After 8 years of various “web-” jobs (from Web Director (Jagged) to Web Designer (Maxim) to Web Master (Youthone) back to Web Designer (Common Sense Solutions) to Web Technician (Franklin University) to Web Developer (LexisNexis) to Senior Web Developer (LexisNexis) and now Senior Developer (Resource Interactive), I’m starting to think about a shift in my daily duties.

My earliest work on the web were all centered around fostering community and facilitating communication. I was a geocities community leader. I volunteered for the Open Directory Project (back when everyone thought human-powered search results were the way to go). I was on livejournal before they required invite codes. I worked for a not-for-profit that provided youth with online support and volunteer opportunities.

I waded through a bachelor of science in digital communication, a computer science certificate, a java 2 certification exam, and am nearly finished with my master of science in computer science degree. I definitely have a technical background. But in the end, I’m a liberal arts girl at heart and I just want to give users a kickass online experience, ensuring they can meet their needs in a way that best suits them.

At LexisNexis, I was in the User Experience team, so we primarily built prototypes and went out to usability testing and kept abreast on trends and best practices for providing an optimal user experience. Even as a developer, I attended weekly design reviews and had the opportunity to contribute to crafting the solution to usability challenges. My last year at LexisNexis, I was sitting on several boards and committees (Architecture Advisory Board, Branding and Identity Committee), and was the key Accessibility Contact. Everything was firmly with the users’ best interest in mind.

I can code. Some would say I do it well However, my interests really lay in how information is presented to the user. I’m fascinated by how people use technology to meet certain needs, and how we can best support them in their goals. I am working on that “Rich Internet Accessibility” paper, and the internet has been a great way for me to read up on other opinions, and connect with industry leaders. It’s also helped me to understand the challenges some people face. One article I found on the accessibility of social networks really struck me: one user stated that it was difficult for him to seek out a speaker at a conference to ask further questions, so he preferred to look them up online after the fact. It helped drive home the fact that the internet can really help people with disabilities, if we take the time to consider their needs. (Another great example is the short film “everything I can’t do in the real world, I can do with my Mac“).

In so much as I can contribute to delivering content in an accessible, usable fashion, I will do so. However, I feel as though I want to “move up” in the process, and suggest solutions or approaches, rather than coming in at the Implementation stage. It took me several months to really recognize that I have changed where I fit in the development cycle here at Resource. In the UX group at Lexis, yes, I was coding, but they were prototypes, early in the design phases. Now I work on the final production code, after certain major decisions have already been made.

One of the key reasons Resource is a leading interactive agency is our thought leadership. We do great work, particularly in our Insights phase. Certainly, our implementations are outstanding, but I am really yearning to return back to an ‘ideas’ role, rather than a ’solutions’ one. I have been the only female developer in the company since I was hired, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s somewhat natural: women as nurturers, giving birth to children and ideas and fostering the commuity, and men as providers and problem solvers, delivering on requests and meeting specific needs.

…Hmm.. perhaps that’s not the best thing to post in my technical blog, but I’ll leave it there all the same…

I am going to start doing some light Business Analyst work, with a longerish-term goal of getting into the field of Information Architecture. I think this will be the route I need to step away from specific implementations and focus on common problems (aha, I sense a return to my previous interest in patterns). Ultimately I believe it is the goal of what a site can help a user achieve, and how he feels doing it, that interest me, moreso than the specific details of how.