Keep your eye open for a fresh new Limina design hitting the streets this evening.  OptionIt allows it’s members to reserve their spot at any of their partners’ events at a fraction of the cost.  New site should be live tonight: OptionIt.com

“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed, and believe what ever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes”. ~ The Matrix

Over the past few months, the Limina team has been carefully preparing to grow our business. We have a little way to go yet, but I thought it would be nice to post an update to keep everyone up to speed. As some of you may know, Limina has been around since 2003, and operating in more or less the same model for the past 7 years. We could conceivably stay this size and continue to enjoy our success as a small UX consultancy for years to come, but we’ve decided that it’s time for change.

Contributing factors to Limina’s shift:

• US Small Business Administration 8(a) Business Development program.  Limina entered into this program in 2010.  Participating in this business development program allows Limina to compete on Federal contracts which have been set aside for 8(a) firms.  Given the scope and duration of Federal contracts, growth to support our resource demands will be immanent.
• Increased demand for UX services.  Over the past two years, Limina has experience increased demand for our UX research, strategy and design services – we love our work, but we need to eat and sleep – more hands on deck will help distribute the load.
• Product development opportunity – this topic is Top Secret and we can’t give away any details.  Suffice to say, we will be dividing our focus from the services side of our business to deliver on a turn-key products which will deliver massive value to the field of technology. With our focus divided, we’ll need more staff to work on client delivery and product research, design & development.
• It’s just time.

We don’t have a specific timeline to share, but concrete plans are in motion to secure an office space in the DC Metro area to expend the team.  We’re working out a benefits package and employee handbook details…  and stacking our project pipeline with exciting new projects!

What does this mean for you?

If you’re currently working with Limina as an independent contractor – and you like it that way, don’t worry – we understand that works for you and we won’t cut off our contractors from our projects.   If you’re an independent UX consultant and you’re looking to work on exciting user centered design consultancy – we’re interested, send your contact info, resume and portfolio work samples our way!

If you’re looking for a full time UX career – working with a team of innovative collaborators, start preparing your resume and portfolios!  We’re taking applications and we’ll reach out to you when we kick off our interview process.  For a list of opportunities – check out our job listings.

If you feel like our posts are too far and few between – Follow us out on Twitter!  We tweet daily – and save you time on hunting for tasty UX treats.  Over capacity on twitter follows?  Hit us up on Facebook and slap that “Like” button.

We’re also on LinkedIn, Proudly Made in DC, IXDA DC, UPA DC and DC Tech Meetup – find us at any of their events!

Cheers!

-Jon Fukuda

One of Limina’s more exciting projects from 2010 was working with Invincea’s Web Browser Protection .  Last month they posted a video showing off some of the cool features and demonstrating key product differentiators in the web borne threat detection and management arena.

It’s really cool to see our designs in action.  Read more about our project with with Invincea. You can find more of their demos and webcasts on their YouTube Channel.

Enjoy!
-Jon

Big Data is the topic of discussion at the upcoming DC Tech Meetup. We’re all excited to hear what AddThis/Clearsping have to share along with OPower, Living Social and others. The data challenge is technical, yes… it’s true, how to collect, clean, store, query, mine and report, but it’s also a design problem as well.  How can we provide access to the data in a way that informs our perception? Looking at the deluge of data in overwhelming amounts we can all get pretty easily lost.

Dave McCandless‘ TED gives a great talk on the Beauty of Data Visualization. This talk covers all of the valuable considerations for why providing the right visualizations can make a big difference in how we understand the data.  You can learn a lot from looking at raw data, but when you ask the right questions, and have the relevant visualizations, things can become far more meaningful.

A huge Hat Tip to Jeff Wong, Creative Director at AddThis.