I was honored to be invited to the conference to conduct a spin-off of my UX Show and Tell workshops. The audience participation proved once again what I’ve been seeing across the country and into Toronto and London: that there really is a pent-up demand for user experience designers, interaction designers, information architects, and others to pull back the curtain from their work and share the goods or ask for help.

But as my session didn’t occur until Sunday, I had plenty of time to catch up with old friends from DC, my recent colleagues in Philadelphia and New York, and to finally meet a number of people with whom I had either communicated but never met or simply didn’t know until our time together.

Though I took away a lot of important insight in the sessions and keynotes, my real appreciation of the time lies in the moments spent forging new relationships or re-galvanizing existing ones.

My personal highlight of the conference occurred Saturday morning, when my friend Jeff Parks asked if I could sit in on a low-key discussion about design research with a few other folks. It wasn’t until a few moments before the UX Workshop’s video cameras went live did I realize I’d be having such a discussion sitting next to Indi Young, Eric Reiss, Daniel Szuc, Steve Baty, and of course Jeff himself.

Our conversation (which will be posted to www.theuxworkshop.tv thanks to sponsorship by New Hampshire-based Mad*Pow) spanned numerous topics involving design research, such as knowing what to investigate and how to dig deep enough, convincing clients when you need more research or perhaps even less, and much more.

Not only was the discussion itself valuable, it also granted me the opportunity to finally meet some of that Mad*Pow team, including Amy Cueva and Megan Grocki. I had been aware of their stellar work for some time but had never crossed paths with any of their team in person.

My workshop was a success despite a curveball at the last second: though we were planning on a discussion-style format, we couldn’t get the room converted from a presentation-model layout to round-table in time, and because lunch required the round-tables we’d have about 45 minutes for Show and Tell (usually the workshops are about 2 hours or more).

Will Evans quickly volunteered to kick off the Show and Tell by discussing some of the deliverables originally appearing in his “Right Way to Wireframe” workshop held on Thursday of that week. Will’s work process quickly captivated the audience and also showed the crowd that discussing your work doesn’t have to be all that painful.

Other presentations followed, ranging from people looking for help with their design approach, to other folks who wanted to walk through prototypes of their work to get feedback.

I’ll be the first to admit there were some unique challenges to the Show and Tell, but fortunately with a bit of adjustments I’m convinced such a workshop has an important role in an international conference attended by practitioners of varying levels of experience and expertise.

Looking ahead, I want to continue to build the UX Show and Tell brand with more of the connections I established in Savannah, and I’m sure the natural partnership with the IxDA will provide such a fertile foundation for growth.

Professionally, I can’t wait to engage with this crew in the immediate future and beyond, in any capacity, be it on project work, over a few drinks socially, or again on the conference circuit.

From a professional perspective, I’m beginning a long-term consulting position as a UX Strategist with a major pharmaceutical company to help design a socially-rich enterprise intranet application.

The personal perspective is equally beneficial: I’m really excited to move my baby girl closer to my wife’s parents (my Mom lives in Indiana and my Dad is in Hilton Head, South Carolina) . In addition to my in-laws are numerous cousins, aunts, uncles, and my wife’s two brothers who I’m closer to than some of my friends. If it takes a village to raise a child, then I’ll trust this village of family moreso than the alternative.

So between the great work environment, both for this current gig and whatever comes next, not one but three rich UX communities, and the opportunity for my own family to be closer to more family, the decision really wasn’t that tough.

I’m also looking forward to expanding my network of user experience professionals to include New York City, Philadelphia, and New Jersey, and rest assured I’ll continue rebel rousing the UX community to share their work at UX Show and Tell workshops throughout the region.

But that doesn’t mean UX Show and Tell is leaving the Washington DC area. My friend and fellow UX designer John Douglass will pick up the flag and facilitate workshops in the area. He’s already accepting reservations for our next event on January 12, 2010.

I’ll certainly be back in DC soon, but I also can’t wait to see more of you in Philadelphia and New York for UX Show and Tell, and I encourage you to join me for for lunch on Sunday at Interaction 10 in Savannah, Georgia.

UX Show and Tell is an informal workshop that’s all about the work, where designers can share feedback and ideas on strategies, outcomes, and deliverables, and meet other practitioners in a focused but relaxed environment.

Show and Tell participants brought a number of unique deliverables, such as concept maps and task models of complex web sites,  a process chart detailing how, where and when to integrate UX in an Agile software development lifecycle, and interface design mockups of a scheduling application.

I started the workshop sharing a deck of documents I used to provide visual conclusions from a number of user interviews and observations I conducted for the Library of Congress.  As user research continues to grow in recognition and importance, I thought there could be some value to *showing* how users behave rather than simply describing behavior in a Word or Powerpoint report.

…participants should be able to share specific solutions if they’re aware of the problems in advance…

I was hoping that the group would bear with me since it was the first workshop.  And not surprisingly, there were bumps in the road, from logistical issues such as starting on time to ordering food, to procedural hiccups such as how and when questions should be asked so as not to derail or sidetrack a presentation.

Fortunately, I’ve already begun incorporating participant feedback into future Show and Tell workshops.

For instance,  I’ll ask participants to identify what they’d like to share or problems they need to address during the RSVP process so other participants may be able to help. While I don’t want to see the workshop be so targeted that one session will only be dedicated to wireframes or another exclusively committed to persona documentation, participants should be able to share specific solutions if they’re aware of the problems in advance.

By identifying an issue first, the group can provide more direct, concise feedback.

Moving forward, the workshop will also run more smoothly if each participant quickly says what they’re sharing and what issue they’re having or where they’re looking for feedback.  During the first session, a few conversations began to wander off course when feedback that was meant to be helpful wasn’t entirely appropriate to the project or the project’s audience. By identifying an issue first, the group can provide more direct, concise feedback.

I also see the benefit to posting what was presented on a wall or whiteboard so the group can take a closer look at the documents. The photograph above shows how a number of deliverables were spread out on a conference table which certainly worked, but won’t scale well or support electronic presentations without a projector.

If your organization would like to host a UX Show and Tell, it’s really easy.

At the suggestion of one of the participants, I created a Google spreadsheet to list who attended with contact information to help expand each other’s network of practitioners in the area, many of whom had never met before.

I’m already discussing new locations to host workshops, both in the immediate DC area and beyond. If your organization would like to host a UX Show and Tell, it’s really easy.  Just have space for about 8 to 10 people, a table and chairs, and now a whiteboard, and we’ll set up a date.

Over 45 minutes, we discussed an introduction to human factors, cognitive psychology, and interface design heuristics. And since Mr. Brown’s class is in the beginning stages of a web design project for a local business, we also used the time to focus on identifying audiences, task modeling and other discovery-themed processes.

Mr. Brown has done an exemplary job at recruiting phenomenal speakers to talk with his students–to the point that many of his speakers contact him requesting to speak (I fall into this camp).

His students certainly appear to enjoy a dialogue with practitioners who have real-world experience that they can immediately apply to their own schoolwork, and hopefully put to use for years to come.

Hopefully more high schools, community colleges, and universities will begin or continue to interact with the technology community to benefit their students.

But us practitioners cannot wait to be contacted.

Instead, we should introduce ourselves to those who could benefit from our experiences.  Yes, it’s personally rewarding. But more importantly, those experiences can shape the thought and actions of our future interns, colleagues, and partners.

Some people think so and are rethinking how web design should be taught at the university level.

The problems, at first glance, are as obvious as they are abundant: technology changes too fast, university administration doesn’t offer worthwhile courses, draconian hiring guidelines mean interested industry experts without advanced degrees can’t teach, among others.

On the other hand, we risk over-correcting these perceived problems if our academic institutions simply play catch-up to technology.

Leslie Jensen-Inman‘s Elevate Web Design at the University Level, published last month in A List Apart, is a call to action to the web community and universities to change how web design is taught at most universities.

The Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga interviewed 32 web design and development leaders searching for insight and opinion into how an undergraduate education prepares students for working in web design.

Jensen-Inman mentioned that generally, the 32 industry leaders indicated “these educators don’t have the resources to do what needs to be done”, and James Archer, CEO of marketing agency Forty, went so far as to say that his shop “won’t hire anyone who comes out of a university web design/development program” because “the culture of large educational institutions has, in my experience, consistently proven itself unable to cope with the demands of such a varied and fast-moving industry“.

Archer’s opinions open the door to finding many of the answers.  However, those opinions also lead us to questions regarding the diversity of Jensen-Inman’s research.

First, when Jensen-Inman acknowledged the people interviewed were web design leaders, she may have been a bit modest.  Many of these people she cites are published authors, mainstays on the speaking circuit, and are generally household names among practitioners in the industry.

Why could this be a problem?

Because it seems unlikely many of these first-class agencies would hire entry-level talent directly out of college anyway.  While some of the quoted personalities work in larger teams (Cameron Moll leads a team of 30 practitioners of diverse backgrounds, for example), the majority of those interviewed appear to work either independently or in small boutique rock-star agencies.

I would rather have seen the interviews include leadership from companies who have hired young talent in the past, or at least make those who do stand out.  Here in Washington DC, nclud and Viget Labs quickly come to mind as studios that have recruited recent grads who may not have a shelf of Webby Awards (yet) or a client list that reads like the Fortune 50.

I’m also surprised at the choice to exclude academic representation in the ALA article–particularly given Jensen-Inman’s assumed accessibility to college faculty, including her current employer, and where she studied her craft (University of Baltimore, Savannah College of Art and Design).  Here we could have read unique perspectives from a private art school and a public institution, with both undergraduate and undergraduate programs.  Jensen-Inman’s graduate-school colleagues could have also provided another glance at what they thought of web design in their experiences as well.

That said, there are a number of ways we can improve the skills of future web designers (not computer science majors, information systems majors, etc.) without sacrificing the academic integrity of a four-year liberal arts education.

My recommendations include:

1. Offer certificates, not degrees in web design
2. Allow industry experts to teach
3. Create knowledge sharing opportunities for consistency among faculty
4. Integrate web design concepts in more classes

First and foremost, four year colleges and universities shouldn’t be offering 60-credit majors in web design.  With the cost of college today, students willingly asking (or wishing for their parents) to pay at least $3,000 (for an in-state 3 credit course) for 16 weeks of basic HTML instruction or how to use Flash is ridiculous.  Similarly, 16 weeks of generic “web design” isn’t thorough enough to teach someone the difference between an h1 tag (vocational) and a mental model (abstract, academic).  On top of that, a student may graduate with a degree in something more complex, well-rounded, and potentially meaningful than how to position a background image.

Enter the certificate.  Graduate certificates are increasingly popular as a means of securing post-undergraduate accredited recognition of completing four to five courses in an area of specialization, without the time and expense of a complete graduate education.

Likewise, if students had the core knowledge of HTML and CSS (bear with me, I’ll get to that in a second), they could enroll in a small number of academic but professionally-focused classes at the undegraduate level (similar to this and this and here, not something like this).

For instance, I created a mock curriculum for a 15 credit undergraduate certificate as follows:

1. principles of interface design
2. choose one of two (depending on background):
   typography & design theory
   advanced presentation layer coding (PHP, JavaScript, advanced CSS, etc.)
3. choose one of three:
   human factors & human-computer interaction
   information architecture
   introduction to web-based databases
4. 2 semester-long internships in different agencies, departments, etc.
5. one special session determined by industry expert (pass/fail non-credit class)

Students interested in such a certificate will likely already be coming from a design or development background, or at minimum, have an interest in going down a design or development path.   If a studio art student already has completed extensive courses in typography, then she would enroll in presentation layer coding to learn more about how to implement her ideas on the web, and vice versa for students coming from computer science or information systems classes.

Many of these courses are also already taught today across many college campuses, though perhaps by different names or exist only for graduate students.

Furthermore, and perhaps most important, is we keep an undergraduate education from turning into a vocational education and chasing technology.  Quite the opposite, in fact: principles of interface design haven’t changed that much in 20 years, and such a class likely woudn’t be deconstructing last week’s gallery submission in trying to recreate gradient effects.

The education stays conceptual and philosophical and offers skills applicable in the workforce.

Some readers may quickly point out that such a class requires basic knowledge of HTML and understanding how an HTML page links to another in a browser.

(edited 2/13/2009)

As mentioned earlier, web design is far too complex to fit into one 16 week course, but is also comprised of many important elements that don’t necessarily require a full semester of time to explore and master.

Let’s see more 100 and 200-level classes that lay a foundation for how to design a web site using industry standards and best practices, and introduce timely, but not necessarily technical topics, such as accessibility, universality, semantic code, and how to use CSS and responsible implementation of multimedia and graphics. At this point, an interested student would likely be prepared to continue her academic career by studying graphic design, marketing, or information systems, or something completely unrelated should she so choose.

But we shouldn’t stop at those introductory classes.  Returning to Jensen-Inman’s  ideas, I would advocate enlisting the web community (or skilled graduate assistants) to teach vocational, non-academic “how-to” 8 week special sessions in web design fundamentals, likely about 2 hours per class, two classes per week, that could run throughout the calendar year so students are exposed to best-practices and informed instruction before they’ve established bad habits and even worse fundamentals.

These classes would be open to anyone with the cash–regardless of major, year in school, or lack of web experience. (end editing)

These instructors would also provide special break-out sessions to further explore their areas of expertise, be it in design patterns, kinetic typography, AJAX, or something else entirely.  Ideally, if the web community develops a dialogue with those in higher education, there could be more than one special session available at one time, providing students the choice of pursuing a more tailored learning experience.

If these instructors have a graduate degree, that’s great. But we can’t continue to turn away motivated, qualified, experts in the field who understand the technology and have a passion to share their knowledge.

I’m not giving a free pass though: if you want to teach cognitive psychology, go to graduate school.   But I don’t believe someone needs an MS to instruct students how to design for multiple browsers.

Jensen-Inman’s article also expands on a significant factor in improving web design in higher education: knowledge sharing between practitioners and faculty alike, through conferences, the blogosphere, and elsewhere.

When I was teaching, the entire direction of the class was completely up to me and independent of what was taught either in the past or simultaneously by other instructors. As a result, I was left to develop my own lesson plan, in-class lessons, and assignments without a community or network to offer guidance or advice when needed.

These classes would then feature consistent curriculum even if the instructor changes from session to session, and allow the instructor enough leeway to provide personal emphasis in his or her specialty.

Furthermore, let’s expand how the web and multimedia can go beyond portfolio sites in art classes. The more students engage in problem solving where the solutions are in web-based deliverables, the more those students can begin tying abstract concepts to concrete answers. Students learn that not every problem needs a nail, and not every answer starts with a hammer.

When I was an undergraduate, one of my 400-level (senior) English classes substituted a final term paper for a multimedia presentation analyzing Emily Dickinson’s poems.  Another senior-level class opened its doors to students from the art, computer science, and English departments to create critical presentations in Toolbook investigating themes in the silent films of Communist Russia.

Were those forward-thinking, abstract courses recently discovered at an elite art school in New York or San Francisco? Hardly. I went to the University of Maryland. In 1998.

Do I reference “Bronenosets Potyomkin” on Tuesday staff meetings? Bring everyone down with a Dickinson reading after a successful launch? Of course not, but such skills, acquired early in my career, certainly help when a business analyst has a problem and wants me to design a solution.

I’m afraid if our colleges and universities begin offering majors with classes in how to create printer-friendly style sheets and connecting Visio shapes to one another, those students who think they’re getting a leg up on their web design competition may realize, as Matt Damon’s character says in “Good Will Hunting”, they “wasted $150,000 on an education [they] coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library”.

relevant background:
I earned an English degree from the University of Marlyand in 1998 and taught web design at the Corcoran College of Art and Design from 2005 to 2006.  I also completed graduate study in human factors and human-computer interaction from UMBC in 2007.

Clarification (updated 2/13/2009):
Based on a few emails and other correspondence, and re-reading my position, I’d like to make clear that I’m not advocating that all things web, technology, or computer be removed from four-year colleges and Universities and college students go back to studying Sophocles and Aristotle under an olive tree.

I wholeheartedly support a college curriculum that includes advanced topics pertaining to web design: information architecture, human factors, graphic design, interface design, how to use JavaScript, and more.

What I don’t support is a 3 credit class in how to use Flash, or 16 weeks dedicated to JQuery.

A 3-credit introduction to web technologies, open to all students (not just computer science or engineering majors), with a curriculum that includes the myriad ways of learning outside the classroom, is also benefit to the student and the web community as a whole.

As a result, a student can graduate with a degree in art, architecture, or mechanical engineering and have a strong background in modern web design without having to choose between one major and the other.

AllTop provides “aggregation without aggravation,” showcasing headlines from around the web on numerous topics, ranging from food to religion, and in the notebook‘s case, user interface design.

Currently the notebook is at the very bottom of the list. Who will be the first human factors geek to explain why I’m perfectly content with such a location and hope it stays there?  Leave a comment to answer.

Perhaps I’m so used to the iPhone (and previously the Palm Treo) that I’m now incapable of using a non-QWERTY keyboard, but I could not understand how on Earth to take a photo, text a brief message, and send to multiple phone numbers.  Finally I bailed on typing any message and just sent a photo of the newborn, bewildering quite a few of my friends and family (“Is this the baby?” “Is it a girl? Boy?” “Is everything okay?”–you get the idea).

A few days later I saw the CTIA’s promotional television commercial when the voice-over continually says “You wanted more of this” and “You wanted more of that”, followed by a simple, reassuring “OK”.

Usually if I heard such a shameless promotion for scope bloat, my thoughts would fill of business analysts dreaming up new features that no one will use and engineers developing new capabilities for software simply because they could make the code work.

Instead, I realized all I wanted was an intuitive device built on convention, common sense, natural mappings found elsewhere, and simple affordance clues (when not using my iPhone).

Apparently, I’m not alone.

The BBC just reported that “the complexity of modern mobile phones is leaving users frustrated and angry…” in the January 19th article New Phone Features ‘Baffle Users’.

The article almost speaks directly against the CTIA’s promotional message:

“There is an enormous range of things modern phones are capable of doing but the paradox is that many people are not using these capabilities,” [mobile device research firm Mformation spokesman Matthew Bancroft] said.

Of those questioned, 95% said they would be more likely to use new features if the initial set-up were easier.

Mr Bancroft said bad experiences turned people off trying to get more from their phone.

“If an application does not work once or twice, they just will not use it or try again,” he said.

Though almost edict by now, building something simply because you can doesn’t automatically make it a desirable feature for your users, no matter the production quality of the commercial that tries to convince me otherwise.  OK?

In my ten years of pounding pavement interviewing for full-time employment, project-based freelance gigs, and casual introduction sessions (all of which have unique characteristics, behaviors, and social agreements), I’ve seen companies and agencies that understand a mutual respect between candidate and institution, and those that may not.

To be crystal clear, I’ve never interviewed at Viget and the following situations, anecdotes, or summaries (while all companies will remain nameless) do not or did not involve Viget or their staff.

1. Be up front about a salary range and the position
   Sounds like a no-brainer, but not necessarily so. Please don’t schedule interviews without concrete information about what the job will pay or what the candidate will accept.  I once accepted a 2 hour interview with a prominent DC start-up while I was consulting for close to $100 per hour based on the in-house recruiter saying they needed similar work.   It wasn’t until a day later when they called back with a full time offer for a 5 figure salary.  Ouch.
2. Give an estimate of how long the interview will last
   If your shop prides itself on a comprehensive interview process, please let us know if we have to take a day off or if we can step out for a few hours.  Telling an hourly worker the interview will last a couple hours, but couple implies 6 in the recruiter’s head and 2 in the candidate’s head, is a sure-fire way to a contentious relationship.
3. Start the interview on time
   This is similar to asking the candidate to show up on time.  Yes, it’s obvious, but leaving the candidate reading Business Week or an annual report because not everyone is on the same page is unprofessional.
4. Make sure the interviewers are prepared
   I understand everyone’s busy. So is the candidate.  And just like the company’s staff would take offense if I didn’t know who their prime clients were, or if they were a Rails or Java shop, I would be slightly put off if I was asked if I had a blog or a web site or if I’ve ever studied human factors (or better yet, if I’ve ever *done human factors*).  Those statements are usually answered in as polite a tone as possible, “As my resume indicates…”.
5. Tread carefully with requests for free work
   I understand companies want to see what the candidate could bring to the table.  I get that. I know the staff wants to make sure their potential web designer doesn’t think the home page he could be tasked to redesign won’t look it was designed in 2001 for an entirely inappropriate audience.  But that’s what the portfolio is for, right?  I’ve had two clear examples first-hand of the right way and the wrong way to see a candidate’s thought process when working.
   The wrong way:
   A company wanted me–in the application process, not post-interview–to provide them a comprehensive web site analysis and changes I would make to their web site and why (keep in mind I only had general knowledge of their audience, technology, and business goals). I was encouraged to provide mockups and sample designs to illustrate my point.  Whoa, buddy.  That reeked of spec-work.  Instead of providing hours of free consultation that may or may not be implemented by me, I simply included a heuristic analysis I conducted for another company a few weeks earlier, and explained I could perform a similar analysis of their site for a similar fee.  Expecting that to be the end of it, the company relented their requirement and all was well.

   The right way:
   One of the more challenging tasks I’ve performed during an interview was when I was prompted to design an alarm clock on a white board.  This allowed the interviewing company to see if I’d pick up a marker and start drawing a box, or if I’d inquire about who the target market was, their demographic, and other user-research related questions first.  The company could glean how their candidate would work without the ability to Google “right” answers or duck and dodge tough situations, but there was also no perceived threat of spec-work.   The right move is tasking the candidate to design something with which he or she has first-hand experience.  Prompting a candidate to redesign of its own products or web sites leaves the candidate grasping at straws with no context from which to base the design.

However, it should be said that jobs are more competitive than ever in this down market. It would be foolish to walk out of an interview, indignant that the interview started 10 minutes late because of a priority meeting ran long or a critical bug was just found.  But talent is still available, and respect given is often respect reciprocated.

Like most blogs in the user experience industry, the notebook will often discuss topics ranging from design, usability, measuring and identifying user success, and the methods and tools a UX practitioner could bring to a project or task.

In addition, I’ll provide brief book reviews of UX-related texts and will likely turn to current topics under discussion in the UX blogosphere for frequent inspiration.

These posts will be penned by me and the tone will frequently vary depending on the context.  I rarely expect to publish personal news or events here, but cannot rule anything out, especially on the first post.