Man with no blog

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.

During the week the general terms of User Experience and Usability become interchangeable. Huh?

Well the ISO standard ISO 13407 - the International Standard for Human Centred Design (gets a new number too! - ISO 9241-210) is being side shuffled it seems. Now it’s a standard for User Experience. Is this a good thing?

What is User Experience, really! Well for me it’s all the aspect of the front end user interaction, the emotional response to use the page, the effective usefulness, the accessibility, the audience’s perception of credibility of the site and the directive of the user towards the site’s goal. Usability (ISO 9241-11: Guidance on Usability) on the other hand is just an narrow aspect of this entire user experience

Every so often the media, recruiting firms or someone at a conference stands up and says “Coldfusion is dead”, and everyone goes into a tizzy.

It seems to be that Coldfusion is like the development platform whipping boy, that gets throw out of the cupboard for a beating every now and again.

Now I’m not a “gun” Coldfusion developer, I used to work heavily with the product about 4-5 years back. But lately despite the frameworks and the version 8 advancements my interest in Coldfusion has wained. I guess this really started when I was finding it hard (yes hard) to get Coldfusion work several years back. That to me was the first sign to move on. At that point I suspect I made a decision with respect to Coldfusion. Now that’s not to say that I still think it Rocks.