In May of 2009 I got the chance to have a conference call with Josh Evnin (@jevnin) of ThoughtWorks consulting. Josh had a lot of great input on how Interaction Designers could become influential in a company after graduation; what works, what doesn’t, and what to do.
Full Interview Audio (MP3 Format)
Drew: So just for the sake of introduction, I am on the call with Josh Evnin right now, who is the product of the school of informatics master program in HCID, Human Computer Interaction Design. You graduated in 2005, Josh?
Josh: Yeah, I wanna say yeah.
Drew: And then you went to work for ThoughtWorks right after that?
Josh: Yeah, straight away
Drew: You have been working there for some time now, as an interaction design consultant, is that correct?
Josh: Yes, that’s right. I am an interaction design consultant. I have been here at ThoughtWorks for about two and half years now.
Drew: Great. We sent you the list of questions beforehand and these questions are from myself, students and sort of interested parties. I want to kind of go a little bit different order than what we had talked about initially. If I can first ask you to go through, I guess, the top ten things, or the top things you wish you’ve known coming out of the grad school, or coming into the grad school, rather.
Josh: I’ll give it a shot. This is the ten things that you wish you would have known coming out of grad school. This is, I was thinking about it, this is actually a good topic for a full-on talk. I’d love to come down there and just talk about these ten things. So I came up with a few things. I think it’s important as we go through these things, I think it’s important to realize that, in my role, I am a consultant. Drew, I know that you were a consultant in the past. Consulting is, it might be a little different from what other people graduating want to do. Actually, there’s a lot in consulting that you walk away with that can be applied across the board. So even if you work in a big product design company, or even a small start-up shop, there’’ll be times when you will be treated like a consultant. So somebody would look for you for expert opinion on whatever, on usability, on the design of a screen, on, you name it. They are going to look for your expert opinion because of your specific training. That’s where I am coming from with all of these things, from a consultant’s perspective . So the first thing that I wrote down when I thought about these questions, is, one thing I was really afraid about, going into my first consulting gig, was just thinking about how I might be valuable on day one. Day one of any project that you are on, is sort of scary time. No body around the table really knows what’s going on. A lot of times for someone in interaction design role, people are looking to you for guidance. I think we can talk about that a little bit more later. But what’s really important to think about, before you get to a job, before you meet a client, how you can provide value immediately. There’s a lot of things that we can do to provide value. I could go on forever about that. But the key point here is just think about how you could be valuable to whatever job you’re doing immediately before you go. Now did you want to follow up with questions on that or should I just keep on rolling?
“In my role, I see it as my job to help people conceptualize at the beginning of a project what it is that they actually want to build. Sort of at a higher level. We do that through talking to: users or potential users, business stakeholders, and important people in an organization. We conceptualize what it is that we are going to be building.”
Drew: No, just keep rolling. This is great.
Josh: OK. I guess the next thing about that is coming out of grad school I think I approached client work with a little bit of trepidation. You feel like you’re just coming out of school maybe, and you’ve learned all these methods and tools. For me, at least at the beginning, there was this resounding question coming in that was basically all about how valuable I am to a company or to my client.
The thing that I really want to point out to the HCID grads and anyone who’s listening to this is is that people who have studied and worked in interaction design and HCI and this whole field are actually extremely valuable. We think about problems in a very different way than a standard businessperson does.
Somebody who gets an MBA doesn’t get the same kind of training that we do, or somebody who comes from a computer science background isn’t exactly introduced to design thinking the way that we are.
So one of the first things that people should remember is that you’ll provide immense value just by doing the things that you learned in school or that you’re learning right now. It’s amazing to me. I’ve wowed clients with a lot of things that we think about as the easy stuff. A simple pencil sketch can mean the difference between not understanding what we’re building and having a full, complete view of what the entire system might be like.
To someone like an executive who has thought about a piece of software only at a very high level, having that sketch is very valuable. So don’t forget that, and use the tools that we have at our disposable. It was really interesting, actually. I want to drive into a story about that.
I sat down with a developer the other day at my company. He wanted to build. We have this new initiative in my company where we just opened up our time and expenses application to be an internal open source project. So the developers are all very excited, and they want to build new features into our time and expense application to make it easier and better for everybody to use. So this developer wanted to build an application for the iPhone. So he wanted people to be able to just go onto their iPhone, put in their time that they’ve worked this week, and be done with it. Or take a picture of their receipts as they’re out at meals and they don’t have to do the task of going receipt by receipt through their expenses.
So great. It was a great idea, but he came to me and we talked for maybe 10 or 15 minutes just about all these ideas he had and he was very excited about it, but 10 minutes in, I felt like he was at a loss for where to go next. This guy is brilliant and he has built software for years and he knows a lot about this industry. But basically what he was asking me for was some guidance as to how to layout the application, how to build this software in a very basic sense.
Basically what he was begging me to do and I didn’t even realize it was to take a post-it note and some index cards and do a wire-frame or a sketch right there in front of him. It took me a while to realize that, but once I started drawing, immediately he latched on and was extremely excited. In about 20 minutes we went through what this application could do, a simple work flow. He was ready to run after that.
“One of the first things that people should remember is that you’ll provide immense value just by doing the things that you learned in school or that you’re learning right now. It’s amazing to me. I’ve wowed clients with a lot of things that we think about as the easy stuff. A simple pencil sketch can mean the difference between not understanding what we’re building and having a full, complete view of what the entire system might be like.”
I run into this sort of situation all the time, where I’ll introduce the concept that we take for granted. People from a design background that we know how to do it, something like taking a pen to a sticky-note and putting together an affinity diagram. These things are not basic. We have the specialized knowledge and we really have to use that knowledge. So just remember how valuable you are. Just be yourself and use the tools you’ve learned.
All right. So the next big thing – I guess we learn this a little bit in graduate school, but I definitely could have thought about it a lot more personally. One thing that I think is very important to know how to do coming out of graduate school is how to teach Interaction Design.
People will always have perceptions about what you do when you introduce yourself as an Interaction Designer or a User Experience Designer or User Researcher or whatever your title ends up being, people are going to have perceptions. Typically I’ll introduce myself as an interaction designer and some people will think of me as the Usability person. But then I’ll meet someone else and I’ll use the same title – Interaction Designer and all of a sudden they think I’m a graphic designer. Still other people think that I’m just a UI guy. There’s all these different perceptions about what we do, and when I started, I fought back against a lot of these perceptions. I would tell people, “No, I’m not a graphic designer; that’s not what I do”, and “No, I don’t do usability, but yes, it is a part of what I do”. It’s not my core role, but there is a piece of what I do that is about usability. It’s important to not fight back against these perceptions. So, at the beginning, I did fight back, and to my own frustration, and I learned that that just doesn’t make sense. What I do now in that sort of situation, where I’m sort of pegged into a very singular path in the interaction design spectrum, is I’ll use that as my jumping off point, and then make a marker in my head that I either need to teach this person, or this team exactly what it is that I’m meant to be doing for them. So, yeah, I can use their perception as a starting off point, and teach them about what it is that interaction design is in this field. And also, definitely don’t be surprised when you meet people that haven’t heard the words interaction design used together before. It’s very normal, and we are actually the weird ones; we’re the ones who are specialized, and we are very specific in what we’ve studied. And many people won’t know what an interaction designer does, so definitely nail down what it means to you to be an interaction designer, and from there, educate, educate, educate. So, I’m very much all about sharing this work with people, and people will definitely latch on to it. If you’re doing the job of interaction designer correctly, then it’s very visual, and it’s out there, and it’s for people to take in at all times. So, just do your normal work should be a launching point for education. If you find yourself stuck in a cubicle, and separated from a team, and no one really knows what you’re doing, something is going wrong. So, yeah, use every chance you get to educate people about what you do, and invite them in to the world of interaction design. Tons of people at my company have come to me with interest, because they’ve heard a little bit about what interaction design is, or they’ve heard the term usability design, which is something that I had never heard of before I left graduate school. When people come to you, definitely try to teach them more, and invite them to work with you as much as possible.
“Even if you work in a big product design company, or even a small start-up shop, there’’ll be times when you will be treated like a consultant. So somebody would look for you for expert opinion on whatever, on usability, on the design of a screen, on, you name it. They are going to look for your expert opinion because of your specific training.”
Drew: If I could ask you a follow up there, real quick. You had mentioned people who don’t know, or have never heard of the term interaction designer, and you said really try to narrow in on what that means to you, and what your value add is. Could you maybe give us your spiel, when people ask you that?
Josh: I saw that coming. I saw that coming a mile away! Sure, yeah. Next I’ll start talking a little bit about facilitation. So yeah. To me, being an Interaction Designer is about facilitating the design process for the people around you who will be charged with building or creating some experience.
In my role, I see it as my job to help people conceptualize at the beginning of a project what it is that they actually want to build. Sort of at a higher level. We do that through talking to: users or potential users, business stakeholders, and important people in an organization. We conceptualize what it is that we are going to be building. The next step in the facilitation process is to help take the team through the actual building of whatever experience we’re trying to build, be it a piece of software or many pieces of software or an environment.
The next step is to actually start to build that experience. For me, that can mean anything from doing graphic design here and there to sometimes writing code if I need to to helping business analysts that I work with to define specific functionality within a piece of software. There are a lot of things. That’s the building process.
On the other end, the tail end of the process, is to actually assess whether we’ve met our goals from the beginning. That’s the assessment phase where were looking back and saying: “So at the beginning, our stakeholders had these goals. Are we meeting those goals? Is the tool usable? Are we bringing in money? Are we getting people to use this software who weren’t using it before?” This experience is to be planned at the outset. Did that plan work?
I really like to think about all three of those phases: before, during, and after. I think all of us have a little bit of each of those roles, but you may find that you prefer being in a particular segment of that[...] If you want to be in usability, dig in and really learn a lot about that. But think about it a little bit and see what kind of person you think you are.
For me, I see that as a very circular process. So I do a little bit of all of those things everyday. At the beginning a project will have phases where you’ll kick it off. Then you’ll be in hard work mode. Then you’ll be in sort of look back assess mode. That stuff can happen all the time. There will be the big chunks of a project but you can always loop through the assessment everyday. Every time you do a little bit of the regular work, you can loop back and say how is this going? How is this screen that I designed working out? So yeah. I think that’s my mini spiel.
One of my friends Jeff Patten, he’s an Interaction Designer and he works in the agile development world of software development. One thing he talks about that I really like is thinking about yourself as a before, during, or after usability person. That’s his mindset or Interaction Designer.
So thinking about yourself as: are you the kind of person who likes to be on a project at the beginning before you’re actually doing the work to get it done? Are you you the kind of person who likes to think in broad strokes and at a very high level? Or do you prefer to be very tactical? Do you like to be the person who is creating actual images for a website or designing the detail specification for how you’ll walk through how a user will actually use a screen. That’s the “during person.” Then the “after person” might be a usability tester; somebody who does the testing on a experience or a piece of software.
I really like to think about all three of those phases: before, during, and after. I think all of us have a little bit of each of those roles, but you may find that you prefer being in a particular segment of that. If you do favor being a “before, during or after person,” definitely dig in. If you want to be in usability, dig in and really learn a lot about that. But think about it a little bit and see what kind of person you think you are.
Was that all right?
Drew: That’s exactly what we were looking for I think. We usually do try to ask that of anyone who visits. We asked Brian that. I think it was last week that he came. He had a similarly informed definition of it. His work largely revolves around the consulting model too even though he works for Adobe. So no, that was great. If we could come back to the question – the ten things. I think you were on number four, “How to facilitate a room full of people of varying backgrounds.”
Josh: Yeah. So as I’ve worked as an Interaction Designer, I’ve become more and more convinced that the key to being a great Interaction Designer is being a great facilitator. So a lot of my projects at my company start with a phone call from a sales person who has been talking to people at sort of a higher level at a client site, and one thing that I noticed on a lot of these calls is that, most of the time, people don’t really have an idea of what it is that they really want built. So people, don’t necessarily come to the table with a concrete plan for what they want out of a design.
So, i feel it’s our job as interaction designers to help facilitate. To be facilitators, to create activities that make an open,an open enough work space so that people can, come up with good ideas, and so that we can really understand what the problems are and what are the potential solutions to that, to those problems are.
I think a lot of times interaction designers, especially in school I know that I thought about,I thought this way,I thought that an interaction designer, uh,it was my job to come to a company and have, or come to my clients or to a design problem with brilliant ideas. So, it was my job to brainstorm, potentially with other interaction designers, or people like me and come up with really cool ideas for how to solve problems. It hadn’t turned out like that at all for me. So, most of the time I’m not working with anybody else who has the same background as me. I’m typically the only interaction designer in a room. I’m almost always the only person who has ever taken a class in human computer interaction, so that means its not up to me to sit in that room and teach these other people what interaction design is or how to design. It’s up to me to help this room full of people come up with brilliant ideas as a group. And to really pull out for my stake holders what they perceive their problem to be and then to go out into the real world and uh talk to user, talk to people that are using their problems and see what the problems are on the street then to put these all together. Take these problems out in the world and the goals that the stake holders have for us all as a group to come up with the right solutions and then to build them.
I feel it’s our job as interaction designers to help facilitate. To be facilitators, to create activities that make an open,an open enough work space so that people can, come up with good ideas, and so that we can really understand what the problems are and what are the potential solutions to that, to those problems are.
So, interaction designers really have to we have to be ready to run the gambit of all the roles in whatever, whatever foray you go into. So for me my company does software development so that means i need to work really closely with literally everyone. I need to be, i need to facilitate the process for the project manager, they need to understand how the design process is going to impact the development of the human process they are responsible for. I need to work directly with client, stake holders, which could be everybody from executives, a top level executive of a company, down to somebody who is working the telephone lines. It really runs the whole gamut. Also within my company, Thoughtworks, I need to be ready to work with, you know, people on corporate strategy and design, and facilitates all strategy going forward. It really is a process of facilitation, every steps of a game. Never think about yourself as an ideal person. Think about yourself as the person who is facilitating the great ideas from everyone around you. So yes, ways that we can do that, there’s a lot of tools we have at our disposal. I said earlier if you are doing your job right, you are doing things very visually. I really strongly believe in that. I would go into meetings in the beginnings of a project where people really don’t know what they want. It’s my job to put structure around their thoughts. When I go into a client’s meeting at the beginning, I won’t leave that meeting unless there’s some sort of output from it. That output can just be a simple model that we talked about in the meeting or could be a wireframe, or could be a project plan. It doesn’t have to be perfectly clean and beautiful. It’s typically pencil-sketched. It’s actually really typical on a giant post note on the wall. Everybody grabs a marker at some point, put in their piece. Again, it should not be about you taking in ideas and crystallize them, making them beautiful. It should be very much about making sure everyone is inputting their thoughts. They are coming out of that session with something that mean something to everyone than is crystallized. It should be crystallized in everyone’s head, whatever concept you were discussing.
Josh: Great. Can you talk about the money point?
Drew: Sure. One thing, I don’t think I ever worried about in graduate school as far as doing project, I never really thought about money issues. So money comes out all the time. This is something that I’m still learning about every day. Every client that I work with, has to pay me, right? They have to pay my company. So when I accepted a job, I had to negotiate the salary. These conversations that you have, they can be very touchy. But they come up relatively frequently. So I encourage every one to think about these money issues. When you get a job or when you are offered a job, what is going- what is your move then? Are you, is your job then just to accept. What if you think you could provide more value than they are going to pay you for. What do you do then? I suggest that you read up about how to negotiate things like that. You don’t want to be booked out like a shark. That’s the problem that I typically have. Is that I feel like when I negotiate with people, people think that I going, people are going to think that I am a bad person or that I am just in this for the money. That’s not true. The big point is that the world is different outside of school than it is in school. For me, in my experience, when I was in school, I would receive projects or work from a professor. And it was my job to tackle that project to the best of my ability. But as a consultant it’s my job to do the same thing. I’ll receive work and it’s my job to, to do that work to the best of my ability but it is also up to me to judge what my means are. So can I do my best work with the amount of time or the amount of money that they are offering me or my company. It’s really important to think about this. And to value your time and your company’s time and understand that for every bit of value that you provide to a client, there should be a matching fee for that. And one interesting trick that I’ve -that I’ve learned a little bit about as I’ve been a counsulting, is that there’s lots of psycological aspects to consulting.
As a consultant, my company will sometimes raise our rates. And it’s interesting when our rates are a little higher, we notice that we get a little more respect. I don’t know why that happens, but I guess I can understand it. You know, if you’re coming in and you’re undercutting people and you’re cheap, people don’t expect very much from you. But at the same time if you are, if you are charging extremely higher rates and you are not providing much value, you’ll be sharply, sharply judged. And I have seen that edge-edge of the spectrum to. So , be careful with it. Think about-think about your relationship with money. And think about the fact that you will need it to survive.[laugh] And just get better all the time. Just think about it a little bit.
Drew: I thought maybe we can go over just the last point about basic consulting skills. It seems to something we all need in some capacity as designers because it seems like most of our jobs, despite us being designers properly the title, consulting seems to be a big part of that and teaching others.
Josh: Yeah. Absolutely. In any job that you get you’re going to be some type of consultant. I’ve said that before. Yeah. There’s always nuance in how you can deliver a message so that’s something that I’ve thought a lot about as I’ve been in the role as a consultant. The first thing that I learned right up front when I became a consultant is how to set expectations. This is another one of those things that you just have to get better at all the time.
Again, when you’re in school potentially you’re given prompts or homework or you name it. You’re given an assignment and it’s your job to do the best you can on that work. When you are delivering work to a client, you can negotiate your responsibilities. So if you know that you don’t have time to do some aspect of that clients’ work, you can negotiate either to not do that work or to only be responsible for a particular part that you feel comfortable with. But you have to be very clear up front about what the client should expect from you.
I think that’s important all around. Even if you’re just working on a project with a group of people, it’s very important to set your expectations with them about what they should expect from you. Especially if people don’t understand what your role is – which many people won’t. It’s very important to set people’s expectations about what you will deliver. Lots of things go into that including what the time line is for when you’ll deliver things and how you’ll expect them to interact with you.
So a lot of clients may come in with the predisposition that you’re there to come in and get this bit of work done and just stay out of their hair. But it might turn out that you need to work with them for a few days a week or whatever. You may need to cut into their schedule in some way that will inhibit them from their other duties. It’s important to set those expectations up front that you’ll need some of their time. So yeah. So the expectations is really valuable.
Drew: This is a great lead-in to the next question on our list that surrounds clients’ expectations and what clients expect from you as an Interaction Designer and how you mange this.
Josh: Yeah. So it turns out that most of my clients don’t know what to expect from an Interaction Design Consultant. It’s still fairly rare for somebody in IT or marketing or sales or whatever is kind of department you’re working with it’s pretty rare for people to have worked with an interaction designer. It’s up to us to educate them about what they should expect.
The first thing that always needs to happen is to explain your course of action. You really need to have your plan how a project will work set up out front, it comes down to knowing yourself and what your own design processes and your beliefs are about how a project should work or how you’ll get a piece of work done, how you’ll create an experience over a set amount of time within a set budget. Upfront you need to be able to educate your client about what types of deliverables they’ll be receiving and what you’ll be doing to create those deliverables and they also need to understand why you’ve chosen those deliverables in that course of action. That always answers the question weather you understand why you are using particular methods.
Definitely in your projects now when you’re thinking about going down in a particular path I encourage you to think about those big “”Why”" questions: “”Why are we going down a particular right”", “”Why are we using co-textual inquiry on this project”" or “”Why are we doing usability testing in the lab that’s supposed to out on the street or with someone in their home”". You really need to become well versed in describing the “”Why-s”" behind that, so yeah, definitely be ready to explain how you’ll get something done, what someone should expect to receive and why you’re doing it the way you’re doing it.
Another thing I really like to do with people n my team is to do lunch-and-learns. A lunch and learn, some people call them “”brown bags”" whatever, every organization has their own term for this, basically it’s just a informal lunchtime or midday discussion about some topic that you’re interested in. So I really love to bring my clients into a room and simply talk to them about a particular piece of the interaction design puzzle. Sometimes I’ll talk about co-textual inquiry that’s one of my favorite tools, other times I’ll talk about usability testing and what types of usability testing could be valuable to them. “,”"
Talk about prototyping and how we’re doing it on their project and why we sketch lots of different concepts and why we narrow down to a final concept. Yeah, and really just ruminating over these ideas. Again lot of this stuff we think very deeply about it but for alot of people this will be their first interaction with something like a wire frame. You can get a lot of mileage out of simply doing a half hour session on how to create a wire frame, this will be totally new to a lot of people.
If people don’t know what to expect from me I really like to run these sessions and explain our methods and dept a little bit. You can also do formal sessions so with other clients I have been with, they wanted me to formalize some of this stuff a little bit so we would do a short class about interactional design methods and that’s very valuable too but on most of the projects I’m on there isn’t time for that. Time pressure is very high and budget is really low and they need to get their stuff done, you need to find those little magic moments that you can squeeze a little bit of education and a lot of times that happens at lunch.
The next thing I do to set client expectations is I work with them, in a lot of our methods we use agile software development to pick our methodologies and there’s one concept in particular called extreme programing and in extreme programing there are a number of, I don’t want say hart set, there are a number of rules to in concept within extreme programing that may get different than other programing.
One of those concepts is called “”pair programming”" so on the development teams that I work with the programmers work in pairs so there will be two of them at any given computer and will be coding together. I really love this concept and I think that it’s really great. The benefit to our clients is that since these people are working together the quality of their work is much, much higher. They’re testing their code as it’s written, they’re challenging each other on why they did things in particular ways and believe it or not they also work all day. When you’re working with someone else your feel this pressure, this pear pressure, you know: “”This other person is putting so much effort so I should too”. I think it definitely works for any role on a team. So I’ve touched on this a little before, but as an interaction you can’t do things alone. So one of the easiest ways to set expectations with your clients or your peers if just to invite them to work with you. So you’ll gain a ton of mileage out of simply inviting someone to do your work together. I’ve been in many experiences where I learn by working with other people the same way.
So there’s value in a lot of the business methods that the business analysts that I work with use. I go out of my way to do their work with them and they come and they’ll do work with me and I think it’s just very important to work with other people and to make that a regular part of your process.
A little bit more on that. I’ve mentioned that one of my favorite methods is contextual inquiry and typically contextual inquires – sometimes it’s a difficult method to sell to a client. They don’t really understand. Some of these people that I work with, my clients, will have built a piece of software 10 years ago and they know it like the back of their hand. They’ll be in some specialized little niche of the insurance industry and they know so much about their domain that I will never get there unless I really dig in and stay in that field for the next 10 years just like they have.
But once I’ve sold one of these clients on something like a contextual inquiry and I actually get them out into the field and they get to watch someone use their software that they’re so intimately familiar with, their eyes are opened nearly immediately. This is something that I’ve seen happen over and over again. Someone will think that there is no more to be learned about their software. They think it’s performing as well as it can and that people love it. Then you take them to one of their users cubicles and immediately they’re floored by the fact that this person hates this feature, but loves this other one that is old and they thought was never used.
Yeah. You get a lot just by bringing your clients into your world. The biggest benefit for me in that sort of situation, every time I’ve done contextual inquiry and gotten out into the world with a client, when we come back to their organization, they will present their work. So the work I’m meant to be responsible for, they prefer to stand up in front of their peers and present because they’re proud of it, and they’ve learned something new, and everyone will learn something new from the input and the feedback from those users. So, that’s fine with me; if they want to come back to their organization, and present my work, that means that I’ve done a good job. So, that means that they believe in my work, and us, to stand up for it in front of their peers, and really represent it. And it makes me proud every time that happens. So, yeah, definitely get your clients to take part in your process. Yeah, that’s what I think; those are the things that I do to help set my expectations with my clients.
Drew: That’s absolutely fantastic, a lot of details there, I think, that are really valuable for anyone in the role in interaction design, as you mentioned. If we could, in the sake of time, I know you’ve got a lot of examples you sent us already, is there any way you could go through one, maybe, of your favorite projects? Or least favorite, I’m not sure which one you want to talk about, of the projects of ThoughtWorks, knowing that you can give us any client names, obviously, but maybe one through, something that happened on a project, or the projects entirely, that you might want to talk about, here.
Josh: Yeah. It’s important for me to note that in my role, almost to a project, every project has been different. So, every client has had a different expectation. Part of that is through me educating the sales people at my company; the people who develop business. Part of their perceptions have flavored my project. So, when one of them sees me as a usability person, I’ll do usability work, and when one of them sees me as a user researcher, then I’ll do user research work, and when someone sees me more in the facilitation rules, then I’ll do project inceptions. So, yeah, all of my projects have been totally different from one another. I’ve talked a little bit about contextual design, so that’s my favorite kind of project, and I think that all of my projects should have at least a little bit of that. But I would definitely say my next favorite kind of project, or part of a project, is really at the inception point; at the beginning of the work, when nobody really has a full understanding of what we’re doing. So, I’ve been on a number of projects like that, and I guess my company, because we use agile development methods, that really encourages, um, it encourages a lot of change throughout the development process. This is something, as designers, we’re not really used to. Uh, we will think that the typical way of thinking about a design project, is at least how I see it is that we will deliver and design to a client and the next phase is implementation and we’re not really part of the implementation process. But with my work, i’m always part of the implementation process, it’s really a very different way of thinking. SO that means, when we’re doing our project conception, we don’t have forever to come with ideas or to really understand problems. We typically come into a project and dedicate two to four weeks most of the time to get an understanding of what the project is and to design a solution, and to estimate how much time it will take to build it, and to tell the client how much it will cost, and to make sure this all works within the clients needs. So there’s a lot of stuff, can you imagine- I don’t remember how long the projects are in Marty’s class- what are they 3 weeks, 4 weeks?
Josh: Most of them, yeah, 3 to 4 weeks.
Drew: 3 to 4 weeks? So in that kind of time, imagine not just delivery a design solution but also a budget. And also a project plan, and also an estimate of exactly how long it will take to,- a couple weeks, plus or minus. There’s a lot we need to get done, but it really requires a different way of thinking. When I first get to a client site, it’s really important to impress upon them, that in those first few weeks, it’s not about setting anything in stone but about getting a group understanding about what it is that we’re building. And from that we can extract some estimates about how long it will take and how we will built it. And then once we get into the development process, that’s where we get into the details. And to me, that’s really amazing. So One thing that I never- that I experienced rarely before this job- was that I will have a notion about how my design will work, and I will somehow prototype it, and eventually someone may built it. But the lab time between my conception of the idea and that idea actually being in the real world was very long. But now, in my job now, I will literally design some sort of, I will design some functionality for a piece of software, and the next day I will see some simple version of it and it makes a big difference. Sometimes I work with designers from other firms or even within my firm and they will want to build prototypes all the way down to the last detail. I think there is definitely some value in that. But for me there is a lot more value in actually having that pool built in the real world quickly even it it’s just a first brush. Using it, getting some experience with it, seeing how it works.
A lot of the times it doesn’t work all that well and you’re glad you built a simple version of it before you shipped it out to people to use and to assess how you’re doing. So yeah. I can’t put enough emphasis on building things quickly and looking back and assessing how it went.
So yeah. The project inception is very much about learning what we’re doing at a very high level and then the rest of the project is really about that detailed building and assessment process. Yeah. That’s really my favorite kind of project. I can’t get into too many more details. It’s really too bad. I really wish I could.
Drew: That’s OK. I think everyone understands that it’s the nature of the job.
Josh: Yeah. It’s one of my least favorite parts of my job. I love to share this stuff and I think we all love to share this stuff with the world. We want the world to be able to share our work, but there are secrets and it’s too bad. I wish there was a better way.
Drew: That’s fine. So we’re probably going to jump around a little bit from here. Something that has been on a lot of people’s minds lately has been obviously the economy. I hope you would answer a little bit of this too, but rather than asking your opinion on where Interaction Design is going given the economy, a lot of people have been looking at contract work as an alternative to full time work. Doing that full time basically part time gigs on the side, doing that full time. Can you talk about contract work in Interaction Design a little bit?
Josh: Sure. Sure. So contract work – I think it’s a very important part of our industry. I think a lot of people, especially now are turning to contract work when the world was a little bit less stable for the bigger organizations. I see a lot of people doing really well in contract work. It’s definitely a great option for any Interaction Designer. For me looking back – I don’t think I was necessarily ready to do that leaving school that might have just in me though. I didn’t have any experience, you know, in the workforce , I had worked at very few plan sites, I had an internship – few internships but it didn’t feel like a fit and definitely looking back it doesn’t feel to me like it would have been nested to really do well as a contractor. You have to know a lot of about yourself in order to go into contracting. You need to be extremely self-determined and extremely self-confident. You need to understand how you work and you need to have an understanding of what client’s expects from your work. But certainly it’s a great option, if you think that it would be comfortable working on your own I would – I would look into it and you could always – the key to contract work I think you can be a contractor and have a job at the same time. So you can always take outside work. I know plenty of people who will design simple things like a website for a local business or, you know, a website for your friend’s wedding or whatever, you can do contract work on the side and get experience and learn how to do that and then jump into that world when you feel like you’ve got enough connections and a big enough portfolio that you can keep or you can get yourself the distance with contract work. I think it’s a big tread right now to do contract work as interaction designers but I think I am a little worry of it for people fresh out of school but if you – again if you think it works for you jump in that’s why I jump in.
Drew: Great. Actually could you tell us how you – how you found Thoughtworks — is actually I am going back to the first question on the list given it a sort of a small consultancy and I know you had mentioned it before with me in email correspondences that you are one of only a handful of interaction designers with Thoughtworks. Could you may be explain how you came across Thoughtworks, or may be how they came across you?
Josh: OK, so I say little bit about Thoughtworks. Thoughtworks is were about a thousand employees now altogether it’s our home base in Chicago but we got offices in New York and San Francisco and Atlanta and U.S. and Canada , England, India, china, Australia. Even though we’ve got a thousand people I am only one of 10 interaction designers thereabouts. There’s a little more maybe but we’re all spread all across the world so up until recently this wasn’t really focus, this wasn’t really focus Thoughtworks but as Interaction design as a field has gained more credibility. As people have become more interested, the company has grown with that.
The way I connected with Thought Works is actually an interesting story. When I was at IU one of my roommates, Eric Pickinskas, his brother worked at Thought Works. He had always talked about Thought Works and what a great experience his brother was having.
When it came time close to graduation and I was looking for work, it just happened in conversation that Eric brought up, “Hey, maybe I can talk to my brother about you.” So, Eric forwarded my resume on to his brother. He contacted the right people at Thought Works and within a few weeks, I was on a plane and in Chicago doing interviews.
That was a great process and I learned a lot in that process. Definitely don’t be bashful about working your network a little bit. You know a lot of people right now. It’s a tough job market, but there are jobs out there if you know the right people. So don’t hesitate to talk with people about jobs.
Another big point that I wanted to think about: you know, I wouldn’t have this job if it wasn’t for Erik going out of his way and bringing it up with me. I think there is something about our relationship — that he didn’t think of me as competition. You know, we were peers but we weren’t competitors. We were both… He went off to school after, for more school after IU, and I went out to get a job.
But you know, with my peers we weren’t competing for jobs. We all wanted something a little bit different and even when we wanted something sort of the same, it is really important to be supportive.
There’s a point where i’m staying fresh at my job and there’s a another point of where i’m keeping my job fresh. So it’s really important not just to be up to date with the latest and greatest in in whatever world you are in, it’s really important to try to play some sort of leadership role.
The goal? In my opinion, our goal should be for everyone who comes through the IU HCI/d program to have a great job. That means not just the people in front of you, the people who graduate before you, or the people who graduate after you. It’s everyone. It’s your peers.
I look back and when job opportunities come up with my company, I’ve tried to contact my peers. Yes, it’s really important that if you see a job while you’re looking through jobs on websites or whatever, and you think someone else might be interested, just tell them about it. Don’t worry about the fact that you’re also applying. It’s not a big deal.
There are enough jobs for all of us out there, even in a tough economy. So, yes, work that network. Don’t be bashful about it. It’s okay. It’s the best way to do it. At conferences give out your card and meet people and really interact and connect. I think that’s the key lesson there.
Drew: That’s great. I think that a lot of that spirit is still maintained in the HCI program but it’s always good to have to hear it again. It the idea of supporting each other. Now let’s jump to the last question if that’s ok. How do you stay fresh at your job?
Josh: Yeah, this is a a great question. So the first point that I want to bring up when it comes to staying fresh in my job. I guess I don’t think about it that way. There’s a point where i’m staying fresh at my job and there’s a another point of where i’m keeping my job fresh. So it’s really important not just to be up to date with the latest and greatest in in whatever world you are in, it’s really important to try to play some sort of leadership role. Umm When you go out to get a job there will be opportunities at your company – with your company to go to conferences, try to make it a point to not just go to the conferences, try to speak at them. Umm..Leaving school is not the last time, that leaving school is not the last time to be asked to write a paper. It’s important to try and contribute to this world and interaction design is so new to the field that there are so many innovations and new ways of thinking that are still yet to come about. How we can make our jobs better. There’s publishings and conferences and otherwise and blogging and educating people. But don’t try and stay fresh, try and lead the pack a little bit. When you leave school, don’t stop reading. There’s a differences – there’s a big difference between reading the journals and magazines and blogs and websites and actually reading books. So pick up books on these topics. There’s new stuff coming out all the time. Surf amazon and look for the newest stuff and really read and think about our craft. I can’t go into too much detail on that. Actually there’s one thing I want to promote is the US book club. I joined the local branch in Chicago and it’s great. The idea is that professions or anyone you read a book and come together and talk about it. The UX Book Club, look it up. There are lots of websites about it. I wonder if there’s one in Bloomington. If there’s not, there should be. So, join UX Book Club. Keep reading books.
A little bit of a rant of mine, but I see a lot of people, a lot of people that I work with, they want to learn more about interaction designs, and they think that I can hand them the single book that will teach them everything.
Sure, there are some great books, Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” and the “About Face” books, and there are a ton of books out there that are all really good, “The Design of Everyday Things,” these are all great books, but there’s new stuff coming out all the time.
This isn’t a field that’s about learning it once and then just applying it over and over. Our jobs are going to change our entire lives, so we’ve really got to keep thinking deeply about our tools.
Another way to stay fresh otherwise is through conferences. Definitely, when you’re looking at jobs now, bring this up with potential employers, the fact that you want to stay connected through conferences and you want to go to them. Make sure they’ve got some sort of program or some way that you can get to conferences and meet people in the industry or even in adjoining industries.
I found that the Interaction conference series is great. I-Summit, I heard, is fantastic. CHI, of course, is great. Go to conferences, and even if you end up with a job that doesn’t send you to conferences, find a way to get there.
If you write a paper and you publish at a conference, a lot of companies will probably go out of their way to help send you there. And even if they don’t, if you’re paid what your value is, if you’re paid enough, then it’s okay to send yourself to a conference and meet new people. It’s okay, in my opinion, to pay for yourself to go to a conference. Definitely continue to meet people in our field, and that’s the easiest way, I think, to stay fresh is just going to conferences.
And of course there’s the other things. You can read professional magazines; Interactions is great. There’s lots of great blogs out there, and one thing that I have to mention, because I know that Kevin Keith will eventually listen to this, I found Twitter to be a really great place in the loop with a lot of things Interaction designs.
There’s a lot, a lot, a lot of Interaction designers on Twitter. I am sure that a lot of people in the program at IU are Twitter. Feel free to follow me; I’ll follow you back. It’s a really easy, low touch way to hear about the field, what people are doing so on, yeah, that’s a great way I think to meet people and to stay in touch with people you already know.
Drew: Great. Yeah. A lot of us are twitterer’s so this would really speak to the audience, especially this class. There are a lot of twitterer’s in this class.
Josh: My name is @jevnin!
Drew: We’ll make sure to post that at the top of the transcription page when we put this on the blog. Do you have time for just one quick follow-up?
Josh: Sure.
Drew: You mentioned sketches being important as a quick way to kind of “wow” your clients even though they’re maybe just low fidelity quick sketches. Could you speak briefly about fidelity and sketches because this is something that got brought up quite a bit at this years conference. One poster in particular, Dane Petersen’s poster is being judged. John Kolko from Frog Design was looking at it and said: “You know if I would have put those sketches on there, I would have taken a ruler and really made them look very nice.” Dane said: “I wanted to show you the process.” He said: “That’s great, but when you’re putting it in front of a client, it really has to be high fidelity.” Maybe you could speak about that a little bit about what you think is client-ready and what’s not.
Josh: There is a lot we could talk about with this. A lot of it is very contextual so for me with my clients it’s really important that I set the expectation up front that the way I work and the way my company works is in a much lower fidelity mode probably than the Frog Designs out in the world or the Adaptive Path maybe or the Cooper’s potentially.
Big design firms – and I think I see this way of thinking changing – I hope I do. Big design firms are based on this model that you deliver a big design and hand it over to be built or maybe your team builds it. But there are two separate phases; there is a design phase and a creation phase or a development phase or an architecture building phase. For me, it’s important when I work with my clients that they are comfortable with me delivering concepts quickly and perhaps even brashly. Just showing them to them. I don’t make a big deal out of polish typically. There is a time and a place for it of course. When you’re showing someone your process I think there is validity to showing a sketch.
Now I don’t know the situation you’ve described, and maybe John Kolko had a point. But I think there is a time and a place for a sketch, and certainly everything I show a client isn’t all drawn out and perfectly rendered, and of high fidelity. Now, some clients that I work with, they do need high fidelity. So, it’s important for a big e-commerce website that’s selling something to a lot of people, before a team builds something, they want to be able to see what they’re building. But the process is still there. It’s important to start out with a sketch, and move into deeper levels of fidelity, and really rarely do I ever dig into Photoshop, and start drawing prototypes from scratch like that. It’s pretty rare that I need to do that. Of course, there’s a time and a place for everything, so I prefer to see things actually built, and other people want to get sign off on a rendered version of whatever’s going to be built before it’s actually built. So, unfortunately it’ll be different in everybody’s job, and different companies will expect different things, and different clients will expect different things, but there’s a time and a place for a simple sketch, and there’s a time and a place for high fidelity renderings, and it’s really up to us to judge what those lines…the right timing is for each of those.
Drew: That’s great. Well, I don’t have any more follow up questions, and I don’t think anyone is on the line. Is there anything else that you wanted to add, to say to the HCI audience?
Josh: Yeah, I guess I can take this opportunity to say thanks. Thanks to you, Drew; I know you put in a bunch of time, in putting this all together, so thank you very much. And I guess I can take this opportunity, a little bit, to thank everyone who taught me at IU, and I really had a great experience when I was in Bloomington. So, I really encourage everyone, all the students, to really take advantage of this time. You’ve got a lot to learn, and I know sometimes it’s going to be challenging, really take advantage of it and soak it in. And even the little things matter, going to lunch with people. You’ll take lessons away from that that you’ll use for the rest of your career. In every class, there’s going to be something that you’ll remember when you’re out in the workforce, and take advantage. And please, everyone, feel free to contact me. I’m happy to talk with current students, and former students, and people who are interested in becoming students. I think that we have such a great program at IU, an HCID program is really, it’s already making a difference, and every year I thought that when I was in school, it was really powerful. Thank you again!
About Josh
Josh Evnin (@jevnin) graduated from Indiana University’s HCI/d program in 2005 and started working for renowned software consulting firm ThoughtWorks shortly after. He is a frequent blogger (http://josh.ev9.org/weblog/) and contributor to IXDA. Josh currently resides in Chicago, IL.
Bobak Kechavarzi 3:11 pm on November 23, 2009 Permalink |
Great writeup, as someone in the biological field, you also have to consider the format and presentation of your information. Most researchers prefer a more “utilitarian” approach. Some tasteful CSS styling and formatting, but no flash loading screens, menus, etc.
Just 2 cents from someone that probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Dane 3:42 pm on November 23, 2009 Permalink |
@bobak You’re definitely right!
No matter the portfolio you may be putting together (interaction design, bioinformatics, etc.) you want to make sure the content of your work does the talking. It’s very easy to get hung up on the design of one’s portfolio, starting in the upper lefthand corner and working to the lower right, while forgetting to consider the actual writing and imagery that goes along with it.
People are visiting your portfolio to see the work you do, and it’s important to be respectful of your target audience. Especially if you’re gunning for a design job, you might decide to make a rock-em-sock-em experience with your portfolio. If you have the time, skill and creativity to pull that off, then by all means give it a shot. However, don’t privilege the design of your portfolio over the clear communication of your work!
Binaebi 5:18 pm on November 25, 2009 Permalink |
Additionally, for the HCId students, you have to be careful of a super slick portfolio website. It might give the wrong impression that all you do is web design, when in actuality, you do so much more.
Now, if you’re interested in web design, then that works for you. But if you want to do usability, or research, etc, then like Bobak and Dane said, make sure you’re catering your portfolio style and content to your audience.
In terms of personal brand… People have asked me why I didn’t use my name as my domain. The fact of the matter is that I like to change the layout and style of my website frequently, and I felt that if I use my name, I need to have a consistent look that represents me, versus representing me professionally. Does that make sense? There is my personal identity, and then there is my professional identity. They correlate and influence one another, but they aren’t the same. By having a personal brand, I can experiment with my professional identity.