On 21 Aug 2009, at 08:46, Francis Norton wrote:
Hi,
I have many years of programming and technical communication and I'm
currently learning Interaction Design on an Open University course (
http://is.gd/2rpHx) which ends in October.
Because we all have to prioritise our time, I'd be interested in your
opinions about which of the following interests might best help me
make the
transition into interesting IxD work:
- Building executable wireframes in JQuery or Silverlight - I'm a
competent programmer with skills in .Net, JScript and XML
- Analytics - I'm not a statistician but I do know the difference
between
linear regression and a chi-squared test (and I know which I'd use
for A/B
testing or test-and-learn)
- Physical computing - I am itching to do some Arduino
- Narrative - I have done - and loved - improvised drama and I'll
shortly
be filling this in with a two-day course in story-telling
Define "interesting IxD work" :-) What do you find interesting?
If I have to pick one from the list I'd probably pick "narrative". It
seems closest to dealing with people - and I have a soft spot for
storytelling and stories as a way to talk about design.
As a somebody who has spent a lot of time (and still does) doing
development I can understand the fascination of the prototype building
and analytics (and the Arduino too - I _so_ want to have the spare
time to play with them :-)
They'd all be useful skills for somebody doing interaction design
work. Along with a whole bunch of others things of course.
I think the biggest thing that will help you, which is only implicitly
on the list, is actually doing design. Right from finding somebody
with a problem to having a prototype product in a real persons hands
and watching them use it.
Then you'll see what you did horribly wrong. Then you can go get
better at that bit. Getting better at the things you're terrible at
will make you a better designer. Being better designer will get you
more interesting work.
For me, and this may not be true for you of course, the people side
was the biggest problem when I started getting involved with UX work.
I was fairly good at solving a problem. Quite bad at picking the right
problem to solve. Very bad at working with folk to figure out what the
right problem was, or where I had gone wrong.
Once I'd figured that out I spent some time working at usability
testing, facilitation, reading up on ethnographic stuff, talking to
customer support and technical communicators, etc. That all helped.
I'm less terrible at those things now (which of course just highlights
the other things I'm still terrible at :-)
Of course - if you can find somebody with a nice problem that you
could solve by spending some time playing with some Arduino - that's
just gravy!
Cheers,
Adrian
--
http://quietstars.com - twitter.com/adrianh - delicious.com/adrianh
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