The Economist is looking for a strong UX designer (combination of interaction and visual) for London office.

Here’s the job posting:
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Who we are and where we are headed

The Economist is a standout brand in a world of massive media fragmentation. Founded in 1843 to support the case for free trade, The Economist has become a resource of choice for people who lead, explore ideas and influence opinion globally. The way people read, watch and interact with current affairs reporting and analysis is changing radically. Like all publishers, we are in the fray of a radically new news environment online, and it’s an exciting time to be here.

Our vision is to build the foremost destination online for analyzing and debating the global agenda. The Economist looks to our user experience team to understand our readers and to use that insight to inspire and inform design, to raise the bar on design quality and user engagement and to contribute to innovation.

The role: User experience architect

We’re looking for a user experience architect with a confident and critical design sense, a solid grounding in user-centred design and a strong interest in current affairs. You should be a good problem-solver who can make complex ideas simple and clear. You will be working in a highly collaborative environment with developers, product owners, and editors throughout all stages of product development.

The position will report to the Director of Customer Experience for The Economist online.

You should have…

* Experience as an architect on the launch or redesign of a large, consumer-facing web site
* A complete grasp of tools and concepts applied to all stages of product design — user and business requirements gathering, translation via storyboards, mockups, wireframes and prototypes to effectively communicate interaction and design ideas
* Good oral and written presentation skills
* Fluency in gauging the usability of new and existing products, and making constructive suggestions for change
* Experience applying user-centred design in an agile environment
* Excellent team skills

* A university degree in HCI or related subject, or equivalent training
* A good theoretical and practical grasp of interaction design issues, and of the continually evolving vocabulary of interaction and UI design, and an ability to explain this simply to others

Having the following is a plus…

* Designing news applications and/or information-rich interfaces
* Designing social interfaces
* Web application and tools design
* Taxonomy design
* Designing and developing interactive charts, maps, and interactive information visualizations
* Experience working with Drupal or other open-source CMS system
* Strong HTML, CSS and JSS skills for prototyping

What you can find at The Economist….

* Experience understanding and using a variety of user testing and research methods and approaches
* Collaborative use of open-source software and tools
* Experience integrating customer insight and metrics into design planning
* Experience working on social media design
* An especially bright, engaged and highly skilled group of colleagues, in user experience and beyond
* Extremely responsive and engaged users, who have a high level of respect for our brand
* Business managers and editors who support the value and practice of user-centred design

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If you or someone you know is interested, please contact me. Send me both your resume and portfolio. It would be great if you could also include sample working documents and sketches.

A good selection of iPhone and iPad stencils for various applications (Fireworks, Omnigraffle, Photoshop, etc.) which include:

• Screens
• icons
• shell
• hand gesture icons
• buttons

If you are doing design for an iPhone/iPad, these will make your life much easier and speed up your wireframing/design process.

Take me to the list already: iPhone and iPad Development GUI Kits, Stencils and Icons

Since facebook is becoming the ubiquitous social network and it has officially become the most trafficked site on the web, adding facebook connect feature to my site would make it more viral.

It would do so because it would make it so much easier for my users to interact with me and my content. They can easily like or comment my work or me, as a brand, without having to login to a separate system (i.e. my site) or -worse yet- create a new account.

The virality comes into play when the reference to their action shows up in their facebook news feed and profile, exposing(read promoting) my stuff to their circle. This allows them to identify themselves with me and/or my work.

In my research, I found out that there’s a WP plugin for fb connect integration and here’s one of the tutorials for it:
Easier way to add facebook connect to your blog using WP-FacebookConnect plugin

I’m currently building a WordPress site that requires a plugin to feature posts on the home page.

I did a little research and came across this list which seems to be a great place to start:
5 Plugins For Creating EyeCatchy Featured Content Section in Wordpress

Most likely I’ll use one of the plugins that use javascript and can be updated via the admin interface instead of the flash one so that in case I need someone else to update it, I won’t have to teach them XML etc.

Seems like the Featured content gallery plug in is a good candidate. Many people have used it and they seem to be happy.

In case you need multiple instances of that module -like I do- here’s a good tutorial that would show you how to do it step-by-step: Multiple Featured Content Galleries

From the BBC Internet Blog: A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services

This blog post tells a story of the redesign that the BBC did. A massive undertaking since as many other big media sites, there were inconsistencies everywhere as new products and pages added while the legacy ones are maintained.

Definitely informative and also inspiring. I don’t agree with some of their decisions, but they get it done, which is a very big accomplishment. Kudos to the team.

Here are few resources that will be very helpful for you as you design the look and feel of your iPhone app:

• The iPhone shell
• Screen size trend
• jQTouch - jQuery plugin for development
• PSD file of interface elements
• Mobileroadie : build your own app in minutes with popular features(video, audio, pay, social, etc.)

In case you need to add a CSS definition only for FF 1 or 2, check out this article (with examples): CSS hack for Firefox only

Today, I had a need to create a hover state for a button. I knew how to do that easily if it were an image. I could just use the onMouseOver attribute and insert a little javascript to swap out the image on hover.

That doesn’t work for input field.

I thought about using javascript, but that feels like an overkill and whenever possible, I try to avoid writing script.

Then I came across the following tutorial on applying a sprite technique to the input field.

It’s a really easy to follow tutorial. I got it working in less than 30 minutes. If you want to learn about this technique, you should give this one a try.