Recently I held a Wine and Interviews event at my house. I invited second year Interaction Design masters students over to talk about interviewing and share some wine. We each told stories about our interviewing experiences and learned quite a lot from each other. Following are some basic tips we talked about through our stories and experiences. These tips are not meant to be exhaustive, comprehensive, or applicable to every interview experience; rather they are meant to share the knowledge and experiences between fellow students. You likely already know many of these, but it’s good to be reminded and keep them in mind.

Spread the love, if you have tips to share leave them in the comments.

Projects, Stories, and Examples

Have a good story about failure.

Have a project to talk about in detail.

Prepare your capstone elevator pitch.

It’s ok to talk about the thermostat project.

Have an elevator pitch for your capstone.

Have an example of some design documentation.

You might be asked to show a task flow or wireframe flow, be prepared.

You might be asked to show some usability test results.

Know Yourself

Know your process.

Know your design philosophy.

• 7 themes of design
• user centered design
• how do your position yourself within the field?
• might be a good idea to weave project examples into your answers

Understand what you want from your future.

Before the Interview

Talk to Jeremy Podany!

• he can be a private outside party
• he can help you negotiate salaries and benefits
• he will help!

Understand that a UI Designer is not the same as a UX Designer.

It really helps to research your interviewer when possible.

It’s ok to ask about the dress code for your interview.

It can help to know some basic visual design principles.

Get your resume critiqued by many people.

During the Interview

Build rapport with your interviewer.

• change your perspective
• remember that you will be peers and colleagues
• try to find some common interests
• ask questions
• it’s ok to throw out some jokes
• try not to be nervous
• think of an interview more as a conversation

Take notes!

You will be exhausted.

It’s ok to ask for water during the interview.

Show that you are willing to learn.

Future : (verb)

to design a product, service, or artifact which is intended for use two or more years from the present.

Example 1
My main project for the summer was to future Firefox Home Tab.

Example 2
We would like to hire you to future the iTunes service.

Context

As Interaction Designers, we are often charged with envisioning the future of a product, service, or artifact. At IU’s HCID program, we are trained to design for the present and for the future. It’s easy to talk about the present, as most people can think about 6 months to a year out. However, talking about the future of a design is more of a challenge. Sometimes you would be designing for 2-3 years in the future, sometimes even further. Talking about the future in this way becomes wordy and lengthy. So, we all just started using a ‘new’ verb tense of the word future. This has enabled us to talk more vaguely about design possibilities and prompted us to be more creative. We use this tense so much that it has become quite common place.

I’m hoping that bringing this tense into industry, we, as designers, can more easily talk about the future of things. Although I’m not promoting everyday use of the word, as I’m considering it industry specific jargon, I do think that by using it more in this tense, we can help drive our creative imaginations.

Thoughts, reactions?

What Show and Tell Taught Me About Being an Experience Designer

In kindergarten, in the US at least, we had show and tell, at least my school did. Well, maybe it was first or second grade, I can’t remember. Each day we would have a student bring in something. This artifact was usually from around the house, and parents usually helped out, again from what I remember. Students would bring this artifact to the front of the class and “show” it. They would tell the class what the artifact was, it’s purpose, perhaps it’s personal history, etc. From there, other students might ask questions about the artifact, or discuss what the artifact means to them. At times the teacher would interject with learning opportunities. Wikipedia refers to this activity as a chance for students to learn public speaking. However, I think it’s also about being aware of the world around you and connectin to that world. Further, it provides opportunity for other children to see new artifacts, and (just as important) to discuss those artifacts and their relationship to them.

Show and Tell in Interviews

As I’ve been interviewing this past week for a full time job, I’ve been reflecting quite a lot. One thing that has hit me is how much, despite all that I know, I keep trying to tell when I really need to show. Instead of showing some images of my process and walking through a project, I tended to ‘tell’ about my process and just show the final outcome. While the final outcome is important, it’s more important to show how you got there. What methods were used, what assumptions made, what research was conducted, what processes were in place, and where did things fail and succeed. Show, show, show, and then tell as you show.

Show and Tell in Documentation

As practioners of user experience, I think we also fall into the ‘tell’ instead of ‘show’ trap. One of the top artifacts we seem to produce (going on some assumptions here) is documentation. We produce design specs that are 60 or more pages in length. They likely have some pretty pretty pictures in them, but are very wordy and lenghty. And this makes sense, considering our higher education system. Wireframes and mockups fail at showing an experience. User flows and diagrams might start to get at this, but still fall short. These artifacts still ‘tell’ the experience, as they are accompanied by explanatory text, instead of ‘showing’ the experience.

As a field, I think we need to take lessons from our kindergarten classes. We need to show more and tell less. One way in which we can start showing more and telling less is through prototypes. Prototypes allow us to show an experience to clients and users rather than telling and explaining. Our world is complex, and our designs are often complex as well, by showing instead of telling perhaps we can push our field further and focus more on human beings.

Image: Kindergarten class by chesirekat
Image: Wireframe Walkthrough by carriejeberhardt

At Interaction 11, Bruce Sterling gave an amazing closing keynote. Out of the hundreds of nugests of wisdom, one thing in particular stuck out to me. Bravery. I’m not sure entirely how Bruce spoke of it, but he reminded us to be more brave when we design. Something about this phrasing stuck with me as very inspirational. In fact, this phrasing helped change and re-shape my capstone project for the better. So, thanks Bruce!

However, the inspiration did not stop there. A couple of days after the conference, a new re-phrasing came to mind, “Design with Bravery”. To me, this spoke to the heart of Bruce’s phrasing while reminding me to continue to push myself and my designs into new directions. With this in mind, I created a poster to hang on my wall, where it now sits reminding me to be design with bravery.

The above image links to a full size screen quality graphic. Contact me for a print quality version.

Design with Bravery by John Wayne Hill is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.vectorportal.com.