Archive for March, 2010

South By South West #1

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

I’ve finally managed to save up enough cash to go to arguably one of the most important gathering of geeks in my field in the world (that happens to be in town I live in). Besides the pricing for the badges, there was the cost to consider at my job: as a contractor I have no holiday time, I get no vacations, I don’t have sick leave, and any time I’m not working is time I don’t get paid. To that end, this will be an expensive conference for me (but I’m sure, completely worth it). There are a lot of people in town I’d love to meet and say hello to as well as many of my friends and peers that I’m lucky enough to know in Austin that I’m sure I’ll have no shortage of panels and distractions to last me a long time.

It’s a real treat that so many of the people that I know who are going have been going to interactive for some time. I’m trying to follow their lead somewhat to keep everything loose: plan to attend panels and RSVP for every party, but keep and open mind and follow your gut to decide what you do next. I’m also going to try my damnedest to not spam the hell out of people on Twitter and Facebook (I hate it when people do that to me, so karma dictates some tact) and instead will be pushing lots of content to this blog. I’m stepping up my lifestream updates to hourly and I’ll be posting as much as I can.

The Rundown

Sparkles, professional male model

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/wcyarbrough

SxSW Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/wcyarbroughsxsw – updates

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I’ve included a picture of me (thanks Handsome Boy Modeling School) so you too can find me if you’re out and about. I hope to see some people out at parties (I’ll probably drink a beer or two with you too). I’m super stoked about my first actual southby instead of vicariously living through others! See everyone out there and check this space for more updates!

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of Makers and Managers, Cabbages and Kings

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

I’ve been thinking about scheduling a lot lately, what with SxSW going on TOMORROW and all. I’m juggling a few projects at my daytime contract and a few for my personal business. I feel that some of the reason I’ve not been at the top of my game lately stems from how I schedule blocks of time to get into the flow.

I was reminded a few days ago of Paul Graham’s essay on Maker vs. Manager Schedules and I thought about my personal business. I often times need to be a maker and a manager – to need to have meetings and also give myself enough time to work effectively (and one assumes, live a life in between). I think what I’m going to do is schedule one day out of the week when I need to have a meeting and keep the rest of the week open to have some bit of flow.

There have been some awesome co-working spots that have opened up in Austin recently and talking with some of the people who run them about getting some time to get some real work done once a week or so. I think if I make myself have a standard meeting location, I have time to do managerial duties while leaving the rest of the evenings free to focus on actually making things (a persona I was working on should’ve been finished in one night instead of three).

I really want my business to succeed, I just need to be more effective in how I structure workflow so that I’m not doing more work with less results. We all make better ‘stuff’ when we get in the zone, into the flow of things, so the more often I have batches of time, the better off I think my work will be.

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Sprezzatura – plain and simple

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

Sprezzatura is an old Italian word defined as “an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them.” In other words, making it look effortless. This is an important trait for user-centered design: the workflow, actions, and methods a user takes through the design should make the experience pleasant and as simple as possible.

I like the idea of old words to describe concepts which have become so full to bursting with just a certain type of meaning, that they exist as themselves – untranslatable. Words like panache or schadenfreude or (to quote Kim Loop) tacos. There should be a certain amount of the untranslatable in design, too; something that helps users navigate the difficult and deep concepts that we ask them to follow. Think about how many interactions a user must go through to purchase goods and services for an e-commerce site or how many fields must be filled out to sign up for a new service from a provider. These interactions can happen because UX designers and developers have paved the way – made it seem simple and clean.

The best way to make the hard stuff look easy is through research: find out what your users get caught up on, find out what they want most in your interface, and find out what makes your users trust you. Keep testing, through A/B testing, constant design tweaks and polling your users. I’ve always liked programs like Silverback and doing task-based polls with simple click-based tasks. By taking stock of what your users find difficult, you can make that difficult time seem easy. Capiche?

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