ia play

30 is fine. I still get ID’d in pubs so I’m not likely to be worried by the laughter lines.

Pileswasp thinking my birthday is tomorrow also fine. It would be churlish to be picky about exact dates when he bought Ribenna lollies.

Work today being just like the current Dilbert thread. Less fine.
(As a result I won’t be able to go to the IA coffee morning on Friday hosted by the lovely folks at Wellcome Trust. If you’re in London you should definitely go, if only for that cake!)

Being 30 also means that career #1 is 80% sorted. I’ve got lots of careers planned so none of them can take up more than 10 years. The plan is to retire at 82. Might be worried about the laughter lines by then.

We still have space to offer an IA work experience placement this summer, preferably July or early August.

You can get more information from the BBC work experience site or it might be simpler to read IA work experience on this site.

Ecom are advertising for junior IA role (amongst others) at an un-named agency.

Do you know digital media inside out or have a genuine interest in learning more about it, do you know production and interaction design inside out or wish to find out more?

Are you brimming with energy, creativity and enthusiasm? Are you totally passionate about user experience and information theory?

Are you capable and confident enough to get the best in information architecture and user experience from any brief across a range of large brand clients andsectors, and do you want the opportunity to do so?

Do you have an aptitude for getting stuck in, stacks of initiative, emphasis on quality, delivery and client satisfaction whilst keeping innovation and the user journey at the fore are all part of the deal. Yes? Then get in touch!

I was confused by the requirement to ‘know digital media inside out’ and then realised they are using this same description for mid-weight and senior IA roles at the same company. They also seem to have a very precise salary scale: junior = 27k, midweight = 37k, senior = 57k.

( Don’t bother going to the Ecom website. They must have spent all the web budget on the pretty flash animation of falling leaves and didn’t have any money left to post job opportunities on their own site. )

At the BBC we divide our large UX team into a number of fine grained distinctions: visual designers, interaction designers, information architects and usability engineers. The reality is that the actual people in the team don’t fit neatly into this divisions, even if you could come up with a clear definition of the differences.

I’ve been recruiting juniors recently and it has been noticeable that the applicants struggle with the differences between the various UX job titles.

At the same time I’ve been having a look at the job adverts on a few job websites & mailing lists (Monster, TotalJobs, Chinwag, Mad, Jobserve, London-IA, London-Usability) to see if there was any consistent connection between job description and job title. I went through 50 ads in detail and skimmed a load more.

information architect - far and away the most common job title (3 x more than the nearest rival UX architect). Every single job description asked for wireframing skills and only one didn’t mention sitemaps/blueprints. At least half asked for experience in working with multi-disciplinary teams (project managers, designers and developers), client facing skills and a pragmatic approach to balancing user needs and business constraints. Half also asked for usability testing skills, interaction design experience and persona creation. Where tools were mentioned (a third of ads) it was usually Illustrator, Photoshop & Visio rather than any particular package.

interaction designer - rarer than I expected, when this did crop up the job description was pretty much identical to IA. The rarity may indicate a loss of popularity in favour of user experience designer.

user interface designer - similiar to IA and interaction designer but with a slightly more technical angle, often including HTML, CSS and Javascript

user experience architect & user experience designer - very similar to IA and Interaction designer. The only noticeable difference was the remit of these roles often included ‘visual design’ which I didn’t see once in an IA job description

usability specialist & usability analyst - usability engineer seems to have lost popularity as a job title and this appears to have coincided with a broadening of remit. These roles are very similar to the IA and UX job descriptions but with a greater emphasis on designing, conducting and analysing usability tests.

So essentially the job descriptions are very, very similiar for all these job titles. They *must* mention wireframes to be an IA, the UX prefix may widen the job description to include visual design, UI designer is probably more techie and a usability prefix will mean more emphasis on user testing. But these are subtle distinctions. A great deal more unites than divides.

Now job ads aren’t the end of the story but it is interesting that we’ve created so many different job titles and then essentially described them the same. No wonder the applicants are confused.

The No Asshole Rule inspired my latest book buying round.

I’m keeping (occassional) track of the ways I discover new things (out of professional interest). In this case I was posting an old IA summit presentation to slideshare. At the end of the presentation, Slideshare recommended another presentation about Branding & Teams. I was curious about the connection so watched(?) the presentation. It mentioned No Assholes and I just had to buy it. See working principle #3 if you are not sure why.

Only just realised our programme model is publicly available: BBC programmes ontology

We now have a top-level directory of /ontologies/. I’m not quite sure what I think of that. The metadata-geek in me is tickled. The bit that spent hours going through the list of all the random top-level directories is uneasy.

My dullest slide deck ever, I’m afraid. I felt quite sheepish given all the shiny, shiny powerpoint on show in Miami. And I do need to point out here than the 15 little people on the first page are only representative of the number of juniors and not their general shape (or colour).

I’m very glad we were able to run the session as more of a conversation than presentation in the end. Not sure how much of that will work in the podcast (coming soon to Boxes and Arrows, I believe).

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I love this Firefox add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2677

It is useful and I like having the little cup of coffee next to the normal boring browser icons. It is particularly good for reminding me to do repeating tasks that happen on a certain day each week e.g. timesheets.

I’ve also found it good for dividing up weekday and weekend routines e.g. stopping me wasting time meandering around Swapshop when I should just be going to work.

For those of you who’ve been asking about our job description for junior IAs:

Junior IA job spec

(We’ve shortlisted for a current junior vacancy. In our IA summit panel I said that the junior programme is my favourite part of my job…well the interviewing is a great part of that, particularly when we have such a good pool. I’m looking forward to meeting everyone.)

Henning’s posted his slides from our panel on SlideShare. I don’t seem to have my final version but will post mine when I get them back off Mags!

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