On Sept. 17, I attended the latest SoCal UX group meetup in downtown Los Angeles, where 29o designers mingled with startups looking for talent, and honed their skills by learning about the latest trends in web design and marketing.<\/p>\n
The whole UX field is still very much a tech sector that is under construction. I’ve seen UX described as everything from the process of identifying the potential users of a new site, to the graphic design of a site, to the utter stats-based refinement of online marketing.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, working in UX feels a lot like the “Alice in Wonderland” quote from Humpty Dumpty:<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153When I use a word<\/b>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153it means<\/b> just what I choose it to mean<\/b>\u00e2\u20ac\u201dneither more nor less.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The question is,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Alice<\/b>, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153whether you can make words mean<\/b> so many different things.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
UX is a field of study and implementation that really didn’t exist even a decade ago. It’s not surprising that we’re still struggling with the nomenclature to describe what it is that we do, now that web design has evolved to become a meld between art & science. Even moreso, now that we’ve seen the rise of DIY, paint-by-numbers sites like Wix, Weebly and SquareSpace.<\/p>\n
It used to be that to build a site required a wide range of knowledge (and to a certain extent, it still does). But the democraticization of tools designed to make to make it “forehead install easy” to publish content to the web, has meant that the differentiator in the market has moved from technique … back to content.<\/p>\n
If just about any schmo can spin up a responsive site with integrated forms and CSS transforms, then what use all those coding skills we all burnt so many brain cells to acquire these past 15 years?<\/p>\n\n\t\t