Posts Tagged ‘business’

Rules

In her article for Inc., Margaret Heffernan speaks plainly about how flexible hours inspire productivity. I am totally on board with her take on this, but what struck me most was this bit on rules in general. Makes me wonder what the implications are for parenting, because she’s right — monitoring and enforcing rules is no fun.

“…I have always resisted rules, for myself and for others. Why? Because once you have rules, you have to enforce them—and there’s no more tedious task in life.”— Margaret Heffernan

The Cost of Starting Up

This is always a fun conversation, isn't it? As always, Brad's comics are funny and on point. →

User Experience Margin

How much is User Experience worth? Would you be willing to pay a bit more for a product if you also knew you’d get a better experience? I’ve had to answer these questions lately and based on personal experience, my answer is definitely yes.

A couple of weeks ago we had some new countertops and tile work installed in our kitchen. We worked with a local, family-owned remodeling company. Throughout the planning and selection phase, we had a great experience with them and were confident we chose the right company to do the job.

And then they started the work. Read the rest of this entry →

Why Front-end Developers Are So Important

Paul Carvill provides some clarification around the roles and skills sets of developers, designers and other front-end players and the importance of such to the future of businesses on the web. →

Traversing the Bermuda Triangle

Good, fast and cheap. Any project that aims to satisfy all three is as doomed as an aluminum canoe in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. Perhaps you’ve been involved in such a project. It can be frustrating, stressful, uncomfortable and downright painful.

So if you are ever dealing with a client that is asking you to do all three, point them to this graphic and ask them to choose which two aspects are most important to them. Then, point out what they get when they choose those two. Read the rest of this entry →

How I Manage My LinkedIn Network

The other day I received an invitation to join someone’s LinkedIn network. This was a person I worked with at a previous company a few years back. I declined the invitation because I didn’t really know the guy. He worked in a different department and I don’t even recall a one-on-one conversation we ever had. Read the rest of this entry →

How to Get Hired

At Rosetta Stone, we’re looking for a senior-level Interaction Designer to help us out on the Web Strategy team. This isn’t a call for resumes or anything, but if you do happen to be interested or know someone who is, by all means send them this way.

At any rate, as I’ve been receiving and screening candidates, I’ve been disappointed with the quality of candidate resumes and portfolios and thought I’d offer some tips to help job-seeking designers maximize the possibility of getting an offer of employment.

Read the rest of this entry →

Meeting Pet Peaves

I started this post a month ago and have written and re-written it numerous times. I’ve been trying to come up with eloquent ways to talk about how to improve meetings. But I seem uninspired by that and would rather just pine about the things that bother me instead.

What I think would improve meetings the most would be to infuse some rigorousness into the way we schedule and conduct meetings. Without further adieu, here are my top-5 complaints about meetings: Read the rest of this entry →

Let's Be Honest

Recently, I was reading the bios of the “executive team” for a local web design/development firm (undisclosed) and saw that a couple of them had “over 20 years experience” in the web industry. An acquaintance of mine at a different company states he has “over 10 years experience” on his bio. If that’s true, then he started doing web development when he was 14.

I guess that is not unfathomable, but honestly, how realistic is that? And what type of web projects were the other two guys working on back in 1987? Not saying it isn’t true, just really wondering about the robustness of truth in those bios. Perhaps we’re all a little guilty of this from time to time.

After reading all this, I started to wonder about a couple things.
Read the rest of this entry →

Overheard at Webmaster Jam Session 2007

Last weekend I had the good fortune to attend the 2007 Webmaster Jam Session. I enjoyed the experience of learning from some great speakers, meeting some new friends and hanging out with old friends and new co-workers.

I haven’t had the mental bandwidth to sit down and comprehensively write down everything I learned and how it will shape my future. But I did take a few notes and thought it’d be good to share something, so I put together a list of “one-liners” from my notes of a few of the sessions I attended.
Read the rest of this entry →