Hi Denise - - I'm jumping in late here, but this is a topic near and dear to my heart!
I did my "training" in IA/UX as the web manager at a not-for-profit. I was a web staff of one (though we had a web dev firm actually building the site) and one of the many hats I wore was as an evangelist for good user experience. However, even though I thought of that as one of my roles, I never gave that role a name. All I said was that I wanted to make our web site and intranet as easy to use as possible. I received no objection to that goal. I chose my battles wisely, but overall it's hard for even the most opinionated (and important) person at the organization to counter an argument that's centered around making people's experience better. Non-profits are all about getting the user to the content or to the donation form. The things I did to construct a good IA or improve the site UX would be recognizable to people in our field - wireframes, card sorts, usability testing, user interviews, analytics - but I never said that I was "doing IA or UX" - I would have been met with blank stares. I think that in the case of my organization, the more buzzwordy I got, the less support I received, so keeping it simple helped me get support for things that might have been rejected otherwise. In the long run, I like to think that my subtle evangelizing paved the way for the org to welcome in UX-savvy people/firms for work they did after I left. Once I decided that I wanted to do IA/UX work full time, I moved to a for-profit environment and now do government consulting. There was no way that the non-profit needed a full time person dedicated to UX, but I'm so glad I got the experience that I did since now I've seen both sides of the picture. Best, Hallie ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
