Vendor Client Relationships
June 29th, 2009I love Round Rock Nissan
June 15th, 2009I really like my 2007 Nissan Sentra. It runs well and it’s got good tech: keyless doors, keyless ignition, hands-free bluetooth integration, stereo controls on steering column, mp3 and 6-disc CD changer, etc. The kind of things you usually don’t get in a car at that price point unless it’s unbearably ugly and marketed to teenagers. The dealership has always treated us well and given us great service. You just have to know going in that the service department is going to try to screw you. They don’t try hard. In fact, I’d have to say that they try to screw me very gently.
I’m taking my car in tomorrow for its 45,000 mile service. Nissan has three different levels of service that I’ll call “you’re a cheap bastard who doesn’t care about his car”, “you’re a reasonable guy”, and “nice rack, would you mind bending over for me?” I’m not a cheap bastard so I didn’t price that one. Reasonable was $195 and the rack was $295. “But wait,” I said. “The rack doesn’t do a whole lot more than reasonable does.”
“Oh, you’re right. I gave you the wrong price for that. It’s actually $253.”
“Really?” I said. For just x and y? “Well,” he said, “your maintenance guide from 2007 is a little different from what we have in our systems now. If I price out what’s listed in your guide the price’ll be $213.”
Great. I’ll take it! We’re essentially paying the reasonable price. I’m not being facetious when I say I love them. Anytime I have to deal with anybody regarding a vehicle, my default assumption is that I’m getting screwed. To not only know exactly where I stand but to be able to correct matters so easily is a great thing. And I’m really happy with the situation.
Viva la Round Rock Nissan!
Found: Chocolate Lab
June 10th, 2009Monday I came home to find a chocolate lab wandering the street with no tags. He was a friendly guy. Followed me to my house and, when I opened the door, walked right in and made himself at home. Barked all night long.
I snapped a few pics of him to put up a few “found” flyers around the neighborhood. My wife laughed at me for my flyer (see pic). Couldn’t help myself and it only took 10 minutes. When I went to put the flyers up after work today we found a missing flyer for the dog. Turned out to belong to neighbors down the street that we’ve met a few times (they’re daughter is crazy about Ashton). Happy ending.
P.S. I’m loving Alexandra Black. It’s like a chunky Garamond.
Alamo Drafthouse on Spectrum Culture
June 8th, 2009A photo of the Alamo Drafthouse that I took for SpiceWorld 2008 is being used, with permission, by Spectrum Culture. It’s not a great photo, but still cool to see it being used: http://spectrumculture.com/2009/06/the-alamo-drafthouse-at-the-ritz-austin-tx.html.
Designers: Design Your Resumes!
June 2nd, 2009I’m reading through resumes and cover letters, looking for freelancers to add to our pool of talent at Spiceworks. And most of the resumes suck. They are horribly designed. (Two pages in all caps, seriously? And you call yourself a designer?) As a whole they have terrible leading, headers, use of white space, suffer from poor font choices, and are riddled with typos, misspellings, grammatical errors, missing punctuation, inconsistent punctuation on lists, and on and on.
With any given design in your portfolio you can at least fob off poorly designed elements on the client/boss/committee. But you can’t do that with your resume. That’s all on you. At the absolute minimum it should be free of errors and use a good font. That’s not setting the bar very high.
Bonus tip: if the only thing you have listed under accolades is that time you participated in a civil war reenactment eight years ago, considering leaving that section off of the resume altogether. I’m just sayin’.
UX Team of One Panel (Unedited Notes from Presentation)
March 15th, 2009These are the unedited notes I took during the SXSW panel. Sub-lists aren’t indented so I’ll need to come back and format later. No guarantee I’ll actually do that so hopefully she’ll publish her presentation.
- Put away the computer
- Start with a six-up template:
- A piece of paper with six thumbnail boxes
- Designers tend to come up with only 1 or 2 ideas at first
Usually influenced by tools and recent designs - Six-up template forces you past that wall
- Don’t limit yourself to six
- Conceptual frameworks:
- Spectrums: explore 1-dimension of project
Ex: Experience Level: Beginner to Expert- First timer: how-to guide
- Intermediate: Choose template, step-by-step process
- Expert: DB stuff with past evites, invitees, etc. (control panel)
- Spectrums: explore 1-dimension of project
- 2×2: spectrum on top of a spectrum
- First-Timer/Expert plotted against Manual/Automatic
- Quadrant A: First-Timer/Automatic
- Quadrant B: First-Timer/Manual
- Quadrant C: Expert/Automatic
- Quadrant D: Expert/Manual
- First-Timer/Expert plotted against Manual/Automatic
- Grids: plotting all the spectrums across x/y axis
- Word Association:
- accordian, auto-complete, bookshelf, breadcrumbs, carousel, cart, collapsible, comments, comparison, configurator, …, icons, …, modules, …
- Inspiration Library:
- Use screengrab tool for Firefox to grab screenshots of things that are interesting.
- Use iPhoto to catalog them
- Assemble an ad-hoc team:
- Make sketchboards
- Post sketches by group to a large board (like a mood board!)
- Ex: requirements, home page, create invitiation, re-visit invitation
- Post sketches by group to a large board (like a mood board!)
- Run template-based workshops
- Design the box: front, back
- Concept Sheet: title, draw a picture, …
- Design the experience: title, …
- Make sketchboards
Decorate your space with your project sketches and materials while you are working on it (not after). Invite people into the process.
When someone starts describing something to you, give them a pen. Ask them to draw it out.
- Have a black-hat sessions:
- Get everybody together for a fixed period of time and play a game where everybody has to take a turn being a villian and they have to go through and point out every possible objection they could possibly have. Gets people who won’t shut up about their concerns and let them feel heard. Takes people who were too afraid to give you their criticisms and gets them to open up and voice their concerns.
Get rid of the idea of a genius designer (d’oh!)
- Use design principles (5-7 pithy statements about the essence of the experience):
- Tivo Ex:
- It’s entertainment stupid.
- It’s TV, stupid.
- It’s video, damnit.
- Everything is smooth and gentle.
- No modality at deep heirarchy.
- Respect the viewers privacy.
- It’s a robust appliance, like a TV.
- Google Calendar Ex:
- Fast, visually appealing, and joyous to use.
- Drop dead simple to get information
- Tivo Ex:
Quiddity (great Scrabble word): a statement of what you want the essence of the experience to be. You will not create a great experience unless you define what the quiddity is.
- Evite was the case study used for the session:
- Three step process:
- Choose design from the design gallery
- Add recipients
- Send evite
- How would you improve this process?
- Three step process:
Twas Time
February 22nd, 2009March 16, 2007, Karina and I welcomed our baby boy into the world.
January 1, 2008, I took a job with a startup company, Spiceworks.
You’ll have to excuse me if I not only didn’t post here in the intervening two years, but if I let the site fall into disrepair. But I just had a productive weekend. I finished moving all of the sites I maintain — about half a dozen — to a new host. Where shareware was in use, like on this site (WordPress), I upgraded everything. I switched to new plugins for Flickr and Delicious (see sidebar). I’ve gone back to the default theme with the hopes that I’ll have more weekends like this one and that I’ll take those opportunities to design something new. Something not corporate. We’ll see how that goes.
At this point I just want a place that I can post family photos too, share design links, tweets (note to self: add a Twitter feed), and maybe even an occasional blog post when Ashton does something funny or when I’m working on something interesting.
PS I’m “clussman” on Twitter.
Dancing with Crutches
November 26th, 2008
Cool video from Spinner:
Post hip-hop troubadour RJD2 teamed with dance and media artist Bill Shannon for the ‘Work It Out’ video. Shannon, born with a degenerative hip condition, developed a way to express himself through dance (and even skateboarding) on crutches. Director Joey Garfield took to the streets of New York and captured one continuous shot of Shannon, injecting RJD2 into random roles throughout the video.
Mucous boy and the dog walk
November 26th, 2008Ashton has an awful cold. I never knew so much mucous could come out of something so small. He seems to be dealing with the issue by not sleeping. We’re running a humidifier and a Vick’s vaporizer to help him at night.
Despite being sick I took him outside when I got home today. He had been cooped up for too long. He wanted to take the dogs for a walk, something he’s never done before and, to my knowledge, hasn’t seen us do more than once or twice. So I bundled him up like an Eskimo and let him take Bock’s leash. I took Honey’s.
It was the cutest thing ever. The first quarter of the walk Bock was practically dragging Ashton behind him and they were running the whole way. Toddler’s even run cute. The next quarter of the walk Bock got tired and Ashton didn’t. So the tables turned and Bock had to try to keep up with Ashton.
The second half of the walk was calmer. Everybody had gotten their respective bursts of energy out of their systems and we proceeded at a more normal speed. The best part of pairing Bock and Ashton together is that anytime one of them would get distracted I could just say “Come on!” and the other one would drag the first one along.
Ashton got tired near the end so I picked him up and carried him while walking both dogs. You’d think that would be difficult but everybody behaved and it was surprisingly easy.
The internets are awesome today
September 8th, 2008Too much good stuff on the internets today.
