AlexAitken.net

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:

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 business of design is hard. Design has a tendency to deteriorate the greater the number of parties who contribute decisions. Design’s chances of maintaining coherence and integrity decrease the further the designer is from the top levels of organizational structure. And production versions resemble prototypes only if designers are constant companions to all phases of the development lifecycle. These things I believe.

It’s a wide-ranging discipline. The focus of this site is on the front-end of the web but my design inspiration is drawn from numerous sources. I think it’s in looking outside our areas of expertise and practice that we can often take our most valuable lessons.

Design processes usually entail decisions made on the basis of subjective opinions and experience. If good design is our goal, what we hope for is that the people whose subjectivity shapes the product are people who have devoted time or careers to understanding the questions and implications of their design decisions. At a fundamental level, of course, we need to define what design is and what ‘success’ entails for any product design project.