Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

The deeper I go into user experience design, the more I realize how broad the topic is, and also how difficult it can be to explain to someone for whom the idea or term is new. I appreciate Thomas Gläser‘s Venn diagram of the discipline and how it relates to many other disciplines. On various sites where the diagram has been posted commenters are quick to point out what’s missing, e.g. why doesn’t sound design overlap with interaction design?  But, as Mark Wilson points out on fastcodescign.com,

…to critique a piece like this is to ungratefully overlook its utility: Don’t see this as the only road map for the entire UX design industry, but a postulation as to why it’s so darned complicated to nail good UX. To think anyone could be an expert in each of these circles is sheer absurdity. Scratch that: To think any designer could be an expert in each of these circles is sheer absurdity, but to recognize that every end user is an expert in each of these circles is highly important. As humans and end users, we might not know what makes an experience right, but we certainly know when it’s wrong.

Yup.

Shelise and Fara, with Blue the Blue Mouse Monkey

We’re sad to see her go, but happy about the reason: Blue Mouse Monkey’s studio manager Shelise Gieseke has left to have her baby! Shelise has been with Blue Mouse Monkey for almost three years, and we could not have done it without her. THANK YOU, SHELISE!

We’re thrilled to welcome Fara Heath as the new studio manager. With her background in entrepreneurship, communications, and the performing arts she’s going to be a great addition to the team. WELCOME, FARA!

Blue Mouse Monkey, Inc. is now officially certified with the state of Oregon as a WBE – that’s a Women Business Enterprise. It took two tries – the first attempt was thwarted by a joint lease agreement. Now that the BlueMM office space lease is solely under Julia Stoops’ name, the certification was approved. It also helped that Blue, the furry Blue Mouse Monkey, is a girl.

The Blue Mouse Monkey has a name (Blue) a gender (she’s a girl) and a personality (adventuresome.) She posts snapshots of her travels to the Blue Mouse Monkey Facebook page. Here she is in Seoul, Korea, and the Douz palm oasis in Tunisia. Check out the page to see Blue in more exotic locations – oh, and don’t forget to Like while you’re there!

Blue Mouse Monkey’s Julia Stoops and and Shelise Gieseke presented a talk yesterday about User Experience Design called “Website Hotseat: Do you know what your visitors are feeling?” at the WVDO (Willamette Valley Development Officers) annual conference.

After a brief overview of what User Experience Design actually means and why it’s important, Julia critiqued several websites point-by-point on their level of user-friendliess. Which, unfortunately, was generally low.

The presentation seemed to have struck a chord with many attendees and Julia and Shelise received lots of good feedback. Julia’s personal mission is to beautify the Internet one website at a time, and today’s talk was a reminder of how much work there is to be done in that regard.

Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch

Suzy Vitello and I are distantly “related” in the literary world by virtue of our involvement in separate writing groups that sprang from the ur-group, Tom Spanbauer’s Dangerous Writing. While we’ve never sat at the same writing table, we’ve chatted at parties now and again, and we’ve worked together in our other lives — in the world of communications, branding, and websites. Suzy is an editor and copywriter, and I’m a web designer, and we have delightfully collaborated on many projects together over the years.

And she edited the text on my Parts Per Million website!

And I got to redesign her new author website!

And she interviewed me on her blog! Check out Writers and branding: an interview with Julia Stoops for our discussion on the importance of author websites, the effect of DIY technologies, and the impact of art, teaching, and creative writing on my branding and web design practice.

The Blue Mouse Monkey team: John Redder, Shelise Gieseke, Jimmy Thomas, Julia Stoops

2011 has seen some bittersweet personnel changes at Blue Mouse Monkey. In July Jimmy Thomas, developer extraordinaire and my office-mate for 3 1/2 years, moved to Japan, where he’s persuing a new life teaching English. To live in Japan was a long standing ambition of Jimmy’s, and I wish him well. But I miss his generous good nature and most excellent CSS skilz. We made some wonderful websites together.

And this December saw the departure of John Redder. For the past year John has provided incredible insight and support with process analysis and improvements, and project management. I’m still amazed that we “hooked” John at all — he brought to my little company experience and expertise from a higher plane, and I feel so lucky. Blue Mouse Monkey is a better company for John’s efforts, and we are sad to see him return to the bigger pastures from whence he came.

But all is not lost! We have some excellent new freelance developers in our stable, and in-house, our studio manager Shelise Gieseke is expanding her role and ably stepping into John’s role as project manager. With new, streamlined systems in place, we’re even better positioned to take on larger and more complex projects. I feel really ready for 2012.

After a hectic spring and summer at Blue Mouse Monkey, projects are wrapping up and my workload is decreasing. And I’m loving it. All of a sudden I have time for family and friends. I have time to just poke around the web, or stroll around outside. And time to get working on my second novel.

Okay, there I said it. Yes, I am working on a second novel. The first one, which took me 10+ years to write, is in the process of being queried to agents. Many readers tell me it’s an important story that needs to get out there, and I do hope it finds its way in the wider world. Learn more about Parts Per Million here. This second novel won’t take me 10 years. This time I’m starting with plot and moving towards crafting sentences, instead of the other way around. And its going to be more of a literary thriller. Parts Per Million has some thrillerish aspects of uncovering secrets and facing dangerous repercussions, but I wouldn’t call it a bumper-to-bumper thriller.

The new novel is going to be about a rogue biohacker. I’ve started research (which means amassing folders of related articles Thank you New Scientist) and am sketching out plot. I’m also working on making my rogue protagonist sympathetic. You’re going to be on her side, even while she wreaks havoc, because, well… I don’t want to give it all away!

And as the summer closes there’s time for pickling cucumbers and steaming home-grown edamame, and drawing on rocks with a 15 lb yellow-orange crayon. We were at Crescent Beach last weekend, and at the patch of basalt scree at the far end of the beach I discovered a rock, a piece of sandstone perhaps, that had oxidized (or something – I have no idea what I’m talking about, really) and was coated in a 1/2 inch layer of soft, crayony bright yellow…stuff.

Basalt, which Oregon is full of due to the massive basalt floods of 17–14 million years ago, is dark gray. Rather a somber stone, and not particularly inviting. But when columnar basalt breaks off it does so with smooth, slightly curved planes. Nice to draw on. I had fun brightening up the jumble of gray at the end of the beach.

And now that the anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis has passed, I’m ready to put that difficult year behind me. When my GP broke the news to me last July, she said, “This will dominate your life for a year.” And she was right. And now I’m better, stronger, healthier, and so happy to find a soft yellow rock to draw with.

A depiction of John Nelson, the protagonist of Parts Per Million. The painting is titled 'Waiting for a Sign'. Mixed media on paper, mounted on panel.

There’s this other thing I’ve been doing these past few years; some people know about it, many don’t. When my writing friend Laura Stanfill posted her interview of me on her blog yesterday, it felt like a coming out of sorts. After all, what business does a visual artist and web designer have writing a novel? Well, the project started as a compulsion ten years ago, a story that took hold of me and wouldn’t let me go until I wrote it down in a rush. Then I went back and revised it. Again. And again. And again. I lost track of the number of drafts. Now Parts Per Million is a complete novel. Pared down, tight, thoroughly critiqued by many, and ready to go out into the world. The next step is finding an agent to represent the MS.

Laura’s a wonderful writer with a couple of novels under her belt already. I learned much for her when we sat together at Stevan and Joanna’s Pinewood Table critique group. I’m so grateful for her generosity in including me in her interview series!

Read Laura’s interview here: Novelist Julia Stoops on Anti-War Activism and Using Research to Build a Realistic Fictional World