPeople, Futureheads, Propel London, Ecom recruitment and Vanburn at ITHR. Don’t forget, however, that many companies don’t (or even refuse) to work with recruiters, so it’s worth doing some active searching yourself.

4. Automate your search

No need to keep on visiting websites to hope for an update; modern technologies come with plenty of options to stay in the loop without working too hard. The following services allow you to sign up for an email update on your search query: the Guardian, Monster, the Ladders. And these services you can follow by RSS: uxwork, UK UPA jobs, London IA jobs, etc. What also might be an idea is to search Twitter for UX jobs and to choose the ‘show tweets nearby’ tab.

5. Linked In

LinkedIn was for me the site where I kept coming back to. It has the ability to do background checks on the companies and the people who are interviewing you. Also more and more companies are actively using LinkedIn as a recruitment tool.

6. Quality over quantity

At the moment there is a strong demand for UX designers in London, therefore if you aren’t too sure about a company don’t worry too much about turning down a job offer. In the end it’s better to only go to job interview with companies you are interested in, better one well-researched and prepared interview then ten careless conversations.

more to read:
Improve your changes of a job in UX
Grow your UX skill set
Things you need to know to get an IA/UX job
Getting hired

Please let me know in the comments how you’ve experienced finding work and which knowledge you’ve found essential.

Many business gurus state that quality is created by keeping the amount of products that work according to specification up. Others argue that it is not about the lack of errors, but about fulfilling customer expectations. On the surface defining quality seems easy: it is that which is good. But soon we discover that it is not only what is good, it is what stands out. A Casio watch compared to one that came for free with washing powder might seem as a product of incredible quality, but compare a Rolex with a Casio and it suddenly becomes a cheaply produced mass consumption product. Of course the value of the materials used to produce a Rolex is higher, but there is more to it than only time and money. What I want to discuss is the quality of products, in both its physical and psychological manifestations.

When we judge the quality of a product we judge it by the total experience. That is: the actual properties of the product plus the experience we have with these properties. Because the experience depends not only on the product but also on its surroundings —other products available, emotional attachment— the perceived value of a product varies from place to place and from person to person. This split between the actual product quality and perceived quality leads to a situation where it becomes possible to increase the perceived value, without actually increasing the actual product’s quality. To stay competitive many companies choose to increase their experienced quality through large advertisement campaigns that enable the price of the product to go up. It can create a situation where expensive products become expensive, not because they are good, but because the marketing campaign needs to be paid for. I would argue that there is a better way: increase the perceived quality through actually increasing the quality. This is the age-old path of the craftsman.

Quality is realised through the interaction between the physical and the psychological world. Take a bottle of wine for example. The house wine sold in a local supermarket supplies the alcohol that will get your body in a more relaxed state. Nevertheless it is no match for the experience of drinking a French wine imported by a French friend whom you met years ago during your stay in Paris. They might do their physical job equally well, but the psychological impact is of a different magnitude. You can engage with the story, you feel the care, passion and dedication of both the friend and the château in every sip you take. Besides the insurance that only the best ingredients are used, you also want to be engagement with the story and the care of the craftsman who created the product.

In a competitive market the producers of products need to keep on innovating and increase their quality to remain competitive. In the category of computers it becomes quite clear that what was known as the best of the best five years ago is no longer relevant today. But what if innovation is no longer possible? If you are the producer of a famous quality whisky with roots going back for centuries, coming up with a new improved flavour might not be the successful path to follow. Instead what you can do is focus your attention on perceived quality. You can tell the consumers through advertisement campaigns about your unique values, your incredible ingredients, your centuries of tradition; all these stories increase the experience of the first sip.

The problem here is that the quality of the product remains the same. None of the hard working labourers in the distillery will get an extra penny for the improved experience, since what they are doing remains what they’ve been doing for centuries. Or even more in the case of mineral water, where the labour involved consists mainly of bottling the water that was already there. What goes for both mineral water and whisky is that the price that we pay to purchase these products is mainly used to pay for the advertisement that seduced us to buy these products in the first place.

I think this is wrong. We should not waste the sparse resources of this world on advertisement that informs us that we should really buy products of good quality by craftsmen who care. It does not benefit the hard work of the craftsman and it creates the risk of make-belief. Thanks to the power of branding and advertisement we might consider to buy products —for example clothes— that are of a higher price and lower quality than those we could have bought if we weren’t persuaded by the power of marketing.

The money could better be spent on making people aware of the advantages of purchasing products that are created by people who truly care about creating great products. People who not only perform their job, but master it, not because there is a demand for quality, but because pushing quality beyond the ordinary creates a sense of meaningful being for the craftsman. Passion, dedication, care and hard work create an environment where magic can happen. When the reason for making good products goes beyond the wish of keeping clients and reputation, there is a new space where good can become great. L’art pour l’art, craftsmanship for craftsmanship’s sake.

As the field of UX is growing and we have to tackle more and more challenges, we can no longer reach out for our old tools and methodologies. Jesse James puts forwards a concept to see UX design for the web as one of the many forms of experience design that exist. Liz comes at it from another angle and states that we should rethink how and what we design, we shouldn’t limit our users by our choices, we should enable them to use our designs and run with it. We are only the makers of violin bows, a useless artifact if it wouldn’t be used to create something beautiful.

Jesse James Garett
We also have to look at the experience that is being delivered outside the medium that we delivered it in. Our work is not done when we deliver it, it’s done when it is used by our customers. An experience is (always) the outcome, but our goal should be to engage our users in it. We can speak about engagement in two different dimensions, the perception-action dimension and the cognition-emotion dimension.

Liz Danzico
Not only should we redesign the language and concepts that we are using, we should also alter what we design and how. We should bridge the gap between creator and consumer and meet in the middle, where the consumer can use and reuse what the designer made. We should also understand that to give room for improvisation we should be much more clear about the few rules that we keep in place. To enable improvisation we should design for three things: the present – it has to happen in the now, detectability – it must be understood at at least some level (see rules) and responsiveness – there should be a short feedback loop to keep people engaged.

Michael B. Johnson
We build bows for violins, useless in themselves, but essential to create beautiful things. Quality is the best business practice. We layer our films in three levels: the world in which the story is set, the people who live in that world and finally the individual. Beauty is not merely a side product. Making beautiful products makes people happy and enables them to be more productive.

Joshua Porter
If we want to have a bigger seat at the board table, then we should account for our work. Data-driven design might seem to be the answer but is not. There is a problem with the current divide between data-driven and intuition design. Intuition design might come a long way but leads us into endless discussions. Data-driven design might be clear but could cause us to optimise a sub-optimal peak without ever getting to the much higher mountain a bit further up. We should therefore set up a culture that takes the best out of both worlds. Data doesn’t design, designers do.

We can’t solve the problems with the same tools that created them. – Einstein

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Einstein

Yesterday I held my talk at uxcamplondon on how to enable users to customise their site whilst avoiding a usability nightmare (both for them and for their future visitors).

It was a pretty interesting discussion, and a few ideas came out of it that I want to share with you all:

1. Don’t offer the user total control, offer them the feeling that they’ve just successfully designed a site according to their own preferences.
2. Customising sites should be a quick, fun and enjoyable experience, after which users should go on with the reason they came to use your site in the first place.
3. Just because site editors are built in a certain way (for example colour pickers), doesn’t mean you should just reuse that pattern. Think a step further, how you can steer the user in the direction of good design.
4. Although the request might be for a site editor, a customisable template might do the job as well.
5. If you build an editor with many features, you will attract people who love even more features.
6. Tools do push a certain design, don’t give a user too much rope.

A decent write up of this presentation is still in the pipeline, but meanwhile here is my slideshow.

If you have any examples from your own experience or come across other sites with great customisation tools, please share it in the comments.

Long ago when I was still young, I believed in a world where the future would lead us upwards, technology would bring us prosperous times and digital enlightenment would come to earth. Virtual worlds would open their doors and for the first time humankind would be connected and world peace was on the brink.

Later on I discovered that I was haunted by a mix of two ideas, first that in the future things would be better and second that through taking risks and hard work one would always become successful. And as far as I’m aware, I’m not alone. If we no longer believed that buying new and better products would lead to happier lives, if progress could no longer be linked to faster computers, and if a seventy hour work week no longer represented the road to success, the Western world would go downwards fast. Lucky for us most people do buy into the idea that technological progress is essential for the progress of us as a species, and that progress is good beyond questioning. Thanks to this unquestioned faith we now sit behind our glowing screens, drinking fake Italian roast fresh from the machine, burning through our lives for a better tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry »

We are moving from representing ourselves online to being online. The expression of our online identity is no longer what we’ve accomplished in the past, but what we are doing in the now. Just like us, brands can no longer work on their heritage, but are challenged to actively engage in the now.

Something that has been distorted by the thick clouds of mass media, became clear once more: a brand is only a group of people working together with a common interest. In that way it comes as no surprise that brands become more like individuals. The lack of two-way communication allowed brands to act like aristocrats directing the world from within their invincible castles. These days however the villagers found ways to unite against the aristocrats, making it impossible for anyone to hide and deny responsibility behind the anonymous face of a brand. In a way it can be seen as a step backwards in time to an older model where people bought their products from local craftsmen with whom they had a personal relationship.

Top-down, directed and centralized communication is being replaced by a bricolage of presences that are dynamically generated by the multi-directional and decentralised interactions of the crowd. The brand identity is the result of this complex interaction, and it’s defined every day anew by experience. This connected and shared experience is made out of a multitude of conversations, faces, comments, quotes and images that float around the brand (but no longer controlled by it) and they define a fluid and ever changing identity.

The reason that the top-down brand strategy became obsolete so fast is that it turned out to be even less useful than pre-social media. The consumers got together faster than their rulers could divide them. More and more we will see it happening that a group of people who all have a strong personal brand come together to form supergroups. A famous example of course is CSNY, but you can see it happen in every industry. Brands should avoid being an abstract entity, and start to make clever use of the strengths of the group of people they represent. Only by putting individuals in the foreground will there be enough trust generated to truly engage.

Social media is a toolset that allows the villagers to unite themselves. The old aristocrats are still welcome among them nevertheless, but only on the condition that they leave their shield and sword at home.