I give a design exercise to candidates to bring in for their onsite interview. The point of a design exercise is shed light on the following: Are they masters of their tool? Are they productive? Are they creative? Are they logical? Are they detail-oriented? One thing I advise candidates to avoid is the “Default Design”.…
My mother-in-law, Penny, is a retired nurse. After retiring, she took up weaving. For those of you who don’t know, weaving takes up alot of space. There are baskets of wool everywhere. The loom itself is enormous. Penny’s loom is roughly as big as this one. She used to have a dining room, now she…
When I review a new applicant, I look at their information and decide whether to set up a zoom video conferencing call or not. The truth is that I WANT you to succeed. I want you to have multiple lucrative offers. So to help you, here is a cheat sheet to get past my review.…
Some of these tips are going to seem obvious. Like “Duuuuhhh” obvious. However, I can tell you that I am getting candidates who fail on every single one of these. Master Your Tools The job is to be in a design tool and make stuff (and go to a bunch of meetings). Meetings and design,…
The Roadtrip Metaphor I love metaphors and this one is one of my favorites. Imagine a project as a roadtrip with some friends. Sometimes you will be driving, sometimes you will be in the passenger seat, sometimes in the back seat. There are people, like your parents, who just want to know where you are,…
Every designer has a section of their portfolio where they show their work. The typical method of documenting their work is called a case study. case stud·y/ˈkā(s) ˌstədē/a process or record of research in which detailed consideration is given to the development of a particular person, group, or situation over a period of time. Here…
I often like to think of things in a spectrum or on a line graph. A junior designer asked me how to convince the product management team to increase the scope of the project to add in all of the usability features. He said that it was a better product that way. I drew him…
It’s time to hire again! I have two open headcount for product designers. Woo hoo! Senior Product Designer and regular Product Designer. We aren’t Google with fancy free food. We aren’t Facebook with crazy money for every employee. (Although we do pay quite well) We aren’t Twitter with 330 million users. I need to have…
I have three new designers showing up in the next few weeks bringing my team at Treasure Data to 7. Generally, I feel that doing 1:1 development of an employee takes time and trying to accomplish that for more than 5 people once is difficult. So I am faced with choices of how to structure…
I’ve been using a new top-of-the-line Mac as my primary desktop for the past 11 months. Although it was not by choice, I made the best of it. I installed the Beta of Sierra and now Catalina. I experimented with different apps and ways of organizing my desktops. Lately however, I have been missing Windows.…
I had tried cord cutting before, but it didn’t work. (Parts 2, 3, and 4) However, that was a while ago and I felt that it was time to try again. My internet access is from Wave communications, 500mbits and pretty stable. I have 8 eero devices scattered around my house. Starting (monthly) costs before…
Let’s do a quick lightning round and some observations at the end. Joe Biden Big picture of Joe and Give me money! Hmm, interesting. Scroll UP from the home page. It’s a bug. A BUG! Come on Joe! How can we trust you with the nation’s highest office if you can’t even get your website…
I have to give credit where credit is due. In April, I complained that Adobe was taking years to build out basic things in XD. Today, they released a huge update. Let’s see how it compares to my complaints. Text Transform. Done! Scale Resize Symbols Independently. Done! Quick Access to Google Font Library – not…
About Face 4th Edition, the Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Christopher Noessel. Many years ago an interviewer asked me who my influences are. My answer was pretty lame. He generously gave me a list of books to read. I read them and dozens more. Three particular books formed…