Designer Interviews

Q. Can you tell me about Clear:Left, the company you are the Managing Director for and what you do for them?

A. Clearleft are a little like an architecture company for the web. As well as designing how the site will look, we also work out the strategy, plan where everything is going to go and how each interaction is going to work. We do this though site maps, wireframes and prototypes, the blueprints and scale models of our profession.

We’re basically user centred designers so we build products that focus on the needs of the user. This may seem obvious but so few companies actually do this. Instead they build their sites based on what they think people want, or according to their own personal preferences and biases.

Q.You’ve spoken at a variety of conferences. Which was the first place you were able to speak, and what has your experiences of speaking at conferences been like?

A.The first conference I spoke at was actually SXSW, one of the biggest events in the calendar. It was an event that I really wanted to attend and you got in for free if you spoke, so I was basically trying to save a bit of money. I put my name down to speak and to my surprise got picked. Getting up in front of a room full of your peers for the first time was absolutely terrifying. However I managed to get people laughing and by the end of it was really enjoying myself. I think having a quaint English accent helped. I could have said anything and they would have though I was charming and intelligent.

Q.You worked on two books, both were co-authored, can you tell me about the experiences you had in working on CSS Mastery, and Blog Design Solutions?

A.Writing a chapter for a book like Blog Design Solutions was easy and it lulled me into a false sense of security. With CSS Mastery I wrote the majority of the book, excluding the two case study chapters at the end. That was really hard work. Writing the first draft was OK but then I had to work on a second and third draft which took almost as long. Then there was tech editing, copy editing, image creation, source file creation and a whole bunch of other stuff. So the whole thing took about 5 months flat out work.

Q.You constantly write about web development and standards on your blog, AndyBudd.com, what got you interested in web development and web standards?

A.Well, I used to write a lot about standards a few years ago. Back then most developers were writing crappy table based code and only a handful of people cared about web standards. So people needed to write about the benefits to get the word out. During that time the language was immature and there was still a lot of discovery and innovation going on. Each week a new technique or browser bug would be discovered. These days web standards have become more widely adopted and the technology has matured so there is much less need to shout about it from the rooftops. In fact that’s the whole point of standards. Once they are a standard, people stop caring about them and they just slip into the background.

These days I’m much more interested in usability and user experience design. However things are finally starting to hot up again with the gradual adoption of CSS3 and HTML5.

Q.Of course a follow up to the previous question is, what do you think about blogging and how has it impacted or effected your life?

A.I was extreme lucky to be in the right place at the right time so my blog became the catalyst for my book, my public speaking and the company I run. Without that initial seed who knows what I’d be doing or where I’d be working today (you want fries with that?)

Q.What was it like to write CSS Mastery, and has the book been the type of success that you wanted it to be?

A.Writing CSS Mastery was a massive pain in the butt and after finishing it I said I’d never write another book again. That being said, the book was a huge success and something I’m very proud of. I wrote the book to help people jump over the learning curve I went through and profit from my mistakes. So I’m really pleased when I meet people who say the book has helped them out in some small way.

Q.Can you explain a little about Silverback, what it is, and who it is for as well as your involvement in its creation?

A.Silverback is a lightweight application for usability testing on the Mac. We do a lot of usability testing at Clearleft and always had to use a video camera to record the sessions which was a real pain. We tried a few software solutions but they were all a bit clunkey and difficult to use, so we ended up building our own. We basically realised that the average desktop or laptop came with all the hardware you needed to make a portable usability lab. Namely a browser for running the test on, a video camera for capturing the users reactions and a microphone to record what they had to say. So Silverback was born.

Q.You’ve also been one of the driving forces behind dConstruct, a designing the social web conference in the UK. Can you tell me a bit about the event, your experiences with it, and how it got started?

A.At the time there were no other web design events in the UK so we kept having to fly over to the States to attend any decent conferences. We always ended up having a great time, meeting loads of useful contacts and learning a lot, so we wanted to bring some of that back. That’s essentially how dConstruct was born.

Interestingly we’re doing exactly the same thing with our new conference, UX London. All the good UX events are in the states and it costs a lot of time and money to go. So we wanted to bring all these great speakers over to Europe and give people here a chance to benefit from their knowledge and experience.

Q.What are some of your favorite books, ones that you’ve enjoyed and would recommend others read?

A.I assume you’re meaning web design books and not Where’s Waldo? I think the books the inspired me most were Jeff Veen’s “The Art and Science of Web Design” and Jakob Neilsen’s “Designing Web Usability“. Both are well out of date now, but still worth a read. More modern books include “Don’t Make Me Think“, “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” and “Web Redesign: Workflow that Works“.