::slingthought::

There’s a plethora of job titles floating out in the Webosphere.  I’ve been gathering them from things like LinkedIn, Search Engine Keywords, Job Boards and other Social Networking Tools.  I’m curious about how you or your organization has positioned your role within our collective profession.  Take a look at how I’ve started to organize the job titles above and let me know if I’ve missed something or if I’m way off the mark.  This is work in progress.

I operate under the “User Experience Strategist” moniker.  Let me explain why I’ve chosen that specific label.  I have a multidisciplinary approach to user experience opportunities.

I have backgrounds and expertise in the following:
- Visual Design and Communications
- Illustration
- Usability
- Information Architecture
- Interactive Marketing

I specifically selected “User Experience” because I’m passionate about looking across the experiences that human beings have with the Web, Email Marketing, Intranets, and Web Applications/Services.  I haven’t spent as much time in the mobile field, but it certainly relates as being a user experience.

I decided to use the label “Strategist” because I may be looking at applying my collective background, or I may only utilize Information Architecture.  As a strategist I look at a plan of attack or approach for the overall experience.

Any contributions you may have to this organic categorization will be helpful for us all.  My intention is to help better define how we talk about and position ourselves to clients, recruiters, and other business professionals.  Please leave a comment and even some rationale behind your title if you feel like it.  I’d love to update the mind map with new labels that haven’t been accounted for.  Reminder- this is how I’m looking at things.  How does your point of view differ?

A simple cut and pasted line of javascript code opens the door to observing user behavior on your site.  It captures mouseclicks, keystrokes and cursor activity.

Clever way to be a fly on the wall and nice logo as well.

Scrutinizer is web browser, based upon the Adobe AIR toolkit and the WebKit browser, that offers a simulation of the human visual system.  It helps you get a better grasp on how users might be looking at your site or application design.

This video is an interesting peek at the science about how we see and perceive information on screens and might help you plan how to organize, group or re-arrange some of the screen elements in your experiences.

Nice breakdown, from 2002 mind you, by Challis Hodge on Experience Design Roles.  The thoughts are still relevant today.

Here are some interesting samples of image zooms.  I like the subtle fadeout transition on Example 5.  All would work nicely in an eCommerce experience for decision support in the browsing process.

Here’s another slick jQuery user interface design with smooth transitions.  Big fan of the silhouette of the glasses with a scrollbar for browsing the collections of glass styles.  Many thanks to Faderisimo for pointing out this minimal, sophisticated example to me.

You can see it here.

Brooklyn-based Carrot Creative has a unique jQuery navigation scheme that acts a bit like Flash, but its not.  The navigation experience is elegant as the pages shift into focus.  What really brings a smile to my face is all the attention to little details in the creative.  Even a normally mundane page like “Staff” is fun to browse.  The employees have their photos shot on a big, carrot orange couch.  Looks like a blast to work there.  Jealous.

ProtoShare appears to be very promising as a rapid prototyping tool.  Most of the basic wire framing functionality is covered.  Additionally you can collaborate and share your prototypes.  It also appears that you can also do some things with HTML, CSS, RSS and framing other sites.  Unfortunately their 30 day trial requires a credit card, so I wouldn’t be suprised if a number of people, much like myself, skip test driving it.  I really would like to see how it stacks up to tools like Axure, but paying for a demo…not so much.

They should put up a sandbox to let us play before we pay.  I realize you can cancel at any time, but there’s a lesson in user expectations with Web-based services.  We need a snack before we feast on your app.

If you’ve tried it out, by all means, leave a comment.

Interesting.  Seems like an affordable means for getting a perspective on your Web app, service or site.  Folks are getting paid $10 via PayPal for 20 minutes of reviewing your site and talking aloud while they do so.  The company must be providing them with a screencasting app or service.

Wondering how insightful the feedback is, though any feedback is better than none.

Might be worth a go on a few of my client projects.

Sample User Test Video

Usertesting.com

This posting gives a quick overview of the top-playing tools available to User Experience Professionals.

Personally, I use Axure RPPRo, Fireworks CS4, Visio 2007, and look forward to Adobe Thermo, which I’ve read quite a bit about and can’t wait for the official release of.

Here’s the review…