UX Job Board:  Valentines Day Edition

To celebrate Valentines Day this week, I thought I’d highlight a few dating/matchmaking sites are currently hiring UI, UX, Front-End and Mobile Dev folks.

• Grindr is looking for both a Senior UI/UX Designer and Front End UI/UX Web Developer
• OkCupid is seeking Product Designers and Front-End Developers
• Match.com needs a UX Designer
• JDate is hiring Mobile UX/UI Designer
• eHarmony is looking for a Mobile Developer.

And yes, that Grindr and eHarmony appear in the same list cracks me up.

All kidding and holiday-fueled silliness aside, online dating sites introduces an especially fascinating set of UX problems and patterns to me. This may be a topic I re-visit in the future.

Miscellanea & Effluvia

BIG Architects designed this Valentines Day Sculpture in Time’s Square.

‘BIG(heart)NYC’ is a 10-foot tall cube-like structure composed of 400 transparent LED acrylic tubes enveloping a large red heart that is suspended within. the cylindrical components refract the surrounding bright lights of times square around the symbol of love. the interactive art piece pulses with a glowing red luminosity whereby, people’s interaction with one another intensify the beating of the brightly, burning heart. (via Designboom)

Amazing! I love the interactivity component of this sculpture. I’m curious as to what types of interactions, or how the sculpture is reading/registering them, trigger the behavior. Anyone know?

From the User Experience Toolbox

Rachel Hinman graciously shares her UX Austrailia 2011 presentation on slide deck on Mobile Prototyping Essentials. One of the most damning challenges? “Designers new to mobile don’t have the domain specific skills or heuristics to lean on.” Her suggestion? Prototype early, prototype often. And she gives you some details on how to get started. Love the Steal This Slide tags she included throughout the presentation.

Things I’m Trying To Figure Out:  Pinterest

I may be bit behind in coming to Pinterest, the online pinboard “to organize and share things you love.” You “pin” a photo of something you like or find inspiring, and others can “like,” comment on, or re-pin your pin.

At first glance, it’s a site where ladies can share photos of hairstyles, crafts, clothes, food, and home decor. A friend described her first — and as far as I know, only — experience with the Pinterest UI as “It looks like Facebook went on a bender, threw up, then didn’t clean up after itself.” Pinterest is eye crack for visual people, admittedly, but what is the fuss really all about?

This infographic, pinned courtesy of Aaron Biebert—one of the small but growing number of men on Pinterest—perhaps sums it up best:

A mad tip of the hat to Monetate for an effective infographic that neatly summarizes the “What/So What?” of a topical subject, easy to distribute virally through social media, it includes their name, and a call to action to follow them on Twitter.

So, what’s on Pinterest that attracts me, personally? Oh, my. There’s…cinnamon roll pops. And a really creative, contemporary interpretation of Disney princess costumes. And that’s a charming visual narrative. Okay, so Pinterest warrants further investigation. (Or at least further groveling for an account invite.) Have some sway in getting a girl an invite? Hook me up, perhaps? ;)

Miscellanea & Effluvia

Designboom highlights some of Alan Sailer’s exploding food photography, wonderful arrangements captured using some homemade flash equipment. I poked about Alan’s Flickr collections and his The War Against Christmas series is absolutely amazing — exploding Christmas ornaments! Strange to see so much beauty in things being pulverized.

The Business of Designing Information

6 Steps to Making Your Infographic Work — Love them or hate them, infographics are trendy, and for good reason:  they’re visually interesting, easy to digest, and practically built circulate through social media channels and build SEO links. SEO Gadget shares some tips to guarantee your idea will take off before you even begin illustrating.

From the User Experience Toolbox

What Color Should Your Links Be? — In short, it doesn’t really matter; just be consistent.

On My Wish List

PlugBug USB iPhone/iPad charger & MacBook Plug Attachment — Because I never seem to have enough outlets. <3!

BookBook for iPhone — Because I’m apparently on a TwelveSouth *squee!* spree…

Miscellanea & Effluvia

A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage — The mysterious timing of the McRib’s re-appearance may have finally been cracked. If this article’s author is incorrect, however, I would readily believe the “The McRib heralds the end of civilization as predicted by the Mayan calendar” as an acceptable alternative answer.

I’m in the process of working on some really cool projects, which sadly are leaving me with little time to put together the blog posts I’d planned. In the meantime, here are a few things from my virtual reading list.

From the User Experience Toolbox

Site Architecture Stencil for OmniGraffle — Having used and loved the EightShapes’ Unify deliverables template before, I’m practically doing backflips over the OmniGraffle template Austin Govella has put together. It’s the elegant aesthetics of the original template, but without the perfectionists’ hell that is trying to create and maintain a sitemap or flowchart in InDesign.

Internet Rock Stars

Personal finance blogger Ramit Sethi talks about the Fortune article on his blog, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. “When I started this site, it was a rinky-dink blog. I didn’t make a cent off it for years because it was just this random hobby. But over time, the articles resonated with you, and you stuck around, giving me your time and attention. Some of you joined my courses or bought my book. Together, we all grew towards living a rich life.”

Miscellanea & Effluvia

Rome Is Trying to Make Their Streets Easier for Walking in Heels

H&M Under Fire For Using Fake Computer-Generated Models

Holy cats! Nearly three months after all entries were due, the Unmatched Style CSSOff team has finished evaluating every single one of the entries. Each and every one of the 416 entries. All. of. them. Yowza!

Some participants and boosters have expressed concern that at the rate it takes to judge entries the CSSOff will simply not be sustainable as a competition. What do the contest organizers think of this?:

Oh yeah, CSSOff is not sustainable, but we’re just crazy enough to not care. The thing is we LOVE this stuff and we’re having a really great time reviewing all the entries. Believe me we’re getting a ton of knowledge out of this whole thing. So, unsustainable or not, we’re committed to go the distance for as long as all of you guys are into it! (link)

How beautifully geeky!

So now that the judges have evaluated all contest entries, now what? Now they review them all for final scoring. And we continue to wait. *le sigh*

Mid-October I was one of many to entry into the UnmatchedStyle.com CSS Off competition. And, like many, the demands of client work made me drop from the competition. But not to fear, 416 souls stepped up to the plate.

An update from the Unmatched Style judges say the 2011 CSS Off entries are still being reviewed. The few that I’ve seen of participants who shared the URLs to their entries on Twitter looked amazing.

I’m in the process of planning a trip to Europe to celebrate my thirty-*mumble* birthday later this winter. To help me get into the mood I’m brushing up on my French language skills.

To begin, I have to confess I don’t currently speak French. Not fluently. Or even, frankly, all that functionally. My first trip to France—a decade after two semesters of undergraduate French—I discovered what little I remembered was food-related vocabulary and obscenities. To help round out what are clearly my key communication priorities, I’m learning some Web design-specific French vocabulary words.

I’m sharing them here with you in ma blogue in the hope that you’ll find them equally useful. Either that or native speakers will reach out when I’ve gone astray with a gentle “No one says that—you sound like a jackass.”

Le bas-débit

Slow speed Internet

L’haut-débit (m?)

broadband/high speed Internet

Le blogue

Blog

Le icône

icon

Le site web

Web site

La Toile

the Web

This latest batch courtesy of Computer Vocabulary in French.

In my imagination I’ll be able to whip out my intermediate-level French skills and dazzle all those that I meet with sparkling conversation in response the question “Qu’est-ce qui est votre profession?” (What do you do for a living?). More likely than not I’ll receive the same response I do when describe what I do for a living to my parents: a blank stare followed by a slow nod that acknowledges we are clearly not speaking the same language.

I had the opportunity to meet groovy new folks and learn lots of really cool tricks at the HTML5tx conference in early October. One of the things that got me really riled up is LESS, the dynamic stylesheet language. (Not to be confused with the similarly-named Less framework, the CSS grid system—also is in my queue to check out.)

If you’re not familiar with LESS, it’s a great way to build and manage large, complex CSS style sheets lightning-fast using variables, mixins, operations and functions. You can either link the .less file to your HTML document and render it client-side using JavaScript (dude, don’t waste your visitor’s processing cycles), or you can compile the LESS code during design time on your machine and attach the resulting CSS file to your document.

Just to give you a little taste of the awesome, this is a quick summary what variables and mixins are all about.

Variables

Variables let you specify a value once, then re-use it throughout an entire document. Say what? In other words, you can specify things like colors, font faces, or other properties only once, and re-use the variable throughout the CSS document.

So write this in your .less file:

…and it gets compiled in your CSS as this:

Mixins

Mixins let you bundle several properties together, and then reference them as a single group. This is awesome for when you need to create several CSS3 properties like box-shadow or border-radius to cover multiple browsers.

So write this in your .less file:

…and it gets compiled in your CSS as this:

Want more LESS?

Yes, you know you do. Go check out the LESS dynamic stylesheet language syntax and (for Mac users) download the LESS.app for Mac OS X to automagically compile LESS files on your local machine.

I just recently upgraded the Winnermint Web site to WordPress using the Thesis theme framework from DIYthemes. Migrating to WordPress will let me (relatively painlessly) keep a blog on my site and make my less-frequently updated pages easy to maintain.

As the first of many things I want to share, I’d like to kick off with sharing the song I use to get pumped for creative projects:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.