I thought it was a resume trend a couple years ago, but I’m still seeing it. It’s quite common with designers who like to add that extra little crispness to their resumes with graphics, colours and snazzy stuff. You go down the rows: 9/10 in HTML, 9/10 in CSS, 10/10 in excel and so on.
Read MoreThere’s a conversation I’ve had more than once. “Hey, order in a pizza for your crew and get them to crush out the last bit of work tonight.”
Let’s get a couple things straight:
Pizza is awesome.
Good will matters.
A little extra work is sometimes needed.
Once upon a time, I thought having a dozen people in a room deciding everything was normal. It starts innocent enough I’m sure. The boss is needed for some important decision, and he just sticks around. Then that one guy from sales had an idea people liked, so he’s in there too. Accounting? Well, at some point people are feeling left out.
Read MoreThe infamous Business Manger incident, or how we knew when we hit bottom.
Once upon a time when I was working accounts, we had a flurry of quality issues with our ad work. Websites with broken links, brochures with typos, and even a billboard with a big mistake. There was a common knowledge that things weren’t going well, but there wasn’t a sense of accountability.
Read MoreHave you ever shopped for a dress shirt? You know, the shirts with a hundred pins, cardboard forms and a 15 minute journey to try it on?
My friend and I needed matching shirts as groomsman (super cute) and not being experts in sizing, we must have tore through a dozen packages before finding the right look and fit.
Read MoreI tried to find stats about how much of our lives we spend waiting (checkout lines, on hold, etc.) but I couldn’t find one, so I’m making one up. An average North American will spend over 8,000 hours waiting in their lifetime! That’s almost an entire year!
Read More‘Customer Transacts’
That’s where the sticky notes ended on a long wall with an arrayed rainbow of squares. Each had a key feature of our website from the landing pages to the checkout. Beneath the line were all the suggestions for improvements…
Read MoreYou learn best from mistakes, but it’s far more fun when it’s someone else’s mistakes.
One of my earliest lessons in user design occurred while I was still in sales. We bid on a large government project for a registration software. We lost out on a big government deal for a registration software. We pretty much had the thing already built, a great price, expertise, BUT NONE OF THAT MATTERS. I was pretty bitter.
Read MoreI’m a nut for cooking shows. I’m not talking about drama-ridden, spoon-throwing reality shows, but the ones with absolute masters of culinary experience. Maybe it’s because I can draw so many parallels between great cooking and great writing.
I recently binged on Chef’s Table on Netflix (highly recommended) and revelled in the story behind each master. As I did, specific things stood out as metaphors for exceptional writing.
Read More“I don’t like companies having my data.” Says someone between status updates. “I feel violated that they know everything about me!”
This hypothetical individual isn't alone. About 50% of people are worried about the amount of personal information about them online.
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