About

What I do

“The browser is your first client.” -Quote: Myself

If you make a living as a web/UI designer (like I am), you need to accommodate many different clients.

Types of Clients

There are the people at the top of the food chain – just follow the money trail to find them (your company , the project manager, and the actual client); the people that are to your “left and right” – business analysts,  FDS writers, developers, testers (from left to right); and, most importantly, the folks in the center of gravity: the users, who, without their knowledge, have reached the status of immortals: We will do everything we can to please and appease the user.

The User

Like children, users understand their own needs and want your product to be easy, fun, novel, engaging, noisy, spinning, you name it, or they will move on to the next playground in a matter of split seconds.  Since you love them and, moreover, need them, you will do everything possible to make them stay. And you know the tricks of the trade: Getting to know your users by creating personas, applying design patterns, following usability research, diving into PET (persuasion, emotion, trust) design, and so on.  If you are lucky, and your project manager is as well prepared as you are, your project will be a success, and all of your clients will be happy.

The User’s Agent

All of your clients? The client I, personally, am most concerned with (because it is the pickiest of them all), is the web browser. How can I possibly put the browser over the user? Well, it is not by choice, my friend.  Let’s break it down and you will see. First of all, the browser, also known as web client or user agent, literally is – you guessed right – the user’s agent. It acts on the behalf of the user, requesting info from the most remote server,  validating the trickiest data, remembering its user’s preferences, warning about “phishy” content, in short – being there for the user all the way.

The user, in return, has to feed the browser well to stay in the game: Installing add-ons, custom toolbars, active-x controls, plug-ins, upgrades, whatever the browser demands. Clearly, there is a mutual dependency between browser and user,  a relationship that sometimes happens by chance (like “ending up” with a pre-installed browser), sometimes by destiny (like having a good friend who proudly introduces you to a particular browser), and other times by actively searching the browser scene (which usually means you are a web designer/developer and have no choice but, in a way, to love them all).

Lost in Translation

Depending on which agent the user employs, the web designer has to speak the language of the chosen browser. Technically, all browsers understand dom/html/css/js, but this “language” comes in many dialects. What language a page uses to communicate is determined by the doc type the web designer assigns to it.  If the web designer doesn’t know all dialects and the way different browsers understand them, some user agents will struggle with the designer’s message.  Worst case, the message gets lost in translation, and the user cannot complete the task he or she wants or needs to complete.

If the information gets translated to the user via another user agent, such as a screen reader, whose translation is only as good as the information provided by the browser, who, as we remember, gets the info from the web designer’s page, the user relying on that screen reader often gets the shorter end of it.

To allow for a clean translation process, the web designer needs to have a good understanding of the following:

• What browsers do I have to accommodate? (This can be project-specific and should be clearly stated in a requirements document)
• How do I choose the appropriate document type? (This allows for document validation)
• How do I separate structure, content, and behavior of a page? (This allows the user agent to translate faster)
• How does a machine, such as a screen reader, interpret my pages? (This creates universal access)

As a designer, if you put the browser first, you have a good chance that all your others clients will be happy, too (if not, blame it on the developers and graphics designers, unless that’s yourself).

How I Do It

To please the immortals, I meditate over the following sacred literature: W3 specifications, synchronized RSS feeds and books about web design standards and best practices, accessibility, usability, philosophy/spirituality (for my own sake and sparingly), and other related fields.

Since accessibility is somewhat dear to my heart (I say somewhat, because I still haven’t spent enough time with screen reader software – Fire Vox doesn’t play well with FF3, and JAWS is too expensive), I try to live by example and build in (should I say “sneak in”) accessibility features wherever I can, even when nobody else seems to care.

To make my work work, I walk a fine line between graphics designers (which I envy for their gift of creating the most amazing shapes with Bezier curves) and front-end developers (which I envy even more because they totally “get” JavaScript – no, it’s not something I can learn, Jeff, I gave it a shot). Since I am fortunate enough to have access to both (graphics designers and front-end developers), I can concentrate on diving deeper into the css/usability/accessiblity aspect of things. Pretty limited you might say, pretty specialized I reply. Because usually graphics designers don’t create good source code (that’s not their expertise), and front-developers often have a programming background which by nature prohibits them from implementing what is called the “user’s mental model” (that’s not what they should have to worry about). That is my space, after all.

Besides GUI work, I enjoy working on SharePoint, fiddling with InfoPath forms and workflows, and applauding project managers who have the stamina to follow a flexible process. On the other hand, I regret being a web/UI designer if I end up on a “death march” project (yes, there are still plenty of those).

Why I Do It

I will have to think about why I do what I do. I will come back and update this paragraph once I have found out for sure (which will require some meditation). But, in the end, we should never ask why, unless we feel comfortable with the fact that the answer can only be another question.

About Me

I am a web/UI designer located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I currently work for a medium-sized emergency management company that provides IT services to federal, state, and local agencies. I have been creating GUIs for RIAs, traditional web apps and small to medium-sized websites for the past ten years. What I enjoy most about my current work is that it is near ROE (results-only environment), which results in real flex time and interesting team dynamics.

In my spare time, I help friends, family and non-profits with setting up their web presence whenever I can squeeze it in. I like the idea of becoming self-sustained (no time right now, but as owner of a little bit of land it’s somewhere in my future) and the idea of “less is more” in all aspects of life (I don’t just mean moderation, but significantly less of mostly everything). Still got a long way to go.