I am joining Huddle

Posted by Jaan on May 4th, 2010 | 14 comments

Once in a while a fab opportunity comes around. This is one of those times.

Starting this week I am joining Huddle as User Experience Director. I’ll be based at the company’s San Francisco office and working with a very talented team including Martin Eriksson, Huddle’s VP of Product.

The reason I jumped at this opportunity, after considering simply continuing working as a freelancer, and also turning down offers from other companies, is that I believe in Huddle. I have used Huddle for projects for a long time, and several of my clients rely on it as their main collaboration space. I have seen it in action and I know what it can help companies and people accomplish.

Huddle is also one of the apps and services that make a Noded working lifestyle possible for knowledge workers everywhere. Now it’s my time to return that favor, and help Huddle do better.

My wonderful clients have all been very supportive of me joining Huddle, and I’ll be able to assist a few of them in the future too.

I’ll continue my involvement with CodeSlam, blogging, popping up at events, and generally being a nuisance. No change there, then.

Here’s what Martin Eriksson, Gloval VP of Product had to say about it (link not working, included the post copy below):

A few months back when I wrote the requirements for Huddle’s first ever User Experience Director I talked a lot about about passion, about championing the user and about striving for clarity. In hindsight I realise it was like describing Jaan Orvet.

Jaan’s passion for usable, user friendly sites and apps is well known, as is his focus on clarity and simplicity. If it’s one thing he likes it is to help people “do better, not more”. He has been in the web industry since the mid 1990′s and worked with large clients as well as start-ups on both sides of the Atlantic. Most recently he has been consulting, blogging and speaking as part of his own Sharpenr consultancy.

Jaan also co-wrote the book “Noded – The untouchable business” with long-time collaborator Andreas Carlsson on collaborative working in distributed teams. Sweden’s Internetworld magazine liked it so much they listed Noded together with Twitter, Apple, Nintendo Wii, and Threadless as companies and ideas that are “leading the way”.

I am delighted to have Jaan onboard at our San Francisco office, and to be able to work with him to continue our relentless focus on the user. Follow him on Twitter where he is @orvet.