Author: Uday Gajendar

I am a UI designer in Silicon Valley, having worked within large corporate user experience teams and design consultancies, for over a decade.

Happiness or Meaning?

I know this blog is supposed to be about lessons from my day job at a design firm in Silicon Valley, but this little tete-a-tete between two characters from the breakaway hit show Heroes is rather profound and worth citing here:

Linderman: ”There come a time when a man has to ask himself whether he wants a life of happiness or a life of meaning.”

Nathan: ”I’d like to have both.”

Linderman: ”Can’t be done. Two very different paths. To be truly happy, a man must live absolutely in the present, no thought of what’s gone before and no thought of what lies ahead. But a life with meaning, a man is condemned to wallow in the past and obsess about the future.”

Wow. There’s gotta be a connection to pushing pixels and creating good user experience and all that in there somewhere.

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When in Rome…

As the design and development teams are finalizing the designs of widgets, controls, labels, you need to come together on the vocabulary: is it a dropdown menu, droplist, pulldown list, or something else? Establishing consistency of lingo is key towards more efficient, clear communication with minimal confusion downstream at spec’ing and QA’ing stages.

And part of the consistency might mean the designer has to suck it up and “drink the kool-aid” of the client company and use their legacy lingo particular to their customers and culture. I prefer the analogy of “when in Rome…do as the Romans do”, as “kool-aid” has a rather grim origin :-)

Prototype Evaluation

When constructing POC (proof of concept) prototypes for customer evaluation:
1) The prototype should be as real/accurate as possible with real data, to convey something sufficiently familiar in terms of tasks/content…not greeked text with random, imagined data and layouts. That will only confuse users.
2) The goal of the evaluation is to gather feedback–both positive and negative–for subsequent iteration and decision-making
3) Consider staggering the introduction of new features into the prototypes such that the initial round is for primary concepts and later rounds have variations of the concepts with more detail, interactivity, etc. — ie, don’t overload the prototype with every whizz-bang feature. Be diligent and focused/scoped to yield better feedback.

Jobs on Entrepreneurship

And a few words from Jobs on the hardcore challenges of being an entrepreneur, also circa 1995:

I get asked this a lot and I have a pretty standard answer which is, a lot of people come to me and say “I want to be an entrepreneur”. And I go “Oh that’s great, what’s your idea?”. And they say “I don’t have one yet”. And I say “I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you’re really passionate about because it’s a lot of work”. I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. Its really tough and it consumes your life. If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure its been done but its rough. Its pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.

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Steve Jobs on Organizations

A small departure from studio-based lessons from Andrei…now let’s hear what Jobs says about organizations vs. start-ups, circa 1995:

One of the things that happens in organizations as well as with people is that they settle into ways of looking at the world and become satisfied with things and the world changes and keeps evolving and new potential arises but these people who are settled in don’t see it. That’s what gives start-up companies their greatest advantage. The sedentary point of view is that of most large companies. In addition to that, large companies do not usually have efficient communication paths from the people closest to some of these changes at the bottom of the company to the top of the company which are the people making the big decisions. There may be people at lower levels of the company that see these changes coming but by the time the word ripples up to the highest levels where they can do something about it, it sometimes takes ten years. Even in the case where part of the company does the right thing at the lower levels, usually the upper levels screw it up somehow. I mean IBM and the personal computer business is a good example of that. I think as long as humans don’t solve this human nature trait of sort of settling into a world view after a while, there will always be opportunity for young companies, young people to innovate. As it should be.

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