I’ve been spending a fair amount of time lately thinking about initial client engagements and how we can better calculate a design that is both in the realm of what is desirable from the intended audience and what will knock the client’s socks off. Its especially difficult for the client who doesn’t know what they want until they see it. Questions that have come to mind include:

• How do we learn more about the audience?
• How do we know whether or not the client’s idea of audience is correct?
• Can we talk to a sample of the audience?
• How can we better use personas in the design process?
• Are the personas based on real people or they fictitious calculations based on who we think the audience is?
• How will we measure the audiences reaction to the design once it is released?

These are the kinds of questions I’ll be tossing around in coming weeks. In the meantime, here are some great articles from the Viget Blogs:

• Bi-Directional Actionscript/Javascript Communication in AS3 [Inspire]
• Brian Makes “Top 35 Under 35” List [FourLabs]
• RubyInline in Shared Rails Environments [Extend]
• Refresh 007: Ending Legacy Code [FourLabs]

Well, not literally, but I did change jobs recently. After 4 amazing years at AOL I’ve decided to move on. Its been a week since I left the AIM Product Design Group which included some of the smartest and most talented people I’ve ever worked with. Saying farewell surely didn’t come easy but I know the fine folks back at the ranch will carry on in fine form and I look forward to watching from afar.

Thankfully, the difficulty of leaving has been softened by the warmest of welcomes at my new gig. This week I joined Viget Labs in Falls Church, VA as a Design Director in their North office. They sport a startup atmosphere with an 8 year proven track record and there’s a variety of work in their portfolio including ODEO, Squidoo and newcomer Loladex. I couldn’t be happier with this new opportunity as I believe the size of the company along with the atmosphere and growth potential suit me well. Look for some fine writeups on design from Doug, Erik, Jim, Keith, Peyton, Rob, Samantha and myself on the Viget Inspire blog. Plus there are several more Viget blogs to watch covering a variety of web business topics.

Here are some examples from this past week at Viget Inspire:

• Organizing Your Stylesheet Using CSS Edit
• Pulling Your Flickr Feed with jQuery

Did I mention we’re hiring?