I attended An Event Apart, Seattle ’07 a short while ago. It was an excellent conference and beyond the program, I enjoyed chatting with the speakers, organizers, new geek friends and old geek friends alike. The conference ran flawlessly, and the location was exceptionally posh, even with a giant cruise ship parked alongside. Yay for AEA SEA!

Out of the 350+ folks in attendance, an hands-up poll showed job “titles” were split 45–45 between web designers and web developers, with the other 10% made up of copywriters, marketing, PMs, etc. I don’t recall if the speakers polled types of employment—freelance, small company, large company, etc.—but really I wish they had. In fact, I wish demographics of web-related conference attendees were always available, and something we could study and refer to as a community.

All the AEA presentations were top-rate, but Jeffrey Zeldman’s “Selling Design” presentation, in particular, helped me focus my thoughts on a fragment of the audience that has been under-addressed in articles, conferences and blog posts. Mr. Zeldman’s presentation was about making the case for design thinking and UX, primarily using the vocabulary of freelancing (with extrapolation, a company-bound UX worker could think of bosses as clients). Likewise, other presentations at AEA Seattle also swung back and forth between UX attitudes and techniques for multi-discipline freelancers and corporate UX professionals.

But here’s the thing: Collecting UX tips and tricks to take back to freelance or defined corporate work is wonderful. But what about people trying to carve a UX role out of resistant or ignorant companies?

What’s not addressed is people working in crap jobs. Places where users are paid only lip service, if anything. Places where design is mostly high-fidelity visual mockups. Places where UXD is fragmented (if anything) across PMs, devs, managers, founders, executives and designers.

The good fight, in those situations, is to try to develop an awareness of UXD. The good fight is to start practicing UX tools and techniques individually, and show their effectiveness to team members. The good fight is to get buy-in from those currently owning fragments of UX, and solidify support and awareness into one position in the company, which then advocates users to upper-management in a happy, peaceful, enlightened process.

Yeah, right. What could go wrong there?

My own experience is that if that fight sours, it can do more damage to a team, company and UX professional than good. Resistance can range from passivity and disregard, to active politics and hostility. The prevailing advice, from that mostly targeted at freelancers, is to drop a “bad client”. Quitting is always an option. But then how do people get their feet in the door as a UX professionals? Leaving a job is no easy thing, even if you’re that clear-minded about it.

The situation is exceptionally difficult to fix, which is why it has been swept under the rug by educators, I think.

…

I have to say I don’t have any easy, clear thoughts about such complex problems. But I’m certain I’ll post more on this, as I work it out. I primarily wanted to articulate the thought.

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Like Véro, I thought I’d post about my own Google Reader “Shared Items” feed, should anyone want to follow the items I bookmark within the 325ish feeds I follow (religiously, now that I’m unemployed). In a previous iteration, I had a “shared” widget-sidebar on this blog, but it looked both awful, so it’s gone.

I’ve tried del.icio.us, bluedot and other social bookmarking services in the past. The only one that really fit my needs was del.icio.us, and even then, I use it is a research-ready collection of articles on user-centered design. Del.icio.us is just too clinical for my personal bookmarking, but it does work well for sharing research. Maybe my organizational methods are on a different wavelength than most people (likely), but if it doesn’t fit in my Firefox bookmarks, I really don’t need it weighing on my mind as something to which I need to attend.

I’ve updated it a bit today, with things that I could recall being worth sharing. Yes, it’s mostly XKCD.com comics. They’re funny.

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I have not one, but three pieces of my own writing in this week’s Digital Web, 11 June 2007. The first piece is my usual news blurb, announcing the new issue with relevant links and my usual “quirky” prose—all without the use of “thrilled”, about which Carolyn continually teases me. The second piece is an five-impertinent-question interview with this week’s featured author, my fellow Seattleite, Scott Berkun. The third piece is my first book review for Digital Web, about Scott’s book, The Myths of Innovation. It’s a great book and it was a pleasure to read and review it for Dig-Web, though I would have read it anyway. Scott’s essays helped me though the end of my tumultuous employment with WhitePages, so I have an affection for his writing and perspective.

While they’re not definitive articles about unique topics, I’m pleased with them. I got a chance to see the author’s side of the Digital Web editing process, and see my esteemed colleagues Carolyn and Kerri at work with my somewhat scattered book review. I learned a lot about flow, editing and the timbre of Digital Web’s voice in articles. All great lessons. And I now have my first published writing up on Dig-Web. Hopefully the pieces in various shades of “draft” will now go more smoothly.

Thanks, fellow staffers!

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In an attempt to gain some clarity and separation of topics in which I’m interested, over the last month I’ve been preparing a new blog, which is now live. It’s called Lost Cog, and it focuses my research and interest in the relative maturity of tech companies (management, tactics, hiring, etc.) from the perspective of the average worker.

Go check out Lost Cog.

I’d like to note a few things about its development. More than a few intelligent, awesome people spoke with me about the underlying themes and questions. Without their help and encouragement, I would have kept my inner turmoil about the tech industry—well—inner. And there are far too many smart people keeping their observations about problems in the industry internal, to the detriment of us all, I believe. The tech industry is too new and raw to keep its maturity evolution strictly a top-down process. It employs some smart people, yet it undervalues or even ignores their analysis.

My interest in management theory comes out of personal discomfort with what I’ve experienced so far, in my career. I’m happy to admit my expectations were high, though. I was raised by one of the best managers in Seattle: my dad, Tim Fehr, who worked for Boeing his entire career. Tim Fehr (hereafter, Dad) started as an engineer within Boeing, eventually working up to being a senior VP, tasked with training many of Boeing’s top-brass in his management style. Dad underplays it, but my childhood was professionally managed by the best of the best. My analysis of management is strongly informed by a childhood absorbing Boeing’s management theory from my dad, and his take on management in a competitive, geeky industry not unlike the tech industry. So now I find myself reading management-theory books for fun, as an echo of management strategies played out on the kitchen table of my childhood, with salt and pepper shakers representing stakeholders, and the napkin holder representing the Board.

On the geek side, Lost Cog represents the beginning of my summer project of learning new skills: Ruby on Rails, domaining and improving my design and writing abilities. Lost Cog’s visual design tries hard to follow both grid-based design and a strong, mathematic attention to vertical rhythm, both hot topics in web design. It also runs on Garrett Murray’s writing-focused, RoR CMS SimpleLog, which gives me a working app for tinkering with RoR. Simplelog is a great project all the way around, and a good learning foundation for subsequent projects. (I’m a good ways into my first real Rails app, currently.)

With Lost Cog, I have a focused place to write about my ongoing argument about my career and industry, hopefully with an editorial overtone, rather than personal. I’ll cross-post summaries of big topics on Lost Cog here, of course, but I hope to keep Syncretic Conundra devoted to my own technical and design topics. More than a few posts are in “draft” status.

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