Notes On the Margins

onthemargins.com

I have recently decided to shift gears in my career path a bit. The few jobs I’ve had in the professional sphere have been in web design of some sort - either visual, markup, or ui/interaction. I did some client-side programming in Javascript, but now I’m deciding to take a bite out of Cocoa and Objective-C and try my hand at becoming a “User Interface Developer”.

One of the biggest changes is that I’ll be spending at least half (if not more) of my time writing code - that means staring at syntax-highlighted text files, compiler progress, and error messages. Although I did go through at least six months of this kind of work on the GMT, Objective-C seems (note I say “seems”) like much more of a serious undertaking than Javascript does.

One of my major motivations for this change of scenery is that I hope this development experience will make me more literate when it comes to evaluating and adopting new frameworks for my own projects (e.g. Noesys). The design patterns and algorithms I will (hopefully) learn will also help me better architect my own applications.

My other motivations deal with interaction and interface design. I have been reading about and trying to practice methods that lead to good goal- and user-oriented design. The web design that I have been doing lately hasn’t allowed me to follow these methods to their end. My present work is more about informational sites/portals, which focus on IA, site flow and presentation, less so on interaction and use cases. Advertising and click-through factor heavily in this world - sometimes at the expense of the experience.

Previous to this, I worked on the GMT which, as a web application, had a more task-driven design process. However the tasks and users were still loosely defined, in part are users were nobody, since we really didn’t have a client, and partly because are users were everybody - the app was primarily for searching and reading news stories, which can appeal to a wide variety of users and goals.

I see my new job as a more serious interaction design challenge, since I will be designing an application for a defined set of tasks and for a specific profession. This application will also be sovereign one - the users will be using only this application for an extended period of time. They will also be using it on a weekly basis (hopefully), so I will be able to consider most of the users as intermediates, rather than always as beginners (as is the case with kiosks).

The bottom line is - this application has to work well for people that will be using it often, and more efficiently than its competitors. I know that sounds obvious but I’ve never felt this burden of proof so strongly in anything I set out to design. My team mates and I will really have to strive to take into account facets of the users’ tasks and goals that other applications that do similar things may be overlooking. I will have to bust out all the tools I have learned in order to find out what users’ really need (not what they say)… code something that we think answers those needs, then test it to make sure it does. There’s no hiding behind entertainment, coolness, or sales numbers.

The other aspect I am thrilled about is that I will be doing some coding, which is necessary to me. I know I brought this up earlier, but when it comes to interaction design, it is important for my process. I need to see the behavior and try the alternatives. Its the same as a graphic designer being able to move type into different positions in Photoshop, step back and see if it works visually. Being able to make adjustments on the fly also shortens the design cycle, making room for more iteration (the guys at FAW summed it up nicely) We shall see.

So I may be saying goodbye to the web for a while. I don’t know how I feel about that. In a way I am very excited to learn something new (Cocoa) and really test my knowledge of design methodology. On the other hand, I’m going to miss things like CSS, browser idiosyncracies, and trying to fit everything in a 1024×768 screen for the masses.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 11:30 pm and is filed under HCI, interface design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.