Content has been at the heart of Web design for me ever since I built my first sites back in the mid-1990s. (That was after working a few years as a print journalist designing news pages with managers and peers drumming into my head that visual communication was a means to an end and that end was to tell the news of the day.)
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I’ve never worked in an environment that I would call user experience friendly. That doesn’t mean I’ve had bad employers or clients. In fact, I’ve been lucky over the years to work at some pretty great places. But if you mapped my resume based on how highly each organization valued user experience expertise, the spectrum would be narrow and range from “somewhat tolerant” to “nearly hostile.”
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Quick: Explain why the long E sound in the word treat is spelled “ea”, but for the same sound in the word wheel it’s “ee”. Now explain how one-third is the same as two-sixths. Now explain why a ten-cent coin in the U.S. is smaller than a five-cent coin. But wait, you have to do all this without referencing the evolution of the English language, numerators, denominators or the price of silver in the late 19th century.
Welcome to helping my six-year-old daughter with her homework. Or, (in the universe’s constant reminder to me that everything is really one thing) helping a recently graduated designer tackle her first information architecture work. In both cases, the challenge is to build a foundation strong enough to support all the learning that comes after it.
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Design is what it does and what it does is solve problems.
Words and the way we use them cheapen our understanding of design. We screw it up in both directions; sometimes we add modifiers to break the granite of design down into so many pebbles, while other times it floats away from us after we over-inflate it as Design with a capital D.
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I’m always wildly uncomfortable when people use the term “creatives” to define the professionals who do the kind of work I do. It harkens back to the pre-digital advertising agency world where a copywriter and a graphic artist teamed up and waited for somebody else to tell them the direction the client and the agency had decided to take for a campaign. Armed with instructions from the agency’s account team, the creative team would churn out their copy and graphics. The creatives’ jobs were essential to their agency’s success, but their work was strictly constrained within a specific stage of the project.
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Design should always be a means to an end, with that end being to solve a well-defined problem. If we over-inflate design and allow it to obscure other aspects of a process, we make it harder to address core challenges.
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I’m not one of those designers who stays up nights worrying about how best to define a thing, but I’ve found it useful to figure out what I think design ISN’T.
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Design is what it does and what design does is solve problems. Online, we concentrate on designing user experiences because the problems that need to be solved always come down to a single individual and the decisions they make. User experience could be pretty dispassionate work with such cold logic at its core, but in practice, it’s hard not to feel a bit protective of our users. We don’t want to do a Hansel-and-Gretel, abandoning folks in some dark forest full of dangerous critters. We want to create a relatively safe place where they can interact with content, functionality, and other users. We want to design user experiences like petting zoos.
When it comes to curation, I think there’s good news and bad news.
Curation is “the art of plucking all the good stuff from a superabundance of crap.” (That’s the Cranky definition actor and dilettante media analyst Joseph Gordon-Levitt gave in a recent Esquire magazine interview.)
As a result of explosive growth in the use of self-describing code and the increasingly sophisticated application of metadata, online content is getting smarter every day. As content gets smarter, controlling that content gets not only more difficult, but also less appropriate.