I was talking to a friend of mine today about focusing on one thing versus spreading yourself too thin as a company. His thought was that the important part was to finish what you start. But once you finish you deduce the next biggest opportunity within your company’s strategy and then pursue it even if it doesn’t seem to relate to the last thing you finished. But it’s critical that it still fits within your company’s broad strategic framework. If it doesn’t, then that is when you are foolishly spreading yourself too thin.
Archive for February, 2009
When and how to focus
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009Working in WinForms
Monday, February 23rd, 2009I’m redesigning one of the main dialogs in my company’s ancient windows app. One of the restrictions on the project was that I had to only use the canned winforms controls that come with visual studio 2008. So today I spent most of the day in visual studio’s design editor pulling out controls and checking out their parameters. It was creative to have such a limited selection to design with, but at the same time it made me realize just how flexible designing for the web really is.
Product vision versus visual implementation
Friday, February 20th, 2009From a Cooper interview of Andrew Hoag. Good point about product vision versus visual implementation of that vision. It’s important that the person with the passion for the product maintain their vision as they deal with designers who are creating the drawings of the product.
I was discussing the relationship with Cooper with a couple of advisors. Their initial reaction was “You should never outsource design.” After talking with them and figuring out what their concerns were, I now spend time differentiating between the product vision and the manifestation or implementation of that product vision. It goes back to the comment I made earlier about our product vision being consistent.
http://www.cooper.com/journal/2009/02/interaction_design_for_startups.html
I realized why I prefer “User Experience Designer”
Thursday, February 19th, 2009I prefer the title User Experience Designer to Interaction Designer, even though defining and capturing the interaction is what we do, because user experience designer refers to the user, which who we’re creating the interaction for. User Experience Designer reminds me who I’m designing for.
A new field
Thursday, February 19th, 2009I was recently talking to some people about the interaction design field. The position is so new that it’s known by a bunch of different titles and it’s job description is a little different for different companies. The names I’ve heard so far are Interaction Designer, User Experience Designer, User Interface Designer, IxD (the guy actually said we need more IxDs), and UX.