adrianhoward

I've also found that US companies expect US bank accounts to be associated with US companies/individuals, so their standard forms are also setup that way to expect SSNs, etc.

For me, running a non-US business, international bank transfers, credit card payments (I've been… surprised… how large some CC payments have been) and PayPal (very much not ideal I agree) have been much simpler.

In the UK/EU everything is a direct bank transfer.

From the US — despite offering the wire transfer details — the majority of payments I've received are CC, PayPal and (ugh) cheque. Apparently it causes them less hassle that arranging a wire transfer with their accounts department. As ever YMMV.

Sketch is focussed on UI designers. Affinity is focussed on illustrators. Different markets, with some overlap. In many ways, within the Adobe suite, Sketch is closer to Fireworks than Illustrator.

I think part of the reason you're seeing a bit of an explosion in apps, in addition to the general digruntled-ness with Adobe, is that Illustrator is one of those apps that is serving many different markets — not all of them well.

I'd disagree with that. Some of the most entertaining bits of work I've ever done were for companies whose main job wasn't software.

The problem isn't companies who aren't focussed on software. The problem is companies that don't value the great things that software-oriented folk can produce. Unfortunately there are plenty of the latter in the software-focused end of the spectrum too.

Don't work anywhere that treats you badly. Sure. Don't work anywhere that doesn't value you. Sure. Don't work anywhere you don't enjoy yourself. Sure.

But I know some folk who are having excellent fun at banks. Solving stupidly hard problems that fascinate 'em, fostered by great management, and being compensated very well for their trouble.. I know others who have worked at large tech focussed companies that have had bloody awful stories of management idiocy. Hell — I've got more than enough horror stories from smaller tech-focused organisations.

That said — in my experience — the course work that UK universities that's much less susceptible to cheating in general than some stuff I've seen from US universities. Work varies more year-on-year, and the kind of work involved are things like essays, projects, etc that are harder to copy in a sensible way. I don't think I did a single multiple choice test in my whole degree.

He's spot on about the difference in expectation on top grades though. I've had some… interesting… chats with US students in the past when they went from all "A"s at their US institution to 70-80% at UK ones. Not so much because their answers were wrong — but because they're answers weren't 'excellent'. It seemed to cause an enormous amount of stress for them!

Not make or break maybe. Be a potentially big market - hella yeah.

The majority of design-ish people I know, including myself, would kill for a decent tablet drawing environment. Folk are already laying out for specialist devices like http://www.wacom.com/en/gb/creative/cintiq-24-hd-touch.

My iPad is cute and useful for many things. I do very rough sketch stuff on it. For professional deign work it's pretty much useless. As somebody who's been buying Apple kit since before Jobs return the surface is the first time I've ever been tempted by Windows hardware.

I know many folk who walk around with a Macbook + iPad + wacom tablet. I can see a lot of those folk switching if the Surface 3 worked well. I know lots of long-term Apple folk who were really tempted by the Surface 2.

The office junkies, coders and games have alternatives. Currently there is almost nothing that does what the Surface 2/3 do, on the design side, in a single device.

(I also imagine that the issues of stylus sensitivity & lag will apply to other interaction models to. Getting those things to feel "natural" is non-trivial. Pleasing the design folk will probably make it better for other peeps too.)

Lets you sync with iCloud / Dropbox / Google Drive.

The problem I have is, reading the landing page, I have no idea what the product does.

I've just shown it to three other UXish people. Neither do they ;-)

That suggests there may be a problem with the articulation here somewhere...

Longer version ;-)

Me: I'm about half dev & half UX. I do persona development among other things. For the last 10+ years that's been mostly in agile/lean contexts.

I'd disagree that the persona development is a long process. Persona documents are a communication tool — an artefact. It's user research that (can) take the time if done traditionally. Persona are one tool in communicating that research.

Managing the research, doing the analysis/synthesis of that research - that's the hard bit. Persona are one output from that. Your site reads like a persona creation tool - that's not the hard problem.

That said, using persona well in more agile/lean contexts is an issue for some folk. It's one various folk are already addressing in various ways (the ad-hoc persona structure you see from folk like Luxr, my incremental persona work, etc.). So there's definitely a problem to be solved for some people.

However, in my experience it's not really a software or tool problem. It's a discipline silos / workflow problem. One you get past that there are a bunch of existing tools that seem to support the necessary work just fine.

Reading your site I have no real idea what you product does, what pain points it solves, and how it would help.

Sorry ;-)

Really varied mix of content. Great venue. Had a fantastic time.

Command-+ three times until it's a legible size. Then get annoyed by the rivers in the text due to justification without hyphenation. Then close window before finish reading ;)

Some of the reasons I speak at conferences:

* Before I started speaking at conferences I got a lot out of attending. Both in learning and networking. As corny as it sounds I like to give a little back to the communities that helped me when I was younger and less experienced.

* Not everybody learns the same way. I know that I've attended workshops and talks that have made clear topics that I've found opaque after reading books, blog posts, etc. People have told me that they've got more from one of my workshops than they have from hours of reading and unstructured practice. So while I might not be reaching the maximum number of potential listeners, I may well be reaching people that I would have otherwise missed.

* I reach people through different channels. The people attending a conference are not necessarily the same people who read blog posts, mailing lists, etc. If you're following a blog on X, then you're interested in X. Conference talks are an opportunity to reach people who maybe didn't even know X existed.

* I find presenting in front of groups a little daunting and difficult. Practice has made it less daunting and easier. Communicating to groups of people is a useful life skill — from business meetings through to pitching to investors. Presenting makes me practice and improve it.

* I value the time I invest into making a good presentation. It forces me to put my thoughts in order and really think about the most effective way of communicating a topic.

* Unlike the OP I have got work through speaking. Both directly, from people who've seen my speak, and indirectly from folk googling around a subject area and finding my name pop up repeatedly around particular topics at conferences.

* I generally don't present at a conference unless I get at least travel / accommodation / ticket. So this reduces the cost of an event to opportunity cost at worst. This means I can go to more events. I enjoy and get value from conferences so this is a good thing in-of-itself for me.

* Speakers usually hang out together at some point. This means I've had the opportunity to meet and occasionally make friends with some wicked smart people. Occasionally folk in the "Squeee! I'm a fanboy" area ;-)

* I generally get more feedback from a presentation than I get from a blog post. Both directly from talk Q&A, folk approaching me with specific questions, etc. And indirectly from watching the reactions of the audience during the session.

* You often have the opportunity to present something multiple times at different events. This allows you to experiment with different ways of putting the message across with fresh audiences. Something much harder to do with blog posts, etc.

* Linode - for hosting

* Namecheap - for domains

* CrashPlan - for one layer of our backups (other layers are timemachine, dropbox, and disk imaging)

* Pinboard for links.

* Office 365 - because the £8 per month is worth it for dealing with the MS files that other people send us and expect edits on. No - OpenOffice isn't good enough at conversions.

* Google Docs - for shared editing

* Dropbox - for sharing files + another layer of backups

* ScreenHero - for screen sharing

* Slack - for chat

* Trello - for organising everything

* CloudApp - for random sharing of screenshots

* Buffer - for social account organisation (suboptimal - but best of the bunch that I've played with.)

* Until recently Adobe CS subscription, but our usage dropped so much we've swapped for Pixelmator & Sketch as an experiment...

* Sublime Text 2 - editing on desktop

* Editorial & Writeroom - writing on iPad & iPhone

* OmniGraffle - wireframing, but very rarely used now

* aText - text abbreviation expansion on OS X

* Carbon Copy Cloner - backups

* Air Display - so I can use the iPad as a second screen when I'm on the road

* AntiRSI - reminds me to take screen breaks

* Skype - conference calls

* Transmit - [S]FTP client

* TunnelBear - UK/US tunneling, useful when I'm not in UK for some foolish things

Play:

* Have a subscription to the excellent PseudoPod, EscapePod & PodCastle podcasts

* SMBC comic patreon subscription

* Whatever the amazon streaming video thing is called

* Amazon Prime

* Downcast - Podcasting app for iOS / OS X.

* Steam - games (barely use)

Steve Matteson's Open Sans is another one that's become a bit of a go-to typeface for me.

Some others that I like https://pinboard.in/u:adrianh/t:font+free+good

Starting at the framework end doesn't help me much. Instead I go with the people I have for the project and the things I want to do/validate - and start looking for what gets me progress as quickly as possible.

For us - and I know for some other folk I've talked to about exactly this topic - things like delicious and pinboard are really important services. I've done a little bit of custdev around this since a "better pinboard/delicious" for my particular use case is something I'm interested in.

I may be atypical. I may not be part of a large enough market for a real business to be built around (only done a little bit of custdev ;-). I've no idea.

But I do know there are people willing to pay at least that much on a monthly basis. Coz I've got a smallish mailing list of 'em ;-)

I would. I would pay $10 pm for the current pinboard service quite happily - and there are a bunch of things I hate about it!

I'd probably pay more for something that wasn't ugly as sin, had good support for team sharing, better historical browsing, etc.

You were also, at that point, restricted to arbitrary hierarchies rather than arbitrary tagging. The ability to slice bookmarks over multiple categories is stupidly useful (for me anyway.)

Need something that's cross-platform, cross-browser with arbitrary tagging and suddenly you're looking at third party service.

Add to that the discover side of shared bookmarking tools (Gee - I wonder what everybody else has tagged with "foo") and a third party service is the only thing that will help.

I was a really happy delicious used before the post-yahoo rewrite. Then they lost about 1000 bookmarks of mine so I moved to pinboard - where I'm not quite unhappy enough to go write my perfect system ;-)

I wonder if that's a US thing? I'm based in the UK and have been unfortunate enough to have a bunch of friends and family die of different cancers over the last ten years. In all but one case they were told almost as soon as they had a diagnosis. In the one case that wasn't the second consultant that did tell us was quite visibly cross that the first consultant hadn't done the job.

For me TDD is a design/development practice, not a testing practice. That's where it delivers value for me.