Men are not an abstraction Placing work and commerce near residences, but buffering it off, in the tradition set by Garden City theory, is fully as matriarchal an arrangement as if the residences were miles away from work and from men. Men are not an abstraction. They are either around, in person, or they are not. Working places and commerce must be mingled right in with residences if men, like the men who work on or near Hudson Street, for example, are to be around city children in daily life—men who are part of normal daily life, as opposed to men who put in an occasional playground appearance while they substitute for women or imitate the occupations of women. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities 9. Scattered Work genderwork
Skeleton, Organs, Circulation, Sinew, Skin An Article by Dorian Taylor I’m concerned with how I witness the work of user experience practitioners getting treated: like it’s just a set of motions toward a product’s all-important implementation, and one that we try to compress, due to its ostensible superfluity. Once the implementation is finished, the UX work appears to usually get discarded. Tracing the answer backThe UX coral reef ux
Tracing the answer back I submit that the materials that form the precursors to a product’s implementation have considerable value on their own. My vision is that I will be able to ask a question as mundane as one about the wording of a single button, and trace the answer all the way back to the overarching business strategy to see that it makes sense. decisions
The UX coral reef It isn’t a site, or a service, or even an identifiable product at all, but rather a system for creating a skin around and connective tissue between things like: Demographic studies Contextual inquiries Stakeholder and user interviews Surveys The business ecosystem Personas Scenarios Sketches, storyboards, wireframes Mockups, models and prototypes Email and IM conversations Meeting notes Content inventories and audits Concept schemes, taxonomies, thesauri A UI style guide A branding and visual identity guide A voice and tone guide A code style guide ...etc The individual elements of such a corpus represent the work of half a dozen specialist sub-disciplines, and are useful for realizing a product’s implementation. But if you hook them all up together, they merge to become a strategic artifact that transcends products and operates as a critical control surface for the business. This is because what such an artifact represents is a coral reef of deeply-considered and hard-fought decisions, and a story of the process that yielded them. connection