The future is flexible, and we’re bending with it. From responsive web design to futurefriend.ly thinking, we’re moving quickly toward a web that’s more fluid, less fixed, and more easily accessed on a multitude of devices.
As we embrace this shift, we need to relinquish control of our content as well, setting it free from the boundaries of a traditional webpage to flow as needed through varied displays and contexts. In the words of futurefriend.ly’s Brad Frost, “get your content ready to go anywhere because it’s going to go everywhere.”
I had a dream last night where I was an XCode project. Every time the alarm went off, that was running “Build and Run.” If I would fail to compile, I’d have to fix the errors and try again. The next time the alarm went off, I’d attempt to “run” again, and I kept failing to compile a few times when I kept hitting “snooze.”
The last thing I did before I actually woke up was fix a missing semicolon which finally allowed me to compile and then I was awake.
In my mind, the title of “User Experience Designer” does not belong to a single person. Instead, it should be embraced by everybody contributing to the project, whether they are a designer, coder, photographer, writer, or systems administrator. Because after all, their work is what ultimately defines the user’s experience.
If you want to understand a person – look at their shoes, or lack of.
As the most frequently used interface between ourselves and our physical environment more than anything else that we our footwear treads the fine balance between communicating both need and intent.
