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I like to describe myself as a ‘bibliophile,’ a lover of books. But that love only applies to the commercial fantasy genre. Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon, the New York Times bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist, is probably the first non-fiction book I ever thoroughly enjoyed—or finished reading without the need to force myself. This little book (with dimensions smaller than a piece of Kleenex tissue) offers ten transformative rules to motivate creatives to come out of their shells and reach out to others so they can get discovered and become an inspiration to an audience.

Photo: AustinKleon.com

Back in September, I read an insight by customer experience expert Gerry McGovern that stuck with me ever since. He argues that “digital is mainly garbage.” Simply put, almost everything you post online is pretty much filler, so get straight to the point. This mindset literally evolved the way I write moving forward, focusing only on what needs to be said then deleting everything else. And Show Your Work! does precisely that.

One of the reasons I’m uninterested with non-fiction is that I find they often discuss something completely different, resulting in hundreds of redundant pages. Show Your Work!, on the other hand, keeps it short by talking about relevant and essential details and ideas; each line of text provides something valuable. The book is over 200 pages, yet Kleon holds your attention by adding various illustrations, quotes from known artists, and blackout poetry. If I could, I would recommend it to a friend by telling them just to read the whole thing. I marked the pages containing interesting points with a sticky tab—and there’s practically one on every other page that includes the main content.

Photo: Flickr

Show Your Work! is an aesthetically pleasing book mostly aimed at visual artists, designers, and other creatives. Still, there are a lot of pieces of advice that can be applied to any career. Speaking as an interactive media management individual, I combined all my learnings into three key takeaways:

Don’t Hog Information

When chocolate chip cookies were first invented around the 1930s, the baker Ruth Graves Wakefield didn’t take the recipe to her grave. Instead, she shared it with the world, allowing it to continue existing in food places and everyone’s tummy many decades later. This sweet, hunger-inducing analogy links to Kleon’s advice to not be a hoarder and share your knowledge with the world. “The act of sharing is one of generosity—you’re putting something out there because you think it might be helpful or entertaining to someone on the other side of the screen,” he remarks.

Everyone has something to contribute in their respective fields, whether they’re just starting or have been in the game for a long time. Share valuable and educational information you use to grow your career. Provide links to blogs, articles, resources, and tutorials. When you share something with someone, chances are they’ll share with you back.

Teaching someone that knowledge is even better. If you’re not well-rounded about the subject matter or confident enough to do so, then that’s okay, too! There’s always someone else who can do the teaching for you. Be helpful; it’s enough to point the people one step behind us in the right direction.

Forget thinking of it as losing your competitive advantages. “Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it. When you teach someone how to do your work, you are, in effect, generating more interest in your work,” Kleon says. “People feel closer to your work because you’re letting them in on what you know.” So give away your treasured trade secrets and out-teach your competition. There’s always knowledge to be shared, and benefits we can reap by doing so. Let’s not waste it.

Connect with People

Great, you just learned about a free event where they teach all the exciting things about UX. But who do you share it with? Your network, of course!

People who attained great accomplishments in their lifetime didn’t do so by shunning the world. “Lone genius is a myth,” writes Kleon. So get out there and reach out to people. The relationships you make and the people you meet can help you become successful.

Networking is the perfect opportunity to gain access to the fundamental resources and experiences that will further advance your career. Having connections with all sorts of professionals is beneficial. But searching for the right people who hold the same interests as you is what substantially impacts your craft.

Humans tend to desire meeting others they identify with. As Kleon puts it, “These are your real peers—the people who share your obsessions, the people who share a similar mission to your own, the people with whom you share a mutual respect. There will only be a handful or so of them, but they’re so, so important.” Find someone who is passionate about typography or idolises Don Norman as much as you then do your absolute best to maintain that bond.

It’s hard to admit but it’s true: you can’t do everything by yourself; you need to collaborate with others. The good news is that you don’t need to be the perfect candidate in your profession to network. All it takes is having something to offer and the ability to share your knowledge.

Get To Work

Excellent, you now have a network of people who can share their expertise with you and provide support on your work. But there’s no work for them to look at if you’ve done nothing.

There comes a certain point when you need to pause making connections and start doing. When describing the people he looks up to, Kleon notes they “...aren’t schmoozing at cocktail parties; they’re too busy for that...Instead of wasting their time ‘networking,’ they’re taking advantage of the network.” Stop spending too much of your energy searching for every little piece of knowledge you can get. By using your current resources and dedicating time to do well on what you do, others may come to you for your wealth of experience.

Overnight success is a myth. Achieving goals through hard work and perseverance isn’t. Your dream job at Google isn’t going to be handed to you the instant you receive that certificate or diploma. “Dreams are lovely. But they are just dreams,” TV writer Shonda Rhimes once said. “But dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It’s hard work that makes things happen. It’s hard work that creates change.”

Based on the book “100 things every designer needs to know about people” written by Susan M. Weinschenk, there are some basic points that as designers we must know. This book talks about how do people see, read, think, decide, feel or remember. This topic is relevant to me, thus I have found the same problems in different websites and as a designer, I feel we can counter that. It is important to understand human behavior and be more empathic with users to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

Despite all the information we learned when we were at University about the use of color, the accurate font size, or the rule of thirds, designers still doing some assumptions when creating a new website and repeating mistakes such as complex content, complex flows, and inappropriate error messages.

First of all, it is prevalent to find a complex context on websites. Due to the inappropriate use of language and terms. Users find difficult to understand the information or the terms. For this reason, I consider it is important to have a specialist or writer who can help us to be more accurate with the text or the terms we choose. Another way is Flesh-Kincaid, an online tool that can help us to calculate the reading level of our texts, in this way if it is shown that our text is complex, we can work on that. We need to make sure our readers are understanding the meaning behind the words, and not just reading. Also, it is important to not overwhelm the readers with all the information at the same time or give them multitasks. The book called this term “Progressive disclosure” which means providing only the information people need at the moment. Additionally, we need to consider that everyone has their mental model depending on their past experiences, which leads to having a mismatch between the product and the people´s mental model. Therefore it is important not to do assumptions. As well as try to create a website that interacts with the user, just as it does in person, using basic guidelines, and predicts different scenarios, to avoid the complexity of it. 

Secondly, abstain from complex flows. Designers tend to trust too much on eye-tracking tools to make sure the users are watching whatever they want them to watch, but this tool is not 100 percent accurate. Designers might assume that users have wandering minds, and it is important to give them signals of how to use or navigate within a website. These cues are called affordances. 

Finally, error messages sometimes are so abstract and helpless to the user. Thus, these messages usually just say “Error”, instead of providing a better explanation of what the problem is, and guiding the user of what to do using uncomplicated language. However, it would be better, if designers focus on the likely mistakes and test the product with similar targets to predict errors as well as work with different strategies. Thus people use different paths to solve their errors based on their personal past experiences. Moreover, give them the freedom to undo things easily, in the same vein, this will prevent a user to get an error message.

Shopify is an e-commerce platform for online stores created by Shopify Inc., a company in the multi-channel commerce platform industry. What started as an online snowboard store in 2004 built from scratch after frustrations with available software at the time turned to becoming the “leading global commerce company” that’s home to over a million business owners. Now, the company is headed by one of its co-founders Tobias Lütke and consists of over 4,000 employees. It has offices in Toronto, Waterloo, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Singapore, and many other locations all over the world, but its headquarters is in Ottawa.

It’s understandable daydreaming about going to work and being exposed to thrilling employee lounge amenities, onsite fitness facilities, and a cafeteria that provides free lunch and snacks daily—and Shopify has them all. (Psst…there’s an indoor go-kart track in their Ottawa office.) Their dog-friendly office space permits a very casual dress code for its employees who also have flexible work hours and work from home options.

Moreover, Shopify provides growth opportunities for its employees. They offer basic health benefits plan, in-house training initiatives such as mentoring and paid internships, performance recognition like individual performance bonuses and awards to recognize employee impact, and a no-limit vacation policy.

But what makes working at Shopify great is how they exemplify having a strong company culture. They display job openings by applying to you beforehand. Shopify provides its own résumé, informing applicants about the education of their current employees (some of whom are university drop-outs) and their business functions (of which Chief Product Officer Craig Miller oversees UX and Design teams), among others. They then add an interesting twist through the Life Story interview, the first stage in their hiring process where Shopify goes more in-depth to learn about its applicants and their personal lives leading up to where they are today.

Canada is a country with a wide range of banks, offering attractive benefits for its employees. Scotiabank is one of these, offering a convenient place to work and have fun at the same time, growth opportunities and respect for every employee as a human being.

About Scotiabank

The 3rd largest bank in Canada is Scotiabank. This is a Canadian multinational bank with around 90,000 employees, whose backgrounds are from more than 120 countries and speak over 100 languages. This bank is well-known for being all around the world; North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia. Scotiabank has beyond 25 million customers within all countries. 

Scotiabank Digital Factory

This company has a digital branch called “Scotiabank Digital Factory” in Toronto, Chile, Perú, México and Columbia to mention some. In this Digital Factory work scientists, engineers, designers, analytics, digital marketers, artists, problem solvers which mission is to improve human experiences. Toronto Scotiabank Digital Factory is located at 333 King Street East Toronto, Ontario. Its office is an internationally recognized and award-winning workplace for having innovative environments with different ecosystems. 

Scotiabank implemented this new system to work called “Way we work” (W3). This system introduces a different way to work with, no static offices, and a variety of spaces where everyone can work whenever and wherever they want. This reformation promotes the reduction of spaces and the consumption of less paper. Scotiabank is working on other improvements to collaborate with climate change, essentially using renewable energy, solar panels, and introducing an internal tax for carbon, 15 CAD per ton. Another of its actions is to enhance its consumers to buy ecologic cars, with a program that gives the users special rates, and bonuses.

Work culture 

In this Digital Factory, Min Jee Kim performs as the Senior UX Designer leading designers and problem solvers. UX Designers or other professionalisms willing to work there will enjoy a friendly environment where the employees are valuable and are encouraged to be themselves in an inclusive environment. Additionally, they are allowed to dress casual within the offices. Its employees have access to the free shuttle to and from Union, as well as a subsidized cafeteria and indoor fitness center.

Benefits

Work within a bank, can allow you to enjoy from different benefits, and Scotiabank is not the exception, offering to its employees:

· A performance bonus

· Company matching programs on pension and profit-sharing

· Paid vacation

· Personal & sick days

· Medical, vision and dental benefits since the first day

· Personal development funding

· Maternity leave top-up

· Parental leave

Mentorship & Salary

Scotiabank has training programs for its employees, to help them grow personally and professionally. As an employee working in the UX department, you can reach a salary of 85,000 a year. Furthermore, this bank offers special savings plans to its employees to help them increment their wealth.  

About ICF

ICF is a strategic consulting company that has been in the industry for 50 years. This company is specialized in different topics just like Energy, Education, Health, Digital and Marketing, Transportation, just to refer to some. Recently ICF, launched ICF Next, another branch focus on marketing, communication and technology business. ICF team is formed by technologists, digital strategists creatives, social scientists, etc. This company is rapidly extending around the world, reaching more clients. If you are seeking to join their team, and work in a company that has values just as sustainability, respect, but also enhances its employees to grow personally and professionally, this is an appropriate place for you.

ICF is a multinational company, with more than 7000 employees with different backgrounds and speak beyond 75 languages. This company runs all around the world; Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.

In Toronto, it has only one office, located at 400 University Avenue, on the 17th floor. Its contact number is +4168484115 and its email is [email protected].

This district where it is located is very convenient for its employees, thus, it is close to the TTC line, access to the GO Train and bike lines.  

This company is further committed to the planet, thus since 2016, ICF started implementing new facilities to its employee´s business traveling and commuting, as well as buying renewable energy, to reduce greenhouse emissions. Moreover, ICF is still trying new strategies to alleviate the contamination.

Work culture & Management 

The Digital Strategy department in ICF Toronto is in charge of Sherief Salem, who is the leader of this area. He is the point of contact in case you are interested in work for that area or know to get more information.

This company is well-known for having a friendly work environment where collaboration, respect, and open communication persists. 

One of the ICF strengths is that they value their employees, and they think is not only about an office and colleagues, is about built a community where employees have flexible hours, weekly catered lunch, work together inclusively and collaboratively, but above all, they have a chance to grow. 

ICF has a program to encourage its employees to donate, as well as the company does, but it is not mandatory. These donations go for different causes and are optional for each employee.

This company believes in equality between men and women. For this reason, its employees have equal salaries and 55% of the leaders are female, which demonstrates that women have the same opportunities as men have. 

Grow opportunities & Benefits

ICF offered the following benefits to its employees. 

Health Care 

Medical Plan 

Dental Plan Retirement 

Retirement Plan Life Insurance and Disability 

Accidental Death and Dismemberment 

Business Travel Accident 

Life Insurance 

Long and Short-Term Disability Annual Leave 

11 Holidays 

18 Vacation Days 

Discretionary Sick Days Other 

Medi-Passport Emergency Travel Assistance 

Employee Assistance Program

Furthermore, the salary average for a UX Designer in ICF is around $90,000 a year. Additionally, ICF provides to its employees mentoring and coaching with the purpose of enhancing them to improve their connections and communications, but personal growth 

An illustration of this is live and virtual courses, online courses focused on business development, balancing work and life, strategic thinking, managing people and teams, etc. 

Throughout my first semester in Interactive Media Management, we were tasked with choosing a book to do a book report on that has relevance to being an Interactive Media Professional. The book I decided to my report on is called “Branding Yourself: How to use Social Media to invent or Reinvent yourself” by Erik Deckers & Kyle Lacy. Before I get into my takeaways from this book, I would like to explain my rational behind choosing this book.

Right off the bat, the title caught my attention. I have recently started designing my own sports apparel that I hope to one day sell. Before I do so, one of my biggest obstacles was trying to figure out how to build a social media following that will get my designs out there. This book was exactly what I needed to jump start things.

This book is about….you guessed it….how to use Social Media to brand yourself, your company or a combinations of both. This book teaches reader how to choose the best social media tools for achieving  personal goals, build and authentic storyline and online identity, SEO tricks, how to best utilize platforms such as Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and so much more.  Branding yourself is presented in a semi-informal way, almost as if the authors are tweeting and conversing online. It’s a great example of real meaningful conversations that engages readers. Far too often, when people are introduced to social media they try to strong-arm their way trying to reach as many people as possible but providing very little value. There aren’t giving their audience anything of substance, or telling any compelling story.

One of my main take a ways from this book came from the section about why it is important to promote yourself.  The main point the authors are trying to portray is that we have the power to establish our own brand, and to build that brand through our own personal story. Giving users an insight as to who you are and what you stand for will translate to increasing interest in your brand. They outline that it’s ok to talk about yourself but just not brag about yourself.

They go on to talk about how important building your network is. Within discussing this topic, something I found interesting is they stress the importance of analytics linked to social media. I think this is a much underutilized tool for actually understanding what you are doing on social media that is proving to be most and least effective. They also mentioned that its good practice to start a blog, as this will show your audience that you are an expert in your particular endeavor.

As an Interactive media professional, much of these tips and tricks are integral skillsets to know moving forward within this industry. The social media strategies presented in this book using the various platforms can be translated into any company or startup. In particular, there is a sections which discusses promoting your brand in the real world, and how important it is to follow-up after you have made a connection. This was good information to have for networking events that I was required to attend this semester. It helped me make the most out of the opportunity.

HOW TO BE AN ETHICAL MANAGER/LEADER IN A DIVERSE TEAM

Figure 1; https://forcechange.com/20270/promote-diversity-in-the-media/

Equality is about creating a fairer society, where everyone involved can participate and has the opportunity to reach their desired potential. It is the act of ignoring discrimination regardless of people’s gender or gender, race, nationality, religion, ethnic, marital status, age, color, physical or mental disability, social background or sexual orientation. This way a workplace can be considered professionally ethical.

Diversity on the other hand goes beyond mere “equality” which means recognizing and celebrating the differences that exist between individuals as sources of strength and enlightenment. Diversity in the sense that staff, students, careers and families bring to the organization should expand the variations of thinking, communication styles, skills and behaviors which broaden the peoples’ horizons.

Since communities are becoming more mixed and diverse societies and there is a need to be able to incorporate that appropriately and sensitively when creating content as professionals. In the human rights legal framework covering our employment practices and service delivery there is equality and the need to ensure it is strictly considered to work within this framework and avoid discrimination.

http://www.management-standards.org/sites/default/files/B12%20-%20Promote%20equality%20of%20opportunity,%20diversity%20and%20inclusion%20in%20your%20organisation.pdf

 HOW AN INTERACTIVE MEDIA PROFESSIONAL CAN PROMOTE EQUITY/DIVERSITY

-          Picture people as individuals respecting their beliefs, views and lifestyles even when they are different from our own.

-          Take into account work mates and audience religious, cultural and social needs.

-          Challenge questionable attitudes in contents if you feel someone is behaving inappropriately.

-          Report discrimination, bullying, harassment or victimization of any kind towards anyone to a line manager.

-          Ensure we collect information about our staff and target audience so we can monitor how the policies are serving everyone.

-          Everyone involved in recruitment should have some basic training around equality and diversity or have completed the relevant recruitment course.

-          Encourage teams and colleagues to look into the different areas of equality more detail in the content to be published.

-          Complete equality analysis on any service activity, developments, policies to see if they impact upon any group(s) fairly.

 For further reading;

http://www.robertpicard.net/files/Measuring_Media_Content_Quality_Diversity_Book.pdf

http://www.sunshinecare.co.uk/docs/145.pdf

http://www.management-standards.org/sites/default/files/B12%20-%20Promote%20equality%20of%20opportunity,%20diversity%20and%20inclusion%20in%20your%20organisation.pdf

The Interactive Media Industry is one which is rapidly evolving everyday and companies approach to reaching their ever growing audience is evolving along with it. Content is now created to cater to many different people from all walks of life, people of different backgrounds, races, ethnicity, gender identities and economic upbringing all need to be considered before content is put out for them to consume. However, there are several challenges that those creating for such a diverse audience, within the Interactive media industry, will face:

Diverse Team

A diverse team is a key component when it comes to creating for a diverse audience. You need people who understand the audience that is trying to be reached, and in many circumstances, people who are from or who are a part of the specific audience you are trying to reach. There are challenges involved in finding such a team in general and if one is put together, the issue becomes trying to get these people to coordinate and work as a cohesive unit for the greater of the team. Setting aside personal view points as well as strong opinions is sometimes necessary to come to a solution.

Communication

Assuming there is a diverse team in place, the communication between the team may become an issue. Let’s say for example there was a language barrier, this puts a big hiccup in any initiative. But asides from a language barrier, cultural background or traditions may end up playing a major factor. One person may have one way of traditionally doing things or approaching an issue while the next person may do the same task in a much different manner. A team made of individuals from different social backgrounds (especially those whose sect are going through oppression) may create a team who is overly sensitive or one where individuals are cautious/hesitant to share their input. Each member of the team needs to have some sort of understanding for other members of the team but also for the audience that is being catered too.

Resistance to Change

Having a great interactive media management team is ideal. You have many different people with different views and information all helping to usher in a new generation of content. However, who is to say that all companies are open to such change? Perhaps certain companies are just fine with the status quo. This throws a huge hurdle in front of those in charge of strategizing creation for a diverse audience. Many companies do not embrace change in the same manner that others do. Now the resistance is no longer coming from within the team, but instead by company beliefs and protocol.

http://www.diversityjournal.com/4889-diversity-communications-101-one-size-does-not-fit-all/

http://cogsagency.com/2016/10/diversity-benefits-vs-challenges/

My professional background is in the Legal profession. I worked in a law firm as a Real Estate Law Clerk, working with a diverse pool of clientele. During my time within this organization I learned the valuable lesson, not all clients are from the same mold. Each individual clients reciprocated information in different ways. Asides from the diverse array of clients, we had a diverse team. All people of different genders, races, backgrounds, people from all walks of life. All of us were tasked with one common goal, implements a strategy that will help engage more clients. As we worked together it was apparent that we each has different views and methods of doing things. Also, people within the group could contribute methods to help attract clients that are more related to their particular walk of life (eg. Ethnicity, gender). I was stuck in a predicament where each person has their own view how to garner the attention of one individual group, but not everyone as a whole.

Creating for a diverse audience is indeed a daunting task and one that is not as easy as it sounds. It taking a sound strategy and tons of research to understand what message you are trying to convey and how that message can be curated in one way which can appeal do the diversity of the audience. I believe this can be achieved by keeping a few factors in mind:

Understand who exactly who the audience is

When creating for a diverse audience, consideration should be made as to who exactly is part of the diverse audience. A diverse audience doesn’t necessarily mean every single person. Narrow the pool down to as specific as can be and try and find commonalities.  

Have a diverse team open to diversity

The team assembled should in some manner mirror the audience that is trying to be reached. This means different people with different views from different walks of life. Each individual however, should be receptive of one another. You cannot create for a diverse audience if you are not willing to open up and work with a diverse team.

Leadership which embraces diversity

Leadership can make or break any team or organization. It’s important for the leader to lead by example and in this instance, management or any person in a position of power overlooking a project, should embrace diversity and different methods of creation. If the top level management is open to diversity then that create a greater pool of talent, as well as more opportunity for a broader range of ideas

Research

It is important to understand what the best method of getting the message to the audience will be. Research what has worked previously for presenting to a diverse audience but also how you can build upon that. Understand what makes the audience diverse and what values they find important. All this research will help get an understanding of how content can be created that will appeal to the audience and what format will be most appropriate.

http://www.bthinkforward.com/content-for-multiple-audiences/