At Amazon, the first time UX teammates see our potential candidate pool is what’s called a “materials review.” A group of 3 people has 90 minutes to review 15 candidates, and judge if they’ll move on to a phone screen and the actual interview loop. This means you have 6 minutes to make an impression […]
Author Archives: Daniel
Keep learning.
Despite working with AI-powered systems for years, I’d never really gotten hands-on with building one. I’ve been working on this Coursera IBM Applied AI course, and finally got past the “advertising for IBM” part. Enjoy this useless chatbot.
A designer’s job is not empathy (and other unpopular opinions about UX design).
Inspired by agreements and disagreements with: Stop telling designers to stop being designers 1. Be a designer. This is a fair statement: If you are a designer, be a designer. If you’re not a designer, stop telling designers to be something else. This is also an unfair oversimplification. What is design? In short, it’s synthesis. […]
Updates in Brief
I’m now a Senior UX designer for Amazon, working to help 3rd party sellers succeed on Amazon. My goal isn’t to make them feel like selling on Amazon is something they must do. I want it to be something that the love doing. I’ll add updates for my Indeed work when I can. I recently […]
Never stop learning, but stop learning the same things.
It’s a truism, but that doesn’t make the advice to never stop learning any less meaningful. It is probably the number one bit of advice I offer to anyone in regards to career growth. For better or worse, I see designers largely reading and passing around UX and design-focused tutorials – they’re reductive, simplistic, and […]
Family Cooking, Part 2
Following up last night’s experiment, here is what I accomplished in one hour of wireframe. I focused on a single core flow – defining who is cooking the meal and how it could work. If you like this idea and can pull it off, you have my permission to steal this idea. Just do a […]
2 Hour UX: Family Cooking, Part 1
Timekeeping: My initial notes and sketch stayed within the one hour time limit, if you ignore the fact that my Wacom tablet and Photoshop had a disagreement that required troubleshooting and a reboot. I spent another 30 minutes or so typing this up. The basics of a recipe app are pretty well defined at this […]
2 hour product: Introduction
I’m trying a new strategy for generating and exploring experiences, based on the idea of speed painting – a part of the warm up and exploration process of artists where they strictly time-box themselves and try to generate a larger quantity of work at lower fidelity, and not worry about specific executions later. If we’re […]
The interview process
The reality is no single interview format is perfect. Someone has a bad day. They’re too easily faked. They are problematic for people who aren’t neurotypical. They test the wrong things. They’re not respectful of time. Passion isn’t the same as skill. Look. Interviews aren’t fun for anyone. The whole process from initial contact to […]
Admin note:
A recent WordPress update appears to have duplicated sections of some blog entries and mangled more than a few others. If you see weirdness, I discovered this while writing at 11PM on a Monday evening. I will fix it when I am less likely to make things worse.