AlexAitken.net

A couple of years back I half-yawned my way through a UX­Week break­out ses­sion on di­git­al strategy led by Hen­ning Fisc­her from Ad­apt­ive Path. Root cause ana­lys­is fea­tured. The group also went through a couple of mock spend­ing ex­er­cises. Then I re­mem­ber a Venn Dia­gram that had me say­ing, “I have to re­mem­ber this,” be­fore I skipped out early for some San Fran Chinese.

A yank in the UK who runs a four-days-per-week web agency, has up­wards of 26k Twit­ter fol­low­ers, and hangs (at least vir­tu­ally) with oth­er big names like Veen, Heil­man, and Snook, it seems Ry­an Car­son gets his work and is pas­sion­ate about bring­ing it to oth­ers. He also re­cently caused a stir with a tweet and ac­com­pa­ny­ing blog post in which he pos­ited that "UX Pro­fes­sion­al is a bull­shit job title" and that only two people – a web de­sign­er and a web de­veloper – were needed to cre­ate a web site or app. I think UX Pros have their place. The piece I honed in on, however, was the single de­veloper con­ten­tion. Web site? Sure. But are we reas­on­ably ex­pect­ing de­velopers to build mod­ern and per­form­ant web apps end to end right when new devices and web stand­ards are adding fur­ther (al­beit ex­cit­ing) com­plex­ity to the task? I don’t know…

For the second year run­ning I’ve spent four late sum­mer days at Ad­apt­ive Path’s UX Week in San Fran­cisco. The 2009 edi­tion saw me di­li­gently post­ing day-by-day notes and ac­counts. This year I simply re­lay quotes and sources while steer­ing clear of at­tri­bu­tion. The con­fer­ence was again killer, the per­spect­ives at the same time re­fresh­ing and af­firm­ing, the chal­lenges plenty and in­creas­ing, the in­spir­a­tion ubi­quit­ous and palp­able. Thank you Mer­holz and co. for an­oth­er un­qual­i­fied suc­cess.

Even at the time it de­b­uted dur­ing my os­tens­ible un­der­age years I re­mem­ber be­ing im­pressed by the bril­liance of Jim Beam’s ‘You al­ways come back to ba­sics’ ad cam­paign. The ori­gin­al, which ran in the Oc­to­ber 1989 is­sue of 16 na­tion­al magazines, de­pic­ted a pro­gres­sion of Amer­ica’s pre­ferred food­stuff over 5 dec­ades. A series of 7 pho­tos in­cluded 1955’s ham­burger, then a hero sand­wich in 1975 and bean sprouts in pita bread for 1983 be­fore re­turn­ing to the ham­burger as the go-to of 1990. Sub­sequent vari­ations played the same trick with box­er shorts, re­cord al­bums, salt and pep­per shakers…

One of the harder things I do in my cor­por­ate design gig is to try and main­tain some wiggle room with­in UI and in­ter­ac­tion projects. More of­ten than not these put front end pieces to mar­ket that grow from months of di­li­gently sched­uled meet­ings in­volving busi­ness ana­lysts, mar­keters, bankers, front and back end pro­gram­mers, and strict dates. The UI pro­cess ex­pect­a­tion is one of ex­haust­ive re­quire­ments defin­i­tion, then pro­to­typ­ing and si­gnoff, then code. And I don’t think the mod­el is an ex­cep­tion for big or­gan­iz­a­tions with in-house teams.

I near the end of my ten­ure as Project Lead for the biggest cor­por­ate web site design project I’ve ever been a part of. We’re go­ing to hit our date (no small mir­acle giv­en that it was based on a 5000 hour es­tim­ate 6 months ago), but that’s not to say there haven’t been ma­jor chal­lenges along the way. Fore­most among these has been that of in­cor­por­at­ing the vis­ion, de­sires, feed­back, and con­cerns of all the parties in­volved. Not un­til I con­struc­ted the list of these, however, did I real­ize the achieve­ment it is to have ar­rived at a mod­ern, fo­cused, per­form­ant, and co­her­ent site. Here’s to the cooks in the kit­chen:

Five years ago online functionality was a differentiator, the UI designer’s job was to throw paper prototypes over the wall to the backend JAVA programmers, and the end product was a happy (or not) accident of translation and pre-packaged technologies. But pre-packaged components don’t provide unique solutions and UI development requires a skill set very different from that of a classical JAVA programmer. The following is the epitome of a write-up delivered to non-technical business leaders that tries to make this case.

Alan Cooper, sometimes the "Father of Visual Basic," was an interaction designer before there were interaction designers. One of the first advocates of the user-centered approach, Cooper waxed lyrical and prescient in his 1995 book About Face on the politics of admitting ‘designers’ to the software club. Our field drops you like a bad habit if you languish on skills or technology, but some struggles endure 13 years later.

The Financial Times on December 4 published a fascinating, sprawling account of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. acquisition of MySpace in 2005 and the reasons behind the social network’s subsequent decline and abdication to Facebook. Matthew Garrahan’s 4000-word piece delivers the type of in-depth, well-researched reading for which the newspaper industry is struggling to find an audience and revenue model in this era of 140-character text bytes. For the invested, it also contains a clear subtext: foot-dragging on design and user experience improvements drove people from the MySpace ship.

In October of 2008 I attended the Ajax Experience Conference (sponsored by ajaxian.com among others) in Boston. 2009 saw a conflict between Ben and Dion and Adaptive Path’s San Francisco UX Week, which I opted for to diversify. Here, however, near its first anniversary, I share what I took from the 2008 Boston session. We’ve made progress. There’s still a way to go. And I still think UI/X is king. The excitement and challenges of a year ago: