Looking for UX work again...

Yes, I’m back on the job hunter trail again. My previous employer was a start up and they have used up too much of their funding before getting to a point where new investors could be attracted. So they laid off the entire development team on Dec 21, 2009, ostensibly for a “6 week development break” – they have a plan to attract new investment with the existing product and then re-hire the dev team Feb 1, 2010.

Unfortunately, I have my doubts about them being able to land more investment under the circumstances – there are too many issues with the product, mostly due to a lack of adequate design and development processes resulting from the dev team being given extremely short, date driven deadlines with an excessively large feature scope expectation.  In fact, although I was hired as a Usability Manager, the time given was so tight I found myself being a glorified interaction designer, with no opportunity to develop UX requirements documents or do appropriate user research to base my work on.

Anyway, I don’t think I’m going back even if they do find more investors – after some offline conversations with the CEO it seems we have a difference of opinion about what a Usability Manager should be doing. It seems he wants someone who can show him a “Usability Vision” for the product. I’m not entirely sure what he meant by that, but it is presumably a complete vision of how the application should look and how the interaction should flow, but before there has been any chance to obtain stakeholder consensus or do any user research. :P

sigh.  Such an unsatisfactory situation. For the health of my career I guess I should just wash my hands of them.

If there's anyone out there seeking someone for an upper level, hands on role (i.e., not management alone) in user experience design or an intermediate level role in web, multimedia or game design and/or front-end development, please let me know! I’m particularly interested in permanent positions but will consider contracts of 3 months or longer, especially if they are contract-to-hire.

:-j(enni)