AlexAitken.net

It’s a fun thing to be at the fore­front of a lan­guage/tech­no­logy re­volu­tion. I’m al­ways a little amazed at how the JavaS­cript I began cod­ing ten years ago has turned in to one of the corner­stones of my ca­reer. MBAs and years on con­sensus build­ing are one thing, but it’s this lan­guage that truly brings my design work to life, from its pro­to­typ­ing stages to its full pro­duc­tion de­ploy­ment. And while I’ve forged deep­er and deep­er un­der its hood, JavaS­cript has im­plic­ated it­self fur­ther and fur­ther in mod­ern de­vel­op­ment prac­tices. JSConf 2011 brought most of the thought lead­ers re­spons­ible for this im­plic­a­tion to­geth­er for two days in Port­land, OR, in­duc­ted oth­ers in to the circle, and hummed throughout with young, fresh, en­ergy and ideas de­voted to the stand­ards lan­guage mak­ing today’s web hop. Notes on the sum­mit:

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.

Al­most all ap­plicatons we in­ter­act with on the web are form driv­en. User-sup­plied data in; sys­tem con­clu­sion out. To be sure, a dec­ade plus of ex­per­i­en­ce and in­nov­a­tion has seen UX im­prove by leaps and bounds. But we’re still build­ing forms, and to that end I al­ways en­joy re-vis­it­ing the ba­sic ques­tion of how to build them well. Here’s the es­sence of a re­cent stab.

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.

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:

UX Week 2009

Presentation Recap
Jesse James Garrett: The State of User Experience

Jesse James Garrett, Adaptive Path president and coiner of the term ‘Ajax,’ closed out UX Week 2009 with what he called a “state of the union for UX.” UX, Garrett reminded us, is a field that took root on the web. But over the past 15 years the concept of User Experience has spread to other media and technologies, and has implicated itself in the product and service economies such that today it is perhaps the key informant in the design of holistic, multi-channel experiences.

UX Week 2009

Theme

‘Perception and the senses’ was day three’s theme. Attendees were welcomed with an introduction to the concept of Synesthesia, defined as “a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, such as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color.”

See the synesthesia movie.