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: accessability, career, coding, design skills, freelance, Information Architecture, javascript, usability, user interfaces, user+testing, userexperience, web design
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 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:
