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I had forgotten the tactile feelings a pinball table can give you.

I’m looking for a “t-shaped” person to help expand my small User Experience team. Someone who is smart, web-savvy, and can handle multiple projects while evangelizing customer experience.

Our team is busy envisioning unseen solutions to complex design, business, and technology challenges. We’re trying to change the culture of a billion dollar travel company one prototype at a time. Our focus? How things should be, not how they are.

Like a startup, we have a small, passionate team and things move fast. Unlike a start-up, you don’t have to worry about 80 hour weeks, burnrates, or poor benefits. The company I work for has 9,000 employees in over 45 countries and a long successful history behind it.

Our campus is located in Southlake, TX (minutes away from an Apple Store!). And we enjoy working in the best suburb in Dallas/Ft. Worth area (no, really, it’s cool for a suburb).

We’re looking for the right people: Folks passionate about interaction design, information architecture, front-end development, design research, new technologies— in general ‘making things work for people’ (our mantra).

Sound interesting? (No, really I’m fun to work with!)

Let me know: http://www.jeremyjohnsononline.com/connect/

Sometimes it’s hard to convince developers that Design (and all the little details associated with Design) really matter in an application. Maybe the application you’re working on is focused on efficiency and someone on your team feels like visual design is just getting in the way. You’ll hear things like “We don’t need any colors” or “there’s no need to make it look friendly or fun”. The feeling is consumer applications should stay worlds apart from business applications.

Well, I obviously disagree and went searching for some quotes to support the importance of visual design in productivity applications:

“Sometimes, in web application design, it feels like every pixel matters. This isn’t just a question about the application’s aesthetics. Visual design can have a huge impact on how the application communicates its use.”

http://www.uie.com/articles/usability_challenges_of_web_apps/

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“…you can use visual design to communicate key concepts to your users. By addressing the question “What is this?” we communicate usefulness. By addressing “How do I use it?” we communicate usability. By addressing “Why should I care?” we communicate desirability. Clearly this communication goes beyond mere styling and “looking good”.”

http://www.guuui.com/posting.php?id=1799

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“It’s rare for software to win an industrial design award. But that’s just what happened this week when the Industrial Designers Society of America announced that Microsoft’s Center for Information Work has won a Gold 2003 Industrial Design Excellence Award (IDEA).”

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2003/jun03/06-27IDEAAward.mspx

“Is there a point at which productivity software won’t require further innovation?

I don’t believe there’s an end. Human ability and behavior will continue to adapt and transform, and we will invent entirely new and novel ways to accomplish unforeseen goals and missions. We believe software can inspire that change in people and the way they behave, and in turn software has to adapt to that change. So, just as there are no limits to human creativity, there really are no limits to productivity software. ”

Interview with Designer: http://blog.biznik.com/2006/01/25/why-design-matters-nadja-haldimann-on-beauty-identity-and-visual-language/

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“The visual design of a website bears the responsibility of communicating the possibilities, limitations, and state of interactions. It tells users what they are seeing, how it works, and why they should care. The better at communicating we are, the easier it is for our users to use and appreciate the websites we design.

However, the wrong message may be sent to users when visual elements are applied without an understanding of the underlying interactions they are meant to support. Visual styling that obscures or clouds crucial interaction options, barriers, or status messages can have a significantly negative impact on user experience.

You can think of visual design as the “voice” of interaction design and information architecture, and therefore directly responsible for the usability of a website.”

http://blog.sessions.edu/featured-interviews/luke-wroblewski-the-hardest-working-man-in-web-design/

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“46% of respondents said that design was the most important factor in establishing credibility.”

http://www.donloper.com/web_design/why_design_matters_on_the_web.html

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“Is Beauty the new usability attribute?”

http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/oct05.asp

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Any more good ones out there?