New Year’s Resolutions get a bad rap, and many say they’re trite and futile. I couldn’t disagree more.

Setting goals, especially challenging ones, is the best way to effectively change behavior. A resolution is a commitment to oneself, and I can’t think of a more honorable and necessary thing for a human to do than to make a promise to themselves to reach their true potential.

The way I see it, New Year’s Resolutions are a personal product strategy. And without a strategy, success is just luck.

On Twitter I deemed 2011 the Year of the Book. What that really signifies to me is that I want to slow down, be more focused, be more thoughtful, and get back in touch with life’s simple pleasures.

With that in mind, and in the spirit of truth and openness, I want to share my New Year’s Resolutions for 2011 with you:

1. Make more time to learn
2. Take time to make decisions
3. Enjoy cooking
4. Make more time for old friends
5. Make physical and mental health the highest priority
6. Make time for myself and disconnect
7. Be nicer to myself
8. Don’t lower myself to meet another’s expectations
9. Don’t agree to do things I don’t want to do
10. Save money to save me from myself
11. Speak the truth

What are your New Year’s Resolutions? Are they personal, professional, or a bit of both? How do you keep yourself on track throughout the year? Hate New Year’s Resolutions? Tell us why.

• Happy New Year to You
• SXSW Interactive: Never As Good As the First Time
• May you be inscribed in the book of life
• I am (more than?) a bunch of adjectives
• My 2nd Indie Anniversary

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to define your audience, how to name them. We all know that if you design for everyone, you end up designing for no one. But demarcating a group of people can be a real struggle, especially since people exhibit different behaviors in different situations — one of the axioms of user experience.

As I’ve been trying to find a single all-encompassing word to describe our target market, something vivid yet versatile, obvious yet open, I keep repeating these statements to myself:

You are a pedestrian, relative to a driver.

You are a civilian, relative to a soldier.

You are a layman, relative to an expert.

You are an amateur, relative to a professional.

You are a foreigner, relative to a native.

You are a spectator, relative to a participant.

You are an editor, relative to a writer.

You are a neighbor, relative to a neighbor.

You are a victim, relative to a perpetrator.

You are a donor, relative to a recipient.

You are an employee, relative to an employer.

You are a success, relative to a failure.

You are a successor, relative to a predecessor.

You are a realist, relative to an idealist.

You are a moderate, relative to a radical.

You are a competitor, relative to a partner.

You are a regular, relative to an occasional.

You are a constant, relative to a variable.

You are an introvert, relative to an extrovert.

You are a buyer, relative to a seller.

You are a celebrity, relative to an unknown.

You are a listener, relative to a talker.

You are an independent, relative to a conformist.

My point? To truly understand who someone is, you also have to study who they’re not. To design for your target, you must consider their antithesis.

Who’s the antithetical user of your site? Who’s the anthesis of you?

• Maimonides’ Eight Levels of Charity Applied to Building Your Personal Brand
• Your target market cannot be everyone
• Ultra Light User Experience
• My Top 10 User Experience Blogs to Watch in 2010 on Blogs.com
• See For Yourself on Johnny Holland Magazine

Perhaps not coincidentally, I had two totally separate conversations on Sunday within the same theme: how much should I charge?

Later that day I tweeted:

Several folks responded that they’d like to hear more about my reflection in a blog post, so here it is.

One conversation was with a friend who’s interviewing for a new full-time job. Another was with a friend who’s pitching a consulting gig. Both were unsure of how to make their case.

Ultimately we all realized that this has very little to do with the money itself — something I think I already knew, but needed to relearn. Money is only a quantitative assessment and agreement between supply and demand, consumer and producer. Value is determined by the scarcity of the merchandise; the more you have something to offer that no one else can provide, the more you’ll get paid.

When anyone asks me, “How do I figure out my value?” I say that value is the greatest amount that someone is willing to pay. It’s incredibly elastic, so it’s crucial that we continually put ourselves in a position to figure out how that value is shifting.

But there’s a deeper issue here: your current value is not necessarily equal to your worth. And the only way to get your value as close as possible to your worth is to know how to sell yourself.

Of course there are people out there whose value is much greater than their worth, and I say more power to them for selling something that doesn’t exist. What they lack in hard skills they certainly make up for in soft ones.

What you’re worth is a question only you can answer. It’s loosely a combination of your ability, experience, and instinct. I don’t believe any of these three can be objectively measured, therefore it’s your responsibility to make a subjective assessment and assign a dollar amount to it.

Some people charge by the hour, but I won’t. If my worth requires more time to shine through, the client should not be penalized. But if my worth gets me to the answer faster, why should I be penalized?

When you present a client with three options — the rate you’re willing to take, the rate you expect, and the rate you deserve — any smart businessperson would offer the rate you’re willing to take. Why? Because it is every business’s duty to increase revenue and decrease cost. If a business isn’t actively trying to do this, that probably isn’t a business you should be working for.

They’ll ask for the cheapest option and will agree to limited scope, but I assure you they’ll come to expect more than they’re paying for as the project progresses. Because they know that you have more to offer. They know you’re worth more. And worst of all, they know that you don’t.

Accepting a valuation that’s less than you’re worth is a quick way to lose others’ respect and diminish your chance of success. By pricing your value at full worth, you give the person an opportunity to have more than they thought they needed. Not everyone will recognize this opportunity, but the right person will. That’s the person you want to work for.

Having a full-time salary isn’t much different. If you believe you deserve more, then you owe it to yourself to ask for it. But remember that you’re also going to be expected to deliver on it. It might mean having to up your game.

You find your worth when you butt up against your own limitations. If you aren’t always trying to outdo yourself, then you won’t know where that worth lies. Moreover, you lose the biggest opportunity of all: making yourself worth more.

• My SXSW Core Conversation: “Breaking Taboos: Pros Get Real About Money Matters”
• Fire your worst customers
• The Work I Love
• Do Not Underestimate the Power of a Great PM
• Web 2.0 Expo NY: Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics 2.0: Rethinking Decision Making in a ’2.0′ World

“For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it?” — Luke 14:28

It’s not every day I quote the Bible. All the rarer that I quote from the New Testament, given the fact that I’m Jewish.

But I happened upon this passage for the first time a couple months ago while I was reading Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover, and it really struck me. Though Ramsey uses it to make a point about financial planning, my brief research tells me that it is attributed to Jesus, regarding the cost of being a disciple.

If you’re going to devote yourself to a cause, and want to succeed, first you need to determine whether you’ll have the ability to endure.

This has applicability in all aspects of our lives: using our money, running a business, being in a relationship. I call it Preactive Procedure, in contrast to Reactive Procedure.

Perhaps put another way, do you lead with your id or your superego?

I see a lot of products developed using the Reactive Procedure:

1. I’m scratching my itch.
2. Should I keep scratching this itch?
3. I’ll scratch this other itch.

As a user experience designer, consultant, and member of the NY tech community, I instead advocate for using the Preactive Procedure:

1. Who’s itchy?
2. That itch isn’t being scratched.
3. This is how to scratch that itch.

By taking this approach, there’s a much higher likelihood of success — true understanding of needs, widespread value, and a sustainable solution. Most of all, there’s purpose.

Purpose is everything to me. Simon Sinek puts it more concretely than anyone with his Why? How? What? statement. By starting with why, we understand and acknowledge the “driving motivation for action.” This is much more meaningful than, “I’m itchy.” Instead of acting from our id, we act with our superego. We look outside ourselves for the answers. We dedicate ourselves to a greater mission.

But this, too, is just masturbation. The product becomes secondary to the process. We concern ourselves far too much with the theoretical and neglect the practical.

Campbell McKellar, founder of Loosecubes, is the first person to make me realize that there’s something even better than the Preactive Procedure — the Proactive Procedure.

By acting sooner, you are actually achieving more. You are creating the future instead of just predicting and accommodating for it. You are inventing a new reality, based half in what people need, and half in what you want them to have. You can observe behavior sooner and course-correct. It is the most transformative of all three procedures for both the subject and the object. In other words, it’s leading with your ego.

This is the way to balance user experience and business vision. It is the holy grail of product strategy. And it’s a new mentality I’m ready to try on for size.

[Some inspiration for this post]

• Designing for Startups in Smashing Magazine
• The Work I Love
• If the product doesn’t work, its “user experience” doesn’t matter
• Whit Hour – Week 4
• My 2011 Holiday Gift Guide of Pleasurable Experiences

Undercover Boss is one of my favorite new shows. Why? Because we desperately need to encourage upper management to get in touch with what’s really going on inside their companies. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, and it’s harming employees just as much as customers, if not more.

I was introduced to it on an episode of Oprah in which she highlighted the executives in the first two stings of the season. When I first heard the name of the show, I assumed it was about bosses going undercover to discover the negligence of their employees; instead it’s about discovering the negligence of themselves.

The series premiere featured two major corporations: Waste Management and 7-Eleven, both multi-billion dollar annual revenue companies. [Watch full episodes at CBS.com]

Posing as a regular dude, Larry O’Donnell, President and COO of Waste Management, worked alongside his lowest-level employees — sorting through waste, collecting garbage from a landfill, cleaning Porta-Potties — and was even fired for the first time in his life.

The moment that was the most poignant for me was when O’Donnell was on a garbage truck in Rochester, NY, with a female driver named Janice who visits more than 300 homes a day. At one point during their shift, Janice disappears for a bit while Larry was talking to the cameras. As they’re getting back into the truck, Larry notices that Janice is holding a tin can and offers to take it for her (she’s driving). She flinches and says, “No no no, this is my pee-can.” Larry first thinks, “Where I’m from we call it pee-kahn” — but then realizes what it is. Janice goes on to explain that while she enjoys working for the company, they aren’t very female friendly. Her manager hasn’t scheduled enough time for her to use the restroom along her route, and while the men just pull over to the side of the road to go, she can’t exactly do that. Instead she pees in a can that she keeps for the day and empties it out at the end of her shift.

Needless to say, as the President and COO of the company, Larry is devastated to hear this, but tries to keep his cool so not to blow his cover. In his interview with Oprah, he explains how eye-opening it was to realize how little of the process he truly understood. Here he is, running this company, and he doesn’t even think about the fact that someone, somewhere, is driving this truck, and there isn’t any policy in place to allow time for bathroom breaks.

Of course he says on national television that changes are being made, as anyone would. But it got me wondering about the companies I work with, and the antiquated and often inhumane processes that not only harm customers, but more often the employees who are trying to serve them.

All of the discourse around user experience is about the rights of the user — maybe because of what it’s called — but what if instead we focused on the human experience? Might we be able to extend our purview to all of the people affected by the systems we aim to improve?

I was very fortunate to work on a project with Reprise Media last year in which I helped to redesign a piece of software they use internally (I’ll leave it at that for confidentiality purposes). The best part the gig for me was uncovering some significant inefficiencies in the process that surrounded the software, some that even the department’s manager was unaware of. And this guy is very hands on with his staff, and very with it. But he doesn’t shadow them all day every day. He doesn’t sit and ask them about the difficulties they’re facing in getting their jobs done well — and even if he did, they probably wouldn’t answer 100% truthfully because he’s their boss.

It felt really wonderful to help meet the needs of users who are inside the company, many of whom had probably never felt considered before. I’d love the opportunity to do more work like this, but moreso, I’d love for more companies to start thinking of their own employees’ needs with as much gravity as they do their customers’.

The fact is, if your staff isn’t healthy and happy, your customers certainly won’t be. So take a moment to look inside. You might be alarmed at what you find.

• The Work I Love
• Elegy for Capitalism
• Photo of the day: Bottom loading instructions
• Nationwide Insurance demonstrates user research with NationPam
• The plain numbers about women in tech – The Startups

On April 18, 2010, Griffin James Lam Konig was born at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasett, NY, weighing in at 7 lbs 13 oz.

Griffin’s mom Donna is the 39-year-old daughter of my childhood babysitter Theresa (who I’ve always called T-T).

The day after Griffin came home from the hospital, twenty-seven years after Theresa welcomed me home from the hospital, Donna and her husband Bill asked me to be Griffin’s godmother. Theresa’s grandson is my godson.

When he first opened his eyes.

I’m an only child so I’ll never truly know the experience of being an aunt. If I’m lucky I’ll be an aunt to my future husband’s nieces and nephews, and I’m sure that I’ll have friends whose kids consider me an aunt, but I’ll never really be one by blood.

Although I am not related to Theresa by blood, she was my babysitter for the first 9-1/2 years of my life. To be clear, my parents were very present in my childhood, and continue to be amazing, loving, parents, but they own and run a company together, and have an active life away from home. Plain and simple, Theresa was a second mother to me. Her family (which also includes her son David and husband Earl) always felt like family to me, and now, in a way, they actually are.

I never expected that Donna might ask me to be Griffin’s godmother. That she did is one of the greatest gifts I will ever receive. It is an honor of epic proportions — and I also recognize that it is a huge responsibility.

Despite being Jewish (the concept of godparents being of Christian origin), I actually have a godmother of my own, and a wonderful one at that. Bonnie has been my mom’s best friend since they were in the second grade. While I was growing up, she would take me shopping, take me to dinner, stay up-to-date with what was going on in my life, tell me stories of her young adult adventures, and just generally provide me with wisdom and love.

Now that I’ve become a godmother, I felt it was important to do a bit of research to see might be expected of me in this new role. Traditionally, a godparent is meant to ensure the religious education of the child — after all, the term is godparent. But the modern take is to be a spiritual guide, an über-mentor, and a caretaker in the event that the parents are no longer present.

In thinking about what it will mean to help shape Griffin’s spirituality, I couldn’t help but relate it to my role as a user experience designer. At the core of what we do — all of the material artifacts we produce put aside — we transform the value systems of the organizations in which we work. A true user experience designer sees conflict between the internal mechanisms of the company and the external audience it wants to reach, and aims to bring greater truth to the interaction between the two, creating deeper meaning for the business and for the customer.

Is that not the same thing as encouraging spirituality? I see spirituality as the desire to develop your inner self, connecting yourself to the greater universe and finding the inspiration to be the best possible version of yourself you can be. Isn’t that our higher mission as user experience designers? To encourage our companies to be better versions of themselves, to have a stronger connection with the people they serve, to continually self-reflect and readjust their behavior accordingly? I think they’re very much the same.

So while the long road ahead as Griffin’s godmother seems daunting, I feel confident that I have the skills to do the job well, and to have an important impact on not only how the world sees him, but how he sees himself. It’s my first month on a new life-long project, and I can’t wait to get to work.

• Samantha LeVan’s Lame Cancer
• Finding Myself in You
• The User Experience Designer’s Anthem
• You’re not a user experience designer if…
• Designing for Startups in Smashing Magazine

The words both start with L-E-A, but can leadership really be learned?

As a consultant, I have the pleasure and challenge to work with a variety of different teams. I am a team of one, but I collaborate with agency teams (such as Happy Cog, whom I’m working with on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum project), internal client teams, freelance designers and developers.

Sometimes I’m brought in by an executive on the client side. Sometimes I’m brought in by an agency who has already won the client. Sometimes I’m brought in by a consultant to the client, who is helping them to build a team.

Almost every time, it’s incredibly unclear who’s leading.

I mention Happy Cog above because I fall over myself with excitement every time I get to work with them. Not just because they’re some of the most talented, most professional, most revered people working on the web today — but because everyone’s role is crystal clear, and every team member can point to the project lead in under 3 seconds. Not only that, every team member respects the project lead and follows their lead. It is in NO way a dictatorship, but it is also not a sociocracy — “a system of governance using consent-based decision.” It’s a meritocracy, where the lead becomes the lead because he demonstrates that he can lead, and that he’s willing to.

It’s a deep honor to work with these people, and have the opportunity to do things right, and well. But at the same time, it has made me acutely aware of the leadership problems that I have faced on almost all of my other projects.

Since I am always brought in as a consultant, I am never the true project lead because it is ultimately not my responsibility to implement the solution and integrate it into the business. One day I would very much like it to be, but that’s simply not the case right now. While I do currently get to lead almost all of the user experience phases of these projects, I still have an overall project lead that I report into — and in order for my work to be successful and impactful, the leader has to possess some pretty specific qualities.

My expectations for a leader are:

• To set clear goals, and to continually articulate them in written and verbal form to the team
• To motivate the team to believe in their vision
• To recognize and nurture the expertise that each person on the team brings to the project
• To assign actionable tasks with measurable results
• To express their appreciation for the contribution that each team member makes
• To be decisive and confident
• To ask team members for their input on key issues, but to always take responsibility for making final decisions
• To stay calm
• To ask for help when they need it
• To put the needs of people above the needs of things

I very rarely come across people who possess these qualities, and who take pride in not just what they do, but how they do it. I’ve been spoiled by working with Happy Cog, and I worry that I’ll have a really hard time working with people who don’t meet these expectations.

Part of my responsibility as a consultant is to clearly and respectfully communicate to my clients what I need from them in order to be successful. But I have to ask myself: Can leadership be learned? If it can, do I have the authority and chutzpah to express my expectations to the person who’s supposed to be my leader, or should I simply use this list as a rubric against which I evaluate potential projects and working teams?

I’m sharing my thoughts with you as I’m going through a period of discovery, so not all of this is entirely clear in my mind. I would love your honesty and guidance in helping me thinking through some of these issues.

Thanks in advance for your advice and understanding.

• Do Not Underestimate the Power of a Great PM
• Web 2.0 Expo NY: “10 Tips for Creative Environments” with Adaptive Path’s Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson
• Happy Cog and Happy Whitney
• Loosecubes and the future of work
• Whit Hour – Week 4

In Seth Godin’s recent blog post, more, More, MORE!, he makes the unpopular-but-wise assertion that until you fire your worst customers, you’ll never be able to do your best.

I think it applies to clients just as much as consumers. The bottom line: you can’t please everyone, and it’s stupid to try. You’ll end up making no one happy — most of all yourself. Read on.

Some consumers are short-sighted, greedy and selfish.

Extend yourself a little and they’ll want a lot.

Offer a free drink in the restaurant one night and they’re angry that it’s not there the next.

The nuts in first class weren’t warm!

The challenge of winning more than your fair share of the market is that the best available strategy–providing remarkable service and an honest human connection–will be abused by a few people you work with.

You have three choices: put up with the whiners, write off everyone, or, deliberately exclude the ungrateful curs.

Firing the customers you can’t possibly please gives you the bandwidth and resources to coddle the ones that truly deserve your attention and repay you with referrals, applause and loyalty.

This seems to be the opposite of conventional wisdom to most people. Why not just charge the most difficult clients more money — an aggravation surcharge? Because there is no amount of money that will ever offset the penalty you’re passing on to your better-behaved, more deserving clients by having your time eaten up by one giant monster.

Last summer I met Anthony Casalena at a casual happy hour gathering, and we got to talking about the evolution of Squarespace, the company he founded, from a freemium model to a subscription model. I asked Anthony how he can get away with not offering a free version of his blogging platform. His answer: “I can’t get away with offering one.”

Why? In his first year of business, 90% of the time he spent answering support requests was for — you guessed it — non-paying users. He realized that the people willing to pay for the service are the ones who really believe in what he’s doing, and those are the people worth his time. Since eliminating its permanently free option (not to be confused with its 14-day free trial), Squarespace’s profits have skyrocketed, and today they’re considered one of NY Tech’s greatest success stories. Read more over at Center Networks.

I have had to deal with this in my own business. I’ve had clients whose actions made it very clear that they didn’t respect my work or my time. I convinced myself that I could just work harder and give more of myself to the project, to prove I was up to the challenge, to show that my determination has no bounds. All I really showed was that I had no self-respect. I finally got the wake up call I needed when the check never came.

You can’t win them all. But would you rather the defeat be on your terms or someone else’s? Always be conscious of who’s treating you with the graciousness you deserve, and who isn’t. When insolence is staring you in the face, it’s best to cut your losses early, and make the space in your life for those who really matter: your fans.

• Your target market cannot be everyone
• What are you worth?
• Web 2.0 Expo NY: Lane Becker’s “Customer Service is the New Marketing”
• Whit Hour – Week 4
• Marketing e-mails that actually help customers