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Simply News: The Plain Herald
Since my youth, I've been interested in news media design -- juvenile neighborhood newsletters, teen youth group newspapers, college magazines, blogging -- but I've gotten out of the habit lately, especially in non-digital form.
These days, I mostly just debate the merits of print journalism with friends and look with admiration at Jacek Utko's newspaper redesigns.
So, when the Boston Globe launched a haute new premium website, it got me thinking:
- Why should clean design be offered only to paying customers?
- Could I take local news sources' RSS feeds and design a handsome site I'd use every day? A site that didn't look like it was automatically generated by a computer?
- Could I use responsive design techniques to have a single adaptive site for desktop and mobile devices?
- Could I leverage existing web services to rapidly build a purely client-side implementation?
- How long could it last before the C&Ds arrive?
So I spent an evening, and I built it. I used it for a few days and realized it should be pretty easy do this for any metropolitan area. So I spent a few more evenings, and implemented eight other locales.
One domain registration later, and we have The Plain Herald.
Here's the design strategy:
- Focus on the local content. Metropolitan news and sports, plus my town, at the forefront.
- National news from a serious source. By and large, local papers don't have their own national reporters anymore, so I chose a source that does.
- World news from world newspapers. Get your news from the locals, not from some American reporter who phones his work in.
- Remember me. Remember my town, and my country of interest, and show that news when I come back.
Sure, there's a lot I don't see since I'm not visiting Boston.com anymore. But I feel like I'm being informed now -- and not pandered to, shouted at, or advertised. It's just enough to remain an effective citizen.
Critique encouraged.
Job: Senior UX Designer at Novartis
Our user experience group at Novartis in Cambridge is expanding; we're looking for another senior designer to lead drug discovery software projects (web & mobile, in the lab and out). Please be in touch with resumes or recommendations!
Senior User Experience Specialist (Contractor)
Description
The User Experience team at Novartis NIBR IT is looking for a Senior User Experience Designer to work on internal drug discovery applications. This role will work on a variety of areas including software, web, mobile and lab. You will work as a design lead on projects and will be expected to act as the user advocate throughout the product development lifecycle. You must thrive in a fast-paced environment, be able to communicate effectively with a wide range of audiences, and be able to produce usable artifacts on the fly.
Responsibilities
- Create wireframes and workflows.
- Translate business requirements into documented navigation paths, UI page layouts, wireframes and/or storyboards.
- Formally present user interface concepts, designs and functional requirements to large groups of design partners.
- Develop personas, user scenarios, and other analysis documents to inform the design.
- Develop UI prototypes and document user interface design standards and guidelines.
- Facilitate user interviews, field research, joint application design (JAD) sessions, focus groups, and usability tests to ensure that user input is gathered throughout the product lifecycle.
- Manage multiple projects at the same time and be able to prioritize tasks and set expectations.
Experience
- Proven ability to manage junior team members and vendors.
- Ability to write clean, precise and detailed Information Architecture documents (mockups, wireframes, interaction diagrams)
- Experience working with Business Analysts and Subject Matter Experts in a User Experience product development lifecycle.
- Detailed knowledge of the software engineering process, problem solving and decision-making ability.
- Ability to multi-task and react positively to frequent changes in priorities
- Ability to build and manage working relationships with IS team and business users
- High level of project organization, attention to detail, and time management
- High level of motivation to solve existing problems while anticipating new issues
- Ability to lead a cross-functional team to consensus.
- Manage changes to existing systems to ensure that they fit with the long-term strategy.
- Experience working in cross-functional teams as the UX role.
Desired
- Experience with Agile development methodologies.
- Experience with JIRA or similar tool for tracking software requirements, changes and releases.
- Biology, Chemistry, Genome domain knowledge
- Experience with Axure, Visio, Balsamiq for wireframes and prototyping
- Experience with Confluence (web-based corporate Wikis) to organize, maintain and communicate UI implementation guidelines and functional requirements.
- Experience with data visualization tools like Spotfire a plus
Qualifications
- Masters Degree in HCI, Human Factors, Psychology, or related field to User Experience.
- 10+ years creating strong user experiences.
- Minimum of 5 years designing detailed wireframes and specifications for software, websites, RIA, and mobile applications
About Novartis
Novartis (NYSE: NVS) is a world leader in the research and development of products to protect and improve health and well-being. The company has core businesses in pharmaceuticals, vaccines, consumer health, generics, eye care and animal health.
About Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR):
Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) is Novartis’ global pharmaceutical research organization. Informed by clinical insights from our translational medicine team, we use modern science and technology to discover new medicines for patients worldwide.
With talented scientists located in six locations around the world, we are committed to leveraging knowledge we gain from our own innovative research and discoveries made at leading academic institutions and biotechnology companies.
Over the past several years, Novartis has had the greatest number of new molecular entities approved by the FDA for clinical use in the US. With our ongoing focus on diseases with unmet medical needs, NIBR scientists ensure that Novartis maintains its robust pipeline and successful track record in innovative drug discovery.
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