Deemed by my colleague at Black Pixel and Xcoders organizer Paul Goracke, Xcoders this month was Watch-a-palooza! I had the pleasure of collaborating with Curt Clifton from The Omni Group on talks about WATCH and WatchKit.

Olaf Helman’s Talk

My Talk

Curt’s Talk

Q&A

In the past few years I have abandoned goals/resolutions in favor of themes or guiding principles for the new year. The reason is because sometimes goals set in the past become irrelevant by the end of the year for me. Instead, I try to establish guiding principles of my areas of focus for the year and set smaller goals based on that.

Learn

Be consumed by learning. I feel I did a pretty good job at this in 2014 when I left HTC and was taking a break and working on my side projects before joining Black Pixel. However, I hope to accomplish intensive learning throughout the course of my year without having to quit my job every time!How I will learn this year:

• Read 15 books for 2015, as per our reading group every year.
• Immerse myself around people way smarter than me. (This is every day for me at Black Pixel).
• Go to a museum once a month to see an exhibit.
• Build something with an Arduino.

Create

For the last few years, I have been rather absent from creating physical objects. My work has been mainly focused on digital products. It was not until when I 3D printed an Apple Watch that I made a physical object and refined it with files, sandpaper, and other tools.Some do not know this about me, but I was an Art major in college. Those four years I spent so much time painting, drawing, photographing, woodworking, metal smithing, and sculpting. I really miss those days and there is really no reason I cannot take those skills and apply it to my job now. In a conversation with a friend, we talked about how working in digital products (design + code) is being an artist in a different medium. That really inspired me to re-calibrate my artistic approach.A few ways to focus on creating:

• Build device prototypes with soapstone, plaster, or foam core.
• Spend more time in a machine shop or studio.

Connect

Throughout my career I’ve had many great mentors who helped me get to where I am going now. They really enabled me and donated their time to help me develop as a designer/person when they really did not have to. Now later in my career, I feel like I am in a position where I can give someone some useful guidance.An idea is to meet with a new person a month—someone needing guidance in the industry. It is amazing how an introduction can change someone’s direction or enable them. In addition, I will continue to focus on receiving guidance from my current mentors and new mentors to come.Some ways I will connect:

• Doing more public speaking and sharing with people. (Shameless plug, I will be speaking at Seattle Xcoders and CocoaConf in Portland this year).
• Meeting with my present mentors once a quarter to get feedback from them on my career and life.
• Introduce one person to someone new a month to help connect them to the design community.

Focus

Finding focus to learn, create, and connect. This means having to say no 1000 times to focus on the one yes you want to. It is not easy to do, but is necessary. In order to do this, I need to focus on what the goals I have are and stay committed to that, even if other enticing things come up and distract me from the goals. Now that said, goals can also change.This also applies to my personal life. I want to spend better time with people, not necessarily more time. I would rather have coffee and a good conversation with one person instead of going to a networking event and talking to many people briefly.For me, focus simply means being as present as possible in the what you are doing, whether that is having dinner with a friend or working on a project. Learn. Create. Connect. Focus.

Disclaimer: These are notes I took from Wren’s talk but also added my own thoughts. You can see her slides here.“We’re not designing pages. We’re designing systems of components.” —Stephen Hay (@StephenHay)

Unless you are planning to retire as a UX Designer in five years, you will work on a project that will be beyond the display—hardware-enabled, mobility, etc.Two focuses in designing (particularly on mobile):

1. LayersThe biggest takeaway for me from the talk is when Lanier discussed heavily using the Z-Axis in the way you visualize layers and flows of a product. It makes me really want to explore finding software or a plugin that can help in visualizing wireframes and prototypes in a 3-dimensional space.Layers also allow interface elements to move independently of one another. Lanier uses the example of a Big Mac (as an anti-example of this) and then next shows a carefully stacked Jenga puzzle.

Examples:

• A nav element can appear from the top of the interface and appear.
• Content can move “forward” towards the user and move out of the screen. Example
• A UI element may already exist below a layer. Example

Here is a quick drawing of how you can think of your layers. They don’t have to be entire screens but just a few UI elements to create a sense of depth.

2. Transitions

Transitions soften up the moments of change between layers, especially when a user is on a device that is viewed closer to his or her face. It also provides context cues for the user to interact with the app.For example, directly manipulating the message on the Mail app on iOS reveals options the user can interactive without taking him or her to a new screen.

What’s Next?I firmly believe that we as UX Designers are in very great danger of becoming irrelevant if we do not rapidly evolve with the technology we are designing for. We are entering the era of design of devices (in plural) and singularity is dead. Users are expecting a multi-device experience and we need to consider all the devices and the spaces between the devices.As the quote by General Eric Shinseki goes, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”View Slides

I am no beach bum, but aspire to be one. Last summer I went to Lisbon with my co-founder and some of our friends from Paris—beautiful city with perfect weather, really nice people and great food. We went to the beach to go surfing. It was my first time and didn’t know what to expect. All I knew is that it was probably going to be more difficult than I remembered.It proved to be as difficult as I anticipated but I loved every second of it. I probably got on my board about 3 out of 25 times. However, it becomes addicting to keep trying. It made me think…surfing is a great life analogy. You could probably relate this to personal life but I’ll focus on decision-making as it relates to work (mainly).What does surfing teach you about life?

Choosing the right wave

The first thing I had to learn was to choose the right wave. I can’t tell you how many times I got on a wave that seemed good from a distance, and was too small to even go anywhere. On the flip side, I passed on a lot of waves which turned out to be great ones I should have jumped on. The perception of something from the distance skewed what it actually was as it approached closer. As I got more experience observing waves, I was able to make more confident judgments.

Committing

One thing is certain: You cannot half-commit on a wave. When you see a wave you want to take, you have to start paddling with your arms full speed and go 100% even if it is not the ideal wave. I think this is often true when it comes to life. When you decide on something, you need to see it through with no regrets, because hesitation can often be the first step to failure. At the same time, you can decide on pass on something, but you felt it was the right decision at the time.

Going full force until success or failure

They say in the startup world, that you want to fail quickly. Why? Because you want to get to the point where you realize if something is worth doing or not without wasting too much time or money. The results were really apparent for me; either I get on the board or fall off immediately.

Learn from successes and failures, and try again

After each attempt, I thought to myself, “What did I do wrong? Did I try to stand up too soon (or late)? Was the wave not good enough?” I take each experience and remember it for my next attempt. I think about this when our Xhatch team works on client projects. We talk about what we did well, and what we could do better. Even in the most successful projects, there are always things we could have done better.If I were to ever plan a team-building retreat, it would be taking the whole team surfing.

This is by far my favorite Apple commercial. It really encompasses what Steve Jobs is about and what Apple is. Honestly, it’s not about the products solely—they are just part of it. They are just tools to use to unleash creativity, passion, and to make a dent in the universe. As Steve says, “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”Even something as synthetic as creating software, applications, and hardware…the X-Factor is the human element. I still can’t believe it’s been a year since Steve has past. It is quite amazing to imagine how much impact someone you have never met has in your life, but they do. A dent in the universe is created by all the smallest movements. Imagine all the impact we are making right now. We are changing the way things are every second. Why wouldn’t we do more to change it in a positive way?It was this time last year that we decided to make Xhatch exclusively dedicated to iOS design and development. I’ve been blessed to work with some of the most dedicated people I know. Every second I work with them feels like fun. We love what we do, and not many people can say that.Last year we said we would set a goal of having one app in the app store in dedication to Steve.We have four.Yet, we feel like we haven’t done anything, because we can do so much more.Thank you, Steve. We hope to continue your work in the best way possible.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.