About the poster

2005-10-14T00:46:00.000-07:00

The purpose of the 'Creating the Perfect Experience Architect' poster is to communicate the skills and attributes that we believe are beneficial to job candidates and colleagues in User Experience roles. We have developed this poster and all the content using feedback and input from colleagues within Framfab and from ex-colleagues in other leading User Experience companies. We have tried to be as inclusive as possible, but we realise there are flaws, that we should get more extensive data, and that we need a more robust way of analysing it.
That’s why we need your help for Iteration 2: suggest some attributes yourself, rate yourself on our scales (flawed though they are), suggest some possible uses of this framework, suggest some ways in which we could improve it, dispute the information – the debate is essential!

Why bother?
We are an industry with very little specific vocational training in what we do. As a result, it is often hard to select candidates for roles within a team or identify areas for our colleagues to develop. There are so many qualities that are desirable in candidates for User Experience roles but they are things that we don't or can’t explicitly look for.
It is also hard to identify the appropriate training and development for our fellow user experience colleagues because our industry has changed so much in the last 5 years.

But, nobody’s perfect are they?
Of course, nobody’s perfect. The information we gathered here demonstrates how hard our job is and how no single person could be outstanding on all these attributes. Our solution, within Framfab, is to try our hardest to seek balance through a strong team where our consultants’ strengths and weaknesses complement each other.

Why Experience Architect (EA) and not Information Architect?
Our new title since our recent merger with Oyster Partners is actually User Experience Architect (UEA) but it starts to get a bit of a mouthful so I am sticking with EA for simplicity here. So why change a well understood industry term?
The industry is changing: our clients are getting more savvy and interested in ‘Customer Experience’; we feel we need to evolve our titles to reflect our new responsibilities; our EAs have a mixture of backgrounds (philosophy, graphic design, product design, architecture, engineering, development), not just library science and HCI any more; our clients need to understand that we are focused on user experience, not just information, and we need to be reminded of it daily.

Creating the Perfect Experience Architect

2005-10-14T00:31:00.000-07:00

This blog has been put together at the last minute as an area for people to contribute to the discussion/debate about the Perefct EA poster I created for the Euro Summit this weekend.

I am hoping that you can contribute to some constructive conversations and have your say, so that we as an industry can learn from each other's experiences.