Between Hacker News and Quora I may never do anything productive again. Still, much as I love Quora for its salon-esque feel, there are a few things about using it that really grate.
Category: ux
Good news, everyone! Starting in January, I’ll be joining Richard Wand‘s Experience Design team at EMC Consulting as a user experience architect.
It’s an incredibly exciting opportunity and I can’t wait to start. Big thanks to Johanna Kollman for introducing me to Rich and to Michelle Flynn for her exceptional professionalism in the conversation that led to this decision.
You know, it’s funny how things turn and turn again. I first got to know EMC as a technology journalist in Johannesburg. Thanks to the power of the internet, I even managed to dig up my last interview with Mike Ruettgers, shortly before he vacated the CEO’s seat for Joe Tucci in 2001.
Reading that piece with the perspective of ten years, it’s astonishing how the far tech has advanced. But the principle of disruption in the name of progress and excellence remains fresh and relevant. It’s alive and thriving at EMC Consulting and that is why I’m so happy to join the team.
Last week I went to #gumtreemeet to hear the guys discuss the extensive work they’ve done over the past year or so to in designing the new face of Gumtree. Late last year, I had the pleasure of discussing the UX approach to the redesign with Cenydd Bowles of Clearleft. It is really rather cool to see things like fuzzy location-based search make their way from concept to product.
Steve Bulling, Gumtree’s product manager, walked through the new site describing the rationale behind a few of the UCD decisions and site changes and some of the planned innovations. I think the thing I’m most looking forward to is the ability to search listings by proximity to Tube line. 
The event was organised by 1000heads, who on learning about my gluten-free-ness, expressed dismay that there were no g-f cupcakes for me to munch on.
It’s no biggie – over the last year or so I’ve just grown used to having few options in the cupcake field, unless I make my own. So I shrugged it off and enjoyed the sushi instead.
A few days later, I got this in the post along with a hand-written note from Nicola Jackson at 1000heads. It was your typical post-event thank you note with additional info which, if I’d have received by email, I’d have just dismissed without much thought. So, okay, a postal follow up allows them to include some non-Newtonian Gumtree Goo, which is always fun to play with, and hey, who can’t use (another) USB stick? 
The thing that really impressed me was a) the hand-written note and b) the postscript, which reads: “P.S. I’ve included a gluten-free treat to make up for the lack of cupcakes!”
Entirely unexpected, totally made my day. Thanks, Nicola and Gumtree!
I decided to retire from journalism on a fine Saturday in August last year.
It was at UXCampLondon, a BarCamp focused on user experience design, interaction design, information architecture and usability. I was surrounded by people talking with passion and enthusiasm about ways to improve our experience of the world and its many interfaces.
There were charts. Graphs. Diagrams. It was heaven.
I found the courage to run my own session (a discussion around designing more enjoyable and effective embedded feedback channels within websites or apps, if you must know). To my surprise, more than one person turned up. To my greater amazement, those who came enjoyed the discussion and left with something to chew over.
Afterwards, enjoying riverside drinks in the summertime haze, I said to Dees: “This time next year, I’ll be working in UX.”
I scaled back my editorial commitments, starting with TechCrunch Europe. Mike Butcher gave me a fantastic pep talk and an awesome sending off in October. In December, my Telegraph tech blog reached the end of its span, leaving me with time enough to focus on my copy-writing projects and the UX transition.
Six months later, I am pretty much there. (More on that in subsequent posts).
I have to say, it is very strange to consider myself as something other than a journalist. The job is so involving that it can be all too easy to self-identify with the role, and it’s interesting to observe the detachment (or lack thereof) in day-to-day situations.
Case in point: it has taken me for-freakin-ever to write this post, because it has been so psychologically hard to draw the line under my journalism career and set forth into the bright unknown.
Guess it’s drawn now.
So. This is me officially announcing that I am no longer working as a journalist. I have one last gig lined up — reporting back from SXSWi for ComputerWeekly. After that… well, as Semisonic says: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.“
