I’ve recently returned from a family break in Cornwall; a chance to repay my sleep debt, help around the house, and rediscover the warmth of a novel. In quiet moments I watched a fox inch across the garden, wagtails bounce on the patio, acrobatic squirrels wrap their haunches around the bird feeder. Seems I’m becoming more sentimental about the natural world as I get older.

The break was also a chance to take stock of a dizzying year. Although 2010 has been fruitful, burnout has stalked me like a shadow. I can’t sustain the tempo, so next year’s themes will be enjoyment, travel, and the opportunity to breathe the air.

I’m keen to do more public speaking and have a few gigs already lined up, not least the plenary. I also want to write more. This year I’ve been seduced by the romance of the written word—and experienced its occasional drudgery—and I now regard myself as both a designer and a writer. Design will always be my passion and pay my bills, but next year I hope to broaden my writing horizons and scratch out whatever reward I can earn. I’m not yet ready to write another book, but please bear me in mind if you have any suitable projects.

Finally, I must confess that it’s been a year of maturation. I’ve learned a lot about the humbling experience of having an audience. I’ve surprised myself with my determination and occasional temper. But above all, I’ve found that my love for what I do is stronger than ever. And for that, I’m truly thankful.

See you next year.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s a fine service. But its simplicity predestines it to serve as a final resting place for the written word. While the iPhone app is pleasant enough for grouting the quieter moments of my day, reading is still a pokey experience. Instead, I typically succumb to games or email, the weight of words growing heavier until shamefully purged.

So I bought a Kindle. (Not this one.)

Some technophiles scoff at single-purpose devices. No features! Get an iPad instead! And yes, the Kindle is a limited beast. A laughable browser. Prehistoric syncing. Awkward interaction design. But the reading experience is superb, and this is why the Kindle is an excellent device. The remarkable e-ink display makes long articles a joy to read—which is fortunate, because of course there’s nothing else to do. The Kindle allows no access to the black hole of email, games or social networking, much to its benefit.

That’s not to say I’m entirely sold on the Kindle ecosystem. I’m still unconvinced by the idea of buying books in Kindle format, due to DRM and my reluctance to only license something that I ought to own. For now, my Kindle has found its niche just serving me Instapaper articles. Sure, the integration is hacky, but it comes with an odd curatorial satisfaction, just like loading the iPod in the old days.

With my enforced RSI breaks adding up, I’m devouring upward of twenty articles a day (Dan Saffer’s list of canonical interaction design articles has provided ample food for thought). Between them, the Kindle and Instapaper have exposed me to a host of fresh perspectives—and that’s surely among the highest praise technology can earn.

At last, the book’s rolled off the printers and is in stock at all good online bookshops. You can now buy the paperback on Amazon UK for £11 or Amazon US for $20. If digital formats are more your thing, it’s also available on Kindle: Kindle UK (£10) or Kindle US ($16). An ePub version (for iPad etc) is also in the works, release date TBC.

We’ve given interviews for UX Booth and Scrunchup about the book, and there’s a short excerpt Winning a user experience debate on UX Booth too. Early reactions have been very positive, and sales have been brisk, so we’re pleased with the end result. I’ve been particularly humbled to see so many friends and colleagues industry grab a copy. That said, Undercover User Experience Design isn’t really a book for the senior conference-going elite. If you’re a junior-to-mid UX professional, or a developer/designer/etc looking to introduce user-centred ideas into your business, UUXD should be right up your street.

Finally, if you’ve read and enjoyed the book, please do consider leaving a review on Amazon. It makes a huge difference, and we’d be very grateful.

Last month, unable to suppress my curiosity, I briefly rejoined FFXI.

Although the game’s mechanics are largely unchanged, the designers have given belated thought to the beginners’ experience. The fearsome learning curve has been softened thanks to a tutorial, benevolent sprites to help newbies in distress and new trials to allow players to gain their first few levels quickly. No doubt spurred by customer retention metrics, the game’s designers have tried to create a more enjoyable newcomer experience.

Their attempts have failed.

Designers of MMOs (massively multiplayer online games) provide the game mechanics such as the architecture of the game world, the appearance and behaviour of enemies, and rules for movement and combat. But the primary architecture of an MMO is social. While game design provides the initial impetus to explore and level up, the thirst for experience points soon dries up without social context. FFXI’s original design acknowledges this, and encourages player collaboration by rewarding efficient party-based levelling. Thus a new player is quickly thrown into a social world, meeting other players with whom they can explore team-based missions and, finally, “endgame” content such as defeating Notorious Monsters. The fundamental premise of player versus AI foe continues all the way to the highest levels, but teamwork is essential at all times. Even the endgame reward system is socialised, as many boss battles only reward players with raw materials that must then be synthesised by another player. Value is created largely by users—all the game designers can do is trickle currency and items into the system and watch as they are bought, sold and reconfigured. The game outside of combat becomes largely an exercise of socioeconomics and commerce, with markets rife with inflation and deflation, supply and demand, and sharing of resources among clans and friends.

Although there is intrinsic reward in defeating a formidable opponent, social capital is the driving force in endgame play. Defeating Notorious Monsters grants players a title visible to all. Members of exclusive endgame linkshells, who hunt these monsters, wear their allegiance like a badge of honour. Even altruistic acts like raising fallen colleagues help to build reputation in the eyes of others.

In 2005, I was part of this world of interaction, rivalry and friendship. But almost all of my friends have now quit FFXI (endgame play tries your patience after a while), meaning this social incentive is missing from the game today. The shared exploration of the early days—such as being the first on our server to discover, and quixotically attack, Cerberus—has long gone.

FFXI is now a lonely experience for the new player. Experienced players hang around in ever-expanding high-level areas, where they can mingle with players of equal experience and trade endgame equipment. As a lowly level 14 character, these areas were off-limits. I was never once invited to join a levelling party and, since I kept my elite history concealed, established players assumed I had little of value to tell them. Instead of a social experience—a community bonding around the rules of the game—FFXI now feels joyless and isolated. For all their attempts to improve the newcomer’s experience of the game itself, the designers can do little to improve the social experience.

Virtual worlds in their dotage

Square Enix won’t want to lose the revenue from a relatively successful game, and have just appointed a new director to guide the game’s future development. But with a sequel just days away, new players are no longer the focus, minor gestures aside. Instead, the designers will continue to support the endgame activities of their existing, committed userbase. The time investment and social capital these players have built up will mean some keep their accounts, but many FFXI players will soon migrate to the sequel. I expect that FFXI will therefore implode in the foreseeable future. As resources are poured into the sequel, development of new content will cease, and eventually the maintenance costs will exceed revenue. Vana’diel will die, taking with it the memories and stories that took place within its territories.

FFXI has had remarkable longevity, but the game is no longer fit for new players. In concentrating on endgame activity, the designers have (perhaps deliberately) caused the social architectures around low-level play to vanish. Where new players once experienced a rich world of social value, economics and interaction, they are now left with a mere game of player against environment.

Digital environments undergo an aging process more aggressive than mere erosion. This aging is not caused by the degradation of the environment, which stays as faithfully preserved as at its creation. Instead, the value of our digital worlds is eroded by relative decrepitude. Our games, our websites, our interfaces are soon rendered obsolete by more fully-realised alternatives. Final Fantasy XI loses to Final Fantasy XIV. MySpace loses to Facebook. The lure of the new feature set, the redesign, the higher polygon count is hard to resist. The death of our digital environments—websites, MMOs, operating systems—is inevitable. Entropy always wins.

Perhaps nostalgic sentimentality has no place in our futurist outlook, but in our eagerness to create the new we should consider the human experiences that lie within the walls of our antiquated structures. Designing to conserve experience, perhaps, is the digital industry’s sustainability challenge.

See also: James Bridle—The Value of Ruins at dConstruct 2010.

UX is a pivotal role at Clearleft. Our UX designers act as project leads, determining the methods and approach we take, so we need someone senior but T-shaped, with some HTML/CSS, visual design, and project management knowledge. Preferably someone who can write well and present well. Definitely someone who sees user experience design as their calling, not just a job. We offer a training budget of £1,000, team outings, flexible working, and the chance to work with high profile clients such as Channel 4, Mozilla and NBC Universal. No politics, no bullshit, just a chance to do the best work of your life.

If this sounds like your cup of tea, read the job description on the Clearleft site. The closing date is 12 October.

The post’s misrepresentation of UX is easily refuted: everyone should know how to cook, so why have chefs? The generalist/specialist debate has been replayed in knowledge work for decades, and answered recently by folk smarter than I. But three days later, the rebuttal doesn’t particularly interest me. Nor do I bear Ryan any grudge. Instead, my mind lingers on the painful and disheartening truths behind his post and our discussion.

As I read his tweet, I immediately forsaw the reaction: a hundred angry replies, and a hundred crowing retweets. It confirmed what I have long feared: the UX industry faces a credibility crisis. Victims of our success, we’ve created a rush of interest that has indeed caused some appalling job title inflation. Thousands of mediocre web generalists are now calling themselves UX designers in an effort to gain cash and authority.

The UX industry is becoming polluted by dilettantism. It’s no surprise then that people are attacking the field. We can expect more of it, and there’s a real chance that the fury and division we see in the conversation surrounding Ryan’s post will soon drown out the cause we espouse—designing technology that helps people be productive, empowered, and happy. Our peers are divided, with thousands eager to denounce our work. We have been unable to convince an influential web figure of our value. And this is a real shame since, alongside the flash-in-the-pan opportunists, there are exceptional people in UX who have formed a community of intelligence, generosity and thoughtful action. To see their work and passion decried as quackery makes me tremendously sad.

Perhaps my pessimism is exaggerated by too long in front of a computer and not long enough in front of a cocktail. But I’m disheartened that the cause I’ve dedicated my adult life to is seen as a fradulent landgrab. I worry it’s the beginning of the euphemism treadmill that could leave the UX label permanently damaged.

My recent writing endeavours have further kindled my interest in words and language. I’ve chosen to study the fundamentals of editing, work on my grammar, and investigate the nuances of written style (such as global attitudes toward the Oxford comma featured in this sentence). I consumed The Awl’s What It’s Really Like To Be A Copy Editor with empathy and faint envy.

Regular readers will know I’m eager for the British UX community to get the recognition it deserves. I’ve therefore concocted a scheme to combine this cause with my new-found obsession for the written word.

I’d like to volunteer my (free) services as an editor to anyone in the British UX community. Whether you’re writing a blog post, an article for a UX magazine, a book review—hell, even a tweet—just drop me an email and a timescale and I’ll be glad to offer questions, corrections, and suggestions. All I ask is that your piece is somehow related to UX and that it’s for public consumption. Hopefully we can make some great work together, while I get a fantastic opportunity to read more and offer my modest skills to the community.

Photo credit: Wondermonkey2k.

The writing process

Writing a book has been the most complex information architecture challenge of my life. The permutations in which you can sculpt, exclude, clarify and link information are staggering. No surprise then that we relied on our familiar design process, heading up the chain of goals, structure, content and surface. We appropriated the tools of our trade: personas, content analysis, user feedback and deep iteration—but it was trial and error that finally unearthed the process that worked for us.

1. Research. The scale of the project demanded hundreds of hours of research: absorbing other books and articles, recombining miscellaneous thoughts into coherent patterns. The trick was knowing when to stop. The only way to write the perfect book is first to read every book. We repeatedly had to refocus on our audience and mark tight boundaries around curiosity. Several high-level ideas, although fascinating to us, weren’t relevant for the punchy style of the book.
2. Outline. We then turned our scrappy notes into a hierarchical structure with the help of OmniOutliner. Somewhere between a vast card sort and a minimax search; an exhaustive attempt to craft as coherent a flow as possible.
3. “Pigeon”. Turning this outline straight into high-quality prose proved too great a step, so first we threw words onto the page without regard for their quality.
4. First draft. Only then did we turn this “pigeon” prose into tight writing. Even with this narrow remit, this step challenged our writing skills and patience. We reshuffled and excised enormous swathes of text, while juggling minutiae of definitions and style. Here too we finally cast off our Britishness and accepted dollar signs and American spellings, although we’re proud to say we drew the line at “gotten”.
5. Diagrams. Undercover UX Design is printed using two inks—black and the blood-red Pantone 484U—meaning our illustrations could only use these colours. We had to recreate several deliverables from scratch to suit this setup, and spent many hours struggling with the technical requirements of the printers.
6. Templating. The first draft then had to go into an awkward Word template for the publisher. Mind-numbing hours of copying, pasting, and style formatting, including smart quotes and other preferred typographical treatment.
7. Author review. Our two wonderful editors Wendy and Jacqueline then reviewed our work at both the logical and technical level, and returned corrections in a haze of Track Changes. Most points were minor—grammatical or logical errors we kicked ourselves for not seeing—but even at this stage we found ourselves in deep spirals of “What are we really trying to say here?”. Our response was usually to leave the offending sections on the cutting floor.
8. Proof. Finally, we returned the author review and the compositors laid the text and images out in a PDF which we then proof-read alongside the publishers. Proof-reading was impossibly tedious but immensely valuable, giving us the chance to fix clunky phrases and embarrassing typos.

The tools

I relied on the excellent Scrivener throughout, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It suited my non-linear writing style and its stability is truly impressive. As we worked concurrently on chapters, James and I shared our work with a hacky Dropbox sync. Only once did we overwrite each other’s work. There’s a strong case for a more formal version control system, but the very thought depressed us. Dropbox worked for us, and again I gladly recommend it.

Our other essential tools included Skype, Illustrator, a good thesaurus, and several Stars of the Lid albums. Trial and error again showed me which albums I could successfully listen to while writing. Anything with vocals or strong percussion was out, creating a last.fm-skewing portfolio.

The effort

Everyone knows writing a book is hard, and I won’t play the martyr. But I will say the extent to which my life ground to a halt surprised me. A writer isn’t just an author; he is a project manager, juggling chapters, drafts, reviews, illustrations and copyright releases, as well as personal time and client time. A book is a constant source of ideas, questions, and worry. The pressure made me regress into quasi-adolescent nail-biting and insomnia, and I’m enjoying the quiet return of my regular life.

I was initially advised not to partner with a co-author and not to write a book while in full-time employment. Excellent advice, which we ignored. For six months I’ve been fond of saying “Having a co-author doesn’t mean you each write half a book. You each write a book”. It would have been substantially easier for either James or myself to write this book alone, but without my co-author’s inspiration, efforts and motivation, Undercover UX Design would be a shadow of its final form.

The money

Our financial return from Undercover UX Design will depend of course on sales, but we shan’t end up rich. Tech & design books don’t sell in the quantities required to turn huge profits, and what initially seemed a decent advance was quickly demolished by currency conversion, tax, bank fees, and other costs. Both James and I had to register as self-employed, go through the US tax system with its obscene forms and mandatory trips to the US Embassy, hire an accountant, and so on. As a wage slave all my life, it’s been a major upheaval, but money was never a priority for this project. Royalties will be a happy accident rather than the main reward.

The illustrations

Early on, we decided we wanted to make a book that was slightly different to other tech books. We politely insisted on a 9×6-inch format (rather than New Riders’ customary 9×7) for aesthetic and usability reasons, and commissioned my friend Chris Summerlin to produce chapter illustrations for the book.

He did a spectacular job. The results lie somewhere between Kevin Cornell‘s A List Apart illustrations and The Perry Bible Fellowship, demanding a second or third look before the penny drops. They’re quirky, slightly tangential and wonderfully drawn. We hope our readers will love them as much as we do.

The result

Undercover User Experience Design ended up shorter than expected, mostly thanks to rigorous editing. There’s no wasted space, and the book’s concision is definitely a feature, not a bug. As befits the title, we’ve tried to create a down-to-earth, practical book that avoids the more ponderous tendencies of the field. We’re proud of the results and I’m hopeful UUXD will become an essential guide for people who can’t do UX by the numbers.

It’s too early to say whether writing a book has changed me, but it has certainly sparked further interest in writing. I’ve learned a great deal about making a coherent argument and writing well. My client work is suddenly full of content challenges I never previously saw. I’m no longer frightened to wield an axe on my favourite ideas, and I now see a good editor as the solution to most of the world’s communication problems. (More on that later.)

Now we wait, and hope others will respond well to our work. James and I would be eternally grateful if you could spread the word about Undercover User Experience Design. Please feel free point people at the website or suggest they pre-order on Amazon. (Please use these links so we get a small referral fee per sale: Amazon UK and Amazon US. Note that the RRP is still unconfirmed, so there’s a very good chance the book will end up cheaper. Pre-order now and you’ll get the lowest price available.)

Thanks to everyone who supported us, and we hope you enjoy the book!

User experience is rightly seen as a critical way to stand out on today’s competitive web. But how does one go about shaping something as vague and personal as someone’s enjoyment of a website? What does it mean in practical terms?

This workshop gives an outstanding introduction to the world of web user experience design. By learning both the basic theory and practical applications of usability, information architecture and interaction design, you’ll learn how to make websites your users love and your company will profit from.

The workshop covers the entire design process. We begin with the fundamentals of both user and business research, including how to draw out unspoken requirements from both groups. We move on to discuss ways to turn your research into design concepts, and tools that will help you structure the site and pin down its major elements. Finally, we look at how to make effective wireframes and prototypes, test them with users and improve your designs through iteration.

It’s £345 until 10 Sep, or £395 after that. As an added bonus, attendees will get a free copy of Undercover UX Design.

Find out more at Workshops for the Web.