Transcription Web Designer #5

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

Interviewee: Simon Nixon

Location: London, England

Duration: 50 minutes

Date: May 20^th, 2010

*Okay to put audio and transcription and name online.

Could you tell me what you use as your job title or area of expertise?

My current job title is user-experience architect, and my area of expertise is user-centered design and project management probably. I haven’t done that for awhile, but it is definitely there at the top??

And how many years have you been in the design industry?

I did my first site in 1994, so that would be 16 years. It’s a long time.

Do you work mainly as freelancer, consultant, or in-house?

Totally freelance now.

How if at all would you label your workflow in reference to your current position or projects?

How would I label what?

How would you label your workflow if you were selling yourself to a client?

Oh the kinds of things that I do?

Yeah.

Goodness me. It’s funny enough because someone asked me this recently and I managed to get it all onto one side of an a4. The whole kind of offer, what is user-experience, so maybe I should share that with you at some point, so you can take a look at it. *email for document

I deal, as well as typically, the normal type of deliverables that you get in UX, personas, user-journeys, ? analysis, wireframes, whatever it is, the other thing I tend to get asked to do quite often, is to gather requirements for clients, in work by courtesy of a bunch of workshops, so when they kind of have had enough of the traditional BA, functional spec route, they might say, is there another, way, I will say, absolutely. We will identify your audience, and then just build everything for them. That sort of thing has been happening quite a lot recently.

Sort of repetitive, but in your own words could you tell me what user-centered design is? And why and how you use it?

Well it is really about the user as part of the design experience. Bringing customers into the project, and there are various techniques and ways to do that. Things that I have learned, over the past few, many years. And it’s very much the opposite; to we’ll say the board that decides to make all the decisions themselves. We get clients to stop designing for themselves and start designing for the customers, so if it doesn’t involve customers, in anyway shape or form, it is not user-centered. If somebody just says, can you design that interface? Sure I can do that, but it’s not user-centered. If somebody says, can you analyze a key bunch of journeys, I can do but it’s not user-centered. It can’t be user centered until the users are in the center of it. They have to part of the process. That is my view.

Does that mean actually customer participation?

Both. Clients and customers. I have clients come to workshops and I give them pencil and paper so I get them to draw stuff, and just get them to engage with a different way of working. And then obviously customers, focus groups, usability testing, interviews, questionnaires, whatever it is, just get that input, get that customer input.

Why do we do it? If don’t do it, then you are usually guilty of ignoring your customers.  So no business ever wanted to do that, even if the purpose of the business was just selling very, noncommercial or community based information, there is always a customer, this is always somebody in mind, even if you are anonymously sending out, you still want somebody to read it, and it is about having those people in mind, and doing whatever you are doing, for them.

There is possibly, I did an arts degree, I am not an artist, but I did an arts desgree, and there is probably a bunch of people I know from the early 90’s who would say about art for art’s sake. What about producing something with nobody in mind but yourself? And I know I worked in the music industry for a long time, and I know that there are a lot of musicians who work that way as well. Who don’t think about their audience, so again, we’ll put those in a special box, but for everybody else. There is a customer.

I don’t know, you said you have worked with nonprofits before, but do you have a specific experience that you used user-centered design with a nonprofit organization, or community type org?

And do you want to speak fluidly about it, or shall I provide markers?

No I can speak. I can always talk. Everybody always says that about me. I went for an interview once and they said I got the record for the longest ever interview…its passion…

The not for profit experience was my first ever website in 1994. It is hardly surprising that I would say it wasn’t very user-centered. This was a bunch a people in Oak Park Illinois, who were trying to figure out how to even build a webpage, and figuring out what a webpage was. So there was nothing user centered about it.

*increase in technology has led designers to thinking more about users? Less pressure in other realms?

It was just us trying to get something up. I got a job there. Because I didn’t have a work visa for the states, so I took on this volunteer position ….And So I got a job there showing and driving people to apartments and showing them,  as the community center was about housing equality etc..Trying to have an even distribution of racial demographics in each building. So that was the purpose of that. So was just the guy that drove people to apartments. After awhile, well I said I would like to be a counselor, well that’s just another word for somebody who sits with clients and gets their requirements. So you sit with them and talk to them about what their requirements are, so there is no real counseling involved. Not in the British definition of the word counseling, but it is very personal thing, sitting around and talking about your housing needs. Not if you have got loads of cash, but if you are not wealthy and you have got loads of kids and no husband. This regularly happened. There is a kinda social element to it I suppose. Anyways, so I did that. And then somebody said oh we should do a rebranding project, and so everyone was told to design a new logo, it’s a bit of an urban myth among the people who work there, apparently my logo got chosen, but I think that is not true, I don’t remember that way, I think someone else’s logo got chosen, and I got with my friend here, and said yeah I think I can put it on a web page, and I really didn’t know what I was saying. I just regretted it immediately. Someone I , it was a little bit of , I guess now then probably called it a community forum or discussion board or something, but back then, it was just a list of people in Oak Park who had websites, and a couple did, and I emailed this one guy, and asked if there was any chance he could help me. Out with html and so that is what we did, in a weekend, and then we did a website.

And user centered design for me didn’t really come about till 2004/5, when I had been doing some interface design and more project management and a bit of interface design, but I started to, I went into an organization where the opportunity to test real users was about, so that is when ? started to change. About six years ago.

Um between 2008 and 10 a few months ago, I worked at Direct Gov, it is the biggest most visited, it may not be the biggest in terms of volume of pages, but the most visited public sector website in the UK. With I can’t remember how many millions of visitors per month, but it has got a hell of lot of citizen facing content, as they call it. They are a very user centered organization, the people there before me, preached the benefits, so I just rolled in on the back of that wave and carried the delivery in?? So I was hired as a practitioner and then became leader of the team, and manager of the whole team. So it was our job to design citizen facing content and functionality that let people, ?? and you can’t do that unless you are user-centered. So I worked with departments, like HRLC? The tax people and MOG, some part of voluntary sector?? And things like that. All sorts of things.

?? Recording fuzzy??Who are you working with now?

Actually working with Stereo?? The technology supplier for Direct gov. But that is relatively coincidental. What they do is Smile. Co. uk banking site, the co-ops banking site, they do the police service sites, and I think for one client, they have got 500 developers onsite in the client’s office. And they will often spend in excess of a million pounds just on the bid process for winning a massive contract, to give you an idea of the resource scale and the size of it. I think we have got 19,000 employees and two major develop centers in India. Big. Biggest company I have ever worked for, by a mile.

So there is nobody in there, who does user-centered design. I am the only one.  So there are 18,999 technical people, and me.

Are you able to talk about a special issue in your direct.gov project that you used user-centered design for? What kind of methods you use within it as well.

There is one that springs to mind straight away. So inside of MOJ, the ministry of justice, they still working on the project, so I will have to talk around it, because it is not live, K, so they are developing a service to help people who go to small claims courts. A lot of people go to small claims courts that arrive with the inappropriate information, so they are in the wrong part of the process to even be in the court room, or they don’t really understand what the concept of winning even means.  So there are all sorts of information and education problems that the MOJ face. Giving to people before they get into the court room, Gonna speak slower now, so I can think about what I am saying before I say it. The requirements were put in front of us, and the solution was also put in front of us, because they had mapped out a solution and they extended all the way around the room, where we stuck the pieces of paper on the wall, that was just one of 14 journeys that they had mapped out. So, to say a lot of paper would have been understatement of the year. It was factually correct, and it was legally correct, and it had been signed off, but there was no way it was usable. It was just ridiculous. On paper, even in the room, and being told, and talked thought it with somebody who had been on it the last year or two, it still didn’t make an sense to us. So we decided to try to get them to consider that they might need to redesign it. 14 times around a meeting room took a long time. That means that the client spent a lot of time developing this approach. When 2 blokes walk in and say change it, they are not immediately going to say, oh okay! Oh yeah fine we still just chuck it away and start again. So I would say we had some stake-holder management challenges would be an understatement of my career. Some challenges and some challenging people, but we, so initially they were very resistant to change, and when I say very resistant…quite brutal. So eventually we managed to get them in a situation where they could talk to us, and we decided to try personas as a way of engaging with the idea.

Can you explain persona?

It is an old marketing technique, in the advertising and marketing world, to create a one sheet snap shot of an individual. Who represents your target audience? Their photograph, their name, income, demographics, social background, education, family status, employment history, quotes they have told us, or made up, their actual story, internet usage, tech saviness basically, their favorite websites, what their goals are and we also embed the business goals in the persona as well. So what the business is trying to achieve, so when you look at it you see a person, and they are very real. And the more you write it, the better you get at making them real. Now sometimes we get given massive documentation, we build the personas from what we see in that documentation, customer insight is what it is generally called, stuff that a business knows about its customers,  they say what would you like, and we say well everything, and a guys turns up with a wheel barrow, and tips a load of paperwork on the floor, and we usually, produce on average around six for any project.

So in the case of MOJ we actually went to courts and hung around outside the courtroom and interviewed some people who were going in. So some of the personas were created from research and some were reading documentation. Some of the research done where we visited people we had met?? When we were done, we had a bunch of characters, and two of them stood out, so we presented those to to the client, and they really liked it, and they got it.  And about three meetings in after that, one of the personas was called Dean. And the client said, What is that piece of work on the table and turned to us and said, Dean won’t be able to use that. And we had that little knowing moment of knowing they have arrived. They have arrived at the place of not designing for themselves, but thinking about their audience, it is much easier, If I said, think about 20 year old males, who are fairly uneducated with nearly no income, and describe them in a generic way, that wouldn’t really work as well as thinking about Dean, and you knew Dean, with a paper that had everything about him and Photograph, and suddenly the whole picture comes into your mind, that is why a bit easier to use than just customer data, or these are our marketing segments, okay very interesting but I am going to turn these into real people. Because marketing segments do not use the website, real people do. So they have this little moment, the light bulb moment, and that is what you are looking for, you are looking at the clients, and in meetings we talk about them as if they are real and put them up on the wall. And we start every meeting, even if it is just regular status weekly check point meeting, we always put them up. We just put em up and it just irritates people sometimes, and we say there, that’s the customer. Well it’s just a check point meetings. But yeah if we branch out, the project, we forget about the audience. And once we have done that we went back and looked at their 14 journeys and realized they were not usable for the personas that had been created. And then we can start the process. So really what you are looking for is for them to say that is not usable, maybe we should change it as opposed to me going in there and saying that is not very good, you should change it. So you are looking for that moment for them to have the light bulb, like upper management when you work in businesses, just get your boss to think that he thought of your idea, because it’s more likely to travel if he thinks it was your idea. You just remove yourself, and have a little moment to yourself, you know it was your idea, and then just let him run with it. A little bit like that you just want someone else to think it was their idea. So yeah, or it I may be that the client does not have any requirements written down, they may have traditionally, done things in the board room, decisions have always been made in the board room, I mean, that is where the decision has been made. Talk about in the board room, then let’s take those ideas and put them in front of users, and record what people say, and we’ll play it back to you and see if it was a good idea or not.

How much education do you give your clients on user-centered design before hand? Or does it normally go like that- what you just spoke about?

SO we have designed, and I saw we because I work with another guy, we also work with a bunch of other people as well, contractors we bring in every once in awhile, and there is one guy in particular, ???….so what we have done, is we have designed, a one hour , 2 hour, and half day and full day workshop of how user-centered design can benefit, the organizational needs and we even trimmed the one hour one to 40minutes the other day, we did  a presentation at an event of about 70 people and we only had 40 minute slot because they want 15 questions from the floor and a 5 minute changeover, so we had to condense, UCD light, so we have different levels we have created, the one hour version is just us talking and the 2, half and full day are where we get a piece of paper out and pencils and we get people to do stuff. And some of those we do in businesses on their premises and offices and next month we are doing a paid version of it, with a partnership with another company, they are doing a half day on Google analytics and we are doing a half day on UCD and people pay to attend, like a proper day’s training, so we are very much focused on making sure people come out with something tangible, I learned this on that day, as opposed to use going this is what this is all about, and that’s great but you come and in and do it for us, but if they are paying us money they need to take away something they can use. Over the last year or so, we have really refocused the longer event to make sure they absolutely guarantee they have something to take out, we have bullet points that tell them what they are going to take out from this session.

Can you also explain journeys?

After someone says you can analyze our user journey which we get asked many times, so I looked at one yesterday for a client, and this one, the very traditional, from our home page it take, a very nonintuitive route and it takes 6 clicks to get to some very good content. I found that out, so I went back to them and went gosh, great content, but it’s really deep and terribly hard to find, and you need to redesign the journey. So typically the types of people who would go on that journey are: this type of person would go down this journey so, school teacher as it was, how they are going to find this, we need to design the site with better navigation???. To make sure they can get to the teaching aids. Another type of user journey might be, because this is an education publisher, might an author who writes books, education books. So they use a journey, and the content they want to find is totally different to the secondary school teacher.  So we are going to map this journey and make sure the key content is apparent.  And not buried. And that is kind of basic, 2 up 2 down version of user-journeys. Really, the real user journey, that makes it more real, is if I, said to you, do you own a car, if I said to you, I would like you to, so you just bought a car, there it is, outside window, I want you to buy a tax disk for it. A British task disk, so you are not British by birth, so you would know what tax disk is or even where to start. But I have given you enough phrases to get you started. So you have got a specific goal in mind. That is the beginning of your journey. You journey starts with, how am I even going to get this information, what is a tax disk, am I am gonna type it into google, maybe I will ask a friend who has a car. Who is English, and you might say hey I need to get a tax disk, can you just tell me how to do that or where to go. So there are two starting points for the journey. Google very typical, online starting point still for a lot of people, asking a friend, you might just coincidently if direct gov had been doing their advertising, see an ad on a billboard or magazine, direct gov the place to tax your car. Or the tv ad they ran last year that was very successful. Ah there it is, that is what I need. SO then traditional advertising is the art of your journey. You could come up with a few more. So then that is the beginning of the journey. How are you going to start consuming this information? Even a Google search is going to return you a bunch of results on the first page. Do you find the one you are looking for? Is that frustrating??Was it easy to find? Did you get a deep link in? Dropped right into the correct part of the direct gov site? Or was it badly done, and you were dropped on the home page and you were still searching? So you got to the site search etc… that is not very good experience. If you just typed direct gov into your browser then a site search would be fine, totally appropriate, but not after a Google search. So that is the beginning of a user journey. Identifying someone’s goals, not their needs, and analyzing the experience of that journey and optimizing it. And the optimization might be better advertising, it might be better SEO, it could be anything, but the more starting points you get, the better it is. That kind of home page 6 clicks down thing, that is important, but that is only part of it. You might not even get that far. And you might just be calling me asking me can you just do the tax disk. I can’t find it. So, and the later, is often not considered. And they just mean the home page down. And directly gov gets millions of visitors, …..google it to find out.. visitor stats.

Only around 50% of those people visit the home page. So when someone says can you analyze the user journey, if you only do it from the homepage, you are only doing it for half the audience.

But where did the other half go, they are deep in because direct gov is a task based website. I said to one of the directors in direct gov when he asked me question about the website, and I said well it’s a task based site, he knew about that but didn’t really say anything. If you go walking around the office at around 12:30 what do you generally see? I don’t know where you are going with this he said? Okay you see people eating sandwiches at their desk, coke having lunch, when you do that, you typically see the same old websites coming up, BBC etc..Sky sports whatever, I have never in all the businesses I have ever worked in between 12-1 on the direct gov site. Because you don’t just go for a browse around, while eating, you go there with a particular task in mind. For if you are that task driven and specifically know what you want to get out of it, then your Google search is likely to be that specific. So people are getting links deep straight in. And getting those results at the top at google, that is hwy most people miss out on the homepage. Whereas BBC, a massive amount of traffic on the homepage, because everyone starts off at bbc.co.uk, top news etc…what on tv that may be enough, or maybe a couple of stories. Just different behavior. Even in the BBC which is a big old website, and direct gov as well you can’t just look at it and go, and say they treat this bit of functionality like that, it’s all tested etc…we should just copy what they have done, we can’t copy what they have done because their audience is different. But even if it is same person, you, are approaching it with a completely different mindset. Great they have done something and tested it, we will have a look at it, but we can’t just copy and paste it into ours, it just ??.

At what point in the user centered design process do you actually seek approval from the client you are working with?

Like sign off? Okay let’s just answer the question in two parts.  User centered design fits into the project life cycle so that is kind of; it fits in quite near the beginning of a project. Typically a project is already started, and the idea is already out there. Some conversations have gone on a few meetings, whatever, and then there is that kind of strategy thing, where people think what should be done and how do we do it. And if we are lucky that is where we get in. We help set the structure, then we deliver blue prints, architect’s blueprints, diagrams, of what we think it should look like then we hand it to graphic design to handle and we are out. We get asked back in the testing stage at the end. That is typically where we are in. If we miss the early bit, the strategy has already been done, then we are usually given the brief, and they say, just design that. We have done all the thinking all the planning we know what we want, just design that. Any opportunity to challenge it. ? Excuse me. Um no. We have already done the thinking we just want you to design. Well that is typically how a long of projects go. Strategy might have been done by a third party and consultancy, the business might have taken it upon themselves, it could be good, it could be bad, or awful, but if it’s done it is done. Sometimes they accept a challenge. Sometimes not. If a standard design gig is available, as we call it, but its generally pitched to people who are a bit junior, or less experienced, the more experience you get the more you get to challenge and ask about the actual project. Are we building a circle or a square? You’ll say circle and I will say square and I don’t challenge it. When you are less experienced you get ….agreement…so there we are up for another project, even if we are not in the strategy bit we are still in design and technical. They are involved looking at what we are doing and worked very well, and it’s been quite collaborative, nevertheless, it goes before that, in a traditional waterfall methodology, it goes before that.

35:46

Um, we are not really talking about agile methodologies here; we are talking about that traditional stepped process. So where we seek approval for our signoff is, really dependent on what we are asked to produce or what we recommend, we produce, so if we are doing a set of personas, and we have the client involved in the drafting of those, but then they need to be signed off. If we are doing analyzing journeys, or competitive analysis, that needs to be approved. Particularly the journeys. When we get down to the wireframe stage where we are building a prototype, then obviously that has got to be signed off. Because otherwise you got major problems when you go forward in design and build if changes are still being made. There is no real point wireframing in the first place. Um, so really we are looking for a sign off with key deliverables. ???

*comes down to the fact not everything can be flexible or nothing would get done.

So user-centered design can be segmented? Sort of plugged in at any point in the process? Or is not really an entire process itself. Is that what I am hearing?

Tthat isa good question. Ask it again.

So user centered design can be plugged in at any point? As part of the process of creating a website, or is the entire process of building a website?

I think it is more the former.

It can be plugged in?

In itself, as an entity, it only gets you so far.

How so?

Well you can’t…for user experience, some user experience people can do a lot of things. But as a discipline of its own it says, what it really says is that you understand your audience, and we are going to show you what they want. We are going to put that in front of you, and we are going to work with you, but by the end of it, we are going to give you something that for sure is going to be used. Used and usable. ……

But it only takes you to that point. It doesn’t, it is kinda like the sort of customer survey, expanded. And it expanded, because it goes that stage further of actually giving you prototype designs and all interpretations, not some guy standing up and giving you a slide pack on PowerPoint, here is your audience and their needs, we go a stage further, and say, and that is what that really means. Things like that. So, but it, stops when we need, in a digital project, when we need creative and technical. But there are some user experience people out there, or agencies, digital agencies that can complete the whole thing. But as a discipline in itself: It cuts off.

What are some of the larger issues that you run into when completing user centered design? Do you think there are any pitfalls to it, things that should be changed? Issues within the process itself that people have not addressed?

Yeah there are lots of things, if you want to critique the industry or the practice, yeah. Yeah there are lots of things I don’t think are quite right, so let’s throw a few of those things out there. Typically we say that if you and I are going to design something, in order for it to be user centered we have got to show, it to at least one person. So, that makes sense, it that person is representative of our target audience. And we get their feedback; it inherently improves the quality because we get their feedback. But if we only do that once, with like 6 people in one round of testing, then we get that feedback, then we have no idea really if what we just did is any better than what we had in the first place, because we only just had one group of people giving their opinions, and you now have version 2, and you need to show it to a similar group of people, not the same people. But similar demographic of people, so you can say hw bout this, but you don’t want to come, and show 1 or 2, you are just going to show number 2. And you are going to ask the same questions you asked 1, and if the quality of the responses goes up then we know we did better in round 2 than 1. It can go down. You can misinterpret, you can make some mistakes, you can go okay we need to go back and have a look at one. So three is going to be more based on 1 than 2. So if you only do one round of testing, you don’t get that iterative approach that you need. So I have started, to believe that when clients say oh yes, we are going to do some usability testing, I‘d say well how many rounds are we doing. Because one round, I ‘d rather we don’t do any. It would save you money and we can spend it on something else. Cause that ….?? Saying that, the more experienced you get, even one round of testing, can give you some information, when you are less experienced, then you need to run more ideas around, …?? It is complex you know; there are factors that mean that more rounds are going to help you. So I tend to think that one round of testing is really not being user-centered. Probably flies in the face of what most people think.

42:33

…

So um one of the key problems that we have as an industry is I’ve met some user-experience people who are, the way to do it correctly is that you have to have an equal balance of what users want and what businesses need to achieve. User goals and business goals. Hand in hand. The client might say, that big ad that appears on the homepage above all the content generates x hundreds of thousands of pounds per year in revenue. But all the usability testing told us that doing an ad above, nobody likes it, and everybody wants to get rid of it. But the fact is, it works for the business and they sell, so okay so in redesign we are not going to have ??? That sits over the content, so prominent, but that could fly in the face of what our users said. We need to balance what the business tells us with what the users tell us. If you go too far in either direction, then you have some problems. And I met user experience designers who were too willing to do what the clients says and ignore, the users, and I have met some others, who are in a much worse position, is that they are so hell bent in being the user-advocate, that they can’t, they get into massive fights with the client over commercial objectives. Say, well that is not what users’ want etc… and they are in violent opposition with the business because they are so, passionate and dedicated to delivering what users want. One person in particular I am thinking of, I have seen in regularly, one person in particular terrible problems with a project, so the person we replaced them with, was not as experience of a designer or had a great portfolio, but understood, that relationships much better and the client loved him. After the first week, the client wanted to hire him. No, he works for us.

So yeah it is just about understanding that balance.

Does anything change when you working with nonprofits in terms of workflow?

NO, they are all the same, no the way we approach projects, the difference is that, for example in the public sector, there is no commercial goal, there is no sale etc.. dvd book..There is not t-shirt at the end of the process. There is a bunch of information that people need to get and a task they need to complete, so it is the same. Just can’t watch and listen to it and wear it, but it is still, as valuable in your life, that you need to find out about that particular thing, benefit, tax disk, whatever it is. So it doesn’t change. Just the context changes, but then everything else is the same. But those other things, those other things are where the industry needs addressing.

I can think of one thing which is that user experience designers often get carried away with producing beautiful documentation. In Brighton there is a place called Clear Left, podcast the other day, they call it Tool Time, don’t waste tool time. Don’t waste your time in took time, actually it takes ages in Photoshop or Viseo, in Actia, PowerPoint, whatever you are designing in, Omnigraffle, you Flex, you are going to waste a lot of time making it beautiful and perfect. And the quickest way is a pencil and a piece of paper. Scribble your idea down, and on the way to the meeting you can always do a slightly neater drawing, if it is really illegible, as often mine are, I have got a whole lot in my bag here, but they only take a few minutes, rather than days and hours to produce. Now, that agencies will particularly say, now here is how, here is a template, we want everything produced in this style, so sometimes you just don’t have time for all that. So you do a drawing, and show it to a designer, and say, what about that, he grabs the piece of paper off me and says that’s perfect, and I’m like….give that back, I haven’t done it in…No he says that is great, I can see what I need etc… navgatopm etc…

And it’s happened. Last month. We just did some work, and it was going at such a pace that the designer were so fast, I just didn’t have the time, so I did the whole thing on a piece of paper, and I am a terrible drawer, not artistic at all, but you don’t need to be. It’s about getting your idea down quickly. And often you spend ages laying it out on the screen you can’t remember the ideas in the first place. You might see more of that. And the more people I talk to about it in the industry, the more they come around to it.

me…interviewee yesterday said it also keeps clients from misinterpreting the documentation. That it is a sketch and not the final design.

True True, so there is no mix up there, it is like in the music, industry when they say, oh we prefer the demo. We like the wireframe more than the final design. Um, ah so yeah, it’s also I think, I think user centered design is about collaboration. And when something is drawn, the client will often feel like then can get a little bit more involved and often, this one lady said to us at a meeting, earlier in the year, and she said, oh I did some drawings. Okay we don’t normally hear this from the client. You did some drawings? Oh yeah but they are awful. No no that is gorgeous….where are they?

Oh they are back at the office in my desk, so I forced her to scan them in and send em over as pdfs, because that was a great insight into what she was thinking the solution was going to look like. But ah, we do our workshops, we have pens an paper and get people creating stuff.

Do you ever use ethnographic research for any of your projects?

Yes, it has happened. It probably, I guess,….. it hasn’t come across me so much, but it does happen for other people.

Is it something that was successful for you, or part of project, or just something that you have come across?

There was a project I had walked into where it had already been done. A bunch of people had left a project, so they needed to get some new people in. So I was handed quite detailed, ethnographic backgrounds, but done by somebody else. IT was really kinda hard to pick up, because the person was not there for the handover. It turned into a bit of a nightmare; in fact it was a nightmare. I won’t tell you who the client was or who it was for.

What do you think about the idea that there is more work to be done in understanding and building relationships with  nonprofit clients and their end users, rather than with commercial work or for profit?

Well, I mean I spent some time in another nonprofit organization,…

Is nonprofit the thing you are particularly interested in…

But my experience with it is ah, I don’t really see that there is a difference, In fact nonprofits, in my experience, are probably more aware of their customers than commercial organization, who absolutely are hell bent on the pounds and pence sales, whereas nonprofits, tend to be more understanding of what the user’s needs are. Whereas commercial businesses are governed on price point or product. So, I actually don’t think nonprofits are behind, I think they are ahead.

I never really thought of that, but happy with the answer…

You said you worked with Wordpress a little bit, and as a side part of my project, because it is what I know how to use..

You know it better than me then,

How much have you used, or what is your opinion of it?

Well up until a few months ago, I was only aware of it as a really good method of delivering blogs, or single entity sites, I want to sell my site, um but it obviously a very powerful blogging tool, and I have seen it integrated into sites as well. So stand alone, mysite.com, or mysite.wordpress.com, and then also mysite. Com/blog. I have seen it integrated and seen it stand alone, ah I also head about people using it for bigger site builds and as CMS, but wasn’t so much aware of that, since I saw the website for the #10, the site for the prime  minister, and the site is a wordpress site. http://www.number10.gov.uk/

• Email for interview possibly?

Beautifully designed, and a great example of what you can do with design, great for government as well. Who are often producing very tired design.  Its??

So 2 months ago when I started at Stereo, one of the specific terms of reference in the documentation of the project was integrating Wordpress. I was like oh this is going to be interesting, because I have only seen this from one, side of the window, Looking in …

We basically had to look at how we could actually integrate it into our site. So we did that, the technical guys, I just told them how it was going to be used, and then, one of them came to one day, and said this is actually a really powerful CMS, and I am wondering whether or we are utilizing 50% of what it is capable of. By showing it just as a blog tool. So that set off a whole scurry of activity as people started googling and talking to people who have used it. To really find out what more it could deliver. Then we found out that the government cabinet had commissioned a whole set of website with Wordpress if the new government came in. New…in preparation for potential change of government. Didn’t’ want to spend too much money on it, bc if there is no change, they will never see the light of day. But they choose Wp. And David Ponger? Inside of the cabinet office, is a big fan of wp and he commissioned WP. …also a meeting that he might want to consider Drupal, the cms we have been devoping in for the past 2 months. And so yeah, I know a little bit more about it, than I did a few months ago.

And also, there is accompany I work with sometimes called… www.pimpmywordpress.com

Lots of how-to’s…etc…themes…

Did you use user experience and user centered designer interchangeably? What is the difference?

The question. Thank god you asked it.

Have we got time to answer it??

This, in June I have been invited to some UX conference summit thing, and one of the topics, it is going to be very fashionably 2009/2010 and we are going to create the agenda on the first morning, I don’t know if you have been to any events like this, a bunch of broad topics are put out there, and then the people in the room, vote on what they want to work on for the course of the day, so they create the agenda.

It’s very cool, and it’s a great way for everyone to be part of it…I think they are going to do it bar camp style, I think there are going to be 4 topics in 2 days, and you can literally, just get up and walk away from the session you are in, if you are interested in the other one. So it is kinda fluid, very fashionable…what are the topics up for nomination? Probably tackling this issue of titles. So a whole bunch of people from around the industry have been invited. Um, UX London is going on right now, yester…it’s a big problem. There are a bunch of buzz words and phrases that get used around our industry, out of contect, user designer, interaction design, user experience architect, information archictect, product designer, when we do our power point we have a slide of job titles and we make a joke of it. Um because at some point or another, we have been called all of those. I know the differences, But I think I just created them. I do, I am not actually sure anyone has the same definitions as me. So it’s a problem, so we see job ads, and for some other project, and we see what title they have used, some of us reach an assumption, that we know what it is,

An information architecture is classic, because it really is a specific part of the industry, It is a particular subject, with a particular process, with a particular outcome. Some people just use it a blanket phrase for all of UX. For the whole of user centered design. But I would broadly categorize, them, if you want to know what I think.

IA – dissemination of large amounts of information, creating taxonomies and navigation systems that basically says here is a branch full of content and I am going to give it to you in usable chunks, just breaking down content into meaningful pieces. There are certain techniques that go along with that, card sorting is the most well known. There are others, and that is the role of the ia in my opinion, and therefore a good IA, may not be able to design an interface, and I think that is perfectly alright, because I think that they are totally different.

UX designer, product interface design, is designing interfaces. Interface designer. Here is a piece of functionality, here is check out process, here are a bunch of forms, calculator, login and registration, something like that, and design it in usable way.

Nothing like IA, but…

More kinda of research bit of user centered design. People who come from the background of ethnographic studies, the background and know how to write surveys and have experience going into people’s homes and gathering requirements and information. They might not be able to do IA, they might be the worst designers in the world, but if they can give you that customer insight that is completely part of our industry. Not in addition to, but in our industry. So that element of being user centered to one extreme is nothing to do with design or IA, and typically, we asked to do all three. And some of us are capable of doing 1, 2, or 3. Rare people are able to do all three.

I try to figure out which one of those three things are the client actually after. After I figure that out, then I can say to them okay I am generally better at this on that one or the other. I have been very lucky to have been exposed to all three, the level of skill is different than all three, but I have been lucky enough to have an experience with all three. But everybody has.

That is the key thing I find, when I interview somebody, that is the key thing I find, where do they fit into the industry, one of those broad three categories or, maybe someone is just a beautiful visual designer, they produce beautiful wireframes, does their wire framing in illustrator, beautiful documentation, I would probably hire them. For ¾ days when all the kind of thinking has been done, and say here you have got some stuff to do, can you just mock that up in to beautiful looking documents? So they have all places to fit it, but they have interchangeable job titles. Massively confusing.

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Tags: cms, commercial, design ethnography, designer views, relationship technology user, ucd, user experience, web design, wordpress, workflow
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