My path into UX design was a bit circuitous. I didn’t study IT, web design or human factors. There’s lots of good courses in those areas, and a specialisation in human factors or human-computer interaction (HCI) would definitely help. My UX practice draws more from my background in journalism and editing – so a focus on content and copy – as well as from my experience in marketing and academia.

I work in a creative agency, working on clients such as Google, Schweppes, Westpac and Sanitarium. Working in a creative agency is a bit different to working in a UX consultancy or as a UX architect within an organisation. You have to work on different clients, different brands, and different platforms.

My UX practice involves everything from content strategy to field research, to business strategy and gap analysis, rapid prototype development and iteration, market research and customer experience design. Customer experience is a parallel field to user experience that has grown out of marketing. A knowledge of this field will serve you well if you are looking to work in a creative, digital or marketing agency. Human factors or HCI will probably suit a UX consultancy, a usability consultant or a software startup.

I work closely with strategists, designers and developers to deliver the user experience, and such I have to understand everything they do as well as my own field.

Of course, I don’t understand it to the depth that they do. I can’t code particularly well. But I have a good knowledge of how code works, and what we can and can’t do. I’m not a strategist, but I can think strategically. I need to be able to speak everyone else’s language, well enough to be understood.

The more you know about the people you’ll be working with and their professional field, the better. Studies in anthropology, ethnography or psychology are great for developing a user research/product development UX practice. Journalism, editing, literature are good for content strategy or microcopy focus. A solid understanding of content and copy will serve you will as a UX designer in a news organisation. It may also help you in a marketing/customer experience design role.

Outside of studying at university, these are the things that I’ve found helpful.

• I worked as a current affairs editor (video and online) for several years. This was useful for learning workflow, writing, editorial and content strategy.
• I worked as PhD researcher / academic for several years. This was useful for learning how to run a research workshop. It was also useful for learning how to run productive meetings.
• I worked as a social media producer for WWF / Earth Hour for a couple of years. This was good for learning social media strategy, microcontent and CMS management.
• I ran numerous blogs, news websites and online projects for friends and community organisations. This was great for learning how to run workshops, learning how to sketch, manage ongoing UX improvement and iterations.
• I studied technical drawing in high school. This was good for learning how to sketch paper prototypes.
• I spend a lot of time online, reading widely (lots of UX blogs, design blogs, literature / academic blogs, comics) as well as reading books. A Book Apart offer great design and UX books, as does O’Reilly.

If you are considering a career in UX, I would suggest reading as much as you can, then try applying it on actual projects. Find a community group and volunteer to help them update their website. Intern at a digital or design agency. Hang out at a UX consultancy. Volunteer for usability testing (UIE periodically ask their email subscribers to volunteer for testing in exchange for access to training webinars). Sketch up a software product prototype, blog about it, engage with other designers and refine your idea.

It’s a good training exercise to review your favourite websites and think about what you’d change to make them easier to use. But always remember that UX is about getting the best experience for the user within the bounds of the project scope, the budget, and the client expectations. UX is about communication and compromise. Once you’ve learnt the principles of good UX, get out there and get your hands dirty.

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In the 50s and 60s, there are five people at the centre working very hard, miserably trying to write a book and around them there are 95 people more or less having fun,” Greif explains. “In the hipster culture the people at that centre aren’t necessarily producing art, they’re actually working in advertising, marketing and product placement. These were once embarrassing jobs. Now it’s meaningful in this world to say that you sell sneakers, at a high level.

Why do people hate hipsters?

I’ve just finished Zero History and I’m still coming to terms with how I feel about it. Being about advertising and fashion, it is of course a commentary about the need for capitalism to co-opt every new thing. The brilliance of Zero History is not in its storyline, which feels a little formulaic, or in its characters, which feel bland. It’s in its identification of the changing relationship between subcultures, consumption, fashion and advertising, and its refusal to fall into a simplistic sell-out / stay true dichotomy.

Other commentators have noted the difficulty to create a subculture in the age of the internet – subcultures get co-opted incredibly rapidly. Or, increasingly, collaborate in their co-optation from the beginning. I suspect the backlash against hipsters was not really a response to it being an empty, meaningless subculture. Most subcultures at their core are more about shared tastes and boundary policing than any deep meaning, and they all have their base in shared consumption. That consumption may be ritualised (buy nothing day, retro fashion), fetishised (fairtrade, veganism, freeganism) or politicised (DIY) or ironic (take your pick), but a subculture can’t exist without shared consumption patterns. Rather, the backlash against hipsters is likely motivated by the fact it is/was a global subculture taking place in public view, arousing all of the usual passions and responses against things that are run by young people.

As a new generation comes of age, it’s likely that their subcultures will figure out ways to resist co-optation even while interacting online. 4chan may be viewed as an exercise in protecting a subculture that exists online. By forcing participants to understand a complex set of acceptable behaviours (call and response, memes), initiations (raids, DDOS) and repelling outsiders (porn, gore), 4chan have, for the time being, created an online subculture that’s resisted being sold out and dissipated.

The central plot point of Zero History is about how subcultures may avoid selling out in a post-geographical world. The designer of the Gabriel Hounds clothing is a closely guarded secret — clothes are sold in small batches and they are sold at pop-up events that are invitation only. This creates scarcity in a post-scarcity world (or at least, exclusivity in a post-exclusivity world). This, naturally, drives the master-coolhunter Bigend insane, driving him to employ someone closer to subculture status to find the designer. Hollis Henry – cult musician, music shop owner, journalist – epitomises obscurity cool. Her band was a cult band, her music shop sold records and her magazine was never actually published. She forms the bridge between the advertising world and the new subculture, and she is thoroughly conflicted about this role. It’s a conflict many creatives in advertising feel, with a foot in both worlds.

By the time Hollis Henry finds the creator of the Gabriel Hounds, the creator has already decided it’s time to go public. Once advertisers have found you, there’s a limited time for you to cash in before it gets done for you – so she does it on her own terms. As hipsters and the generations that follow become more comfortable with this, the more we’ll see niche market producers and subcultural figures selling out on their own terms.

A List Apart: Articles: The Content Strategist as Digital Curator

NYTimes.com Topics employs content managers who sift through The Times’ archive to create new meaning by grouping articles and resources that were filed away (or distributed to library databases).

Apart from sounding like a dream job for a news nerd like myself, this is exactly the kind of ‘sense-making’ journalism I was trying to get at in my honours thesis. I really need to take that thesis and update it.

By 2012 I reckon we’ll see the first breakout author who’s blown up via ebook publishing, probably young adult genre fiction.

UPDATE

Twilight is a possible model for the big ebook star. Find something that resonates with teen girls – doesn’t have to be well written, but has to hit that sweet spot of teen longing without triggering parental outrage – sell it with minimal transational friction (no DRM) and let the teen market sell to itself.

Make out like bandits on merch and film rights, sell micro-cost supplemental materials. Maybe even a submarket of approved fan-fic to supplement existing material, allowing fans to get involved and make some money, while the author and publisher take a cut.

a strong understanding of how the web and social media operate, the ability to contextualise that within the Government’s needs and find creative solutions; and have the technical skills to transform those solutions into product within tight deadlines!

You will need excellent communication skills, and experience in website design and development and in project and database management. You will be proficient in using a range of web design applications including Adobe Photoshop, have a sound knowledge of HTML, and a strong understanding of web publishing principles and techniques.? Knowledge of relevant web standards and guidelines and community engagement practices are essential! Experience in multimedia authoring and video production would be a strong advantage.

While he does have some valid critiques, it’s not impossible to find people to fill these roles. I’ve had positions like this over the last couple of years, and they’re not always bad, if the person in the position isn’t expected to do everything. Without getting into the everlasting debate around whether social media experts exist, it’s possible to have substantial experience in social media research, analytics and execution, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that in an online media position.

However there are a couple of major issues that I’ve been finding working on these kinds of roles. The first is that when you have such a broad range of experience / skills, you end up being the go-to person for technical support. I had this problem working at university, where I was known as someone who could edit video, fix a CMS, get a printer working, etc. I ended up coming into my office at 4pm and working till 2am just to get my own research done.

The second is managing expectations. Editing video and multimedia takes a long time, and doing it well takes even longer. When you couple that with the million-and-one things you have to do daily to keep the CMS up to date, maintain running social media conversations, monitor for feedback, run SERPS and so on, you end up pushing the longer, focussed tasks to the back of the queue. Time management becomes a huge pain, because you often can’t block out time for focus – and this impacts both your state of mind (constant split focus) and your professional development. There’s no time to learn how to do anything particularly well, because you don’t have the time to allocate to deliberative practice. You might get better at multitasking and responding quickly, but professional development ends up happening when you do it on your own time.

That feeds into the other major issue with these roles – you end up getting spread sideways instead of moving upwards. There’s no established career trajectory for this kind of role, and you often simply end up getting weighed down with more and more duties. It’s no coincidence that these roles are almost always 6-12 month contracts.

It’s not an easy process – I’ve got about 2 weeks worth of footage, to start with – but honing in on the story I want to tell is difficult. I’m still undecided as to whether I think the failure was inevitable.

I’ve never been a huge fan of summit-hopping, and I’m pretty dubious of the Cokenhagen approach as well, but I’m just sure of where I stand. Still, working on the documentary is helping me clarify some of it….

I’m feeling very excited about the future of journalism.

I use an iPhone because it does everything I need for a mobile computing device – phone calls, email, IM, social networking, note management, audio recording, photos and music. I prefer the iPhone keyboard to Blackberry because I have big hands, and the touchscreen works better than the cramped Blackberry. The interface makes sense to me better – the Blackberry interface is awful.

A lot of the criticisms of the iPhone strike me as a bit odd. Sure, there’s no multitasking – but apart from a few cases like running a chat client, that’s actually not really an issue. I have a dozen apps open at all times on my mac when I’m working, but I don’t do web development on my phone. The battery life is crap but manageable – and substantially better than a netbook.

That said, I have three main computing needs: mobile device, mid range video/project management/writing, and heavy duty video/compositing. The iPad doesn’t fit into that matrix, all my needs are taken care of. What I’m finding is that a lot of the critiques of the iPad are coming from people whose computing needs are covered – which is not where the demand for the iPad is going to come from. It’s going to come from people whose computing needs are not covered – people who are not technically oriented, who want a usable, simple, trusted computing option that is easy to use, easy to install software on, and one that doesn’t have to be concerned with viruses.

While some of Joanne Jacobs’ critiques are valid the demand for the iPad won’t be comparable to the smartphone market – the demand will come from the market identified here: people who’ve been sidelined by computer design by nerds, for nerds.

Far too often the demands for computer freedom have been dominated by a notion of software freedom that only make sense to programmers. Computer freedom is also about the freedom to use the technology. That’s the market the iPad is going to serve. Computing pundits and free software advocates need to start thinking about how people actually do use computers – or, in many cases, simply don’t. It’s indicative that people are condemning the lack of multitasking when people who are interested in buying one don’t care about multitasking.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.

I can actually see my parents using an iPad. And that is revolutionary.