Although my day-to-day work isn't predominantly in what most people might call UX, consideration of the user experience needs to be a key component of everything we build on the web (and beyond.) So it was high time I showed my face at UX Oxford last Wednesday; and the first time too, I admit rather shamefully.
On the face of it, I picked the wrong first talk to attend: great as Ian Fenn's presentation was, it was about how to put together a UX portfolio. The subject was aimed at freelance UX professionals alone, and not of much interest to a full-time web developer like me, right?
Well, it helps to look at the talk at some higher level of abstraction than just the slides that Ian showed us. Portfolios have traditionally been a photographer or designer's marketing tool, in which visual deliverables are very much the outcomes that need to be marketed: here's a visual deliverable; stick it in the portfolio; add some explanatory text. However, the point of good UX work is the process, not necessarily the (often many) visual deliverables; not even necessarily the immediate outcome or conclusion. With this in mind, the traditional method of assembling a portfolio has to be switched round, with the deliverable serving the text instead; several of Ian's key points might be summarized thus: reports of process-driven work need to avoid focussing purely on the visual deliverables for no good reason.
By that formulation, the talk was of as much importance to a developer as to a "UX professional." I can't stress enough that an image-based deliverable is to me "just" a load of pixels. What developers do, and maybe what we don't always boast about enough, is to follow, iterate on and even create processes, and those visual deliverables are there as guides and illustrations of what those processes should be. As an individual developer, but also as part of a team and a company, I need to be constantly aware of how we can best communicate that core message: what we are doing is both high-quality and a successful solution to problems that users face; but at the same time, summarizing it with a design or two does not do it justice.
Despite me picking an apparently unpromising subject for my inaugural UX Oxford attendance, I still got a lot out of it, as you can see. On that basis alone, I'm looking forward to the next one, some time in August.
