I’ve been getting my hands dirty with wordpress, html, css and php – and the result is my first wordpress theme! OK, so it’s hardly going to win any design awards, but at least it’s fairly presentable and it’s responsive. And it has some orange, which was my number one design goal.
No doubt I’ll tweak it some more, but now I can turn back to the main point of writing some articles.
I’m not a visual or graphic designer. I focus on what needs to go where and how people interact with it. I’m more of a functional designer, concerned with how information is chunked, how it is arranged and how it flows with the user.
The way I design graphics is to describe what needs to be shown and what it needs to convey – then I work with a graphic designer to realise that. Much the same for any interactivity that’s difficult or impossible to achieve in whatever visualisation tool I’m using. I’ll write more about this some time soon, because a UXer actively needs to avoid imposing the limits of their own abilities and tools on the final UI design.
I strongly believe design is mostly about making something fit for purpose. Yes, I could have chosen some whizzy theme or spent hours on something more visual and with lots of Fisher Price interactivity to play with. But at the moment I just want to get some words out, so this theme is good enough for now. I’ll write more on the topic of “good enough” some time, as it’s a vital concept for effective UX work.
This site will evolve over time. I want to add a portfolio of my work. I want to make it look great. I want to use some nice shade of orange. And the functionality and appearance of the site will expand iteratively and progressively as I add more stuff. On any project I think it’s important to get something going quickly to build momentum – too much upfront work trying to achieve rich perfection first time can be paralysing. It seems that might also be a good topic to write more about.
I think I’ll stop now before I promise too many more posts! Actually, knowing when to stop is probably another topic…
Welcome to what I expect will be a sporadic series of thoughts, articles and outbursts, mainly about UX theory and practice but also likely to include loosely connected and wildly tangential topics.
I’ve been “doing UX” for a long while now. And, while the technologies we use and design for have evolved very rapidly, I see the core philosophy, approach and techniques for good UX practice remaining largely unchanged.
I’m hoping that the experience I’ve built up over 20 years applying user-centred principles across a wide range of scenarios will manifest itself in some interesting, thought-provoking or at least provocative articles in this blog.
We shall see…