Category: mentoring

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The Occasional Mentor: How to Ask a Speaker a Question — Zoom Edition

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR is a semi-regular column based on questions I’ve answered on line in forums, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to add your experience or challenge me in the comments, if you have had a different experience.

Asking a Question on Zoom

A great way to engage with a conference presentation is to ask a question. But how do you get a question answered on a Zoom webinar?

A strategy I like for getting noticed was introduced to me by Rachel Patterson at a recent Technology Transfer Days mentoring session on applying for a Small Business Innovation Research grant (SBIR). For SBIRs, Rachel says that if you want to get noticed by the selection team, you should always submit a question ahead of time, ask again in during the live q&a call, then follow up after the call to thank the speaker and ask a related question or continue the conversation. You can use this strategy for videoconferences on any topic.

Before the Event

Often organizers will forward the list of questions from a prospective audience to the speakers ahead of the session so they can address the topic in their talk. If the event you plan to attend offers a way to submit questions ahead of time, do that and make sure to include your name, contact information and a few words about your company or project/program, so they understand your needs. Otherwise think about what you want to learn from the speaker and make a list of questions you might want to ask during the talk.

Personalize Your Presence

When the event is virtual, such as a Zoom call or similar, edit your name so it has your full name. It may or may not be visible to the whole audience but the hosts and speakers (usually co-hosts on Zoom) will see it. You can also add your company name, location or a brief phrase emoji, but keep in mind only a small part of it will be visible on the gallery view.

If the hosts are using the Zoom Q&A feature to collect questions, post your question and let your custom name speak for itself. The session host may be the only people who can see the question, but usually anyone can, so treat it as if public. (Be careful about posting personal information in a “public“ forum).

Submit Your Question

Ideally, the talk hosts will invite people to ask the question or summarize the context of a previously submitted question at some point during the call. Zoom has a feature called “Questions and Answers” that hosts can activate to take questions as they come up during the call. They may alternatively ask attendees to post questions to the chat feed. Be sure to submit questions in the way the host requires or your question could be lost in a long scrolling chat feed.

If you submitted a question prior to the talk, you should also post your question to chat or Questions and Answers, just in case your question is addressed during the talk without inviting you to have the floor or without giving you credit. If they do give you credit, you may get an additional chance to ask that question or a related one during the Q&A session.

When They Call on You

If you are lucky enough to get called on to speak your question online, introduce yourself, add 5-10 words about your organization or work and then ask your question. Make sure your question aligns with something the speaker said in his presentation. I learned this technique at in person entrepreneur events from Andrea Madho, founder of Lab141, an online, small-batch garment platform, who was in my cohort at the Startup Leadership Program. You are not only giving the speaker background on who you are and what your context is, but giving a chance for audience members to know you and perhaps reach out to connect.

You may also be able to post a chat message to just the presenters, if the host allows that setting. There will be settings that allow audience members to see and interact in the chat with all presenters, just the host, presenters plus audience or you may be able to chat directly with any individual person (but I try to avoid that if I don’t know the person, since it can be distracting and possibly creepy).

Read the Room

Notice the reaction to others who are asking questions about their own companies or who seem to be overtly selling. Are salesy comments and chat posts tolerated and built on or ignored? Are the speaker and organizers friendly to questions that are narrowly concerned with a specific company’s problems or are they brushing them off? What topics are getting brushed off?

After the Talk is Over

In an in person, F2F setting you usually have the possibility to ask a question after the session if the speaker sticks around or if there is a social hour. Online venues don’t usually stay open for long afterward so the opportunity to chat informally is limited if it isn’t explicitly given time. If they do extend the session, use the time to add to the conversation, show your interest and ask more questions.

If you try the above and still don’t feel like you were heard or acknowledged you can contact the event organizer to find out the best way to get in touch with a speaker after the event. Often, the speaker will provide contact details. Capture those details and follow up. And don’t feel weird about it. They expect it. That’s why they put their contact details on the first and last slide.

When you do follow up, whether it’s direct contact, LinkedIn request, or intro from the organizer or another party, be sure to mention something specific about the talk. If you got to ask a question, remind them of it. I don’t have a good rule for how long to wait. I usually give a day or two for the inbox to clear, but you can join (or start) a twitter conversation immediately.

These strategies are helpful for getting you noticed and also helps others on the call follow your lead and engage with you, making an otherwise cold and impersonal event feel more social.

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The Occasional Mentor: Kill Your Darlings

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR is a semi-regular column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience.

Kill Your Darlings

I am working on a project with a friend who is acting as a client for a capstone project with an agile development class. She complained to me that the students were unable to create a simple one-sheet deliverable featuring a proposed design. The problem: WordPress hasn’t been set up yet. It didn’t occur to them that they could mock it up in a drawing program or simply sketch it by hand.

When I do in-class studios, I will often make the design students work entirely on paper and whiteboard, no computers allowed, to ideate and create a paper prototype. It can be done in two hours end to end. Is the final deliverable App Store ready? Of course not. But it is enough to move quite a bit toward a testable idea.

Students today, and especially developers, don’t understand the power of a piece of paper that you can throw away. When you start coding (or drafting in WordPress) too soon, you get too married to the code, making it hard later on to incorporate new learnings from your user research. It’s better practice to stay as low fi as possible for as long as possible. That’s at least one day of a five day sprint. Sometimes two (testing the paper artifacts with users). Then “Kill your darlings” before they become too dear.

Note: The phrase “Kill your darlings” (or “murder your babies”) is often attributed to William Faulkner and is a feature of many descriptions of the Beat poets: William Borroughs, Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac et al. In fact, the concept “murder your babies” can be traced to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, a British writer and literary critic in a 1916 lecture series at Cambridge. (Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur (2000) [1916]. “XII. On Style”. On the Art of Writing: Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, 1913–1914 (Online ed.). Bartleby.com.)

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The Occasional Mentor: On Making Decisions and Getting a Job During a Pandemic

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR:
A semi-regular column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in November.

Why do some people randomly do things to upset and confuse you right before you have to make a significant decision?

November 15, 2020

Whether they are deliberately doing it or not, there is some basic psychology and behavioral economics traps that can get in the way of making a decision that is in your best interest. Not having the facts, irrelevant facts or even having too many facts or too many choices can affect your ability to make a reasonable decision.

A famous psychology experiment explores a concept known as the “paradox of choice.” Supermarket customers were offered to taste test a variety of jellies at a supermarket. Those who were presented with six choices were more likely to buy than those presented with 24. Why? Providing too many choices can obscure the value of each individual part and make it difficult to compare one choice to another. Airlines use this when they give you a base cost and nickel and dime you for everything else. Auto salesman have been doing this for decades. Sometimes an abundance of choices causes you to accept (and pay for) too many variables. Other times, it leaves you putting off the decision altogether.

There could also be what you call random things that have little to nothing to do with your decision or that are things you may have little control over. Think about the decision you are trying to make and who it affects, and how it affects them and you. Try to eliminate anything that comes from outside that circle, especially if you know reasonably that you have no control over these things.

Here is a good mind-mapping method that will help bring you closer to a decision:

Write everything down, in concentric circles from the most affected to the least. Begin make connections and start crossing things off as a factor if they don’t connect. Do the same with people who are part of or not part of the decision, especially if they are coming up as possible factors. It’s good to do this in concentric circles so that the most affected people (or things) are in the center and the next level is in a circle outside of the center and the next one another ring further. Draw connection lines and note where those connections are weak or nonexistent. Cross off anyone or anything who is way on the outside or part of a weak or broken connection. Take what remains and draw a new set of circles and examine it. Things should start to come clearer.

Will COVID-19 make entry-level web design jobs harder to get?

November 15, 2020

It’s going to take a lot of effort and network building to land an entry level job in these COVID times. My advice is to try to attend online design meetups and join design slacks (google the phrase, there are many) that make time for interaction, not just webinars that have speakers or panels with no interaction. With the entire world online and hosting events, you don’t need to stick to your local area right now. At the online events and discussions, take note of people who are working in areas you enjoy or want to develop more and reach out to them for a private conversation. Be sure to follow up!

Get creative. Look for start up organizations and incubators at local universities. Look for nonprofits that need to get their holiday funding message out. If you are a graduate of a university or Bootcamp, connect with the placement or alumni office. Alumni are often willing to go out of their way to help someone whose shoes they used to wear.

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The Occasional Mentor: On Minimal and Natural UI, Mid-Career Change and Hailing Taxis in NYC

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR:
A monthly(ish) column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in May. This one has a fun one at the end.

Why are more and more companies moving towards making their UI white?

Answered May 6, 2019

I trace the emergence of white background, minimalist design to the popularity of flat design and the explosion of sites offering crowd-generated content or media from disparate sources, like Medium and iTunes.

Flat design became popular for two reasons. The first, related to mobile frameworks like Material Design, is that people were becoming used to how buttons and links work and the raised, skeuomorphic styles were beginning to look old. Button colors that contrast starkly with the (usually) white background and colors with significant meaning (think red outlines for field errors) were enough to generate meaning. The second reason is the rise of mobile, which required sites to load faster in order to use less data. It’s become less of an issue as free WiFi becomes more and more available. This, along with a need for our mobile launch buttons to stand out, is why we are starting to see things like gradients and shadows making a return.

Minimalist design arose for utilitarian reasons. Having a busy, colorful layout too often competes with the images used by third party sources, so a clean, white (or black) layout makes sense on sites that aggregate a lot of content. There is also a recognition that certain background styles or fonts become dated very quickly. If you avoid using the style du jour, your products are less likely to seem old sooner.

How can I make the UX/UI design of a product feel more natural?

Answered May 1

There were a lot of good answers to this question. I thought I’d add a couple resources that might be useful in understanding the fundamentals of natural, usable design.

First is Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, which discusses affordances like door handles and light switches and how people understand that a thing is something one can interact with.

Then read Indi Young’s Mental Models and Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. These will get you good information about how to approach design in a way that is natural to the user.

I also like Donna Lichaw’s The User’s Journey, which pulls back to the whole experience of how a user finds and solves a problem and what their emotions and struggles are along the way. It goes well with the Empathy Map that some people described in previous answers.

Is it too late for me to take an UX design boot camp and get hired into an UX job? I have no design experience. I am 32 years old?

Anwered May 1

In an earlier post, I discussed the kinds of soft skills that are essential for an older, but new UX designer to highlight in a resume and portfolio and ways to bring up one’s design skills, in addition to boot camps, which I should say I have taught and recommend as a way to get the basics of UX along with some collaborative experience.

The list of tools that I mentioned should be updated, as I predicted. We see shiny, new tools every year, but a few seem to get mention in job posting more than others. We did use Sketch and InVision in our course. There are other tools you might consider working with including Figma, Adobe XD (which is now free), UXPin, Balsamiq, Framer, Proto.io and collaborative design tools like Mural, Miro (formerly Real Time Board), etc. you can find a lot of these if you search “Best UX Tools”.

Don’t try to learn them all and don’t worry about having an expert level at any of these, as you will likely be introduced to new ones on the job. If you have a positive attitude toward learning new tools, it helps a lot. Pick a few to create some mock designs, and then see if you can find a pro bono project to work on. You can also do a mock project for your current company, which would be ideal since you probably know a lot about your customers/users and would stand out in your portfolio. (Ask your boss first).

I know a lot of people who transitioned to UX at a later age from other careers, including similar roles in graphic design and communications, and as distant as restaurant management. Some were over 50 when they made the transition. 32 is still very young, so you won’t have to struggle against age-related bias nearly as much.

Do I have to whistle really loud to hail a taxi in NYC?

Answered Apr 21

I love this question. Lol, no. Though it does call attention. I know a few doormen who have a pretty strong whistle.

If you can’t whistle, what you should do is cautiously step out a little off the curb, especially if you are on a block with parked cars, so the driver can see you. Corners are also good places to wait since you can direct a taxi heading the opposite way or on a perpendicular street to turn your way.

If you are too shy or too short to be seen, NYC Taxis also respond to Curb | The Taxi App.


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The Occasional Mentor: On Constraints in Service Design and Hiring Freelancers

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR:
A monthly column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in January.

What Projects Did You Create in a Hackathon? How Hard Was It to Create It in a Limited Time?

Answered 1/5/2018

Working within constraints is an important skill of any good product designer. At a hackathon, your constraints include time, of course, as well as available data, resources and the knowledge and skill of your team members. I try to join diverse groups that include at least one person who understands the underlying subject matter and available data, one strong open source developer and one designer/researcher type (usually that’s me). If you use and understand open source data and tools you likely have access to more resources than other teams, so unless the hackathon is restricted to proprietary tools and data, it gives you an edge.

Hackathon projects I’ve done (I try to do at least one per year):

The Nature Conservancy Stormwater Challenge: I hosted a service design hackathon in October 2018 with the goal to encourage private property owners to implement Stormwater mitigation technology.

Empathy Jam: My team created a prototype job training platform at the 2017 Empathy Jam.

United Nations Unite For Humanity: I co-chaired a weekend hackathon in 2016 with the goal to create anti terrorist projects. The winning project employed machine learning to disrupt terrorist networks. Other submitted projects included a stateless e911 network and a SMS based marketplace for emergency supplies.

NYPL Open Audio Hackathon: In 2016, my team created a tool to add multimedia content to audio podcasts.

NYPL Open Book Hack: I went twice. The first year, my team created a PDF to reflowable ePub converter for Supreme Court opinions. The next year, my team created a poetry recommendation tool. Based on poems and genres a user likes, it created a booklet with twenty poems.

Upcoming Hackathon: Escape from New York

I will be mentoring at MD5’s ‪Escape from New York Mass Evacuation hackathon in NYC the weekend of February 22-24. This Defense Department Hackathon features $45k in awards. Let me know if you’d like to bring a team or participate as a mentor. There are a few student and professional tickets left but you have to  have a promotional code to unlock them. Visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/escape-from-new-york-a-massive-evacuation-hackathon-tickets-51211081724‬

Where do I find and hire freelance UI/UX designers?

Answered 1/5/2019

TL;DR: Good UX designers pass on any job description that says “UI/UX”. Don’t use it. Instead use a title that describes what the person is actually going to do.

For hiring designers, I’ve had good luck with TopTal, but I prefer to go on Slack groups and get out to meetups to really get to know people I want to work with. I don’t like Dribble or Behance for UX people. It’s typically a lot of eye-candy that shows very little of the designer’s process. If there is a designer I like who has a portfolio there, I’ll look, but I wouldn’t start there from scratch.

A good UX designer will show their process: the methods they use, the choices they made, even the designs they discarded. A good portfolio give you a sense of the problem space and challenges and will have a clear description of the person’s role. You can’t tell any of this from a glossy, finished product photo.

I strongly suggest that you not use the term “UX/UI” in the job description. As others have stated, it is too broad to really be meaningful. Most User Experience people will see that and read “visual design” which may or may not include everything from graphic design, animation, typography and stylesheets. Some good candidates may assume you want a front-end developer, and give the role a pass, because developers typically don’t do UX.

It’s better to use a title that describes what the person is actually going to do.

UI people typically are front-end designers and often are expected to know how to code. While UI fits into the UX umbrella, most UX Designers will be focused on user journeys, personas, user advocacy and may or may not do research. UI people use research, but don’t necessarily produce it themselves and may be a step or two removed from the user research process.

There is a rather hot debate going on as to whether UX Designers should know how to code. Most designers and researchers that identify as “UX” people do not code. I’m from the camp that says it helps, but if they are mostly coding (unless it’s to put together prototypes for testing and they don’t have devs to do that for them), they’re probably not a UX “designer”.

Bottom line: You need users to do UX design. You could make a case for researching logs and customer support database, but since it’s after release, that’s really user acceptance testing, not UX. The user experience design process starts with user testing way before you release a product and occurs along with development, launch and beyond. And if you aren’t applying user research and integrating users into your design processes or at least talking to them, its just not UX .

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The Occasional Mentor: Happy New Year! Resolutions and Bad UX

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR:
A monthly column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below is a question I answered in December (slow month) and an idea for the new year.

Happy New Year!

Wait. Bad UX? I guess we can start the year with something a little more aspirational first and then get on with my answer from December.

On the DesignX NYC Slack, as on many of my social media spaces, everyone is talking about what they plan to change, do, realize for the New Year. It’s a good exercise and I thought I’d share my New Year’s resolutions here.

What I really want to do is get back on top of my writing a bit (lot) more. I do this Occasional Mentor column, but realized that I had a couple months of content backlog that I didn’t publish yet. I’d like to get more articles out on other things I’m doing, especially insights from our Behavioral Economics NYC guests. I’ll be experimenting with a few other formats as well.

I’m all caught up on republishing Brett’s Forbes articles to the Decision Fish blog. Brett posts at least once a month on financial wellness, philosophy, behavioral economics and of course decision making. I’m taking the opportunity this year to redesign that space to be more useful, with timely posts, curated content and links to our Behavioral Economics NYC videos. If I find time, no…When I find it, I’ll put in some work on a much-needed revamp of this site.

I also plan to start having more meaningful F2F conversations. Some of the Slacks I’m on have used the @donut plug-in for peer mentoring/networking. It can be hit and miss, but when I do meet interesting people it’s a win. I’ve already had five meetings this month with people I met at meetups and via @donut, including one client pitch!

In the spirit of Give/Get, I encourage you to think about how you can learn from your networks and what you have to offer, because I’m sure you have a lot to share in the coming year.

How you can help? – Follows always help. Follow my Medium blog. You can also find our pre-Forbes content at the Decision Fish blog and follow Decision Fish on Facebook and Twitter. Join the Behavioral Economics NYC meetup. We have seats available for Donna Chugh’s Feb 28 webinar on The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias? I’m also working on a piece on behavioral interventions, featuring our Stormwater Challenge at The Nature Conservancy in October and psychologist John Pickering’s January talk on saving the Great Barrier Reef.

Also, don’t wait for @donut to match us. Reach out if you want to grab coffee or lunch some time.

Areas where I can help? – I can help walk anyone through the wonderful world of startups and can offer advice on pitch decks, founder programs and bootstrapping. I recently went through the Startup Leadership Program and was in a couple of incubator programs including NYU StartEd. We even placed well in MetLife Foundation’s Inclusion Plus. AMA.

And now, from Quora…

What are some examples of poor UX designs in good websites/apps

Answered Dec 5

I’ll clarify a previous answer. There certainly is such a thing as bad user experience and it is possible for UX Design to be implemented poorly. That said, Bad UX Design or Dark UX or using UX methods or knowledge of human behavior to trick users into actions that are against their interest does exist; however, it wouldn’t properly be called UX Design, since the fundamentals of UX Design begin with the users’ interests.

Poorly implemented UX is really anything that’s is irritating or gets in the way of the user’s goal: badly implemented user flow, difficult onboarding, “corporate underwear” (where content or structure is delivered from the corporate POV rather than the user), or anything that generally frustrates the user.

My favorite example lately of poorly implemented UX is the old Search Bar at Jet.com. They have since fixed it, but for a very long time it was an extremely frustrating experience. On the home page, the search bar is displayed prominently at the top of the screen. It used to be that when you entered a search on the home page, a new search page would open with a new search bar, forcing you to enter the search again. This was true no matter which device I used. I can’t figure out why delivering results from the home page search box should be so difficult that the user should have to re-enter a search. I was really happy when they finally fixed it, which incidentally was around the time they started delivering some items in more environmentally friendly packaging. (I could go on about their packaging issues).

The rest of the online UX at Jet.com is relatively good. I like the filtering and ratings information and the information about product safety. The cart functions pretty seamlessly and allows you to add or change items from a popout window. They could do a better job identifying second day only versus standard delivery, since there is an added cost. And their “buy more to reduce the price of everything” plays into some cognitive biases. You could call it a dark pattern, but it is not a new or unrecognizable one. Walmart has been using similar price drops for years.

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The Occasional Mentor: On UX Certificates vs Conferences

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR
A monthly-ish column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Hope you like it, but feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in May.

Is it helpful to get a UX certificate or go to a UX conference as a starting point for a college undergraduate who wants to work on UX later but has no experience yet?

May 26, 2018

I am going on be the contrarian and say absolutely go to a conference or a meetup that is aligned with your UX interest. A certificate program will probably get you some basic skills, but so would reading books and working on pro bono projects on your own. (See one of my previous answers on certificates). For someone just starting out, it’s the interaction with other attendees as much as the talks and workshops that help build your knowledge of what and who you need to know to get a job in the field. And most conferences offer student discounts or lower-cost workshops so you don’t necessarily have to pay full price to get a benefit. Depending on where you live, Meetups can be plentiful and free or cheap. Online interest groups like Designers Guild on Facebook or UX Mastery on Slack are also good ways to find a community. UX Mastery even has a mentoring program.

Keep in mind that the most valuable UX design skills are soft skills like communication, presentation and ability to make insights. Design tools are always evolving so what you learn at a boot camp may not be marketable in a few years.

Some positive things about taking a certificate course. You meet your competition and potential future coworkers. A formal program may be confidence-building if you fear you don’t have basic understanding of what UX designers do and how they do it and aren’t comfortable picking up these skills on your own. But do some research. Not all certificates or boot camps have a good reputation. Meetups and other UX events are good places to ask about programs in your area.

Even better if your university offers design courses that you can take as part of your degree. Also, look for intro level cognitive psychology and ethnography courses (typically anthropology classes that cover interviewing skills). If your school has business or entrepreneur programs, ask if they offer any design or customer discovery workshops. Sometimes these programs are open to students schoolwide.

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The Occasional Mentor – May 2018

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR
I am rebranding my monthly column, The Occasional Mentor, based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Hope you like it, but feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in May.

May 2018

On Startup Founders taking on a part time gig to make ends meet…

If you model your job search as a consultancy rather than man for hire, you can drop the resume and just use a portfolio. Limit the work in your portfolio to only the kind of projects that will get you the role you are seeking. If they do ask for a resume, I will usually include my startup in my consulting description as one of many ongoing projects.

Be realistic about how much time you are able to devote to a part time gig. Consulting clients are usually aware that you have other clients. As long as they know when they can count on you to be available, they will be happy.

On why companies won’t give interview feedback when you don’t get the job…

The same reason that during employment checks, companies will only confirm or deny you ever worked for them, and nothing more. They don’t want to put themselves in a potentially prosecutable situation.

Don’t be surprised if they don’t respond at all. It can sometimes take a while to complete a round of interviews. You may not actually receive a rejection notice. But don’t let too much time pass without hearing a word. At the end of the interview you’ve probably asked what the next steps are. Be sure to at least send a very brief thank you the evening after the interview or by the next morning. Include any additional information you want to highlight and reiterate your understanding of when you will hear from them. Follow up again within a day or so of the “next steps” date, if you haven’t already heard an answer.

If you do get rejected, ask if they would be available to discuss how you could improve your position for future openings. And if they say no, thank them for their time and move on.

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On Pricing Tables and Mysteriously Familiar Background Graphics

I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity. I took a break in from posting in January. Following are selected questions I answered in February.

Should website homepages have a pricing table?

February 23, 2018

If your users come to your website specifically to see pricing, or if pricing is your main competitive differentiator and the value of your offering is well understood, then by all means, feel free to place a pricing table on the home page. A lot of web hosting sites will place their prices on the home page because they market themselves as a value option for what is essentially a commodity. However different users may have a different understanding of what a good value is for the product or service you offer.

Seeing prices immediately may turn some people off. It could seem tacky, or if the value of the offering is not clear, it could seem expensive, irrelevant or even confusing. You would need to test with users to know for sure.

What I tend to see most often for services and software websites is a “pricing” page in the main navigation, with the home page reserved for display or walkthrough of the product features. If the user is convinced the product does what they need, then they will look for prices. The pricing page would have the matrix showing various packages, but sometimes it will only have a link to contact the sales team, especially if you offer custom services or have a pricing plan that isn’t easily displayed on a grid. Again different users will respond differently depending on the kind of product and their needs and budget.

On the other hand, if the product is retail and you run regular sales, seeing these prices or a link to a sales circular would be expected. Having the sales prices on the home page could be a way to grab sales for the featured item and draw in the user for more purchases (with a link to similar or “customers also bought” items).

A User Test would be a way to figure out what your site visitors respond to.

Who creates the apparently similar background images for slack.com, gusto.com and lattice.com?

February 17, 2018

I think must be very easy to find these images. I recently hired a designer to produce a flyer and they used a blue background graphic that seemed off brand, but very familiar. So I opened Slack to ask my partner to check it out and there was the background in orange in the Slack interface. I’m not sure where the designer got the image, but needless to say, we didn’t accept the design.

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Where Should I Post My UI/UX Portfolio? and Is Wikipedia Failing?

I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity. Following are selected questions I answered in December.

What are the best websites to put my UI/UX portfolio, both personally and professionally?

Answered December 31, 2017

As an archives focused UX designer I always recommend creating a master portfolio that you have complete control over, whether on your own WordPress site or on your local drives. (Ideally both with backups in the cloud). Having control over the data means that you will always be able to access, edit and customize it regardless of whether the portfolio site of the day is still in business. A platform like WordPress is great because it allows you to import and export the CMS database. You should back it up frequently.

Your portfolio should be customizable content so you can craft a deck specifically for the job or contract you are applying for. It should contain not just your best work, but the work you most want to do and is most relevant for the job being offered. You can create separate portfolios for different kinds of work and direct people to those specific portfolio files. You should also have a PDF or Keynote/PPT version available in case a recruiter wants it emailed and also because it is easy to carry into a meeting and have available offline when internet access is slow or not available. If someone asks for work samples, you can either email the presentation deck or send a link to the relevant samples when highlighting your work history for a recruiter or prospective client, depending on their requirements.

If you use a portfolio site like Behance or Dribbble, only include a few top notch pieces and be sure to link it to your more detailed CV website. Be sure to tag the type of work you do on each sample you upload to these sites, and include a brief explanation of the problem you solved and how you came up with a solution. The story of the design solution is very important for UX work, and I don’t see it done quite enough. Can you explain why you made choices you did? Were there in-between stages that reflect some of the decisions or pivot points in the design? Was it an individual assignment or a team effort? How does your work fit in with the overall team effort? Are you effectively claiming the entire design as your own if you only show end results? How will you explain your role in an interview if the end product is a team effort? Is the visual enough? Usually, it isn’t.

My complete online CV is a WordPress website that lists blog posts (that I republish to a Medium account), speaking engagements (with presentation slides linked at Slideshare), a general resume and a bibliography of published work and exhibitions. My portfolio is just a part of that overall CV website. It is unlikely that a recruiter would make time to peruse it all, but it’s all there should someone want to dive a little deeper into what kind of person I am, what my interests are and what I like to write about.

In fact the website has become a bit of a “catalog raisonné” and to be honest it is due for an overhaul. I have mixed feelings about cutting back and will probably just remove thumbnail shots from some of the earlier work (some of the older visuals look quite naive compared to more recent standards). I’d love to hear how others manage the assessments of older work samples, particularly when it’s the type of project or industry work you want to keep doing.

What crisis is Wikipedia going through as everytime I open it they ask for donation?

Answered December 8, 2017

It’s not a crisis. It’s charity season. As people enter the holiday season, they open their wallets and give to their favorite charities. If you open your mail on any day from mid October through December (at least in the US, probably elsewhere), you will see similar, increasingly desparate-sounding appeals from other charities hoping to get a bit of your annual tax deduction locked in for the year.

That said if you like Wikipedia, use it and find value in it, whether as a source of information, community or for their really cool data tools go ahead and give. It’s a great service.

I use Wikipedia so much I started giving a small amount each month. Is the risk of them going offline as imminent as all that?

Answered December 7, 2017

When you make a donation on the Wikipedia website, you are giving to the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs several projects in addition to Wikipedia, including Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and others. As a Foundation, Wikimedia offers grants to its worldwide chapters, project teams and individuals to cover costs such as travel, Editathons and other events, equipment, research, etc. According to their grants page, they give about $9 million US dollars per year in support to these efforts.

More info and links to awarded grants here:

Grants:Start – Meta