A conversation transpired the other day in which a colleague of mine remarked that he’d had it with “hacks” in our industry – that is, those who call themselves developers and designers but still use recycled code, un-secure scripts, and kludged together markup. He complained that there should be an education requirement (like that of doctors, lawyers and engineers) and that the lack of professional underpinnings was killing our industry. He argues:

“There’s such a low entry level to our industry, all you need is photoshop & wordpress to build a site”

“… [T]here are hacks in the webdesign/deve industry (like other industries) and education would help weed them out.”

“Anyone can participate even if they’ve never built a site before or their a seasoned vet.”

These arguments (and I hear them frequently amongst professionals in my field, especially after a few years of making a good, honest living doing this) are worrisome to me. I myself did not earn any degree in my industry (for those that don’t know: I have a B.S. in Microbiology and Immunology. NOT Web development. NOT Advertising. NOT Computer science.) and in fact, most of my most trusted colleagues didn’t either. Ours is a very, very young industry and we should do well to remember that our pioneers are not so old yet. Even surgery was once the domain of the barber. I think the low level of entry is amazingly effective in bringing in new talent who really want to understand and change the industry in new and powerful ways. What first got you into the Web field?

Education, to me, seems a horrifyingly poor way to “weed out” those hacks in the industry. High-powered ADAs who help put away mass murders, rapists, and pedophiles went to law school. The ambulance chasers and DWI-Dudes also went to law school. Education seems to be a rather poor way to separate the hacks from the pros – there are plenty of diploma-factories out there who are all to happy to give you a slip of paper giving you a degree in “Web Paging” in exchange for cold cash. The education is nice, but it’s my belief that Mark Twain was right: “I have never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” I myself teach classes on development and accessibility, I give back by posting on forums and message boards, I try to attend meetups and conferences to learn and share my knowledge with others because it keeps my skills sharp as well as opening me up to learn something from those with different life experiences.

The last point really gets under my skin. I feel that an argument like this is birthed from time removed from a time when the professional was starting out. I will be the first to admit I came in through the hobby and hacker route – I was a little script kiddy doing my best. I learned from stealing source code, playing with scripts from other sites and honestly hacking crap together until I understood how it worked. Tim Berners Lee started this little experiment to help researchers publish content to a hub. This isn’t the Sorbonne, it’s the Wild West – it’s open and free and it’s what we all love deep down in our hearts. I feel the day that we treat this as an elites-only walled garden, is the day our profession will have fallen to so much accounting and pixel pushing. I know the concern is that it lowers professionalism for those of us who make money doing this professionally, but it’s true for any industry. There are those who will prefer the cheap suits at Sears, but there are plenty who respect and want a bespoke piece from Savile Row. The cream always rises to the top, so they say.

So I welcome all the hackers, hacks, script kiddies, punks, and noobs. There’s always more to learn, more that noobs can teach us about ourselves and our established modes of thinking and that’s frankly better for all of us.

As the wonderful Mr. Fry points out, the secret to being gorgeous is in one’s attitude of mind. By being mindful of good design choices and good interactions, users will tell us that we are wonderful. The secret is really in mindfulness – the more time and effort we put into designing quality interactions with touches and flourishes of UX goodies, the better our products become. The late, great John Slatin once told me that he felt that those who were mindful of accessibility and usability were so often far and away better than their peers at those areas. Because the Web is a mutable form, because users are constantly interacting with the implementation, and because feedback is easier and faster than ever before, we need every facet to gleam, every seam to be stitched and everything to look, well, gorgeous.

I’ve been thinking a lot about attention to details, something I’ve always struggled with (even though I know when I do it I’m so much better off because I take more pride in the thing I’ve created), and I’m making a larger push in my design and development to really focus on those details and little things that don’t so much make people notice them, but feel at ease because everything is just right.

Thinking about little details in a broad way helps one understand the full scope. If, for instance, a user is making a purchase on a site for the first time and there are lots of well done photos of the object or all the buttons fit the site look or the breadcrumbs show the steps a user needs to take; then there is a slow building of confidence – the user now trusts the seller because if the process was so tight on the details, the worries of shipping, security, etc are lessened (for better or worse) and customer confidence improves.

So let’s take some of Mr. Fry’s advice – the more we pay attention to making our interfaces and processes gorgeous, the more people will tell us so, which is the secret, really.

I’m a fan of good art. I’ve got art in my home, I love going to galleries in every city I visit, and I have friends and family as accomplished artists. I like art because it allows for everyone who views it to have just a second of meditative contemplation on how a piece affects them personally.

One of my good and dear friends, Andrew Tolentino, is one such amazing artist. Andrew really got fierce into his art in high school, derived amazing cultural and artistic inspiration in college, and then started turning his passion into a movement after graduation. Andrew uses mixed media to bring to life Bosch-like landscapes, cartoonish sketches, and all around wonderful things.

I’ve commissioned art from Andrew before (when we were in college he did an oil on canvas of a stylized Sumo wrestler that now hangs in my office) and I felt it time to do it again with a piece based on his interpretation of my personal company, match head creative. I wanted it to be a large piece, something that he had full control over, using the logo as the launch pad. Andrew brought up an interesting notion: he needed his own website for a portfolio, and proposed a trade, my craft for his

I normally don’t do work for trade, but being able to create a piece of functional art for an artist in exchange for a piece of art? Yes, I think I can do that. Please have a gander and explore the twisted, fun mind of my dear friend Andrew. GET TOLENTINOED.

I’ve been thinking about scheduling a lot lately, what with SxSW going on TOMORROW and all. I’m juggling a few projects at my daytime contract and a few for my personal business. I feel that some of the reason I’ve not been at the top of my game lately stems from how I schedule blocks of time to get into the flow.

I was reminded a few days ago of Paul Graham’s essay on Maker vs. Manager Schedules and I thought about my personal business. I often times need to be a maker and a manager – to need to have meetings and also give myself enough time to work effectively (and one assumes, live a life in between). I think what I’m going to do is schedule one day out of the week when I need to have a meeting and keep the rest of the week open to have some bit of flow.

There have been some awesome co-working spots that have opened up in Austin recently and talking with some of the people who run them about getting some time to get some real work done once a week or so. I think if I make myself have a standard meeting location, I have time to do managerial duties while leaving the rest of the evenings free to focus on actually making things (a persona I was working on should’ve been finished in one night instead of three).

I really want my business to succeed, I just need to be more effective in how I structure workflow so that I’m not doing more work with less results. We all make better ’stuff’ when we get in the zone, into the flow of things, so the more often I have batches of time, the better off I think my work will be.

So much has happened in the past few weeks (both personally and in the tech world) that I’m updating twice this week to make up for last week. I wanted to write about the iPad, but I’m going to save it for another day. I had to comment on my friend Mike Melanson’s (@rwwmike) Read Write Web article (read the full thing, especially the comments).

Because I’m a friend to Mike, and I like RWW, I subscribe to their RSS feed via Google reader. I therefore missed all the amazing comments that ensued from users. I’m now very sorry I did. Here’s just a small sampling of what comments a post called “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login” got:

ok cool now can I get to facebook (fuccinwayne)

The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN. (John Blair)

I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!! (Nicole Gray)

What is going on? You are totally confusing me. Knock-knock. Anybody there? Let me in. Katherine (Katherine Radway Hegedus)

By now you get the idea: There are somewhere in the range of 200+ comments like these. It took me a while to understand what was going on, but it dawned on me that the RWW article ranked higher in the Google search rank than did the Facebook login page. This means someone did the following steps 100% blindly (or autopilot):

1. typed “login facebook” into Google
2. clicked the first link without looking at the link or description
3. ignored the red color scheme of Read Write Web
4. dismissed the huge article in the middle of the page until they found a Facebook icon (Facebook connect)
5. without looking at the address bar or any authentication, logged in as if to Facebook
6. finding the comment field the only place to post, ignoring all other comments, posted an angry or confused question as if Facebook were a person

David Hayes (@drhayes) has a beautiful shot that it’s much more than Facebook on his blog.

As a user experience developer, this brings up all sorts of questions, concerns, and feelings of dread. As a user experience developer I certainly know that I’m not my audience or even close to it, but I do think I have an understanding of how things work. I had no idea how heavy the reliance on Google to get a user where they wanted to go was. I wasn’t sure that so many users had gotten so adept at filtering out such amazing amounts of noise, they saw Read Write Web as Facebook.

Users seem not to use the address bar, they don’t use bookmarks, and hardly read anything. This isn’t bad, it’s not saying these users are dumb, but it brings up a need to fix these interfaces for users. This is just a time where I feel like a priest in the Dark Ages: preaching the only written word through a language no one understands. It freaks me out when I peer into the actions of users who are using the sites and I can’t begin to fathom the thought process or the use case.

Talking with less tech savvy friends and family, they are amazed that I “know all this stuff” when I myself feel I don’t know much at all until I look at it from the other end: this is my job and my life – I am of the priest class, talking in cryptic language, trying to navigate the dark for my flock. I try my hardest to treat these things as material to learn, to grow in my understanding of the philosophy of the user.

Part of me can’t help but think – did users learn the behavior that caused them to act that way because we trained them that way?

I recently lost a potential contract to price. My main competition came down to a price that was about 1/5 less than mine, but the client wanted to work with me more. I assumed that meant that the client would find the money needed for what they assumed was going to be a better experience. They really wanted me to drop my price and match the competition. The first rule in service pricing is this: There is always someone who will do it cheaper. Always.

The issue, given the poor state of the American economy, constantly boils down to price. Is the problem price because the service has been commodified: “How much is one Website”? Is the problem price in that all money is being shunted away from advertising?

If the problem with the price boils down to commoditization of services, I’ve always found that treating the idea of the services as a large investment commodity (how much is a car?). If, on the other hand, the price boils down to a shift of funds away from advertising and into R&D or other aspects of the business.

In the short term, that makes good sense: marketing and advertising are actually investments – you spend the money now for greater brand recognition, greater leads, better sales tools, and so on in the long run. The shortsighted part though, is that those groups who continue advertising efforts through tough economic times come out over 200% ahead of their competitors who cut back during a recession. By reevaluating & re-channeling advertising dollars, by reaching for creative but cost effective solutions, and choosing to really getting to know the customer base; companies can thrive.

One example of cost saving is e-blasts. Sure, as a programmer I don’t like to code them nor do they make me much money because they are pretty quick to design and code; but they make, on average, forty dollars to every dollar spent. Direct (snail) mail pieces on the other hand? 5 dollars to every one is the best one might hope for. Re-evaluation of the whole strategy with a cool head can often return large dividends.

Please comment and let me know some ways you helped get around price and educate your clients. Or, if you think I’m full of crap, let me know! Either way, share your experiences in the comments.