The NY Tech Meetup, founded by Meetup.com founder Scott Heiferman and co-founded by Dawn Barber, has more than 19,000 members and draws 800 attendees every month. Last year, NYTM became a 501(c)(6) non-profit organization incorporated in New York State and as a result now has a Board of Directors that steers the priorities of the organization. There is currently one open board seat and I am campaigning to be elected.
My mission as a member of the NYTM Board of Directors will be to relentlessly advocate for the needs and desires of our membership, and to ensure that their priorities mirror the priorities of the organization.
Voting is now open for all members of NYTM who have RSVPed to at least one event, and continues through December 20. If you qualify to vote, I hope you’ll consider me to be your candidate.
At a Meet the Candidates event at New Work City tonight, each candidate was given two minutes to share their platform. I have shared the full-text of my speech below.
If you have any questions or comments about my platform, please don’t hesitate to ask here in the comments or via email at whitney@whitneyhess.com.
Thank you for your support.
I’m a user experience designer. That means I help organizations create easy and pleasurable experiences for their customers. And as a 4-year member of the NYTM, I can tell you that the experience of being an attendee has significant room for improvement. From the ticketing process, to entering the venue, to event format, Q&A, exiting and after party. We’ve become a really big crowd and as we’ve scaled, we have lost a tremendous amount of the camaraderie that existed in earlier years without equally increasing the value that the event itself provides.
I’m a native New Yorker, run a UX consultancy here and have worked with dozens of Startups who have had the heart to set up shop in NY. Whether in their infancy or adolescence, 5 users or 500,000, I have taught them how to understand and empathize with their customers, deepen engagement and create long-lasting fans. I show companies how to make people’s lives better.
When people pay $10 to attend a meetup, and have to hover over their browsers waiting for tickets to become available like it’s a Justin Bieber concert, we need to make them feel like it was the best $10 they’ll ever spend. Tickets need to be easier to procure, both for first-timers and for members who have supported the meetup for years. There needs to be total visibility into the demo selection process, with some degree of input from the NYTM membership. The demos — and the moderation — should be professional and rehearsed, with no duds; we should be training presenters on how to communicate their vision and wow the audience. And for a tech meetup, there absolutely needs to be reliable and powerful wifi, no excuses.
That’s what I want to do for the NYTM and that’s what I hope you’ll help me do by electing me to the Board of Directors.
Thank you.
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Tags:Community·New York·Technology
It’s quite overdue, but this blog is now optimized to be viewed in a mobile browser. Many thanks to Ben Seven for giving me the kick in the ass I needed to get it done:
Commented on You’re not a user experience designer if… by Ben Seven:
Are you allowed to call yourself a User Experience designer if you don’t care about the user experience of your own blog on handheld devices? I tried reading this article on the bus home having seen it retweeted, and enjoyed the delicious irony of it not being particularly web friendly. Just saying – UX suffers from the same thing my profession does – people calling themselves designers with no real expertise, qualification or questioning from clients – but it’s strange to be concerned about the experience of computer interaction and not catch up with the boom in mobile web browsing on your own platform!
I confess to having a case of “the cobbler’s children have no shoes.” I think some of the busiest practitioners have the crappiest websites because we’re so busy fixing other people’s problems. But it’s no excuse. I need to do a major website redesign pronto.
But hey, now you can at least read this on mobile! Please leave a comment if you are right now.
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Tags:Accessibility·Blogging·Design·Mobile
It was 7:19pm. There I was, standing outside of Tarzian Hardware, its gate down and locked, the lights turned off. The store hours sign read Monday – Friday 8:30am – 7pm. I knocked on the window. I rattled the gate. I called the store from my cell phone with 8% battery remaining and could hear the ringing inside. No answer. I planned to leave a message in desperation in the hopes that someone would check voicemail overnight, but the mailbox was full. I was screwed.
The only copy of my apartment keys were inside.
I had brought them in an hour earlier to get dupes made, then left to run other errands. In my attempt to be efficient, I had made a fatal mistake: I never checked to see when the store closed. I’m accustomed to stores being open 24/7, certainly not closing at 7pm. Toto, we’re not in Manahttan anymore.
As I stood there hopeless, planning to ride the subway 45 minutes to stay overnight in my parents’ empty apartment (yeah, I had those keys!), I gave it one last ditch effort by Googling the store owner’s name in an attempt to find a home phone number. The store had only been closed for 20 minutes; the closing manager couldn’t be too far away, right?
Google turned up dry. I was out of options.
Just when I turned around to leave, I saw a man with a dog approaching the apartment building above the store. I had a game-time decision to make, and I went for it: “Excuse me,” I asked to his back as he put his keys in the front door.
“Yes?”
“I’m so sorry to bother you, but I was just wondering if you know the owners of this store.”
“I do.” Wow, Park Slopers are tight, I thought.
“Well do you happen to have their phone number? I didn’t know what time they closed and the only copy of my house keys are inside.” I was embarrassed to say it out loud.
“I have the keys to the store,” he said, and blood started coursing through my veins again.
“I can’t believe you have the keys to the store,” I exclaimed. “What luck!” He tied up his dog to a hydrant and got down on the ground to unlock the gate and the door.
As he undid the last lock, he looked up at me. “I’m the owner.”
Dumbfounded. Seriously?! THIS is Brooklyn.
Once inside, he found the copies of my keys under the counter along with the several screwdrivers I had put aside earlier to buy when I came back. When he was ringing me up and the cost was rising, he generously asked, “Did you mean to buy this brand? These are professional grade tools.” I thanked him for his honesty and told him that I was replacing some of my old and broken stuff, and a salesperson had helped me find these. “And these are the ones he told you to get?” He almost seemed upset that the guy had upsold me.
“I’m fine with these. I’ll never have to replace them again,” I said, grateful that he had been there to save me and eager not to shortchange him now.
As he finished up, I asked him his name (John) and his story (family business since 1921 that he now runs). I told him my name, said I was new to the neighborhood, and assured him that he’d be seeing a lot of me.
As we walked out and he closed up, I was struck by something: in 29 years, I’ve never introduced myself to a shop owner before. I’ve never cared to. I have greatly treasured my anonymity in the big city and have rarely engaged in small talk anywhere I’ve shopped. I’ve valued getting in and out quickly, silently, and mechanically. I truly don’t know why.
But I chose to move, chose to leave my native Manhattan with its deadly consumerist march and its Disneyfication and its hordes of tourists and multiplying big box chains. I wanted to live in a cozy neighborhood, to support its small businesses, to know its history and to become a part of it.
I’ve always wanted to go where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came. Where customer service is a moral obligation, not a business tactic.
I am home.
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Tags:Community·Customer Experience·New York·Pleasure
All men carry pens, right? But putting a pen in your pants pocket can be a bit of a pain — it rolls around with your keys, sticks out to one side, the cap tears at the pocket lining.
Sitting next to my friend Nik Agharkar at a dinner party, I noticed him reach inside his suit jacket to grab a pen when the bill came. And that’s when I saw it: the pen pocket.
Forgive me if this is incredibly common and I’m just late to the game. I’m not a man, I don’t own men’s suits, and I don’t have a tendency to look inside many men’s suit jackets. Or perhaps I just don’t know many men who wear bespoke suits. Nik’s suit by Custom Men has this ingenius feature and I just had to snap a pic.
I poked around and found other examples of this:
Peyman Umay:
“Pen pocket is a simple and practical addition to your suit. This is a must have customization option for business men. Pulling a high class pen from a pen pocket to sign an important deal is a great way to display a personalized lining color and to subtly insinuate that you own a bespoke suit.”
A Suit that Fits:
“No more fumbling around in your pocket trying to get a grasp of your Mont Blank (or 4 bic); our fantastic New Product Development whizz, Mighel Critten, has launched a REALLY cool attribute that’ll be put into all our suits for this moment onwards! On the inside of the jacket, next to the pocket, is a small slot specifically designed to hold a pen. This extra feature will now come with every suit purchased from ASuitThatFits.com.”
But of course, this feature is conditional for two user groups: right-handed or left?
Wistful Writer:
“I was thoroughly satisfied, save for the fact that they failed to ask me if I was left-handed: the pen pocket on the inside of the jacket was on the wrong side. … If I were a more patient man who cared immensely about the placement of the pen pocket, I would’ve held the Michael Andrews Bespoke to their satisfaction guarantee. However, the truth is that it’s not all that important to me, and I already felt that seven weeks was long enough to wait.”
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Tags:Design·Photography·Pleasure
Two weeks ago, I bit the bullet and moved to Brooklyn. To my Manhattanite parents, this is a betrayal of epic proportions. To my childhood friends, I’ve lost my mind. But to the web community, what the hell took me so long?
I’ll tell you. It’s quite simple really. I’m not cool.
The same week I moved, I attended the much-acclaimed Brooklyn Beta. It was filled with borough-dwellers wearing plaid shirts and black-rimmed glasses. Even the women. They have nerdy tattoos and bed head. They take sketchnotes with fat markers and draw their own avatars. They live to build stuff. They want to change the world. I want to change the world too, but I’m not cool.
I have perfect vision and I’ve never dyed my hair. My body is a blank canvas dressed by Ann Taylor and her friends. I’m not skinny. I hate electronica. I can’t draw. I like money. I’m not cool.
I’m not popular cool and I’m not nerd cool. I’m not stylish or trendy, ironic or vintage. I’m not into politics or literature. I don’t follow sports or indie films. I haven’t seen the Star Wars trilogy. I couldn’t understand a Woot shirt if I tried. I don’t know what fonts were recently released by Typekit. I haven’t upgraded to iOS5.
I’m not friends with all the right people. I often feel like I don’t fit in. Sometimes it gets to me that I’m not on the inside. It can seem like everyone else is in on something I never caught onto. It can make me feel behind.
But then I realize…
I think we all feel judged. I think we all struggle to remain current. I think we all carry the burdens of high school too far into our adulthood. And the echo chamber is bullshit. No one has all the answers. No one knows the right way. We’re all in service to something much greater than ourselves and that’s what we each really need to focus on — not whether we’re accepted, or impressing anyone, or fulfilling another person’s expectations of who we are, who we’re supposed to be, and what we’re doing here.
I know exactly what I’m doing here. I’m doing me. You do you. Then let’s do ourselves together.
Get your head out of the gutter.
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Tags:Community·Digressions·Learning
