because bored people make bad decisions
{ Monthly Archives }
In Seattle Post-Intelligencer, executive coach Maureen Moriarty, argues that a caring boss is key to helping workers and the business remain successful
“people most often leave workplaces due to poor bosses (not the organization). How employees feel about their jobs and organizations has everything to do with how their manager treats them”
It’s been a postively pastoral bank holiday weekend, in which I…
All gently satisfying in “I grew this/picked this” way. Or in a gruesomely satisfying way for the “I butchered this” bit.
Continued the pastoral theme with garden activities:
But it wasn’t all John Seymour. I did some 21st Century stuff too.
Why so productive? Well three days feels like space to do stuff. And being around someone who is only really able to watch telly and surf the net made me really appreciate my ability to do practical stuff. And I guess the coffee was good.
I’ve been reading Cities in Flight
“like everything else in the world requiring an IQ of less than 150, it was computer-controlled. The world-wide dominance of the such machines… had been one of the chief contributors to the present and apparently permanent depression: the coming of semi-intelligent machines into business and technology had created a second Industrial Revolution, in which only the most highly creative human beings, and those most gifted at administration, found themselves with any skills to sell which were worth the world’s money to buy”
Aside from the lovely design (a book with curved corners!) I was interested in this dystopian view of a future formed (perhaps?) from the author’s familiarity with economic depression and cold-war. Novels of the future can be interesting for their views of what will continue as much as the things that will change.
There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don’t know. - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
I always liked the stubborn bleakness of Ecclesiastes. And I always liked The Devil’s Dictionary
He’s good on jealousy too:
Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping
I’ve been rather immersed in commissioning articles for FUMSI recently.
The topics have been interesting stuff: ISO standards & IA, semantic web, knowledge management, web analytics, enterprise architecture and concept maps. That lot should keep us in good content for a few months.
If you’ve got any ideas that you’d like to write about and even see in dead-tree media then let me know. They can fit into any of the four FUMSI areas (find, use, manage and share), although I get more brownie points for Manage articles(!)
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.