I am drowning in a sea of stuff! Is it me, or is there just too much information out there about UxD, IxD, IA, human factors, etc. I haven’t even done my first proper wireframe sketch. Maybe I just need to back off for awhile and give myself some tiny projects to focus on, until I get the hang of the tricks of the trade – aka. sketching, prototyping, powerpoint presenting, design, etc.
The more stuff I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know, the more paralyzed I feel about doing design. It’s worse than having writer’s block. It’s like claiming to know something I absolutely have no clue about, or having all that information in the head and not being able to make sense of it.
I’m learning though. Like, I found post-it notes to be really useful in coming up with rich pictures (something we learnt in Organizational Informatics) and other relational diagrams. I recently used them to produce a diagram describing the various roles, artefacts and relationships at the London Underground. This was produced from textual descriptions of the relationships, but it’s easier to see it visually.
I’m also in the process of downloading tons of podcasts, some of which I can never recall later, but it gives me comfort knowing that it’s there and and I know what Gerry Gaffney sounds like, and what he does, and the same goes for Jared Spool.
I’ve also been twitter-ing a lot, and following the messages posted by some relatively active UX folks. the amount of traffic and information that I get from that is also, overwhelming. I tell myself that being in the conversation pays off, because it somehow comes back to you. Even though I have little understanding of whether ‘leading’ and ‘line-height’ can be used interchangeably, I’m sure it’ll come useful in the future. Note to self: finish the “Stop stealing sheep” book.
And talk about BOOKS! There are so many books to read. I’m now halfway through Buxton’s Sketching book (design), Becker’s Tricks book (sociology/anthropology), and Fogg’s Persuasive Tech book. Not to mention Cooper’s Inmates book which I take on the tube whenever I go to Ikea.
I hope this is just a phase, and that it’ll pass. For now, I may be a subject for sensemaking.
