BlaringSmelly

Shortly after Erich reported his company’s legendary 9-hour all-staff meeting marathon, the company I work for scheduled Tuesday our first quarterly meeting of the year. We were promised food (the unhealthy kind), drinks (2 alcoholic ones and unlimited soda and water), and 2-hour free play at Game Works.

The real meeting was kept under 2 hour. We were (or at least I was) entertained by customer story shared by support team, hat tossing to new employees, cash and reward giveaways, short video montage of popular games from studio and people behind it.

Then Game Works time!

Couple of us designers attended tonight’s Puget Sound SIGCHI event hosted by Google at its Fremont office. The location wasn’t new to Tab and I. 4 years ago, we both worked for the same design firm. The firm’s office was the very location Google’s at now.

This was my 2nd time attended UX event hosted by Google. From past experience, I knew the meeting room is going to be a mad house. We arrived early enough this time to score ourselves a decent spot. There was even time for a quick tour to Googl’e usability lab and eye tracking device.

The speaker tonight was Jake Knapp, UI designer at Google. Jake shared his typical day at work and how things got done in this fast pace and engineer-driven culture.

His talking points were pretty straight forward, and were already adapted by companies practicing Agile Development Manifesto. One tip particularly got me interested was the importance of presentation to UX professionals.

How design concept is conveyed to the entire team and generate great feedback relied heavily on designers’ ability to give good presentation. Just like any design project, presentation should have a goal, start from paper and sketches, and plan out a storyboard that’ll help to get your point crossed.

A list of rule of thumbs:

• Follow the 3-word rule: 3 bullets and enough said
• 10/20/30 rule by Guy Kawasaki: 10 slides, 20 minutes, and make sure use 30 pt fonts for your slides
• Be careful presenting mock-ups. Drawing is a better alternative, as the focus will not be on the design details. Also drawing invites people to participate.

Jake’s talk ended with resources on tonight’s topic:

• More tips on presentation skills, check out Presentation Zen.
• Tech tricks, tips, and downloads for getting things done - Lifehacker.
• You Tube - David Allen: Getting Things Done (46 minutes)

The other day I was talking to the new contractor Jonathan. On his desk was a tiled coaster featuring the illustration of one of my favorite artists, Jenna Colby.

Jenna works on different media: paintings, crafts, sculptures, toys, wearable… A child-like character lives in the world of Jenna’s arts. The character has a Zen-ish quality as she encountering other creatures or lost in her own thoughts.

Perhaps it’s the character’s insect looking profile, her unreadable expression, or Jenna’s painting styles that blur our perceptions between illustration and watercolors, there is a subtle eeriness that tuned down the cuteness and brought serenity to it.

I made a little happy noise and told Jonathan how much I like her works. Jonathan told me he became friend with the artist and ended up with bunch of her coasters. The next day, he brought a pile of coasters in and let me pick one to keep.

This is the best gift I have received from fellow colleagues. Yellow sticky notes were my coasters since I started at BFG. Jenna coaster has definitely added a splash of colors to my monochromatically black office desk.

Friday morning, little pass 10:30am. Quickly I finished replying work emails and walked through some tasks with our intern. Then like a gust of wind, I ran off to the bus tunnel to catch the 73 express. My destination: University of Washington campus.

Not until I was in the bus speeding on I-5 northbound, I realized it has being exactly 10 years since I last ended my school life.

I didn’t expect I’d go back to school. For years, I believed the real learning came from working in the field. I stand correctly. But overtimes, new attitudes and methodologies are merging and shaping the world of web based design. The more I exposed myself to the new design principles, the more I felt that acquiring such knowledge through job force were limiting and difficult to come by. Everybody is talking about it, but nobody has the absolute answers.

So I applied to the User-Centered Design certification program in University of Washington, going back to the good old academic learning. To make sure I can handle school and work at the same time, I took only 1 weekly course this quarter. The course, “Seminar in Technical Communication”, will invite speakers from various technology fields to talk about their experiences in applying user-centered design process to actual software development.

After the lecture, I took advantage of the nice weather and walked my way out of the campus. I’m enjoying every bit of this is because this is so out of what I’m accustomed to between working and being a home buddy.

6 months ago, I invested in a fancy Fish in Space Cosmic Desktop Aquarium. I really enjoyed Fishy’s companion. But today, I had an accident and lost Fishy.

I figured I’ll be gone for my vacation in couple days. I should probably clean the fish tank before my 2 weeks leave. As I was pouring the water out of the tank, I lost my concentration and before I knew it, Fishy got poured out of the tank and was flapping in the drainage hole. Then off, she went down the drain.

My Fishy, gone….

Heard something rather depressing today. In a meeting, a project manager asked to hire several production artists, one of the top executives went “Isn’t that what Janet and Copper are doing?”

Seriously, that sucks. I learn to live with family and friends’ blank look when I explain what I do, or “The PhotoShop go-to gal” remark. But when it’s the people whom don’t have the slightest idea what they are paying me for, now I’m really depressed.

What is a UI designer to do to get some respects? Hanging on my cubical wall are 5 on going project wireframes, black & white printouts of lines and notations. Back to back in my outlook calendar are meeting requests for upcoming usability testing.

I populate internal wiki with competitors’ UI analysis. I study leading online application trends and design patterns. I work with pm on features specs and infrastructures. Then prepare style guide, mockups and documentations for development team.

My current reading is O’Reilly’s “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web”; the next lineup is “Killer Web Content” by Gerry McGovern. And by the way, I’m enrolled in the UW’s User Centered Design graduate program starting January.

So which part of what I do qualified me a production artist?

A company Guitar Hero III tournament was held day before the Thanksgiving weekend. I entered for Medium Level competition and went all the way to semi-final. Not a bad way to kick off the Holiday.