Andy Budd on Usability, Design, and the Death of CSS

SP: As well as Silverback, what else is in the future for you guys?

We've got loads of stuff on at the moment. We've got Silverback launching, in a couple of weeks' time. We're still doing some last minute tweaks; we're still optimising the outputs, because they're a little bit large at the moment. And we've got the web site's design being built at the moment. We're hacking it into the payment system, all that kind of stuff. So hopefully in two or three weeks' time, Silverback should be launched. There are a whole bunch of demo copies floating around -- I gave some away at our workshop.

We're getting dConstruct 2008 organised, which is a conference we run in Brighton, which has grown so much over the years. The first year we had 120 people in a church hall ... last year it was 750 people! And we capped it -- the venue had a capacity of 2,000 people, and I reckon we could have filled up that venue, because tickets sold out to dConstruct last year in under 24 hours. They go really quickly.

But we didn't want to sell more tickets, because we wanted to keep it to a manageable level, and we didn't want it to turn into SXSW. I mean, SXSW is awesome. But I think that one of the big important things about conferences, apart from the speakers, is the attendees, and allowing these hallway conversations. And if you've got 1,500 - 2,000 people in a room, and there's no room to wander around, it's just difficult to meet up with people. So 800 people is kind of the sweet spot. So this year we'll probably take about 800 people.

So we're really excited about dConstruct coming up. That site's being developed at the moment and will hopefully launch soon. We've got a great line-up of speakers, and we do a different theme each year. This year the theme is "designing for the social web".

We're redeveloping the Clearleft web site as well. Plus we've got loads of personal projects on our cards. Paul, our designer, has also got a personal project that he's working on part on company time, part on his own time, called WalRSS ("walrus") and basically it's an application for iPhone users which lets you turn any web site into an iPhone-capable RSS feed, or an iPhone-style web site. So that's something he's done with Simon Willison.

And of course primarily we're a user experience design agency, so we have loads of clients at the moment, doing some really interesting projects. We've just launched Edenbee, which is a really cool social networking site for people who are interested in reducing their carbon footprint. We've just launched a site called Rate My Area, which is a local search site. We're doing a couple of sites in the education space, and a whole bunch of other sites that I can't really talk about.

Plus we've just hired another user experience designer, and very soon we'll be looking to hire a new visual designer, and once they're in place then we need to bed down for a bit and get some of our projects done!

SP: Someone who calls themselves a "user experience designer" generally hasn't studied this topic at university. Is it only something that you can learn from doing, and from going to conferences like this one, and taking queues from the folks who are leading the way in the field? Where does someone who has no experience in user-centred design get started?

The problem for people entering the industry now is that all the people who are senior people in the industry started when the industry was in its infancy. So as technology and the way the industry works has progressed, we've progressed with it. So we're up to 8... 9... 10 years experience. When we started, we were crap, but the web was crap. So we could be crap, and the web could be crap, and we just kind of learned.

Now, the level of quality and the level of professionalism is so high, that when people leave university or college, and don't have that experience and aren't experts, as we weren't when we started, there's actually very little room for that. Because if you design crappy little web sites now, people aren't going to be interested because the level of professionalism has gone up. So I don't think there's a bit of a gulf -- a bit of problem -- in how you jump from having the actual desire to being able to actually being able to do the execution. Because things have moved on.

For example, when I built my first web site, it was a horrible little frame-based web site that looked crap. But every other web site looked crap too, so it didn't matter. Now, web sites look good, so when you do your first web site, it will probably look terrible in comparison.

I do think going to university can help. I think if you go to university, you probably want to study something that is quite specific. If you're interested in user experience, then doing an HCI course, or doing a cognitive psychology course or a social psychology course would be a great benefit.

But still, once you've done that, once you leave, you need to do several years of on-the-job training, and that's really difficult. Because you need to, at the same time, also be learning HTML and CSS and learning to do design, and doing freelance work. When you leave, if you've got a good portfolio to show, you need to go and work for an agency for a while that will take you in and nurture you and get you better enough for two or three years. In a small agency, you can learn those skills, then you can go to a bigger agency or do your own thing.

I think doing things like internships can be good. We've just started doing internships at Clearleft, actually having people in over some period, like a gap year over the summer between university courses. To come and actually get real experience in a web company, I think that kind of experience is hugely important for your development. Once the course is over, if you can say "Well, I've worked for three months at Clearleft, or whatever, and here are some real projects that I've worked on" then you're much likely to get employed.

I do think it's really hard though, and I think what you need to do is specialise. I think gone are the days of the generalist, because I think that, sadly, if you're a generalist, it does mean that you're doing everything not to the highest possible quality. Because there are so many specialists now, you've got to compete with those. So starting off and being really good at web standards, for example, if you want to get a job in industry, if you're really good at HTML and CSS then you will get a job, it doesn't take that long to learn HTML and CSS.

But learning the softer usability skills -- you can learn heuristics, you can learn basic principles. But it's not until you've actually sat down and built loads of sites and screwed them up that you can do that properly.
Which is why you tend to find, in my knowledge, very few companies like Clearleft or Adaptive Path or Happy Cog, who do what we do. Because you need that breadth of knowledge. And you need to have been doing it for 10 years and making loads of mistakes. So most web companies are either very generalist or very specialist that only do user testing, or only do user research ... or they do everything -- the programming, the building: a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

So we've definitely focussed on the user experience side of things, and pit ourselves as "web architects". So we do all the kind of stuff that an architect would do, only for a web site.

SP: Andy, thanks for your time! We appreciate it.

No worries Matt, thanks very much!

Image credit: Gary Barber