Love your Client, Like Yourself
Recently, a client said to me of another consultant that this consultant did not exhibit a passion for the work or for the company. This consultant generally produced good quality work, but that lack...
View ArticleThe Brand is You: Is that a good thing?
Twice last year, I was asked by job assistance agencies – one here in the DC area and one up in Baltimore – if I would speak about how to use social networking to help get a job. I spoke at both with...
View ArticleColleagues or Competitors?
I spoke with a colleague on the phone last week. We hadn’t talked on the phone before but found that we had a lot in common. We both run small user research firms and both enjoy doing similar kinds...
View Article“But our job gives you benefits!” (How much are those benefits really worth?)
I get at least one email message or phone call from a recruiter almost daily. They want to tell me about a great job opportunity. Would I be willing to become an employee of their company (or in many...
View ArticleUser Experience as a moral imperative? We want you, we want UX, but we have...
A client hired Lebsontech for user experience related work, but partway through the process decided to use Lebsontech staff to address some other priorities that weren’t specifically user experience...
View ArticleLinkedIn for User Experience Professionals
[Update 3/29/13: This post was part of the basis for Lebson, Cory. "Care About Your UX Career? Network Now!" User Experience Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 1 (First Quarter 2013).] It was 2003 and a good...
View ArticleTwitter for User Experience Professionals
[Update 3/29/13: This post was part of the basis for Lebson, Cory. "Care About Your UX Career? Network Now!" User Experience Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 1 (First Quarter 2013).] By the time Twitter...
View ArticleStaying Under the Radar: A Business Strategy
I met someone recently who is a consultant at a large organization. We started talking about our various consulting efforts, and I mentioned that I do a lot of work with government agencies. “Oh,” he...
View ArticleDiversify Your User Experience Career
Investors are advised to make sure that they have diversity in their portfolio. By diversifying into multiple types of investments and different kinds of industries, there is a safety in knowing that...
View ArticleUXmatters – Are You Ready to Be an Independent UX Consultant?
For most of my career as a UX consultant, I have worked full time on some company’s payroll. A number of years back, one very large consulting organization hired me for a 6-month, full-time gig,...
View ArticleLessons learned from five weeks “on the bench”
Since I left the W-2 world in 2008, my work flow has been pretty much non-stop with an average of perhaps 35 hours a week of billable time and another 10 hours per week of non-billable time. The...
View ArticleUX Magazine – Go Ahead, White-Label Your Services
While “white-labeling” has been associated most commonly with limited-edition musical recordings, it has also come to refer to a situation where a product or service is provided to a company and that...
View ArticleRecruiter FAQ: No full-time permanence but always interested in talking!
At least once a day I get an email from a recruiter offering some new job for which the recruiter thinks I’d be a great fit. While I do appreciate knowing that I’m findable and in lots of databases of...
View ArticleDon’t be a UX perfectionist. Just do your best.
In high school I was that kid that in theory was supposed to get top grades. I was serious in class, spoke intelligently and appeared studious. Yet my grades were not great – not terrible, just not...
View ArticleIs bigger better when you’re a freelancer?
As a user experience (UX) consultant/freelancer with a small business, whenever there is a new project opportunity, I need to decide whether or not to accept the project. I have to think about how well...
View ArticleRace and gender as usability testing screening filters?
Most qualitative usability testing studies that I do involve the creation of a screener early on in the research process. The screener is the product of a necessary effort to determine not only who...
View ArticleFreelancers Onboarding Freelancers
I’ve enjoyed working as a freelancer for the past 8 years and have largely found that I can maintain a workload that matches what can be done by myself and Edie (the second person on my two-person...
View ArticleRecording for Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning: My lessons learned & a glimpse...
Right at the anniversary of my first Lynda.com / LinkedIn Learning course, I had the opportunity to head out once again to sunny Carpinteria, California. I got to record two new courses, both focused...
View ArticleShould you do UX work in the Federal government when you don’t agree...
For much of my UX career, I’ve been pretty solidly tied to the Washington DC region. While I’ve never committed to any one specific industry, just given the amount of Federal UX work that has been...
View ArticleResearch Recruitment Fail! Now what?
I largely do user experience (UX) research activities such as usability testing, cognitive walkthroughs, ethnography, interviews and focus groups all centered around how users and potential users would...
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