l often get requests to describe what I do. Either the interested party just wants to figure out what the heck User Experience is or how one can get a job doing it. So instead of defining what I do I thought I’d give you a quick glance into my day.

• 9:00-10:00 AM- Grab a cup of coffee and get social. Read approximately 10 top user experience related blogs such as: uxmag.com and konigi.com; jump on CoTweet to read messages, dms, and friend timeline. And respond to emails and check Facebook- personal and Modal fan page.
• 10:00-11:00 AM- Prepare for onsite review of major government agency extranet. This includes: reviewing screen flows, dashboard best practices, and latest developments with the platform.
• 11:00 AM-12:00 PM- Sketch options for new functionality in Moleskin. First rough sketches with screen descriptions then more detailed vignettes describing each control and flow.
• 12:00-1:00 PM- Lunch, check email, and head over to client site.
• 1:00-3:00 PM- Meet with project manager and development team to discuss the new functionality and how to best organize each activity into discreet screens. Listen to latest developments and begin whiteboarding solutions. Run into a snag with multiple sub-activities that happen to have long character lengths. Discussion ensues over vertical and horizontal navigation pros and cons and use of tab-based navigation. Sub-activities require organization so I pull out a stack of plain white index cards and start transferring labels from spreadsheet onto cards. Begin tiered numbering of each card to define level and grouping. Meeting concludes with follow on work to include high fidelity screen mockups for executive team review.
• 3:00-6:00 PM- Create screen template using Photoshop. Apply additional controls and revise navigation scheme. Fix long character length labels through simple abbreviation and email over mockup to development team for review. Meanwhile answered emails and tweets in second monitor window. Got on a bit of a rant about SPEC work and the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
• 6:00-8:00 PM- Dinner and fun with the family.
• 8:15 PM- Receive idea to resolve navigation scheme. Quickly sketched it out and left it for integration into the prototype over the weekend.

So as you can see the day of a User Experience professional involves research, meeting with developers and project management, problem solving using all types of creative techniques, execution, and iteration. And this was just one day.

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