Both articles focused on content and how it gets passed around. The problem is, there is a lot more going than just content on the web. What both articles overlook is the work of the web developer or web engineer. No, this isn’t an attempt to shoehorn engineers into this discussion. It’s about the fact that they are needed to produce function.

Beyond the world of content is a whole slew of function on the web. Web apps have become increasingly important in the landscape of the web. As a matter of fact, you’re currently visiting a web app. Yes, you’re seeing content, but you are also interacting with an application which allows me to manage and publish that content for you to see.

Other things which happen on the web include buying insurance, banking, playing games, posting comments, public forums, meeting whiteboards, chat and many other items which are missing from my list. Web applications are vital to the new web experience.

So, what about the web designers?

Web designers are needed to make all of the extant and constantly emerging applications sensible and enjoyable. Regardless of the particular language or server structure used to produce the web apps you use every day, one of the primary interfaces is still the browser. This means what is an application in one sense is a web page in another. Who designs these pages you see? Web designers.

This link between the design world and the application world has been developing for decades. Designers are vital in the production of web applications just as much as the engineers are. The world of applications today isn’t the same as it was even in the 1990′s.

Users crave satisfaction.

As little as 15 or 20 years ago, to simply have a working application was a feat unto itself. If you could enter input and get a meaningful result in return, the application was launched. People, today, expect more. They want to be able to enter what they need and get the meaningful output they expect, but they also desire rich interaction. They crave visually stimulating and sensible interfaces. Users have gotten more design savvy and they won’t stand for mediocre if they can have the best.

Regardless of where the content, which is fed from a website, is displayed, neither Facebook nor Google will ever be able to serve the function you provide on your site. Moreover, they will not give your user the experience they expect from your company. Only by interacting directly with YOUR site will the user ever find the satisfaction they seek.

Ultimately, the people responsible for bridging the gap between the engineer and the user are designers. Designers come in various flavors from the jack-of-all-trades to the specialist interaction, user experience and interface designers. Designers make the user comfortable. Designers provide the problem-solving expertise which is so crucial to making an interface meaningful and usable.

In the end, to say that the future of the internet has no room for designers would be just as foolish as saying the future of the internet has no place for engineers. I mean, there are all of these turnkey software packages out there, what do you need an engineer for?

It’s foolishness.

Ultimately, engineers and designers are both critical to the web experience. They have been until now and the need is only expanding. Even as content is served out to other distribution channels, the home still needs to be somewhere. Even as content is still king, the sea of applications continues to expand. Much like Jell-O there is always room for designers. Go, design and make the web a better place.

©2012 Chris Stead. All Rights Reserved.

Years ago, I built a project tracking system for the Creative department at my current company which they use for everything. More projects come and go through the Creative project queue than I had planned on, but it has held together reasonably well. That said, the Engineering director would like to get everyone in the company on the same set of software in order to streamline maintenance efforts.

In theory, this unification makes lots of good sense. Less money will be spent maintaining disparate software and more will be spent on keeping things tidy, making for a smooth experience for all involved.

Unsurprisingly, I was met with resistance from the Director of Communications. She told me she was concerned about the glut of features and functions she had no use for. She prefers the simple system because the creative team is a small team of three. Tracking all of the projects a small team has is just challenging enough to require a small system, but not so challenging that she needed all the heavyweight tools a team of 50-100 people would.

I am currently acting as negotiator between the Engineering and Creative departments. Proposals and counter proposals are being thrown back and forth and I’m caught in the middle. The challenge I see sneaking about in the grass is that the Engineering team doesn’t know their customer.

This doesn’t mean the Engineering team is bad. It doesn’t mean they don’t care. It simply means they don’t live in the same headspace the Creative team does and they don’t have enough time to think about it.

This puts me in a sticky situation.

I worked exclusively with the Creative team for the first two years I was with the company. I ate lunch with them, worked with them, met their deadlines, played by their rules and build 95% of the tools they use today. It was a really great insight into what a creative time is really like. Something many engineers never have the opportunity to experience.

Now, I am part of the Engineering team again and playing by their rules. Engineers think differently. I am an engineer and my father was an engineer before me. I know a thing or two about engineers and their quirks. Ultimately, I can see both sides of the argument and the standoff is looking a little hairy.

“So, where are you going with all this,” you might ask.

If you are going to propose a solution to a problem, instead of learning all you can about the solution you are going to offer, learn about your customer instead. Don’t try to shoehorn a customer into a solution saying “it kind of does most of what you need as long as you need the stuff it does.” It will never work out for you.

Learn your customer’s language. Uncover little secrets about them and figure out how they really work. Customers will rarely pony up and say “here’s everything you need to know about us and our problem.” Almost always, they say “here is our problem. Fix it.”

If you don’t know your customer, you’ll never solve their problem. If, on the other hand, you DO know your customer, you have a fighting chance. Mind you, even if you know your customer, they may still disregard your solution anyway, but at least you know you gave them the best you had.

Don’t fret if it takes some time to learn to think like your customers, though. It’s not something that comes overnight. I know it took a while for me to stop thinking like an engineer for 30 seconds and think like a designer. One day, I woke up and everything had to be diagrammed. There were so many things which could only be said through images. The shift happened and the code disappeared.

Look for the transparency. If you can stop and step into your customer’s head for a few minutes you may discover that the real problem is not the issue they have with the solution you offered, it may be with the solution that doesn’t solve their problem. Creatives, engineers, accountants, executives and marketing people all work in different ways. Businesses are much the same. Find how their problem is different and you will find the solution. Know thy customer and make the web a better place.

©2012 Chris Stead. All Rights Reserved.

The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively.

I made a case to move in the same direction at my company less than a month ago. I reviewed the visitor statistics and discovered less than 10% of all visitors to our sites use Internet Explorer. Months ago, Digg posted a blog asking whether they should block Internet Explorer 6 from viewing the site. Their statistics represented similar numbers to our own.

This would be a fairly radical move as blocking someone from viewing a site seems like a fairly aggressive move on Digg’s part. My proposal was much more relaxed and forgiving. I proposed that I upgrade Internet Explorer on my computer and stop supporting version 6. This doesn’t mean I plan to block people from the site if they haven’t upgraded, it just means I’ve consciously deprecated their choice.

A while back, I posted a blog about browser wars and how people were behaving on the web. I would never condone a conscious exclusion of one visitor or another simply to support my favorite browser. This is unfair and, moreover, can alienate the user in a way that will discourage people from ever returning to my site, even if they opted for my preferred browser.

I am certain someone is asking why 10% is a good threshold for clipping browser support. I assure you, the number is arbitrary. Some people may want to choose a higher or lower number, depending on what their audience needs. Regardless of the particular number, the important thing is the direction the percentage is headed.

When Firefox first hit the market, to say it wasn’t interesting as a browser because it didn’t have a large enough market share would have been perceived as foolish. Firefox use was on the rise, so catering to the users would have been in the best interest of all involved.

Internet Explorer 6 use is on the decline and the dropoff is getting steeper. As users buy new computers and upgrade their software, IE6 gets wiped out. Moreover, Microsoft started campaigning years ago for users to upgrade to a newer version of Internet Explorer.

Something of note, Internet Explorer has been around for almost a decade now. As technology moves forward, IE6 only becomes more obsolete. One of the easiest examples to point to is the support for alpha-transparency PNGs. IE6 renders PNGs with alpha transparency with a blue background. Unless your site is already the particular shade of blue which is rendered, the transparent graphics are going to look cludgy and out of place on your site.

Other items of note, which are important to developers more than users, are things like new Javascript technologies and updated CSS specifications. As these technologies improve and grow, IE 6 will continue to to seem more and more obsolete, much like how IE5.5 appeared after IE6 hit the market.

To be fair, there are other old browsers which also fall down when pushed to render web sites using new technologies. The difference is, new browsers have built-in functions to test for updates. IE6 is old enough that Microsoft didn’t think to build that kind of functionality. They relied on users going to the Microsoft website and upgrading by hand.

In the end, we have reached a breaking point. Old browsers which are no longer supported, even by the company that built them, will eventually need to be clipped from the support regime that so many companies and individuals adhere to. Instead of blocking them, however, try the gentler approach of simply forgetting about them and letting them fade into the past. Be kind to your users, give them a gentle nudge to update and upgrade. Never push them off the cliff. Be aware of the browsers you support and make the web a better place.

©2012 Chris Stead. All Rights Reserved.

Today I landed on a slideshow put together by a gentleman at Microsoft all about Ux and why it’s important. This is particularly poignant as Microsoft developed a reputation for building applications that weren’t always pretty, or clear, but essentially got the job done.

Microsoft is a company that hails from the old guard and is trying to move into a new era of user-based production. Their oldest applications were built to serve the techs and speed their progress. They weren’t terribly interested in the average Joe since said Joe wouldn’t be using their software much anyway.

As we hit the 1990′s and computers became much more commonplace in the home, the average Joe became a more critical factor. Apple recognized the need for point-and-click ease of use and simple configuration. The Mac Classic became quite popular for people that wanted a machine that was simple to use and not quite so “techy.”

The straw that ultimately broke the proverbial camel’s back, I’m certain, is the proliferation of the web as a popular platform for distributing and maintaining information, entertainment, tools and any combination of the three. Now we have engineers, users, designers, data people, games people and most other types of people you can imagine, all interacting.

User experience has become paramount in conveying anything through the human interface staring you in the face right now.

So, what is user experience? In short, it’s precisely what it sounds like. It is the experience that a user has while interacting with things around them. This is really important, as William Tschumy says, because there is no choice of having or not having an experience. Every user has an experience. The question is, was the experience good or bad?

Designers have the demands of user experience placed directly on their shoulders. They carry the social albatross of ensuring the user has a great experience and they dictate what can be seen, heard and interacted with.

Though designers are often blamed when Ux goes awry, it is typically not their doing alone. Even if a designer is the best of the best, if you have an engineer that is not focused on carrying through with solid execution, the best designs can be laid waste by the mere use of a keyboard and an engineer.

In the end, everyone who touches a project that will be seen by a user, and that is most projects, is responsible for the end experience the user has. In the end, the thing that will set your product apart may not be the features it does or does not have, but the way the user interacts with them.

If you are presenting information, ensure your user gets to the information quickly and easily. Ensure their path is scattered with signs and directions. Find pitfalls and mitigate them. This task is not for the faint of heart.

In the end, the day is gone when merely having an application that did something was sufficient for a business plan. As the information age takes hold and rolls forward like a juggernaut, we find ourselves as businesspeople, as doers, in the age of the user. If you embrace the user and make things as pain-free as possible, you will do well. If you do not, you may fossilize right next to that old Commodore 64.

©2012 Chris Stead. All Rights Reserved.