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.

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:

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:

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.