Surreal Notions

Despite my short stay at Northern Natural, I was able to help point them in the right direction.  Philip once mentioned that internal projects tend to be less profitable and less likely to have a lasting impact than commercial projects.  He is, no doubt, absolutely correct.  However, I enjoyed working with the team at Northern Natural… and a good team will go a long way no matter what challenges they might face.

I was pulled in to offer advice and help make some of the bigger UI decisions.  More than anything, I tried to give the main architect and developers a crash-course in interaction design.  I gave them lots of thoughts, but I also tried to help them understand the thought process in UI.  How to approach problems from a user perspective rather than a business or technical perspective.  It’s not as easy as you’d think.  In fact, I believe it’s one of the keystone skills a good interaction designer brings to the table.  Furthermore, I’m not certain this is the kind of skill that can be taught in a book or a series of reproducible steps.

Both Jennifer (architect) and Loren (developer) have excellent instincts concerning interaction and usability.  My fear is they get too much push back from the customers and try to please the end users by adding features rather than solving problems.  A subtle distinction I try to emphasize, but I don’t think it is very obvious sometimes.  It’s very easy to add a widget, change a color, move a button, or create a report because a customer asks for it.  It’s not as easy to fully understand the reasoning for the request and solving the root problem, which frequently has little or nothing to do with the requested feature.  But, I am confident Jennifer and Loren are on the right track for now.  I’ll check in every now and then just to make sure they don’t run into any trouble.

I’ve officially started working with Sojern.  We’re still ironing out a few of the contract details, but things should be finalized shortly.  This should be an interesting experience, to say the least.

And people say I’m ambitious.  Sojern has set out with a defined goal of creating $1 billion of shareholder value over the next 3-4 years.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great group of people with lots of talent.  They’ve got the resources and management with enough business acumen and sales experience to probably pull it off.  However, that’s one hell of a goal to start out with!

If nothing else, Sojern should be an interesting ride.  I’m not convinced the business is ready (maybe in six months) for my skill-set yet; however, I’ll do everything I can in the meantime.  Hopefully, I’m wrong and they will need to develop all of the components currently being discussed in parallel.  I suspect quite a few components and concepts will fall into v3, v4, and v5 discussions, because this project strikes me as substantially larger than most people involved want to admit.  I have been accused of biting too much off at the same time, but I’ve never seen an entire office do it at the same time.  I hope I’m wrong, but it’s hard to not notice some of the signs.

Despite all of this, the monstrous goals, the gargantuan challenges, the short time-line, I still think Sojern will probably succeed.  It is just a matter of time.  Given the collection of experience already in the room and the several million dollars in angel investment already acquired, I doubt it’ll take very long for success to find Sojern.