Social networking sites like Facebook and the like were fun when they started. You could be ensured of a reasonable degree of trust with them.
I don’t know if you have noticed lately, but Facebook have been slowly but surely selling off your privacy, and rights to the information you put on their site. They are doing this by just changing their Terms and Conditions from time to time. The changes have been slow and almost calculated.
Over the last few years I have really come to question the point of various web industry professional associations.
Yes, it’s all about member benefits, relevancy, and value for money. What I also look for is the chances to network, face to face or online, ways to enhance my professional development (offline and online). Also the validation that you are following industry best practice as well.
Still the most important requirement is a sense of community and belonging.
You have been to all the networking events, chatted to people, exchanged business cards. Even found a few contacts that would be worthwhile leads in the future.
Still after all this, it just doesn’t seem to be working.
So you go to few more events, you have been really listening to people and you have your opening networking pitch perfect, it’s all going well.
However still the results aren’t that great. Sound familiar?
The problem is business networking doesn’t stop once you have left the event. It’s about the longer term networking post event. This is often the most important aspect of networking besides the event.
I’m an advocate of prototyping. I’ll even go so far as to recommend that wireframing be reduce to just sketching in favour of prototyping. Still prototyping in a UX environment can sometimes be one of those things that you don’t always get to practice when you would like to.
This is where Rosenfeld’s book Prototyping – A Practitioner’s Guide by Todd Zaki Warfel can fill in some of those nagging holes.
Gary Barber
I’m an independent User Experience Consultant.
I design interfaces, build information architectures, HTML prototypes, run workshops on UX design, do user research and conduct usability & accessibility testing and audits.
I can work within your existing team or as an external consultant on a contract or adhoc basis.
You can contact me via my company, radharc or just email me.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
