To me, that’s the heart of the discipline, and it shows up in a lot of ways. I think we embody that, both as individuals within the practice, and even more powerfully, as members of teams.

As one of my colleagues pointed out in discussing this excellent post, divorcing strategy from execution leaves a gap–and, as nature abhors a vaccuum, thence the emerging prominence of the UX discipline in the agency.

I also appreciate your warning about the consequences of lack of clarity around the role of the discipline. While part of me thinks the debate is healthy, I also think there’s an identity crisis in IA and UX (and all the other related disciplines) that’s mostly about defensiveness, a needing to justify our existence and lobby for a seat at the table. That argument, from where I sit, appears over–let’s move on.

David Carruthers designed an excellent poster describing the interface between the Planner and the IA/UX expert.
One can find it on the euroia2007 webpage:

Planning & IA – How will IAs work with Advertising, as Marketing Communications become more integrated
David Carruthers, twentysix London, UK
http://www.euroia.org/2007/Posters.aspx

The Holy Grail is to reconcile the Human Factors/Interaction Designer discipline stream, with the aesthetic/content/experiential focused discipline stream.

The key is to find project architects who are versed enough about all those disciplines to be able to orchestrate projects that balance these streams. Unlike the dotcom era, we now have a far larger number of talent convergent types.

We are a young industry who is still reinventing wheels, finding out what is truly unique about our contexts and creations, all of it.

When I got into interactive I came from a multimedia production and film studies background. What blew my mind is how a role analagous to the ‘director’ in cinema, did not exist as a well defined role on so many interactive teams. There was the big struggle between the various left-brainers and right-brainers. A good illustration of what I think the missing directorial role was, was expressed in an Ingmar Bergman interview. Paraphrasing, he knew enough about the technology of his craft to be able to communicated the details of his vision, and to not take crap from technicians who would say that certain things were not possible, because he knew they were, just not easy.

So think of the director in this way; he owns the bottom line of the story and translates to a technical staff. The director is the third leg of a stool. But if your director is lop-sided in education about any of the two, it will show, and others will have to pick up the pieces and mop up the splatter. For example, having aesthetic only design types having executive authority over interaction design projects is like having a production designer decide where the cameras are going to go. Especially if the tasks and audiences are multiplied as they are in today’s content and utility rich web sites.

Human factors education is just getting going in arenas that produce professional strategists, architects, designers and developers. Alot of web-focused interaction and experience design books that take today’s needs and the evolved computer competencies into account, could only have been written recently. Schools are finally getting this into their curriculums. More design schools are offering interaction design.

Dotcom era: was kinda like if the film industry in the 20’s suddenly had Steven Spielberg budgets and were instantly granted sound and color at the same time. Think about the crisis in role definition transitioning from the prior era, and not yet developing roles, work-flow and best practices, for dealing in the new era. The Suits, the Aesthetic Phreaks, the Concept Heads, and Nerds shouting a across canyons of zero common ground.

Thanks for making me rant. It’s your fault.

Carlos Abler

We offer a range of products for personalization, social computing and web content management. Historically we would go in and describe the latest greatest widget,version x.1.1.1 and never make the connection to how this impacts the end user and their bottom line.

We are now shifting the conversation from features and functions to what a future state user experience can be thru rapid prototyping. As part of the concepting stage we also outline the key areas of opportunity to enhance business value and a measurement plan. This pretty much categorizes our approach to strategy and ideas as we leverage partners to execute on the first two points.

This approach has been extremely successful and proves the value customer centric storytelling and conveying ideas thru pictures..

Just thought i would share another example of how UX is transforming the front end of a sales process…
Dirk