Ghost in the Pixel

Today I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in SF thanks to a free day pass. Otherwise I probably would not have gone. Why? It’s 2010. Aren’t we supposed to be at Web 4.0 by now? Seriously. I feel that meme has been just so overexploited and grown tired, becomingly effectively meaningless, a typical Dilberty buzzword, vacuous and inane. But hey it was free…and I got a few golden nugget takeaways :-)

Yes, there’s the usual “in the bubble” rah-rah about clouds, social, rich, etc. But here’s what grabbed my attention:

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* The Facebook Era by Clara Shih. Basically rhapsodizing on the Facebook phenomenon, per her recently published book. She spoke of the consumer psychological impact and cultural movement symbolized by Facebook: always on, sharing, commenting, liking, networking, etc. According to her, sites like FB, LinkedIn, Twitter (note the total absence of MySpace–is it dead?) make the “cost of staying in touch so low”. (Dunno about that, in terms of the literal billions of minutes worldwide of lost productivity and fragmentary attention spans, discursive relations, interruptive chats). She spoke of “weak tie relationships” and “ever expanding rolodexes” thanks to these sites, which have become indispensable and have to be leveraged in our apps/offerings.

* Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch on-stage interview. Of course the “elephant in the room” was raised, re: HTML vs Flash and Apple’s strict stance. Lynch made clear that his position is “”freedom of choice on the web is the key question”, to enable people to “express themselves”. He obliquely referred to Apple: “some want to wall off parts of the web”, and cited analogies to the railroad system in 1800’s with various rail gauges/sizes that had to become standardized to enable innovation. Also mentioned Open Screen initiative by Adobe, for cross-device interactive media…and Omniture, which is for “analytics and optimization of web content” to allow A/B testing. Another quote: “It’s now passé to talk about experience matters, and that’s great…we can now focus on APIs, clouds, client apps to enable great experience.”

* Ecommerce disrupters: A series of short presos by various dot com innovators/leaders. Mostly a blur to me, but a few choice ideas: “Simple is intelligence”, referring to reducing the vast quantities of consumer choice online to a few distinct offerings that really matter to a customer’s life. And “Don’t use data to guess…instead build a customer relationship”. Avoid the trap of predicting and spamming and over-advertising (info overload/featuritis). Dig deeper and understand customer motives and loyalty/disloyalty incentives.

* Slideshare: CEO Rashmi Sinha described some lessons learned in building and expanding this popular site for hosting/sharing PPT slideshows (and now videos too). For ex: The social web is visual, citing people’s desire to create, express with images and videos. You should build a strong core, and use multiple platforms for distribution (like facebook, twitter, google, iphone, etc.) to grow customer reach/loyalty/mindshare. Strive to reinvent paradigms, citing HP’s publishing their announcement of buying Palm as a Slideshare preso. (not your typical press release) Finally keep expanding your vision, this case with Slideshare now going beyond PPT slides, now getting into videos/movies by users.

* EBay Simple Lister beta: This was a cool demo of Silverlight 4. The speaker also described the process of designing/coding the product in just 8 short weeks, starting with (of course) sketching with pen/paper > clickable comps with rough hand-drawn style > fully interactive prototype. All using MSFT Expression Blend and Sketchflow tools.

* Clouds/Web 2.0: This session was more about distilling some core concepts and defining them or at least reach some common understanding with the audience. The speaker, from Rackspace, led the discussion by raising simple but important questions: what’s web 2.0? what’s cloud? what’s open? No real closure but interesting debate…

OK so you’ve been invited to present to the design team and meet personally with various designers 1-on-1. What should you expect? How should you prepare? Here’s some general tips to help.

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* Portfolio presentation: Again, show your best work with more elaboration of process and follow-through. Tell a compelling story that presents your solutions, abilities, and approach. I personally like to see a range, with evidence of sketching :-)

* If you are a junior designer, fresh out of school: expect questions about your short-term goals, your insights from class projects, what you hope to learn, appraisals of your passion/eagerness to learn (as well as for the domain) and specific skills for on-the-ground kinda work (creating deliverables, making presentations, taking direction from senior level folks, handling criticism and ability to grow)

* If you are a mid-level designer, with 3-5 yrs of experience: expect questions about lessons learned in your work, likes/dislikes about project phases and approaches, general career goals/paths, collaboration experiences, areas of growth/learning, evidence of adaptability, dealing with multiple projects.

* If you area senior designer, with 7+ yrs of experience: expect discussions about your design philosophy, principles, career vision/path, strategic thinking about problems, staging conversations with stakeholders (including executives), management/directing of designers and projects, etc.

* For anybody, expect a design exercise as a way to feel firsthand your ability to assess a problem quickly and generate solutions on the fly with input from the interviewers. It’s not really about the solutions per se, but your thinking style and design approaches. Do you like to write a bunch of stuff first or draw a lot of stuff? Are you referencing common patterns and models? Are you drawing logical inferences? Are you pulling creative insights from other domains or samples in your past work? Can you speak clearly and effectively and take criticism well?

* And as they always say, be yourself, be authentic and true. Putting on a slick sales job doesn’t help much (unless you’re applying for “evangelist” ;-)

* Finally, if you’re applying for a design position, make sure you really mean it. I know how everybody says they want to do design, research, manage, or somehow avoid “being silo’d” and try to weasel out with some vague, general language when asked “what do you want to do”. Just pick one focus/passion with evidence to back it up. Wanna be a designer? Then man up and show that you deserve to be in that role. (likewise for research, docs/writer, etc.)

Recently I’ve been helping screen and interview design candidates for our team at Citrix. Having now seen a range of portfolios with flaws and weaknesses galore, I feel compelled to offer up a few specific tips to ensure the best portfolio material is being shown and explained well. Here are some tips in no particular order…(and this is really an evolving list that I shall build over time)

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* Foremost: Show your best work, and make sure it represents YOU and YOUR design skills.

* Relatedly, make sure your work is relevant to the company/domain/role you’re applying for. If the role is designing a media management app for iPad, your suite of web ad banners probably isn’t suitable.

* Don’t send giant PDFs and PPTs clogging the inbox. Those files get lost in the file system, inbox, etc. Just send a URL.

* Have a website. Seriously, it’s 2010. If you’re gonna be a UI designer, your work needs to be easily viewable online. Either your own website, or something hosted on Coroflot, Flickr, etc.

* A blog is not a substitute for your portfolio. And unless you want me to read your tweets and facebook posts, don’t send those links either. I don’t know you yet, and they’re not germane to assessing your abilities to design.

* Remember that your online portfolio (versus what is shown in-person at the job interview itself) is a teaser that invites me to call you up to learn more, piques curiosity/interest, etc. So show your best, but don’t show everything you’ve ever done.

* Please don’t create a fancy-shmancy Flash site with intros/animations, crazy effects, etc. It overpowers your work. Let your work stand on its own. If it’s good, you won’t need the Flash as a crutch. (speaking personally, if I see a Flash site, I immediately close it and move on to the next candidate, esp if i see “intros”, etc. I’m simply way too busy.)

** Sidenote: if i see a Flash site, I wonder could this have been done in HTML/CSS/Javascript. Was there something particularly unique that required Flash??

* If your prototypes are in Flash, that’s fine, just indicate that clearly and separately. (For ex: Click here to see a Flash demo of a mobile banking app, etc.)

* Clearly label what the project/client/problem is for each image in your portfolio…CONCISELY! No need for paragraphs of text.

* Finally…remember, the reviewer is most likely viewing your work in-between meetings, design sessions, or after work at the end of a long day. With little time to spare, so just made it quick and easy and engaging.

** One more thing ;-) Even if you’re applying for “interaction designer”, make sure your portfolio shows some good taste, aesthetic quality, and looks professional. Clean legible type, judicious graphics, etc. Don’t overdo it with leopard prints, wacky fonts, ugly color combos, and all that.

Hi folks, I’m looking for rockstar designers to join me at Citrix in Santa Clara :-)

I recently joined as a principal designer to help our VP of Design (who came from Salesforce) create design excellence in the enterprise. We’ve got a mandate from the CEO to “simplify, unify, and consumerize” our geeky IT apps into products that are cool, sleek, and reinventing how people work. This means apps for iPad & Android, as well as Mac/Win using Flex or Silverlight, and in-browser for thin client/net PCs, for users in business, education, and healthcare. It’s all that “virtual and cloud computing” stuff that’s hot now! A great time to invent what this software can be with good design.

We need design talent with stunning visual skills and sharp analytical abilities who love to dig into complex products, to arrive at elegant smart solutions. Passion, imagination, camaraderie, and adaptability are key. And of course many of you know I come from the Andrei Herasimchuk school of “design making” and the Buchanan/CMU school of “design thinking”, which I’m advocating to shape a robust design culture. Want to be a part of it? Enabling this is a small but thriving team of designers & researchers from PayPal, Adobe, and Ebay. Lots of experience and enthusiasm!

So forget about crummy old dinosaur enterprise UI. This is a bold pursuit of world-class design quality that competes at the level of Apple, Dyson, Virgin, and Nike. Are you up for the challenge? Read on…

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Visual Designers: Superbly skilled in typography, color, grids, icons, etc. Imaginative sense of ideating/creating the whole interface, not just production of buttons/icons. Armed with an amazing sense of style, always exploring what’s next. Can create gorgeous, pixel-perfect comps and crisply detailed assets. Craftsmanship is an absolute must! Mastery of standard Adobe toolset. Prototyping is a big plus! Grasps the rigors of product development, UI freeze, perforce/SVN, and can handle all that equally well when deadlines get hot. Also key: clearly articulating the rationale for emotive aspects of visuals to executives.

Interaction Designers: Keen analysis of the user’s journey, from macro-level flow and architecture to micro-level UI mechanics & states & edge cases. Able to drive an eco-system POV as well as apply/invent patterns for UI elements. Able to quickly iterate and persuasively explain holistic flow diagrams, meaningful wireframes/storyboards, and gritty spec details. Collaborative brainstorming is key. Prototyping is a big plus! Always challenging assumptions about behavior, flow, and value to the user. Mindful of business goals and tech constraints. Knows how to balance PMs and Devs/engineers. Knows when to do research studies versus tapping your reservoir of past judgment. Must have total product design experience (not just making websites).

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And if you are one of those rare hybrids who does pixel-perfect visuals AND interaction design, even better! No silos on the Citrix Product Design team. We all want to make great products and have fun while doing it!

If you’ve got the chops, please contact me directly, uday.gajendar@citrix.com, with a link to your amazing online portfolio and resume. Thanks!

At the risk of indulging in fanboy-esque hyperbole, I just couldn’t resist the title nor the alluring touch of interacting with such a novel, groundbreaking product that actually makes the year 2010 feel like the 2010 we’ve all imagined! No, we don’t have flying cars or jetpacks or robot servants, but we do have a svelte (albeit heavier than expected), speedy, futuristic amalgam of hi-technology and hi-lifestyle experience–the Apple iPad. Indeed, 2010 may well become the year we evolve a new form of computing, which I term “magical computing” ;-)

By magical, I mean enchanting and wondrous, not “pull a rabbit out of a hat” or make the Great Wall of China disappear into thin air. That’s just cheesy. Magical is instead deeply emotional and humanistic, expressive and experiential, tapping into a latent sense of delight that is rare to behold and eager to be shared with others.

First, the iPad is simply irresistible: The speed, fluidity, slickness, and gorgeous visual quality are an absolute delight, and I want to find every excuse I can to keep wanting to use this, as part of my daily routines. In fact, as a response to those who’ve wondered if iPad replaces a laptop, I’m actually wondering why the heck would I ever want to go back to a laptop?? (except for maybe extensive tasks like designing interfaces, requiring detailed pixel-level control or extensive typing, like…ahem…this blog post ;-)

What is also evocative and inspiring is the fact this slate of a computer can literally be anything you want it to be, depending on the apps. The catchy tagline “There’s an App for that” captured this potent quality for the iPhone. And no doubt the iPhone has ignited the critical sparks for this “magical computing” era. Now, given the form factor of the iPad, being larger, enables it going even further, becoming a full musical instrument, a turntable mixer, cash register, multimedia recipe book, hyper-textbooks for kids, home automation manager, you name it…the possibilities are endless!

And that’s what makes the iPad so special and powerful, that it is the conduit, a vehicle for unlimited range of potential uses for any number of folks, particularly verticals (think medical, financial, supply/warehousing, archit/construction, etc.). UCD experts always ask: what’s the use case? With the iPad the use cases are emergent and will evolve with discovery of potential, not pre-ordained in some requirements doc. Another aspect of the magic, thus requiring foresight, imagination and creative insight. While Tablet PC computing has been around for years, it just really never caught on, presumably because it was focused on replicating the MS Office/Windows experience writ small, cramming pre-determined use cases into a crappy package that didn’t perform well…instead of serving as a platform for fulfilling human desires, whatever they may be.

The iPad is nothing short of “magical” in this regard, much like the nifty tools and trinkets Harry Potter picked up along his journeys. Unlimited possibility, defying (or more accurately, elevating) expectations, producing outcomes that delight and satisfy, and…it just works naturally and intuitively. Pick it up and go, with your fingers.

Other qualities that will re-shape perceptions of computing, changing our lifestyles further:

** The iPad as a remote portable viewer: with apps like Citrix Receiver and GoToMeeting you can just log into your main computer system/desktop from anywhere, using the natural multitouch gestures, having convenient access to your work or home content from anywhere.

** Much as been written about e-books and magazines. Having used it now, it’s quite simply brilliant. Robust stunning image and text quality with full page flip/navigation abilities and archiving via the cloud, why go back to tree-killing print publications that lose money? The possibilities for truly pushing the notion of “hypermedia” are just now being hinted at. From Tim-Berners Lee’s simple linking of research docs to William Gibson’s “consensual hallucination…a constellation of lights”, and beyond. We are on the cusp of some amazing interactive and kinetic storytelling!

** Streaming TV and movies via Netflix and ABC. But imagine streaming web conferences and recorded lab sessions or classroom lectures. Again, the notion of a portable sleek viewer with “augmented reality” aspects for contextual information, networked sources, social sharing.

** The ecosystem of iPhone as a touchpad or input device for the iPad, which hooks into your iMac or HDTV (via Apple TV)–whoa! Very compelling and integrative experiences are possible. Telesurgery? IT administration? Robotics? Or just controlling your home systems from a single touchpoint?

** And of course the full and growing range of UI affordances, patterns, interactions as documented by Bill Scott, Luke W, and others online. Novel ways of visualizing and interacting with data, pushing the communicative potential.

These points and of course, the inevitable technical evolution (megapixel camera, Hi-Def resolution, video/webcam, etc.) suggest moving towards a new age of expectations & perceptions of computing, beyond the traditional desktop-keyboard-mouse stationary setup. We may be at the dawn of magical computing, that is emotionally resonant, sensually irresistible, behaviorally breaking paradigms, and functionally mutable…all the while in the elegant, unassuming form of an aluminum & glass slate, compellingly portable and convenient.