Tag Archives: heart

A broken leg, but not a broken heart

Posted on May 28, 2011 by jillchrist| Leave a comment


My hus­band recently broke his leg play­ing bas­ket­ball. He was going up for a lay up, and some rough guy fouled him while he was in the air. My hus­band fell on his leg, heard a crack, and then crawled off the court, bloody legs and all. He even drove him­self home, and didn’t com­plain once. We wouldn’t have believed it was bro­ken unless the xrays showed the crack through his fibula. He’s a run­ner… a 2-hour-and-58-minute-Boston-marathon-finisher. I know I’m biased, but I think he’s pretty bad ass.

What is most incred­i­ble, is that he hasn’t lost heart. He flew to his cousin’s wed­ding in Col­orado Springs, and walked around the poorly hand­i­cap acces­si­ble grounds that you encounter while trav­el­ing. Then he flew to a con­fer­ence that he had been look­ing for­ward to so much in the Bay Area on com­mis­sion soft­ware. You gotta have heart if you are will­ing to fly to San Fran­cisco for a con­fer­ence on some­thing as bor­ing as com­mis­sion soft­ware! wink wink… He loves it though. That’s what is so great. He pur­sues what he loves, with­out mak­ing ANY excuses for his bro­ken leg.

You can’t go through life think­ing you’ll never break your leg. And when it does, you can’t let it slow down your life. Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to draw some far-fetched metaphor between break­ing your leg and break­ing your prod­ucts, ser­vices, or user expe­ri­ence. But please, if you break your leg — be that guy that doesn’t wine, com­plain, or argue. And still PURSUE WHAT YOU LOVE. Go to events, get your­self out there, and try to enjoy your time in the cast.

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Shipping Gifts from the Heart

Posted on March 31, 2010 by jillchrist| Leave a comment

Seth Godin’s book Linch­pin dis­cusses the impor­tance of ship­ping — he asserts that good ideas mean noth­ing unless you can ship them. He says we don’t need more cre­ativ­ity, because there are plenty of ideas out there. What we need is to get those ideas out there, ship them, and see what happens.

When I think about how this applies to User Expe­ri­ence Design and Research, I think about gen­er­at­ing more ideas, get­ting them in front of users, deliv­er­ing more oppor­tu­ni­ties to observe peo­ple using these design ideas. How­ever, what seems most amaz­ing to me, is how these ideas get imple­mented — get­ting these ideas from test­ing to release.

User Expe­ri­ence pro­fes­sion­als typ­i­cally rely on skilled prod­uct devel­op­ment teams to make their ideas come true (writ­ing code, writ­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion, QA test­ing, etc.). User Expe­ri­ence pro­fes­sion­als don’t really ship any­thing that end-users can actu­ally use, they ship ideas, test those ideas, and work with prod­uct devel­op­ment teams to see those ideas get implemented.

I think peo­ple who rely on oth­ers to imple­ment their ideas should ship more of these: thank you notes — to users, stake­hold­ers, and team mem­bers. These cost hardly any­thing to ship. If you are short, con­cise, thought­ful, funny, and write from the heart, they can make all the dif­fer­ence in the world to users (who inspire your ideas), to stake­hold­ers (who pay you for your ideas), and prod­uct team mem­bers (who imple­ment your ideas). Also, your team, stake­hold­ers, and users will feel more con­nected together too.

Seth says to ship the things you enjoy giv­ing, and gifts that help improve lives. Ship more appre­ci­a­tion and grat­i­tude, and your life will improve too!

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