28 Jun 2013
In my role as a Business Developer at Planet Argon, it’s important to keep connected to Portland’s creative and business community. One of the ways I attempt to gather local intelligence and randomly bump into interesting strangers from other companies, is to regularly attend several of the awesome networking type events around town. There are many to choose from, but this post will focus specifically on CreativeMornings.
24 Jun 2013
Kris Gale of Yammer talks about the costs of introducing complexity into your application.
While I agree with many points, i do worry that sometimes there is too much of a disconnect between Engineers and the Product Owners. If you’re in the position of asking someone to build something… are you explaining why it needs to be built?
If you’re the person being asked to build something… are you asking why?
20 Jun 2013
Our friends over at Blue Box (awesome Ruby on Rails hosting) sent a few of us some nice jackets. We’re hoping they’ll include us in their 2013 Fall Fashion catalog.
18 Jun 2013
When I first came on staff as a User Experience Designer at Planet Argon, one of my very first projects was to take our responsive site, Brainstormr and bring it into the mobile world by building an iPhone application for it. My experience designing Brainstormr was the first time I had gotten an opportunity to do a Mobile Application design and I jumped at the opportunity. There was a lot of research and learning involved, but it was totally worth it, and now i am proud to say my first application design came out a success. Here are a few things I learned along the way.
18 Jun 2013
So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.
Always ask yourself, "how does this benefit our mission?"
18 Jun 2013
We've launched a native iOS app that everyone can collaborate on or offline, export ideas to Evernote, collect ideas from their social networks and keep up with their Brainstormr lists on-the-go.
13 Jun 2013
Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned while being at Planet Argon has been the value of learning on the job. As a design student, there is freedom to create something that is largely for your own visual tastes. But in a professional environment, the world changes when there’s a client and an approval process.
11 Jun 2013
We released an iPhone application to compliment our web application, Brainstormr.
11 Jun 2013
Perfect doesn’t mean flawless. Perfect means it does exactly what I need it to do. A vacation can be perfect even if the nuts on the plane weren’t warmed before serving.
4 Jun 2013
It had been about 6 or 7 years since I went to my last Webvisions Conference in Portland, so I was really excited to go this year since the web has evolved and really changed a lot since then. Planet Argon bought me a pass for Thursday and Friday, and I heard lots of great talks over the two days. Some were on The Agile and Lean UX Methods and working well with your team, some were on how to explain things better and how to develop a curiosity that will take you through your whole career. More technical talks were about things like video on the web, API’s, or building dynamic prototypes.
Among all these different topics and speakers, I had one consistency that helped me retain all the information better (and probably communicate it better to other people on the web too).
It was by taking what I have learned at the conference and sketch-noting the talks.
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