Tal Herman – No, You Used to Be a Designer
As a designer, you spent years honing your skills and involving yourself in both the strategic and tactical details of complex projects, providing very specific solutions to the problems posed to you. Now, as a design manager, you have a wider responsibility for the strategic concerns of the user experience combined with little or no time for actual design work, but at the same time you’re more responsible than ever for the quality of the design work created by your team. In this presentation, we’ll talk about some team management strategies for design success that don’t involve you becoming an overworked micro-managing tyrant.
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Tal Herman is the Executive Producer of User Experience, Design & Production group at Snapfish.com. His team includes a mix of interaction and visual designers, copywriters and editors, as well as a related group of producers and presentation layer specialists. Before joining Snapfish, he established the User Experience practice at the California State Automobile Association. Prior to that, he was the Interaction Design Director for Bank of America’s authenticated applications, including Online Banking, Bill Pay, ATM, Small Business, and Investment.
Tal got his first paying job in the user experience field as a Bay Area-based freelance webmaster in 1994, joined IBM’s original web consultancy in Atlanta as an information architect in 1998, joined a small Atlanta software consultancy in 2000 as the experience design principal, and eventually ended up back in the Bay Area at Bank of America in 2002, where he helped to design their award-winning Bill Pay application.
Before becoming a full-time user experience practitioner in 1998, Tal was a lawyer, primarily focused on state and federal criminal practice. He lives in Oakland with his wife and two children.