Working with Aplia
I joined Aplia in the summer of 2008. It was a long but enjoyable drive from Indianapolis to the Bay area. My title here is User Interface Designer. But if you work in this field, you know the terminologies are always interchangeable.
This is no exception, I had worked as an Interaction Designer and Usability Specialist, my responsibility in Aplia includes everything from interaction design, visual design, user research, and usability study. This reminds me of Adaptive Path’s presentation on “User Experience Team of One“.
Working here is great. People here, even in upper management, have their mindset focused on the user. It’s like we have user experience embbed in the company. We have mottos like “what’s problem are we trying to solve” or “Add a feature, go to jail”. So we never have death-by-feature-creep issue. The envoronment is nice, hard-working, yet casual. I can put things from user research, design ideas, etc on the wall and people do come in and actually discuss about them. White boards are everywhere. It’s a productive environment.
The best part of working here is that we have designers, engineers, QA, product managers, supports, and content writers in the same office. At least for me as a designer, I can get all the resources I need to get the job done.
I will briefly cover some of the major projects that I worked on in my future posts. As you know, all of my works belong to the company, not me. So I could not go over the projects in details. The goal of my posts is to show what Aplia is and why we produce good products and how do I, as a user experience person, contribute to the development process.
User stories, design sketches, ideas on the wall and whiteboard
UI review can be presented openly to people in the company.