Anyway

I’m still recov­er­ing from three intense days at the Ban­ff Centre, tak­ing part in the CanUX For­um. The ori­gin­al motiv­a­tion was to learn more about user exper­i­ence, usab­il­ity, and design. I learned enough about that to fill my brain, and also learned ideas for brain­storm­ing, the rela­tion between cre­ativ­ity and muscle memory, and how some­times com­puters get in the way more than they help when you’re try­ing to fig­ure out the answers to issues.

I’m not going to try to recap the entire time although in future posts I’ll prob­ably come back to spe­cif­ic parts. Some write-ups I’ve seen are from Mack Male (who was on the same design slam team as me on the first day), and teehan+lax. I have lots of pages of scribbled notes that may or may not make sense when I come to tran­scribe them; much of the time was also spent in team work doing exer­cises to really bring those points home. Now I’m won­der­ing how much inter­activ­ity I can put into my own talks, of course, as well as won­der­ing how the “cre­at­ive play” aspects can work in find­ing solu­tions in more tech­nic­al discussions. 

Much to my sur­prise, the room was­n’t full of graph­ic design­ers, or even people with tons of usab­il­ity exper­i­ence. There were quite a few of those of course, people who could draw and sketch, but there were also people who come at things from a more text- or code-based per­spect­ive, like me. Com­ing from that per­spect­ive, I learned, simply means you take a dif­fer­ent path to design. You may not get to the same place as an artist­ic­ally gif­ted per­son, but where you land is not neces­sar­ily worse, either.

And I found lots of people there shar­ing my con­cerns, as well as my require­ments for solu­tions that work for remote design­ers and developers, solu­tions that bring out the cre­ativ­ity in developers and not just those who’ve been to art school. Most of the ideas for cre­at­ing viable designs involved reams of paper and sev­er­al hur­riedly sketched solu­tions that are taken as the basis for dis­cus­sion, with lots of iter­a­tion to get from those quick sketches to real­ist­ic solu­tions. I was aston­ished to learn how long it can take to solve issues, a week on one small menu on a web page is not uncom­mon. Although that thought is mildly fright­en­ing, it’s also reas­sur­ing to learn that even the experts take time to come up with good solu­tions. I’m inspired, as well as tired, and look­ing for­ward to put­ting some of these ideas into practise.