During last week I got to see Jared Spool keynote at IAsummit via a streaming into Second Life. Okay its wasn’t that great, the streaming not the presentation. After reviewing the presentation later. It’s apparent to me that some people maybe missing the point of methodologies.

Jared’s core comments are summed up well by Mia Northrop and Molly from NLC Internet Marketing Blog, basically he proposes that we should be moving away from UCD and start to own up to the point that we haven’t really been practicing it anyway. Thumps up Jared.

We all produce near perfect interfaces for web sites, with a user experience that is optimal for the clients audience and budget. That’s a given. After all the dark years we are all doing it the right way, or at least trying to. Right?

And as the user experience spotlight has streamed over the web, it is now focusing on the Intranets of many organisations.

Rise of the Intranet

Now an Intranet can be a completely different beast than the corporate web site. For starters it’s not just about a single web site, it can be multiple sites over distributed and differing solution architectures. Containing various off the shelf applications from CRM, accounting, records and knowledge management and the like.

During last week I trotted off to give a talk on career directions in the local web industry to a group of high school students.

This got me thinking about the best fit for career directions in the web industry. Seems I’m not alone, Alex Graham also has the same concerns.

It basically comes down to:

• Study at University or TAFE and then trying to get a job with limited experience.
• Doing an apprenticeship, studying part time while getting real hands on experience.
• Doing an internship in your final year.
• Setting up your own business.