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December 07, 2004
advancing
so the other day i was working with one of the developers on our big project here at work, and i realized that she has this amazing innate talent for walking through an interaction flow and visualizing the whole thing in sequence without having to see it in front of her. she can just imagine it.
now this is something that i really cannot do and it's kind of a problem since i'm supposed to be the interaction designer on this project. in reality, i am acting as visual designer and usability specialist, and allowing the developers to suggest interaction design to me, then mocking up their suggestions in semantic XHTML, making it look all sleek and professional, and eliminating any obvious usability gotchas. but they're really the ones visualizing the thing from scratch.
so i was talking with the project lead about this today (who reassured me that i'd made a big and important contribution to the project regardless of this) and he suggested that i seek some education in this matter. in fact he suggested i look into a SIG-CHI conference, which is the big heavy academic CHI (computer-human interaction) stuff, and i'd always regarded it as too technical for me. however, he may be right, and this is the direction i need to go.
also, i have been aware for a while of jesse james garrett's visual vocabulary for IA's which is a symbol language that an interaction designer can use in Visio(?) to lay out the flow of an application or web site. i told our project lead about it, but said that we'd been moving too fast for me to handle the learning curve involved in using this thing. however, things are going to relax a bit next week and he encouraged me to get a copy of the software and to give it a shot.
Posted by lisa at December 07, 2004 02:02 PM | TrackBack
Comments
Wow. You're working on some of the same issues we have in our group here in Indy. It sounds like your group is structured differently than ours...
I totally scored brownie points for sending the link to that conference on to my boss.
Posted by: Steph Mineart on December 9, 2004 05:10 PM
ok, so a) your comment won't post right away because i have to approve it first and b) you might get a server error but your comment probably posted anyway and c) previewing doesn't work so i've removed the preview button.