Yummy or Crummy?

There seems to be plenty of critiques of this year’s presidential candidate websites. Here’s something I noticed for myself.

While I was looking for Hillary’s and Obama’s speeches from last week, I observed that Clinton’s site was smaller than Obama’s in width! At where I work, we have been targeting 1024×768 for quite some time. Obama’s site seems to fit that resolution, and Clinton’s, while bigger than the next smaller threshold of 800×600, was considerably smaller — about 100 pixels narrower than Obama’s.

The difference of 100 pixels makes Clinton’s site look just a bit more crammed and busy than her rival’s. BarackObama.com, by comparison, benefits from the extra white space by communicating (at least to me) a sense of confidence.

So it got me curious — I went to the two other remaining candidates’ websites.

JohnMcCain.com: Black? You really went with black for your background color? Anyway, the screen resolution is even bigger than Barack’s. Guess we know who the real man is!

And here’s the punchline… Mike Huckabee’s site targets 800×600! Over a year ago, it was reported that only 17% of all monitors support up to 800×600. It says something about how mainstream this guy is aspiring to get, huh?

Yummy for Obama, crummy for Huckabee! And if Obama and McCain win nominations for their respective party, you know their websites’ size really mattered.

Obama handed Clinton a serious beating in Washington this Saturday. It was a bit surprising — I thought with the support from both WA senators, Clinton would do a little better. But Obama clocked Hillary in every county in Washington. Whoa.

I missed the chance to go see either one of them when they were in town last week. But luckily for me, the web is full of other people’s recordings. I caught a little bit of Hillary’s speech on NPR tonight, but I missed most of it, so I was glad to find hers as well as Obama’s on The Stranger’s Slog.

Here’s Hillary’s.

…And here’s Barack’s.

If I could vote, I’d probably go for Obama — because every time I hear him talk, I almost get shivers from the charisma in his voice. After 8 years of a fucking chimp (with apologies to actual chimps) in the office, I feel like someone like Obama will have such an impact. He will wake up this nation, if enough people listen.

But then again, after I heard some of Clinton’s speech, I couldn’t help but respect her as well. She sure is one smart and courageous woman. I hope they will both continue the good flight (while keeping it clean). And who knows? Maybe a Obama-Clinton (or vice-versa) ticket may not be such a farfetched dream.

My coworker JFo sure knows how to have fun. For his 34th birthday celebration, he put together the most elaborate scavenger hunt competition, and I was lucky (?) enough to be invited. It seemed daunting (see the rules here while it’s up), but I said what the heck.

I was crammed in a car driving around for most of the day, I spent more money than I planned to, and the judging phase lasted waaaay too long. Worst of all, our team didn’t even come close to winning. In fact, we came 13th out of the 15 teams that participated.

But you know what? I had lots of fun. I got to do some things I had never done before, like:

• Caught a fish at the Pike Place Market
• Learned about the existence of and background story behind West Seattle’s Constellation Park
• Crushed Lucretia while wearing a sumo costume
• Rode the famous SLUT

…and on and on. We didn’t win but we sure beat the crap out of the Careless Bears, and that’s something I’ll have with me for the rest of my life!

> See the flickr pool from the day
> See Dave’s photos of our team, Tanuki-Neko
> See my flickr set of the party + judging afterwards

We have about 3 months left in the pregnancy. When faced with all the things we had to buy/prepare, I couldn’t help but feel like we weren’t even ready to think about our baby. We needed to take care of ourselves before we stocked up on the baby stuff.

There were both practical and emotional reasons. On the practical side, there were (and still are) a bunch of things that needed to be cleared out or moved before we have the baby. So it’s a matter of preparing for the baby preparation. On the emotional side, I felt like we needed to get stuff that we always wanted, since after the baby we’d be less likely and willing to spend money on ourselves. Before the priority completely shifts to the baby, I wanted to make sure to take care of ourselves, so that we don’t feel depressed about not having those things because of the baby, etc.

So — we got a new dining room set (a cheap one from IKEA, but still the one that fits our kitchen better). We replaced the living room rug. We bought a new futon mattress and finally got rid of the lumpy one I’d had for like 10 years. And the last piece to complete this effort came in this weekend — a new bedroom set.

It’s frigging huge — we measured every set we looked at, because of how small our bedroom is. We were confident that this new piece would fit in fine, and it does — actually better than we estimated. But still, a big headboard, solid side tables, and a tall dresser (to replace the double dressers we had) fill up the room quite a bit. We love it, and we’ll be sleeping on it as soon as the smell of the varnish goes away. Right now, it’s a bit strong — enough to make me uncomfortable to think about Lucretia breathing it in.

But all “adult” purchases are complete… Now we have 3 months to think about all things baby, all the time!

This isn’t what I threatened to blog about yesterday, but it’s on my mind now, so here goes.

How to structure a user experience team is something I’ve been thinking about as of late. Related to that, obviously, is a role of each member on the team. Currently, all members of the UX team at POP are called information architects, and we (including myself) all perform information architecture tasks day-to-day.

But that’s not all. I feel like we do so much more, and the label of IA doesn’t always adequately describe everything we do. We’re starting to see IA as a service or a task instead of a role. Other tasks might include user interface design, usability testing, user research, and here’s the part that begs for some clear delineation — strategizing with clients about their online marketing goals.

For a while now, many folks have been talking about the impact a designer can make on not only the design decisions, but on business decisions that clients make. In the product world, IDEO and Frog come to mind as the pioneers in this area. In the online world, Luke Wroblewski has been talking and presenting about this for quite some time.

The debate about IA’s title/definition is not exactly new, either. As long as I’ve been an IA (since 2000) all listservs and discussion platforms I’ve been part of see this topic flare up at maybe about once every three months. I never paid much attention, because I always liked the term IA and I understood it just fine for what I did for my career. Lucky for me, I suppose then, that the title of “IA” seems to have gained sufficient traction and acceptance inside the industry, and most people these days have a pretty consistent understanding of what an IA does.

And personally, this strategy thing never really came into my career path until the last year or two. I don’t doubt that it’s always been a part of some other IA professionals’ skillset or responsibility. But not me, and not most other IAs I have worked with. And if helping clients with figuring out their digital strategy was always part of being an IA, it was always done implicitly as far as I could tell — like it’s a byproduct of our real focus which is creating excellent user experience — rather than an explicit offering. But like I said, that’s been changing lately, at least at POP.

So I’ve learned that it’s important to recognize being a UX-minded strategist as one of the essential skills for a member on a UX team, along with being a good IA and researcher. Perhaps I should refer to this role as — hmm — UX strategist, or maybe take a step back and call it UX designer.

But here’s the dilemma. I also think that while anyone can learn the skill of providing strategy work for clients, not everyone would want to take their career in that direction. Some UX designers/IAs want to focus on solving complex UI problems rather than being involved in stakeholder-level meetings and presentations. I personally see that as a fork in the road for UX designers and IAs, and the two options are not hierarchical, but rather two equally valuable roles within a company with multiple offerings. I say it’s a dilemma because I think it’s a simple matter of personal interest. And because the two paths stem from the same set of basic UX design skills, one path should not be automatically associated with a higher pay grade. But most places consider strategy-related work to be of higher value than the “tactical” task of solving UI/IA problem, no matter how complex. (I think how you determine the value of each role should match the type of work your company is interested in taking on.)

I would stress that all UX designers should be familiar with and practice a certain level of strategy-minded approach. But as a UX designer’s career progresses, I think there can be different paths for someone who wants to focus on providing strategic value for clients from UX point of view, and someone who wants to focus on solving that great UI puzzle so users can get the job done easily and efficiently.

I don’t have the answers yet, and I’d imagine this will be a moving target because other issues play into how you create a structure for a team. Unless you’re starting from scratch with no ceiling, you’re always dealing with an optimal head count for your workload and the levels/skills/preferences of your existing team members.

But by recognizing that there is a fork in the road, and that it’s OK to have specialties under the umbrella of UX team, I feel like I’m starting to have a clearer idea of how to prepare ourselves in the coming months or years ahead. POP is definitely growing, and it’s exciting to be able to take part in shaping the company’s future.

Yes, you read about it here first, folks. Yummy or Crummy will be adding another blog post here sometime in the very near future. Do hold your breath, and don’t sit back and relax, because before you know it my new blog post will kick you in the teeth and throw you down like your daddy never could, no matter how much he drank.

This was a total impulse buy. I came home on Friday, and was feeling really shitty. Lucretia asked what I wanted to do, and I just said, “I want Guitar Hero!” Off we went to Target, and I was a happy man.

I had never played the game in my life — but I’d seen some people play it at work just that day. It looked like fun, and I just couldn’t resist the idea of having a remote-controlled guitar to play for Wii. And boy, the game delivers some good times.

I’m almost through the “easy” level, but I can tell I have a long way to go before I can get through the “medium” level. When you add one more color it’s a world of difference.

The video above is from the first day. I still suck but when this was taken I REALLY sucked. But unlike Elite Beat Agents (which I love), it doesn’t get so difficult so quickly that you are forced to play the same song over and over again until you want to cry. And the game contains like 70 songs!

This game is super yummy!

I tried out Wesabe shortly after they launched almost a year ago, I think. I was initially excited, because I thought the using tags was the perfect solution to address the problem of categorizing personal finance details to see the bigger picture.

When I tried the service the first time, I dipped my toes in by only uploading one month of statement. I realize now that was a bad choice on my part, because it really failed to show me the most powerful part of using Wesabe.

This time, I let Wesabe import everything that it could from my bank, going back as far as last year. And I spent about an hour tagging each line item, going back for maybe about a month and a half. As I was tagging, I noticed that more and more items were automatically being tagged, because Wesabe was recognizing similar transactions. This is not a new feature because I knew about it back when I tried it first, but trying it on one month worth of information just didn’t show me the power of this application. The real benefit comes when you can see the info aggregated over a year or so, using one of your tags — and being able to do so without having to tag everything for a year.

So as the image shows above, even though I only tagged few lines with “gas,” because we almost always get our gas at the same gas station, Wesabe was able to quickly compile our gas spending for the last year.

And my hope now is that each time I update my account info, I just need to tag a few additional new items, and then the rest is good to go.

I’m really hoping that this will help Lucretia and me see where our money is going, and where we can trim the fat, so to speak. That’s all I really need to be able to do — I don’t need to balance the checkbook exactly every month; I just want to be able to know where I can optimize. And in order to do that, I simply need to be able to organize each item in my statement. Tags are really the perfect way to do this. I wish my own online bank had similar features, so I don’t have to import the info into a third-party application.

Anyway Wesabe has a social networking aspect of it that lets people share tips related to certain tags and whatnot. I really didn’t care for this the first time around, and I still don’t. But it’s free to use, and so far it’s given me enough good things (like the graph above, that really made me feel good about buying a Hybrid) to make me keep trying it for another few months or so.

I’m in Minneapolis for the rest of this week. This trip was rather last minute, but I think it’s going to be a good one. I took a walk around downtown, and I like how it feels. Sort of like a smaller Chicago, but things look newer and cleaner. I only walked for maybe 30 minutes, but I got the sense that smart people have planned the city. Maybe it was the light rail tracks and the skybridges that connect the buildings.

The flight I was on yesterday was — well — interesting. Does Northwest Airlines offer particularly attractive discounts for senior citizens? That’s the question that crossed my mind, because I swear, 90% of the passengers looked about twice my age. So bizarre was the sight, I started to look for a buffet line. OK that wasn’t nice — I expected (but didn’t get) this kind of thing with my trip to Sarasota last month, but not for Minnesota!

Anyway, here’s what made the flight a bit more stressful. I assume I’m not the only one to do this — whenever I get on a plane there’s always that faint “is this the plane that’s going to crash?” thought in the back of my mind. So yesterday, I couldn’t help but sweat a little bit more after seeing all my fellow passengers. I’m no mathematician, but as you get older each day, your chance of dying that day is incrementally greater, right? So collectively the same stat for 160 old people must be greater than, say, 160 average-aged group…? Right? Well I’m happy to report that we didn’t crash, and everyone arrived at MSP safely. Good times!

Photo by revgriddler on Flickr

So I didn’t take this photo, but I’m glad I found it on Flickr. It’s confirming that it was in fact a really special sunrise.

I got up this morning and just stood by the window awestruck by the amazing display of colors created by the sun, the clouds, and the mountains. First it was streaks of bright red lines. Then they got more orangey. Then when I left for work they were butterly yellow. Just awesome stuff. Seriously, sunrise and sunset are two of the most amazing things about living in the northwest.