pelago

If your employees aren’t satisfied with their jobs, no amount of money will make them happy and cooperative. If you want the kind of staff that stays late to make a deadline because they’re dedicated and not because you made them, you need to speak to the one thing every employee desires the ability to make a difference.

The issue: Engineers are from Mars, designers are from Venus. Engineers tend to obsess over the details of getting products to work — but they’re uncomfortable with the critical questions that have to be answered before a new product ever gets to manufacturing. Who will buy it? What value will it add? Designers revel in those sloppier issues, but they tend to cower when confronted with problems related to craftsmanship, durability, and reliability. That results in product after product that fails on one dimension or the other — or worse yet, both.

Google’s idea search starts with an internal Web page that takes minutes to set up. Using a program called Sparrow, even Google employees without Internet savvy ( there are a few ) can create a page of ideas. That enables the company to cast its net across its 300-plus employees. “We never say, ‘This group should innovate, and the rest should just do their jobs,’” says Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management. “Everyone spends a fraction of their day on R&D.”

Do you ever feel there is not enough time to do everything you want? Do you ever end the day with a list of things-to-do? Do you ever finish the week with more you need to get done?

Navigation should mirror, or enhance, the customer interaction that exists offline. The final design depends on the company’s strategy for distributing information to particular user groups or, rather, their strategy for customer experience.

In traditional creative agencies – designers talk in terms of ideas, brand values, tone of voice and visual language. However the constant use of “look and feel” to describe the role of designers in interactive agencies does only harm – it positions them as nothing more than painters and decorators.

One of the hottest topics these days in Information Architecture circles is documentation. This is probably partly because the IA’s role is so ill defined. Our jobs sit perched between engineering and graphic design: go too far in one direction, we’re doing the coding, go to far in the other and we are doing the design. Neither role maximizes the architect’s key skills; defining the organizational structure and behavior of the web site or application.

There’s never an appropriate moment for an economic downturn, but for the information architecture community, the recent shift has been particularly ill-timed. Just as we were beginning to make some headway in making the case for the value of our contribution to the ‘Web design’ process, economic pressures are forcing us to evangelize ourselves even more vigorously, as we face heightened skepticism from clients pressured by economic circumstances and weary from five years of dot-com snake oil sales pitches.

The rational rules of management don’t apply when it comes to fostering creative types. In this Harvard Business Review excerpt, the author explains why you should, among other things, encourage creative workers to defy superiors.

The “personality gap” between programmers and designers is really a matter of perception. Unfortunately, the idea that artists only design and techies only program limits the productivity of today’s Web teams.

Our education often teaches us that we are either creative or scientific, and never the twain shall meet. Employers extend that model, separating artistic duties from technical tasks. But how employees identify themselves significantly impacts the production process. Pigeonholing them isn’t an effective way to produce quality work.