It’s been a long and interesting year for me. So many changes in both life and career. It’s been a year of choosing to live deliberately, not settling. Too often, I found myself settling, and distanced from my sense of self. This year has had it’s challenges but is equally balanced by life’s little successes.

A new home: that one falls squarely on Heidi’s great intuition. And great fortune of timing that we were able to find a home as unique as our family. While there is work to be done, it’s an amazing place to call home. I would have never guessed at the impact of living someplace designed with intent could have. It’s funny – I studied architecture, I sell the concept of design daily, but until I’d lived in a home designed with thoughtful intent, I would have never understood it. http://hoertdoerferarchitects.com/work/isle-of-palms-residence

Starting over: SPARC had been an amazing journey. The closest I can relate could be college – learning and experiencing so much at such a fast pace. There are many things I’m proud to have accomplished, growing a team and building a brand around a startup software company. But there was also the loss of self, getting a little complacent, and not having the projects to truly engage and grow. It was a hard decision to leave so many good friends, but a necessary one. Leaving a company changes many relationships, but strengthens others. I’m thankful for my friends & family who’ve seen me through this decision.

Finding great work: Taking Kaloupek Design from a side projects to full time consulting happened more quickly than I could have expected. In leaving Sparc, my mantra had been to do good projects with good people. A simple  goal was to find several great clients with good design challenges to solve.  Power Analytics and InKind are two new clients that have allowed me to do great design work again, and I’m thankful for it.

And being with family. With all the chaos in the world today, this is a time to be thankful &  enjoy my family.

Recapping a couple of things that stuck with me from the 1st day of the Giant UX Conference.  While there’s was a lot of content to cover, it’s always interesting what was sticky and catches my attention the next morning. The presentation by Patrick Neehman on “hunting unicorns: what makes an effective UX professional” got my head spinning a bit. Having had the experience of growing a design team from scratch, a lot of what Patrick resonated. Especially him identifying the lack of definition around our profession.

Specialist vs. Generalist

I’ve mentioned before that we hire generalists, not specialists. Patrick’s talk confirmed: UX is a broad set of skills requiring one to be a generalist. Doesn’t mean you can’t have an area you excel at such as visual design or user research, but any player on a UX/dev team is going to wear multiple hats. There were several talks about a “t-shaped skills” which was a new term for me.

Patrick’s slide blocking out the various hard skills a UX practitioner can have was complementary to something we created to explain the team as it grew. Scott Berkun’s opening talk disallowed the concept that job titles matter – stop creating title with guru and talking about innovation – creative ownerships is gained by doing & making, not by talking about it.  Still, without some definition it makes it a bitch to explain to my recruiting friends how to help scale our team.

Patrick also had a soft skills chart and explanations around what and why they were important to a well rounded hire.  I’d add to that the element of “client facing” – there is a necessary level of maturity needed to explain your ideas and listen when you may be the only person from your team there. And as a hiring manager, there is a lot of trust given when you let someone go in your place.

Our hiring secret sauce?

We may have told recruiting, get me another Matt or another Prashant, but we’ve never hired the same person on the team. Nor should we. Charts like these are great in thought drivers and help explain our professions skills to an outside audience. But little of it matters when you meet the person. Every candidate we’ve ever hired showed up with a skill that we didn’t know we needed. And it’s that hidden skill that brings something new to the team.

And just one more thought: Designing for Experience and Memory

This talk is unrelated but too good to let go. That the high and low points of a person’s experience with your product will average out to be their memory. So not only smoothing out the pain-points, but also focusing on the creative/unexpected high points a good UX designer can include. Those high points help create a better overall memory and create a happy return customer. Great talk by Curt Arledge and my thanks for getting my mind spinning on the subject. 

Rolling through the final day of Giant UX conference here in Charleston as I began to think about what I’d take away from it. It’s been a great experience meeting new people and filling my brain with what I hope to be some actionable new ideas. So much saturation, what would stick.

Maybe it’s because so many speakers oriented themselves to speak about not just design, but experience design. There were several folks, including Jared M. Spool & Samantha Starmer, who hit on this specifically. Jared used references about how the apple store is a vital part of the UX of an Apple product. Samantha got my brain running on integrating physical & digital. Talking about the “space between” when designing a holistic user experience. It’s not just designing for digital, the user-experience needs to be thought of as all encompassing.

It’s an interesting shift for me – with a background in architecture, I was studying to influence the way people interacted with the built environment. Now as a designer of digital & software, we’re circling back to an understanding where the experience isn’t constrained to the device.

Not sure yet how this will manifest itself, but it’s timely after we’ve spend the past 6 months looking at the office environment at Sparc and how that effects our employee’s experience. Seems a little more vague on how to integrate directly into a commercial project, but it reenforces my feelings about user testing what we create in real environments. The physical nature is ever more important, as these things we create digitally now increasingly push back into our physical experience.