I spent yesterday at the Minneapolis / St. Paul MinneBar BarCamp, my first BarCamp attendance. I thought it was terrific. I’ll write more about that later. What struck me yesterday is trying to explain what I do succinctly when asked. So I will expound upon that here and then perhaps with help come up with my ‘elevator pitch’ explanation that allows me to portray my work both at TexoDev as well as Gomoll Research + Design.

I’m thinking something like “I make stuff easier.”

At Gomoll Research + Design, I focus on the user experience design element. We are a small company with amazingly talented people (and I don’t throw those words around loosely.) Someone like me focuses on Field Studies, watching people interact with something, software, hardware, people, stores, and derive important information from these observations. Working collaboratively I then work on paper prototypes and conceptual models to come up with design options.

Now with Gomoll it’s more like “We design elegant product experiences.”

I then include visual/graphic designers who take these ideas and implement them in presenting fantastic mock-ups that we can then test.

At TexoDev, we partner with Gomoll and, to use the cable companies phrase, work on “the last mile” i.e. the development. We do a lot at TexoDev beyond our work with Gomoll, on helping companies get a web presence using tools like WordPress and Drupal.

Now with TexoDev it’s “We build cool stuff.”

At a personal level, both Dave Reid and I are increasingly getting involved in our respective communities, Dave in Milwaukee, me in Minneapolis. We blog, twitter, and attend various events such as UPA, MNteractive, PDMA, web414, BarCamps, and many more. Dave is active in the Milwaukee community on urbanism topics; I talk a lot about social media and how the local aspects are interesting.

Not sure where that goes on the scale but I think it is going to be more important.

I think that last one should be something like “We engage talented people beyond our company walls”.

That gives me three short sentences to capture my focus in my work life. I work for Gomoll Research + Design where we design elegant product experiences, at TexoDev we build cool stuff, engaging talented people beyond our company walls. The last question, why, is easy “because the user experience IS the brand.” We help our clients create stronger connections with their customers.

Thanks for listening…

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