I wanted to take this time to thank the many people who contacted me, commented on my blog or took the time to ping me on twitter over the past couple weeks. Your words of encouragement, leads about job opportunities and willingness to extend your networks to me was greatly appreciated. Your friendship and kindness has helped keep me positive about this change and helped me land on my feet quickly. For that I am thankful.

I, along with 11 others from Habanero (many at Hab longer than I), were let go. You can read all about the reason and the outcomes if you want. It’s a first for me. In the past, career change has been either driven by me or by the merger, acquisition or sale of companies I’ve worked for. Never money or economics.

Disappointed pretty much sums up how I feel right now. As many of you know I made a big change to join Habanero and moved my family from Vancouver to Calgary to work for the company. I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that I expected a better outcome.

But now the task of finding new work begins. And I have to be positive about the future.

What I wanted to talk about though in this post are some things to consider about your career and about creating a safety net so if you ever find yourself in this situation, you’ll land feet down and moving forward, not standing still wondering “what just hit me?”. Here’s my list:

Always keep your portfolio and resume up-to-date

Funny enough, I had just tweaked my resume a few weeks earlier – I usually keep it up-to-date with recent project work and had fallen behind. It can be hard after-the-fact to recall past work, successes and stories. One thing I did forget to do though was grab copies of my work (e.g. wireframes, sitemaps, workflows, strategy and planning, etc.). Not all employers are going to be supportive of giving you stuff after you’re gone. So be prepared. That way you can show what you’ve got when new opportunities arise.

Never doubt the power of family, friends and networks

They say that more people find jobs through who they know than anywhere else and that those who find work fastest have the support of many people. Family and friends are critical parts to your recovery.

Start with family. Tell them what happened. Let them help and be supportive. After I got home and cleared my head I first called Daria (my wife) to talk to her about the changes her first words were “we’ll be OK”. Immediately I felt better. As my friend Robbin said so wisely via email “the good news is that jobs are replaceable, and family, not quite so easily”.

Spread the word. Next, I updated Twitter, Facebook and sent out a few emails to key contacts. As the word spread people offered up ideas and suggestions on where to look, extended their contacts and networks to me and played a big role in keeping me positive on the first day (and the days following). It’s an amazing feeling to see so many supportive people pop-up and say “what can I do to help?” By the end of the day I had leads on some contract work, an interview booked and a potential gig to consider. Not bad for Day 1!

Get references. Seek out those who will be able to speak to you, your work and the outcomes. You’ll need these later when you find your next job. Doing it now will make it easier.

Reconnect with your network. All kinds of possibilities can fall out from a simple email or phone call to update on where you are at. Contacts from your past project work are also a great resource. Let them know what has happened, where you have landed so they can keep an ear out for new opportunities.

Don’t forget about the people you left. Drop them a note to say you’re OK and give them your new coordinates (email, phone, etc.) so they can keep in touch. Make arrangements to hook up again soon. Don’t just disappear!

Update your profile. We all have so many places where we say what we do. Be it Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, associations, your email signature, etc. Make sure you update these.

Consider all your options

Maybe you’ve been thinking about a different career direction, going solo, or have been thinking about exploring or expanding on some other areas in your skill set. Now is the time. Be frank about what you want to do, especially if you weren’t happy doing what you did before (not my case) and seek those opportunities out.

Plan for hard times, not just good times

Live practically, keep your debt in check, your savings robust and make sure you don’t over extend yourself. It makes it easier to ride out these changes and downturns when you aren’t under financial pressures too. Not every job end comes with a big buyout.

When I first started building websites back in the 90’s and met with a prospective client I’d take them through four questions which I would throw in a simple 4-column chart that looked like this:

The questions I would ask were:

• Who’s your audience?
• What are your objectives for each of those audiences?
• What strategies are you going to use to fulfill each of those objectives for each of those audiences?
• What tools/content/functionality do we need to build to address each of those strategies?

I’d take them through each question sequentially, progressively building on the prior answers, and captured everything in the clients words. In the end would have a pretty good idea of what I needed to create and could go away and build out a quick estimate and proposal knowing I had everything I needed. This approach worked pretty well (and still does) and made even small clients stop and think a bit about what it is they wanted to create and spend their money on.

Over the years I’ve adapted that model and here’s how it looks now:

Define the audience

Step back for a minute and consider who you are you building this for. Who are they? Can you describe them, tell us about them? What are their needs? Why this audience instead of another? Make some basic notes, flush out some user profiles or dive deeper and build out living, breathing personas. The better you understand “who” the better off you’ll be.

Define/discuss the business outcomes

Wikipedia defines a business outcome as “an observable result or change in business performance possibly supported by transaction-based metrics, resulting from an event or action“. IMHO every project should have a clearly articulated outcome, but most don’t. And, most companies will have a hard time explaining “why” they are spending $X with you to do X work. Outcomes bring honesty to the table and accountabilities for all involved. It’s scary for many, but worth it.

Business outcomes can be quantitative and defined in terms of their business value (e.g. create new revenue or value, save money or time, lower risk) and expressed explicitly such as “increase our sales revenue by 10%”

They can also be qualitative (e.g. general satisfaction, staff more happy and engaged).

Capture these in your client’s words. If you have some baselines you can capture (where you are now vs. where you want to be) all the better. If you can do them for each of the audiences, better still.

Plan your strategy

So what specifically are you going to do in your project to meet the business outcomes? Involve your client in this process (don’t do it in a silo). Talk about content, functionality, communication, marketing, governance, change management. Go deep. Do it as a team and get everyone involved.

Define the metrics

Your metrics should be measures that help you understand how you are doing against your outcomes. Ideally these are KPIs (rates, ratios, averages, percentages). I tend to avoid raw number because they don’t provide context.

Determine how you will measure your outcomes

Often organizations miss this part and define metrics that they have no way to measure. It’s a good check/balance for the metrics you have defined. Try questions like “what data will be used to validate the above metrics?” Where does the information reside?

Spread the word

Make sure everyone knows the outcomes and strategy. Make big signs, put them in every presentation, live and breath your client’s desired outcomes and hold each other accountable for addressing them. When you veer off-track, reconnect and review what guided you from the start.

Check to see how you are doing

Check-in frequently to see where you are at in relation to your goals. Re-visit continually during the project. Do a post-mortem at the end of your project and check again. After you’ve delivered, check back and re-evaluate. Look for opportunities to go back to the above business outcomes and deliver more value. This is where I loved being a web analyst and digging into the data, identifying opportunities to improve and make things better.

Talk about your successes and failures

Be up-front about where you’ve delivered on business outcomes and shown value. But also don’t shy away from understanding where you’ve missed the mark (as you will miss sometimes) and leverage that knowledge to do better in the future.

Hope you found this helpful and interesting. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and your approach.

Yesterday, I attended an online webinar put on by VizThinkU entitled Visual Note-taking 101. The speakers/sketchers were a wonderfully talented bunch including Austin Kleon, Sunni Brown and Mike Rohde and moderated by Dave Gray (XPLANE). The format was informal and took us through a variety of techniques around visual thinking over a joyous 3-hours. Check out some of the great sketches from the session by Austin (included below with permission – thanks Austin!).

Some take-aways from the session:

Drawing is pictures and words together in space.Visual thinking is comprised of drawings, to which we add words to fine-tune meaning and then we can arrange and juxtapose to create connections. Interestingly, the wireframes we Information Architects produce are comprised of the same elements and all are critical to someone understanding our work.

Everyone can draw. You just need to learn the basics. Using Dave Gray’s visual alphabet it really isn’t hard to draw most things. The basics include the following: a point, a line, a circle, a square and a triangle (you can extend this as well a bit with a rectangle and a swirl).

Many clients like to say they can’t draw and I think this is a great way to show them they can and get them involved in sketching out ideas and their user experience. I’ve been using this same technique with my son over the past few months and it’s amazing to see how quickly kids can learn to draw using these principles.

Build a symbol library and vocabulary. Each of the presenters yesterday had a toolkit of things they use regularly. Austin has a particular way of drawing clouds and the sun; Sunni breaks her drawings into sections with dividers to make things easier to digest; while Mike uses typography and design basics (layout, size, color, shading) to show importance on the page. All of these are elements they can use quickly and easily and pull from their toolkit as needed. I see this as similar to the modular thinking and frameworks based work many IA’s and developers are now using to speed up work.

Start where you like. Austin likes to start in the middle and work his way out, Sunni tends to start top left of her paper (usually adding a title, the company logo, etc.), while Mike starts where it feels best to begin. All were valid approaches and changing up where you start sketching may help shift how you approach your work.

Listening when sketching is a fine art. Some tips from the session included:

• Listen to the speakers tone, volume, cadence, emphasis, speed, metaphors and similes, references to structure and gestures when determining what to draw
• Prioritize what you are capturing
• Cache ideas with simple reminders (like bread crumbs) when you can’t catch everything being said
• Relax and don’t worry about what others think of your drawings
• Add your own personality (each of the presenters had their own style)
• Keep it simple

There were also some great books referenced during the webinar worth checking out:

• Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make a World – Edward Emberley
• Handbook of Pictoral Symbols – Rudolf Modley
• Beyond Bullet Points – Cliff Atkinson
• What It Is – Lynda Barry

Happy visual thinking!

Sometimes I get to do the tweaking/replacing of my past work, and it’s often educational to go back and see what you thought a earlier or how something has changed since you first created it.

On other occasions I get to see what another firm/agency does with a client I once worked with and I learn where I could have done better or watch good work be replaced by bad work.

Seldom does anything last forever. The sustainability of our craft is short.

At best, I’m often able to capture screenshots of past work, copies of deliverables (site maps, wireframes, sketches, mockups). At worst what I’ve created in the past ends indexed in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to haunt me forever.

So I’m going to toss this question out there. How do we as user experience folks create sustainable work?