Brian Hoadley

For me UX has always been about contact with real people in the process of collaboration, workshops, design, prototyping, testing and iteration. Which is why lately I’ve been thinking about the growing reliance UX has on tools like Axure in our day-to-day work.

I’ve been around long enough to watch UX grow from an adjunct to other people’s roles to a profession of some importance in the digital space (see my post ‘Is UX Returning to being a Multidisciplinary Role’.)

As we moved from site maps and simple sketches, to complex sketching, workshops, process flows and wireframes, specifications, prototypes and user testing our profession developed a set of tools by which we could express to the world the value of our contribution. But more importantly, it enabled us to give voice to the oft-forgotten or silent users who eventually are the benefactors of our engagement with the process.

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I find myself thinking about Government’s desire to reduce costs by ‘going digital.’

It’s as though the very notion of something being online instantly results in reduced effort and cost and provides a useful and usable service to Citizens. In recent years, Government has seen digital as a means of reducing ‘avoidable contact’ – that type of contact that Government might not have to have with its Citizens face-to-face or on the telephone if it could service them digitally.

It could rationalise this by saying that digital was a progressive means of servicing a society of such diversity, breadth and distance that face-to-face was no longer an appropriate medium to provide services. Of course this begs the issue of the ten million or so UK residents who do not have access to or use of the Internet.

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I love Hack Days.

I love them because of the anticipation, the spontaneity, the community and the creativity. They generate energy – if for a short time – around the issues they are organised to expose, and for a brief moment overcome the inertia that most people come to dread within large organisations – like Government.

I say ‘expose’ because in my experience of Hack Days often people come to ‘show off’ their skills, ‘show’ the organisations or sectors whom they are targeting ‘how to do things better’, and ‘show’ each other what they are capable of.

None of which is bad. But all of which worries me slightly.

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I’ve been thinking about struggles faced by marketing and comms teams and brands.

Having attended quite a few unconferences, read many blogs and watched with great interest large brands struggle with social media I can acknowledge one simple truth: Campaigns are not the same as social media.

But wait… that’s not big news!

I just think it should be acknowledged that many traditional marketing and comms teams are used to developing time-limited campaigns around awareness, retention or acquisition-oriented activities. There is a thought that enough of these run over time will establish momentum in the creation of relationships between consumers of products or content and the brand.

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