This is a question that many of us should be asking ourselves, especially those of us that are working on products and services. I think it often becomes the case that we accept much of what has been done and works “well” but only needs some “tweaks” for improvement. We see a model of something we like and may try to transfer that approach, but how often do you really try to push the limits? How often do you step completely away from a product or service you are working on and say “is this really the best and most innovative way to handle this?” Read the rest of this entry »
Twitter Provokes the Masses
by John Spyers on May 13th, 2009
While many of you peacefully slept the night away last night, Twitter was busy shaking things up and causing a stir of controversy. Twitter is known to randomly make changes to how the service functions taking away user-configured options and instead just dictating how things operate. This happened last night and caused a backlash that I don’t think they ever considered. Read the rest of this entry »
The New ESPN.com?
by John Spyers on April 28th, 2009
I’m not an everyday user of ESPN, choosing to check sports news and scores more from my phone more than anything else. However, I was just over at ESPN.com after reading a post by Gary Vaynerchuk commenting about the new layout of the homepage. My reaction – wow, where did all the content go? Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome!
by Charlotte Schwendeman on February 16th, 2009
To all who are joining us, welcome! We’re a friendly, experienced group of UXers who exist here at Perficient as part of a mid-sized (about 1300) IT consultancy that consists of — in addition to us, of course – technical architects, developers, business analysts, and project managers. As UXers, we are interaction designers, user researchers, information architects, visual designers, brand strategists, usability specialists and UI developers.
We hope to engage you in some lively discussions about user experience — what it is, how to do it, and what it means to us. We’ll share our likes and dislikes about our field. We’ll answer some questions and we’ll ask more. And we hope you’ll share your ideas with us too. In the process, we hope you’ll find comaraderie, be provoked, react, be informed, be inspired and, at times, entertained. Above all, we hope, together, we can further our field and learn from each other. And we hope to have some fun here too!
I thought I’d start out by telling you a little about me. (I guess I should be twittering this if it’s “me, me, me,” right?) I’ve been in the field of UX for more than 20 years. As the Principal for our UX Practice at Perficient, I’m one of those UXers who possesses the double-edged sword of being very passionate about user-centered design (UCD) and especially about integrating it into larger IT projects. But outside of work — and sometimes at work — I’m also very passionate about dogs, more specifically big dogs, and even more specifically, dog rescue work. (One of our consultants who’s not particularly fond of dogs told me once that I’m the only person she’s ever met who somehow can work dogs into almost any conversation. I’ll take that as a compliment, although I’m not sure she meant it that way.) When I tell people I volunteer with Mid-America Rottweiler Rescue, they look at me as if I’m from another planet. Animal Planet, I guess! The picture is of Sebastian, one of my “projects,” who is a Bernese Mt. Dog/Rottweiler/Golden Retrieve mix. Since his huge paws are one of his most endearing features, I figure somehow, at some point, I’ll work a “paws” rating scale into our blog postings. But more on that later.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how others who are not in our field perceive us and the work we do. Recently one of our senior level technical consultants approached me with a new project of his. His mission was to find out how his business unit could get UX into a project when they can’t engage us – translated, they can’t “sell” us to their client as part of their project team. It just so happens at the time I was reading Bill Buxton’s April 29th, 2009 article in Business Week, On Engineering and Design: An Open Letter. (If you haven’t read it yet, it’s a great 2-page article on how “Yes, Virginia, this is, indeed, a legitimate profession.” He goes on to define four layers of design and the progressively larger investment each demands.) I felt like replying with a sentence from the article, “You’re kind of asking for a master’s degree in an email.”
After some discussion, it turns out my colleague was asking for a list of UX techniques/methods we could train them on so they could use them in our “absence.” After discussing the pros and cons of training a business analyst to do my job vs. letting me help him “sell” us to his client, I went away thinking how in some ways our profession never changes. My earlier days at IBM came to mind. It was the late ’80s all over again and I was teaching UCD, and before that, UI Design, to developers (because in those days the developers did much of the UI design). We used to call it “dragging developers kicking and screaming into the 20th century.” In the 20+ years I’ve been in the field we’ve managed to flip-flop the order of our work so we’re now involved way up front instead of at the end of the development cycle, and yet we still find ourselves justifying out existence from time to time. “We’ve come a long way, baby.” Or have we?
These are some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately. How about you? What’s on your mind?
Thanks for coming to our blog. Hope to see you again soon.
