Anyway

It’s not often that I have a blog title that’s only acronyms (in fact, I think this is a first), and it’s also a first in that I’m post­ing look­ing for someone to join the team and pro­ject I’m on. I can­’t write much about the pro­ject itself here, since we’re still in stealth mode, but I can write quite a bit about who we’re look­ing for. Experts in the above acronyms is the short ver­sion (the mean­ings in this con­text being user exper­i­ence, user research, and user inter­face design); for the longer ver­sion you’ll need to jump past the break.

The pro­ject I’m work­ing on (actu­ally, I’m pro­gram man­ager for it), is a lot of fun. It’s a research pro­ject, so the work we’re doing may or may not end up in one or more of Sun­’s products at some stage. We will be releas­ing the code to open source, how­ever, so your work will even­tu­ally be out in the pub­lic view no mat­ter what. One of the focus points for this pro­ject is usab­il­ity, coupled with rad­ic­ally innov­at­ive design. To com­bine rad­ic­al design with usab­il­ity requires user research, which means talk­ing to real people, con­duct­ing focus groups, ask­ing people what they want, watch­ing them as they use the pro­to­types. In oth­er words, it requires test­ing your design ideas to ensure that being rad­ic­al has­n’t detrac­ted from being usable. You’d be expec­ted to take the lead on writ­ing the screen­ers and run­ning the focus groups, eval­u­at­ing the responses, and chan­ging the UI designs to make them even more usable.

We’re look­ing for design­ers, not developers, although if you can design and code that would be wel­come. The loc­a­tion is flex­ible as long as you can keep the same core work­ing hours as most of the team, roughly 9 am to 2 pm Pacific time. You need to be able to work effi­ciently with oth­er team mem­bers using phone, email, and IM, as we’re spread across four coun­tries and 9 timezones and typ­ic­ally only meet face to face as a team once a year for a couple of days.

For more inform­a­tion, send me an email. This is a fun pro­ject, the most fun in a pro­ject that I’ve had for some years now, and all we need right now is to find the right UI/UE/UR expert to add to the team.