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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I know, it’s been a while. Since the end of March and my last post, I’ve been exceptionally busy and distracted with a lot of thinking, analysis and conversations about the shape and direction of my career. Due to all that thinking, I expect my haphazard blogging to fragment shortly, into more concretely defined side-projects. I expect this blog will continue quietly, as a connection between my projects and as a collection for desultory topics. I’ll post about those side-projects when they’re ready for real use, of course.

In the meantime, my work on those side-projects spawned my first “free theme” contribution to a CMS system! Woo! Wait, let me back up a bit…. Blue Flavor recently added Garrett Murray to their roster. I got a chance to meet Garrett at SXSW, and learn a bit about his own awesome side-project, a Rails-based blogging CMS called Simplelog. Being a Seattle geek, and friends of the Blue Flavor guys, it was, in effect, a challenge to start using Simplelog. So that I might rock Simplelog on my side-projects (and someday soon this blog, too), I had to learn a bunch of things I’d promised myself to learn—terminal access via a Mac, server installs via DreamHost, MySQL and a bit of Ruby on Rails. A secondary goal is to use my side-projects on Simplelog as a springboard for learning more Rails, too.

After a bit of an uphill battle to get Simplelog up and running in a few places, the obvious next-step was to customize the UI and layout. UI design brought in a secondary goal of mine—doing a bit of design work, and building a CSS base that used em-based grids, em-based scaling, vertical rhythm and some of the latest/greatest CSS practices. The task was really rewarding, because I’ve struggled with vertical rhythm and grid design in the past, trying to add it onto and existing project, rather than starting with a grid as the base. Much better to start, rather than add.

Without further ado, I give you “Stripes”! It’s linked within Simplelog’s wiki, so hopefully some folks might adopt it as their design, or as a solid basis for CSS-based sites that want to use a vertical-rhythym/baseline grid system, too. In the meantime, you can see it in effect on the pre-launch of one of my side-projects, too: The Society of the Tap & Pint.

Download Stripes over here.

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