links for 2011-06-30

"I think as a UX community we’ve done a good job of splitting out the different elements of UX Design. Stakeholders and clients are slowly starting to understand the difference between Information Architecture, Content Strategy, Interaction Design, etc. And most people also now understand that those functions are not just gut feel or whatever is the trend of the day. We’ve done a decent job of showing the evidence behind the decisions we make – thanks in large part to the results of user experience research methods like ethnography and usability studies. But Visual Design is the odd one out in this equation. It walks the line between science and art so tightly that most stakeholders and clients only see the art part. So they look at a design, make a gut call, and think that it’s all just whatever style the designer fancied on that particular day."

Two interesting points. When you research it, people are unwilling to pay for content apps, and don't appreciate how hard the work is behind the scenes. And "Building the app is trivial, content production is a headache"

Amusing list on early online "handles". Fortunately, I ditched that silly one I had. Oh, hang on...

"In addition to helping bridge designer–developer gap, UX developers actually build stuff, too! In my experience, UX developers are not building production level applications. That’s not to say they couldn’t or that they never do, but most of the time their skill set is better utilized in other ways. Rather than building full production-level applications, UX developers more often are building prototypes and proofs of concepts. A proof of concept may be as simple as building out a single interaction to see if it works, or testing to see if something is possible. Seeing if something works doesn’t mean seeing if it works technically (e.g., if I put data in this form field does it go into the database?). Instead, the UX developers build out interactions to see if the methods they’ve come up with works from an experience perspective. Is it intuitive? Does it flow correctly? Et cetera. This is one of the main differences between a traditional developer and a UX developer."

"This list is by no means exhaustive.  If you need examples of real names which disprove any of the above commonly held misconceptions, I will happily introduce you to several.  Feel free to add other misconceptions in the comments, and refer people to this post the next time they suggest a genius idea like a database table with a first_name and last_name column."

"The Code Challenge begins well before the airing of the actual show. Soon, 1000 people in the UK will receive a secret message with one of the first puzzles of the challenge. For a chance to be one of those 1,000, keep an eye on Twitter @bbccode and apply via Twitter or e-mail". Only *slightly* disappointed this isn't about writing BASIC on a BBC Micro. I could do that.

"Such irony – working for a print magazine, with a website, writing about the impact of technology and digital marketing on publishing and display advertising – has oft been pointed out to me during the countless times I’ve introduced myself to industry contacts."

Includes at #1 the 'lone community manager': "A community manager’s responsibility is to create content, interact with users and promote the community to potential members.   Essentially they are the point of contact for all things community…or is that the single point of failure?" [via @blaisegv of course]