Hidden Gems

Before 2007, I lived in a vacuum. The internet was overwhelming me.

I bookmarked interesting websites and completely forget to check them again. I read life-changing articles that disappeared into the ether. I constantly felt like something important was evaporating behind the currently-open tab.

Google Reader changed everything for me in 2007. It remade the internet at a human scale by connecting me to real life designers and developers. In six months I learned HTML/CSS, discovered Don’t Make Me Think, found Avinash Kaushik and got a job running the websites for a government agency.

Three years later the iPhone, Twitter, Reeder and Instapaper did the same thing. Just in time, because 2011 was another crazy year.

It’s Play Or Get Played

Even with the right tools it’s never easy to stay ahead of the game. Twitter, Instapaper, Google+, Reeder, Flickr, even email – they’re all out to crush you.

All over the internet, people are panicking and making big statements about unplugging. As if that’s a solution! Far better to think intelligently about your own strategies for consuming and sharing infomation. If you want to start somewhere, try listening to Kip Voytek’s amazing insights on Radio Johnny.

My advice? Police your sources. Ruthlessly unfollow, unsubscribe and unread anything you find boring. Constantly tune your setup. Remember to start from scratch in a new area every now and then.

And your desire for completeness? It’s harmful. Let it go. 

There are hidden shortcuts. Each day I link to two things that I think are amazing on Twitter, so follow @myddelton and let me know what you think.

Podcasts have the power to transform mundane tasks into enjoyable activities. Why? Because unlike books, tv, videos or websites, you can do other things at the same time as listening to them. 

Exercising, cooking, cleaning, shopping, commuting or just lying awake with jet lag are all a million times better with a good podcast between your ears. But like most things online, sorting the great from the merely good is hard. 

Want a head start? Try listening to these, my all time favourite podcasts. 

Radiolab

Few things in this world are as good as Radiolab. Seriously. It believes ‘your ears are a portal to another world’. And it’s right.

You get sucked in by the sound. After the acoustic purity of BBC Radio 4 or the earsplitting compression of commercial radio, the sonics in Radiolab are mind-bending. Original music drifts in and out. Voices are stitched together. Scratches, gurgles and vortexes appear – and silence becomes a weapon.

But the secret of Radiolab is the storytelling. It takes the deepest, weirdest, scariest subjects – death, artificial intelligence, morality, animal rights, tumours – and tells beautiful, emotional, unforgettable tales about them.

Radiolab is the DJ Shadow, the Aphex Twin, the Miles Davis, of radio.

In Our Time

In Our Time has three British academics discussing a single topic over 50 minutes. Sounds dull, but it works thanks to the wide range of topics like:

• Philosophy - David Hume, Malthusiasnism, Free Will
• Science - the Moon, the Neutrino, the Age of the Universe
• Religion - Shintoism, John Wyclif and the Lollards, Islamic Law
• History - the Siege of Tenochtitlan, Custer’s Last Stand, the Iron Age
• Artistic works - Delacroix’s Liberty, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Bhagavad Gita

Melvin Bragg’s a great host too. He never gets out of his depth when cajoling, prompting, hurrying and even correcting the academics into covering the topic. And although he can be brusque, he usually extracts a compelling story.

Which, knowing academics, is a special skill.

Seminars About Long Term Thinking

There are multiple Stewart Brands. They show up in documentaries about Ayn Rand, ecological science, NASA, cybernetics and the Whole Earth Catalog. One even came up with ‘information wants to be free’. But my favourite Stewart Brand is the one who introduces the Seminars About Long Term Thinking. 

You might learn that some organisms are thousands of years old, that you can pick up any language in three months, that governments should use historians to predict the future, or that the South is falling prey to deviant globalisation.

Yes, the ideas are often a little crazy and yes, Kevin Kelly asks ridiculously long questions at the end. But conventional wisdom is rarely this thought-provoking.

The Straight Dope

Finally, when you’re not up for dealing with the big questions, you might prefer five minute answers to the little questions. Enter The Straight Dope:

• What would it be like walking around on a cube-shaped planet?
• Did firemen once use nets to rescue people from burning buildings?
• Are bananas about to become extinct?
• Whatever happened to that plan to grow square trees?
• Could I take down a T Rex with my Beretta 9mm pistol?

Funny stuff. Perfect for walking to the bus stop and learning something new.

Let me know which podcasts you love on @myddelton. Thanks to @sjors and @gabrielheatwave for the original recommendations.

…

Updates

Podcast recommendations from other readers include:

• Triangulation and Just Like Honey via @thompsonsimon
• The Big Ideas from The Guardian via @sjors
• The Zero and Lovelace shows from In Our Time via @lucy_luge
• This American Life via @nicprice and @katheaton

Keep them coming!

For years I’ve been hostile to branding. It felt like smoke-and-mirrors, a relic from the golden age of advertising with no place in our brave new online world.

The Brand Gap changed my mind overnight. It bridges the gap between strategy (logic) and creativity (magic) and is structured around five activities – differentiate, collaborate, innovate, validate, cultivate.

But the twist comes with Marty Neumeier’s (re)definition of branding:

“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about
a product, service or company”
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap 

This focus on feeling makes it a call-to-arms for user experience designers.

Convince People to Focus

User experience people are fond of saying that if you design for everybody, you design for no one. This question of focus is one of our key battlegrounds and, let’s face it, one where we often lose.

The Brand Gap tackles focus head on. Marty admits that focusing means giving up on potential customers. But if this lets you dominate a small category instead of trailing the leaders in a big one it’s worth it:

History has shown that it pays handsomely to be number one in your category – first, because of higher margins, and second, because the risk of commoditization is almost nonexistent.
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap 

More money with less risk of fighting to the bottom on price? Sounds like a convincing business strategy to me.

Make New Friends

The parallels with UX design go beyond focus and differentiation though:

• for brand research, qualitative techniques like 1:1 interviews, ethnographic research and field tests are preferred to focus groups and quantitative studies.
• branding uses prototypes – in the form of creative briefs and mockups – to quickly test and refine the gut feelings necessary for success.
• a clear visual hierarchy – or ‘natural reading order’ as it’s called here – is important in everything from packaging design to websites.
• brand people need to be natural facilitators, as creating a charismatic brand needs thousands of people to work together over a long period.

These shared techniques should make branding and user experience people natural allies – a refreshing change from the idea that marketing is the enemy.

Discover A New History

User experience designers know plenty about the history of design but rarely talk about the story of branding and advertising. Which is a shame, because advertisers were talking about designing experiences back in the 1950s.

The Brand Gap positions itself within this wider tradition. Marty Neumeier even provides a list of “rewarding and true” books at the back, saying:

The ideas in The Brand Gap are like a group of islands whose foundations extend below the surface of the page:
What you see are only the peaks.
Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap 

If Positioning and Selling the Invisible are typical, learning about the history of branding will be extremely rewarding for user experience people.

Why You Should Read It

The Brand Gap is a perfect introduction to branding. Marty Neumeier combines ideas you already love into a story you won’t forget. Read it.

Let me know what you think about this review on @myddelton. And if you liked this, take a look at what else I write about.

User research often throws up problems beyond the scope of designing websites and applications. Awkward things like corporate focus, content freshness, customer service relationships and database quality problems.

All affect the user’s experience, yet addressing the business processes responsible is rarely seen as part of user experience design. Which is a shame because failing to address business issues can undo all our design work.

Redesign the organisation

My first exposure to user research was the CABE redesign in 2008. The big (unsurprising) finding was that people wanted to find content by themes like housing, health or sustainability.

It didn’t take long to design the information architecture, but three years later we still had problems with creating the content. Sections like sustainability, which had a dedicated internal team, had great content. Areas which required cross-team collaboration, like health or housing, were poor.

The lesson? It’s not enough to redesign your website - sometimes you have to redesign your organisation. CABE should have created new teams, or refined their editorial processes, to populate our shiny new information architecture.

Forget the front end (sometimes)

Another site that I worked on had serious usability issues. Frustrated at my failure to convince people of their importance, I did some user research to show the need for change.

But none of the research findings related to my usability concerns.

Instead, the real user issues touched on multiple areas of the business. Addressing them involved difficult conversations, serious data analysis, renegotiation of contracts and even culture change.

The lesson? User research throws up some issues that can’t be addressed with wireframes and prototypes. (Also, don’t do research to prove yourself right!).

Fight for better processes

You might wonder whether these issues matter to user experience designers. They sound suspiciously like things other people should be sorting out.

Maybe. But many managers aren’t digital natives, let alone advocates of user-centred design. They won’t make good strategic or operational decisions without good advice and, weird as it seems, our research is often the first time they find out what users really think. So, for now at least, it falls on us to fight for the better business processes our designs deserve.

And if we don’t? The beautiful websites and applications we design won’t work for users. No matter how good they are on paper.

Let me know what you think on @myddelton.

Normal people don’t usually thank you for teaching them Excel tricks. Unless that trick is the Concatenate function. Then they love you forever.

Concatenate joins together text from multiple cells. Let’s say you have two cells containing “Hidden” (A1) and “Gems” (B1). Here’s how to combine them:

=CONCATENATE(A1,B1)
results in “HiddenGems”

But Concatenate is a long unusual word which makes it hard to remember. So it’s good you can use an ampersand instead, just like you use plus and minus:

=A1&B1
results in “HiddenGems” as well

You can add your own characters into the formula too. Insert a friendly space (or any character string) by putting it in quotation marks:

=A1&” ”&B1
results in “Hidden Gems”, which is much prettier

It’s difficult to explain how useful Concatenate is. I use it to build greetings from title/firstname/lastname (mailouts), construct working URLs from unique identifiers (content audits), add HTML tags to list content (CMS uploads) and export quotes to Wordle to make pretty word clouds (data visualisation).

If you liked this you should read about PureText. Let me know what you think on @myddelton and follow @wizardofexcel to supercharge your Excel skills.

Online grocery shopping in the UK is underwhelming. It’s the same old process (write a list and locate the items) with a few tweaks (favourites and search).

It doesn’t take much to imagine big improvements:

• Find a recipe online and click a link to get the ingredients
• Jump from wine review to buying a bottle (or case) in one click
• Buy a chef’s cookbook with QR codes throughout to fill your basket
• Email all the necessary supplies to that friend who loved your last meal
• Open a government PDF linked to ingredients for a week of healthy eating
• And my personal favourite - enter number of party guests, pick your party food and then watch the website spit out a mathematically-precise party hamper.

All you need is a robust system so that anyone – food blogger, publishing house, civil service mandarin, software developer – can populate a shopping basket with items via a simple weblink. The internet will do the rest.

Everyone benefits

The first supermarket to introduce a great API will reap the benefits. (An API lets websites talk to each other – in this case, any website would be able to create and fill up a basket on the supermarket’s website, ready to order).

Normal people benefit because transcribing and hunting down ingredients for recipes becomes a thing of the past. You can find a recipe on your favourite site and order the ingredients direct from the supermarket.

People using the API get income, like book reviewers do from Amazon. Food bloggers might make enough to buy white truffles. Larger sites could reduce their display advertising (yay!). Government could even get kickbacks from supermarkets through encouraging people to eat more healthily!

Supermarkets benefit most. An API drives customers from new sources, not just existing store visitors. Profitable third party apps give you great design without investment risk (think Twitter and Tweetdeck). Hundreds of niche uses open up, so the mass-market supermarket becomes a powerhouse of differentiation.

Groceries are not books…

Of course it’s not as simple as creating an Amazon for food. Grocery products are fast moving consumer goods and they come with their own challenges:

• The sheer volume of products make it hard to build good affiliate bundles.
• Products are launched and discontinued at a bewildering rate. The same product, same quantity, same manufacturer, can change from month to month.
• There are stock issues. A popular recipe exhausts a rare-but-perishable delicacy. Items like Brussels sprouts are seasonal. Stock levels are so volatile that delays between basket generation and ordering cause problems for users.

…but the hard part’s been done already

Although these are big problems, we’re talking about giants. Tesco is the fourth largest retailer in the world. And whereas Amazon has spent a decade building their stock infrastructure, the Big Four supermarkets already have it in place.

The challenges are about design, not infrastructure. A great microformat for ingredients so the API could make appropriate substitutions (make it open and the world will thank you). A beautiful front-end to help normal people put together baskets for their own links. Interaction design that deals elegantly with stock issues. Service design with real humans doing real quality checks.

The future will have a better connection between the internet and our groceries. The only question is, who’s going to get there first?

OK, I know Tesco has an API, but I’ve can’t find any examples of the uses I want to see. Let me know what I’ve missed on @myddelton. And thanks to Leisa Reichelt’s workshop in January for the inspiration…

The Coasthopper bus in North Norfolk is a fantastic service. It proves you don’t have to be a huge corporation to do great service design. 

If you’re tired of hearing the same old service design case studies, here’s an example of a simple public service delighting its users by meeting their needs.

Frequent, Cheap, On Time

In Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith advises that the first step in service marketing is to “get better reality”. For a bus service like Coasthopper this means you need to be frequent, cheap and on time.

It turns out Coasthopper already has great reality.

Buses run at least twice an hour throughout the day, which is exceptional for a rural timetable. A 90 minute journey along the Norfolk coast costs less than a 10 minute hop into Bristol’s city centre. And in catching eight buses over three days, every one arrived within three minutes of its scheduled time.

Word Gets Around

You can’t get near North Norfolk without hearing about Coasthopper.

A huge part is the name. “Coasthopper” communicates the whole service in three syllables – it runs along the coast and you can hop on or off at any point. Word of mouth matters in service marketing, so helping users form an accurate mental model of the service in a single word is a killer tactic.

The buses look distinctive too. You only need to see the cheerful yellow and blue colour scheme once to realise what’s on offer.

But it’s more than that. We first heard about Coasthopper in the Guardian. Our King’s Lynn hotel had timetables on reception and in our room. The tourist guide had a timetable in the back. Someone at Coasthopper is doing fantastic work with the national press, local businesses and the regional tourist board to get the word out at every possible touchpoint.

Communication Matters

My favourite thing about Coasthopper is the clear, friendly communication.

Timetable design is a tricky business. Coasthopper’s is clearly laid on a large square, with Monday-Saturday on one side and Sunday on the flip. It lists every time, for every bus, at every stop, but the text is large enough for the many pensioners using the service. The (difficult) decision to stick to a single linear route helps, an example of how constraining your service can reap rewards.

The writing is even better. Just compare the empty marketing drivel for First’s Bristol fares with the friendly and informative text for Coasthopper. You can’t fake it – the writer was thinking about who reads it and what they want to know.

Even the drivers are great communicators. One calls out personal introductions to “Sunny Hunny” (Hunstanton) and “Chelsea By The Sea” (Burnham Market) as you pass through. Others make polite, friendly and well-received interventions when people have music too loud or eat on the bus.

Everybody Loves Special Treatment

But what makes Coasthopper exceptional is they clearly know their users and cater to their needs. Some examples in their own words:

• “If you are walking in a large group and you want to use Coasthopper, then please let us know at least seven days in advance, so we can do our best to make sure you’re not left behind!” (incredible service for walkers)
• “Wheelchair users have priority over all other passengers in using the dedicated space” (unambiguous inclusion of people with disabilities)
• “Dogs are welcome on board Coasthopper, and we do not charge for them” (explicit acceptance for people with pets)
• “Coasthopper Rovers come in 1, 3 and 7 day versions, so you can hop on, hop off as much as you wish” (perfect for holidaymakers without a car like me)

• “If you have any further questions, please email us or call us on 01553 776980” (real contact details at the top, not the bottom, of their FAQ page)

Coasthopper wins awards and carries over half a million passengers every year. Their service does more than take people from A to B – it gives you a reason to return to North Norfolk. Did you think a bus service could do that?

Let me know what you think about this on @myddelton. You can find out more about Coasthopper on their excellent website or, preferably, by going to the North Norfolk coast yourself. It’s beautiful…

Twice I’ve joined companies to find professional researchers laughing at my use of SurveyMonkey for user research. They assumed it was inadequate compared to their costly enterprise software.

But most surveys don’t need advanced features. When they saw how easy it was to do surveys with SurveyMonkey, the researchers never looked back.

In their honour, here’s my guide to the lesser-known features of SurveyMonkey.

Super Simple Data Sharing

The whole point of a survey is getting responses. But enterprise tools put so many barriers between writing the survey and getting the responses that it’s easy to forget why you were asking the questions in the first place.

This just isn’t good enough.

So my top reason to use SurveyMonkey is it only takes 30 seconds to create a password-protected URL for your survey results. Now anyone can access the data without being able to modify the responses or mess up the survey itself. 

And what does quick and timely access to user data equal? UX converts.

One Survey, Multiple Collectors

SurveyMonkey lets you create a single survey with many different URLs (‘collectors’). You might put one on your website, another in a mass email to registered users and a third on your Twitter account. 

All collectors gather responses to one place, but the trick is you can view data in aggregate or segment it by collector. This lets you easily see differences between your audiences at the same time as gathering overall data.

And that’s just the start. Segmentation lets you test your hunches (do people respond differently when incentivised?) and compare feedback over time (one set of feedback questions with a different collector for each time you speak).

Conditional Logic That My Mum Understands

You don’t have to create many user surveys before you find that you want to ask different follow-up questions depending on previous answers. 

The classic example is the satisfaction survey – ask one thing to users that failed to complete their task (‘what prevented you doing this?’) and something else to users that were successful (‘what do you most value about our site?’).

Although this sounds simple, in practice it’s dangerously close to programming. And, ouch, debugging. But SurveyMonkey has an interface for branching surveys so straightforward that my mum can (and does) use it.

The Creepy Part

Finally, you can pass information into the survey via a personalised URL. 

Using something like Campaign Monitor you send personalised emails to all of your registered users, each with a survey link that contains their email address as part of the survey URL. When users complete the survey their response is logged alongside their email address. Without them doing anything.

Now you can contact users about issues raised without ever asking for an email address. Fewer fields to complete, and no input errors either. Win-win.

Just don’t claim this is an ‘anonymous’ survey…

It Doesn’t Do Everything (But In A Good Way)

Of course, many great features are missing from SurveyMonkey. (Although the refusal to bloat it with features just makes me love it more).

You can’t drag and drop when designing your survey. Or allow respondents to upload their own files. Or completely retheme your survey with CSS. If you want to do those things then check out Wufoo.

You can’t get an RSS feed of responses. Or do computation and scripting. Or use strings from previous answers in subsequent questions. If this sounds fun, you should look at SurveyGizmo. 

But SurveyMonkey has been ever-present in my arsenal for the last five years, and no other tool can make that claim. It’s solid, easy, powerful, friendly, usable and cheap. If you do user surveys, you should definitely try it.

I’m not affiliated with SurveyMonkey – I just love using it. Let me know what you think on @myddelton – particularly if you know something useful I’ve missed.

Update: SurveyMonkey introduced the ability to use strings from previous answers in subsequent questions in February 2011.

My name is Will Myddelton, but you won’t find any other Myddeltons in my family except my brother. Why? Because my mum and dad made a stand against centuries of tradition when they named us.

They felt that, women and men being equal, it wasn’t right to name me after a distant ancestor on my dad’s side. So they decided not to call me Haynes after my dad. They could have named me Welch after my mum, but this rights one wrong with another. (And my mum’s name came from her dad originally too).

Double-barrelled surnames bring their own problems. Welch-Haynes or Haynes-Welch? What happens when two people with double-barrelled surnames have their own childen? Four surnames is ridiculous, which takes you back to the problem of choosing which name is more important.

So they sidestepped the whole issue and named me after the location where I was born and grew up. I became Will Myddelton from Myddelton Square.

Frequently Answered Questions

We all know you can choose whatever first name you like for your child. But the surname convention is so deeply ingrained that you’re probably wondering if you’re allowed to change it.

You can call your child whatever you like, surname included.

You might ask whether having a different name from my parents makes me feel less close to them. Plenty of others have. But I feel close to my mum and dad because, well, they’re my mum and dad.

The most difficult question you can ask me is what I’ll call my own children. When I was younger I liked the idea of starting a Myddelton dynasty. Now I’m less sure. Some friends of mine changed their names when they had kids so that their whole little family started afresh with a new surname. I like that.

A New River Runs Through It

But the thing I love most about my name is it connects me to where I’m from.

Myddelton Square is named after Hugh Myddelton, who built the New River to bring clean water to London in the early 1600s. The New River flows from Amwell Springs near Hertford into Clerkenwell. And I’ve never lived far away.

I grew up where it terminates at the New River Head, shared a house close to its course through Clissold Park, lived near to it in Finsbury Park and now my flat in Haringey is less than 200 metres away from its sluggish flow.

Instead of making me feel alienated, my name connects me to my city.

I Love A Well-Designed Taxonomy

There are people who think that what my parents did was pointless, even stupid. The political-correctness-gone-mad brigade mostly.

I think it was an extraordinary and beautiful thing to do.

My mum and dad made a political statement about our society while hurting no one, least of all me. And my information architect side is proud that not only did they recognise how important names are, they sat down together and worked out a system that solved the design problem they faced. Perfectly.

I’ve been answering questions about this my whole life, so if there’s anything else you want to know feel free to ask me on @myddelton.

This time last year I was a web editor. Today I’m a user experience designer. If you’re thinking about making a similar transition then this post is for you.

A word of warning. This isn’t about shortcuts or changing your job title to make more money. This is for people who already love improving things for users, who lap up design theory wherever they can find it and who use user-centred design techniques despite these not being in their job descriptions.

If that still sounds like you, here are the lessons I learned. I hope they help.

Calling Yourself A Designer Is The Hardest Part

For me, the biggest obstacle was learning to call myself a designer. I can’t create beautiful layouts. My sketches look like a spider fell in an inkwell. I’m red-green colour blind and I last studied art back in 1991.

In my mind I was no more a designer than an astronaut.

But it turns out that design is about solving problems within constraints and communicating the solutions, not creating pretty art. UX designers come from many disciplines - for example, I’m a history graduate (like the Guardian’s Martin Belam), come from a content background (like Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path) and spent my 20s as a musician (pick one from many!).

My advice? Get comfortable calling yourself a designer because it’s hard enough to switch to a new career without second-guessing your own job title.

Networking Is Essential

I’ve had a dread of networking ever since I first heard the term. So imagine my surprise when after forcing myself to attend a UX meetup I found a crowd of kindred spirits – warm, welcoming and passionate about the things that I loved.

Meeting UX designers makes you realise they’re mostly just like you. Talking with people who employ UX designers helps you find strengths and weaknesses quicker than you would on your own. People, even strangers, naturally tell you about unadvertised job openings and their favourite recruitment agents.

And don’t forget existing contacts! One work colleague observed a personal quality that I’d missed completely – and which I’ve used in every interview since. Another convinced me that I had what it took to make the switch.

Treat Your CV Like A UX Project

I’ve always approached my CV in the way that most businesses approach the web, throwing everything possible at it in the desperate hope that something would stick. It was a mess until a close friend put me straight:

Your CV is a record of what you want to do, not of what you’ve done.

This simple advice helped me rethink my CV as a UX project. Stripping out irrelevant experience felt less like erasing my past than leaving space for core competencies to shine. Focusing the entire first page on my last job didn’t feel disproportionate, it felt like establishing a proper visual hierachy. Fitting it all into two pages was the right thing to do for my users, busy employers.

I solicited feedback, iterated mercilessly and got a job on version 17.

Portfolios Make Interviews Easier

Creating a portfolio terrified me. I’d never done one and I didn’t know what it should look like. So I kept it simple: four pages, four projects, each with a description alongside thumbnails of sketches, photos and screenshots. I was trying to show my whole process rather than specific details.

I also took a paper copies to interviews rather than a digital version. This caused a few raised eyebrows but had some advantages:

• the interviewer can skip around on their copy, scribble on it or read it in detail
• the higher resolution lets you present a whole project on a single page
• you get to leave a physical artifact in the hands of your interviewer
• there is no risk of being flummoxed by technology.

The best parts of my interviews were the portfolio discussions. Rather than responding nervously to questions about hypothetical situations you end up having a proper, substantive conversation about your real work. (This is why you should avoid sending a digital copy in advance – if it works as a prompt to conversation, chances are it won’t work as a standalone document).

Look at my portfolio if you like – but trust me, you’d be much better off reading Jason Mesut’s guide to selling yourself.

No Research, No Excuses

The worst moment of my experience came when an interviewer asked me what I thought of their recent work. I hadn’t looked. It’s not a mistake I made twice.

Researching a potential employer is easy on the web. I wandered through corporate websites, press releases, trade media stories, products and client work to build up a rounded picture before interviews.

It doesn’t stop there. Companies might check employees out on Facebook, but what about employees checking out interviewers on LinkedIn? Knowing the background and interests of your interviewers is, well, kind of a big deal.

But the most useful research task was evaluating a company’s web products before interview. If the portfolio allows a conversation on your terms, turning up with questions about their design decisions is the opposite – your interviewer can assess your design views in the context of work that they know. Just be careful not to force your opinions on them.

You Don’t Get What You’re Worth,
You Get What You Negotiate

So you’ve convinced yourself you’re a designer, networked furiously to find openings, used your CV to get an interview and solicited a job offer with the help of your portfolio.

It’s time to talk about the money.

Yes, like most Brits I hate this part. But after years of moaning about not being paid what I thought I was worth it was time to try out a strategy. Mine was:

1. Set a minimum salary in advance – speak to colleagues about what is reasonable, set a figure and don’t go below this whatever happens.
2. Decide on your opening bid – be prepared with an opening figure higher than your minimum and practice saying it out loud (seriously).
3. Be ready to walk away – the first time I walked away was awful and made me feel like a loser, the second was easier and the third felt completely normal.

Which hubris brings me neatly to my final point.

Switching career to be a UX designer, or anything else for that matter, requires you to put your humility aside and sell yourself hard. It’s OK, that’s part of the game. Just don’t forget to go back to being humble afterwards.

Feel free to ask questions or tell me what you think on @myddelton. Thanks again to Andrew Travers for incredible advice, Jason Mesut for portfolio wisdom, Matthew Solle for the recruiter tip, Ben Clarfelt for finding my job and Leisa Reichelt for the Peter Drucker quotes.