I was having a discussion the other day with some fellow web designer friends on the skills that you required to be stay in this field long term.
Sure we all agreed you need to at least have the core design skills, understanding of layout, colour theory, typography and the usual tricks of the trade. The platform that you used to deliver your designs was immaterial, be that Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks or the like it didn’t really matter, the end result was what was important. That’s a given.
Tagged: accessibility, career, coding, design skills, freelance, Information Architecture, javascript, usability, user interfaces, user+testing, userexperience, web design
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
I should have called this “Ten ways to make your web designer pull their hair out“. This is a sister post to my Ten Things Web Designers Forget.
I have a lot of respect for people that have made the jump from the traditional arena of print design and can now honestly work in the area web design. However this is a reminder to the rest of the traditional print industry that is pretending to be web designers. Stop it! You are giving designers generally a bad name.
So let’s start with a few basics you are just not getting:
Way back when there was Ideas 1, 2 and 3. Well this year to kick of 2008 the WA chapter of the Australian Web Industry Association is presenting Ideas 4.Stepping up at Ideas 4 will be two leading Australian speakers Lisa Herrod, (Sydney sider) webjam organiser web usability and accessibility guru and Rachel Cook, (local Perthite) Founder of Minti and serial entrepreneur (hmm that sounds dangerous).
There is also a bit of a rumour that maybe just maybe there maybe an special international guest as well, you’ll just have to come along to find out won’t you.
Tagged: accessibility, awia, experts, ideas, Ideas4, Perth, port80, startups, usability, userexperience, web2.0, Western+Australia
