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.