We asked Jared the following questions:

1. Jared, as CEO and Founder of User Interface Engineering, I have to ask for your opinion on the many terms in use in our field: Interaction Design, User Experience, User Interface Design, Usability, Human Factors, Web Design, etc. Why "User Interface Engineering" and not "User Interface Design" or one of the others?

I don’t think the words are very important. After all, what is marketing? Can you clearly tell me what a marketing person does? I bet, if you were to describe what you think the "average marketing person" did, then showed that to anyone in the marketing department at your company, not a single one would cop to doing what you wrote down. In fact, they probably have as much trouble explaining what "marketing" is as we have explaining what "user experience" is.

And it’s not unique to business. Beyond what licensing regulates, what does a doctor do? What does an artist do? The names are associative to what’s been done, not to any concrete notion of a role or area of responsibility. That’s why territorial arguments are present everywhere.

So, as a new VP of User Experience, what will define you is what you do, the impact you will have on the customers, products, and bottom line of the business. You, and any manager, can define the meaning of your group’s title by the examples of what it does.

So, which term is best? The one you use.

2. I know that you have significant corporate experience. With regard to design (or user interface engineering), who makes the decisions? Who is responsible for the final design? The final color scheme? The information architecture? Input from a variety of individuals is key, but someone must make the final call, and subjective elements can be challenging. After all, someone did create "hot dog stand".

I’ve been a Mac user for two years. Despite 18 years of Windows use preceding that, I’ve managed to successfully put the memory of Hot Dog Stand far behind me. Thanks for bringing it back.

Why are you focusing specifically on aesthetics? Of all the things a skilled visual designer brings to the table, aesthetics are the least important. And of all the things a team needs to focus on to create a solid design, aesthetics are pretty low on the scale.

You don’t have to go any further than Craigslist to see that you can build an awesome experience with low-grade aesthetics. And history is littered with the carcasses of high grade aesthetic products that weren’t useful, usable, desirable, effective, or delightful beyond the initial exposure.

A skilled visual designer will certainly add aesthetics to the solution. But, if they are good at what they do, they’ll focus on the visual priority and communication of the information. Any aesthetic decisions must be in the service of that visual communication. If it communicates effectively, it’s a good aesthetic choice. If it doesn’t, it isn’t, no matter how sexy it looks.

So, maybe the least important person in the organization should decide on aesthetics, to allow the important decisions, surrounding the overall experience to be decided on by people who know what they are doing.

If the "head of design" is focused on making the call on aesthetics, I’d be willing to bet the organization produces crap for products. There’s about 99 things the head of design should be putting ahead of aesthetics.

Probably the first thing I’d recommend any "head of design" to focus on is the feedback mechanism that the organization will use to determine if the design is working for them. How will they tell, at any stage in the design process, whether the design is working. Our research shows that organizations with a strong feedback mechanism will rely on that to make their ultimate decisions, not any single individual. This will make it much easier to push good design forward faster.

The second priority of a "head of design" is to help the organization realize a solid experience vision. The vision is the stake in the sand that everyone walks to. When a solid experience vision — one that answers the question, "What will the experience of using our design be like five years from now?" — is omnipresent in the organization, part of the organization’s DNA, then all decisions gravitate towards that vision. Each person faced with a decision that impacts the design can ask, "Is this solution getting us closer to the vision or farther away?"

The goal with having strong feedback and a solid vision is to reduce the need for centralized authority to make all design decisions. In an organization of any but the smallest size, centralized authority becomes a bottleneck, losing all effectiveness. Empowering solid design thinking throughout the organization is far more effective, though a hard challenge (especially when such thinking hasn’t existed before).

3. Teams seem to be looking for cheaper and faster ways of validating designs. Usability is often perceived as being very expensive. So, does usability testing need to shed a few pounds? Let me just ask outright: usability testing: hot or not?

Usability testing, in its most basic form, costs basically nothing. It’s a simple process. You sit next to someone and watch them experience your design.

Any associated expense comes from adding rigor to the process. Rigor doesn’t have to be expensive, but it can be.

Think of it like painting a house. One can do it practically themselves, saving a lot of money, but it will probably take a lot of time and, without the proper tools, not produce a high quality result. But it’ll get the job done.

The question is how much is quality and time worth? There is a relationship to how much you invest and the quality and speed you’ll get back. Buy some ladders, get better quality brushes and rollers, higher quality paints, and a little help from some unemployed college students, and you now can deliver a better quality paint job.

The same is true with usability testing. Smart investments improve the quality.

But, here’s the thing that makes it different from painting a house: It may be a mistake to hire someone to do the usability testing for you.

The primary benefit of any usability testing project isn’t the report at the end or the list of recommended changes. Our research shows it’s the exposure the team has with observing real users work with their designs. The more exposure, the better the products that come out.

If you hire out your usability testing, well, it’s sorta like hiring out your vacation — it gets the job done but you don’t quite get the best experience.

So, the biggest investment in usability testing isn’t the money required — that can be pretty inexpensive. It’s the time. Our research shows that the teams at the most effective organizations spend at least two hours every six weeks watching users interact with their designs. That’s every member of the team.

And that experience pays for itself very quickly. The team now knows what it’s like to use the design. They know what changes had the impact they’d hoped, and which ones fell flat. And they see how small, nagging problems can add up to ruin an otherwise innovative solution.

It’s very cheap to get started with testing, if you’re willing to make the investment.

On the other hand, if you’re really concerned with expense, I recommend you build a completely crappy product. That’s always going to be the cheapest solution. (And, interestingly enough, if you want to make it really crappy, you can do it really quickly too.)

4. Traditional software teams typically consist of architects, coders, testers, managers, and writers. Should designers (or user interface engineers) be the sixth element commanding an equivalent slot, or should they be called in to service the core team on an as-needed basis? Are user interface professionals someone you take home to mom, or a cheap booty call?

I don’t know what a "traditional software team" is. I’ve now worked with dozens of organizations, each with dozens of teams. They are like snowflakes. No two are alike.

In importance, the skills on the team far out weigh the roles of the individual team members. Teams developing web sites need solid information architecture skills. However, there’s no requirement that an information architect be on the team. Teams need solid interaction design skills, but they don’t need an interaction designer.

The question isn’t "should a designer be on the team?" The right question is, "does the team need solid design skills?" The answer to that question is a resounding yes, if you want to end up with a high quality design.

Who on the team should have these skills? Everyone. The best teams focus on cross training team members so they are always improving on the necessary skills. This way, the team becomes more flexible and agile, ready for any challenge the organization throws at them.

Focus on skills, not roles, if you want to produce quality results.

5. If you could name your favorite current trend in Web design, what would it be?

Asking me for a favorite trend would be like asking me for a favorite compass direction.

And for those of you that don’t know who Eric Meyer is, shame on you. Shame. Shame. Shame.  I can’t write it any better than An Event Apart, “Eric Meyer has been working with the web since late 1993 and is an internationally recognized expert on the subjects of HTML, CSS, and web standards. Author of Eric Meyer on CSS and More Eric Meyer on CSS (New Riders), Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly & Associates), and CSS2.0 Programmer’s Reference (Osborne/McGraw-Hill) as well as numerous articles for the O’Reilly Network, Web Techniques, and Web Review, Eric also created the CSS Browser Compatibility Charts and coordinated the authoring and creation of the W3C’s official CSS Test Suite.” So yeah, he knows a thing or two about web development.

Jeff: There has been a lot of talk and excitement in the web design community about CSS 3 and HTML 5. I find this interesting, mainly because I’m a dork, but it doesn’t seem like most of the major web browsers can fully implement existing agreed upon standards correctly, much less the next generation. Do you have any thoughts on this? Also I know there are bits and pieces of CSS3 and HTML5 that work in some browsers but when should we expect these technologies to go “mainstream?”

Eric: Some of them already have: ‘canvas’, which is part of HTML5, is used quite a bit for a variety of very cool purposes.  It’s also possible to use some HTML5 markup right now, either with a little CSS or a little JavaScript or both or even neither, depending on the browser. We might all groan and say, “God, the Browser Wars are back!” but really, that’s not at all the case.  Things are soo much better than they used to be that in comparison, this is at most the Browser Mild Disagreements.

Incompatibilities are the only thing we can ever count on in web browsers.  The last day of complete browser interoperability was the day before the release of the second web browser.  Browser teams don’t coordinate with each other, don’t agree on what to do or not do– and if they did, we’d probably complain that they had formed a monopoly that was unresponsive to our needs.

Jeff: Will we have to resort to some sort of battle royale street fighter kumite with everyone involved to get this done (CSS3 & HTML5 becoming widely accepted)? And if so, do you think Jean Claude Van Damme is a good fit or possibly Steven Seagal might make an appearance?

Eric: Um, sure.  Aren’t there any more recent tough guys to throw into the mix?

Jeff: What is the best way (I mean other than physically threatening or brandishing a weapon) to convince people that seem more interested in slapping code together quickly that web standards matter and it’s in their best interest to follow them?

Eric: Leading by example, sharing our experiences, making resources available, and helping when asked.  Nobody can be forced to go down the standards path, and frankly I’m not really interested in trying. People will slap together code, and it will mostly work, until the point where they want to do more powerful stuff or they get users with accessibility problems or they just start to realize that what they’re doing is clumsy and bloated and there must be a better way to do it.  When that happens, they’re ready to look at what’s been done by others and take advantage of resources and assistance.

It’s sort of a virtual apprentice setup.  Those wanting to become craftsmen learn by studying what the craftsmen who preceded them have done and said.  It isn’t perfect, but it’s working all right for now. I suspect there may emerge a system of actual, in-person apprenticeship, but it will happen very slowly.

Jeff: Designing a website to be optimized for mobile devices is a hot trend but it seems like Adobe and Apple are currently engaged in some sort of weird macho staring match about how to get Flash on the iPhone.  In addition, JavaScript and CSS have (at best) limited functionality for the majority of users with standard traditional cell phones. There seem to be a lot of roadblocks to transferring typical web interactivity to mobile devices, what are your thoughts on the future?

Eric: That one’s a stumper for me, because I’m not sure what the best mobile experiences should be, let alone what we’ll get.  There are some things one can do in a desktop browser that just seem really hard to do on a mobile device, like dropdown menus.  Maybe those will just never make it to mobiles.  Or maybe someone will come up with an interaction pattern that is recognizably a dropdown and yet is perfectly optimized for mobile environments and we’ll all wonder why nobody thought of it sooner.

Jeff: I’m going to skip explaining the part about what web 2.0 is, because quite frankly the word makes me want to smash my head through my computer monitor.  What are your thoughts on what the next version of the web will be?

Eric: It’ll be a more powerful version of what we have now, one that we sort of collectively evolve, and we’ll worry about branding it later.

Jeff: Do we go ahead and call that web3.0 or will it be so advanced that we skip directly to web 4.0?  If so, who can I sell this domain web4point0.com?

Eric: I’m sure there’s a social media guru out there somewhere who’d love to take that off your hands.

Jeff: The other day I was thinking about when I was first learning how to design websites, I made this really simple hangman game out of JavaScript.  I thought it was cool and was quite proud of myself at the time but it always seemed that JavaScript was regarded by web developers (at least the ones I knew) as this wacky weird little language that wasn’t really that powerful. Now it seems like JavaScript is everywhere you look, disguised as ActionScript in Flash/Flex, or playing a vital role in the creation of mashups, etc. Has JavaScript changed or have the attitudes of those developing websites changed more?

Eric: Both.  It’s gotten a lot more powerful, and people have started using it to do all kinds of stuff natively in the browser that would’ve been unthinkable even two years ago.  AJAX drove a lot of that change in perception, but also things like Google Maps and the various JS-based APIs.  People started to realize that no matter what you might think of JS as a language, it can be used to do a lot of cool stuff and it’s pretty much here to stay.  My contention of late is that it will be the basis on which the web will advance at a much-accelerated rate, actually shifting the basis of standards development into the hands of the community.  We’ll see.

Big thanks to Eric for the interview!

More about Chris…

Chris Coyier is a web designer from Madison, WI currently living in Chicago, IL and working for Chatman Design. He also happens to run a web design community (css-tricks.com) that has an extensive collection of really awesome articles, forums, videos, downloads and snippets.

Jeff: Obviously uitrends.com covers a wide range of user interface trends (so I’m told), and a lot of the information presented on your website covers how to implement some of these trends. What are some of the key trends you have covered on your own website?

Chris: Using custom fonts is becoming a big thing recently. Fonts have always been a hot topic, since the core web fonts available for use are so limiting it really itches designers the wrong way. So there have always been image replacement techniques and fancier stuff like sIFR. But just recently we’ve seen popular browsers implementing CSS support for the @font-face rule, something that IE has supported for a long time. This allows for font files to be directly linked to in CSS and used in the browser, even if the user doesn’t have that font on their system. One problem with this is that any fonts you can do this with legally kinda suck. But now we have technologies like TypeKit coming around, which I covered briefly, which are using additional technology to allow you to use actually very nice fonts with @font-face. This is going to be big in the coming year I think.

Jeff: There has been a lot of talk and excitement in the web design community about CSS 3 and HTML 5. Are these real solutions to existing web design problems or just a bunch of overblown hype and wishful thinking, kind of like when I saw the movie Back to the Future II and got really amped up about hoverboards? What are your thoughts on these being implemented or even agreed upon by December 21st, 2012 (the “supposed” end of the Mayan calendar)? Any correlation or am I just grasping at straws here?

Chris: Oh it’s all very real. A lot of CSS3 stuff you can already use in a “progressive enhancement” kind of way to make designers cooler for browsers that support them but still be fine in browsers than don’t. The standard example is rounded corners, which you can implement with -moz and -webkit CSS attributes very easily. IE won’t get the rounded corners but of course that isn’t the end of the world. HTML5, for garden variety web designers like me, means a barrel full of new tags we can use to mark up web pages in far more semantic ways. For more hardcore developers, check out this HTML5 intro video that has some pretty mindblowing stuff you can do with HTML5 today.

Of course, I’d swear it all off forever if I could have a hoverboard.

Jeff: Web standards. Are they golden rules to be followed or do they just get in the way of cranking out some sweet non-compliant code? Why? Is this all part of a more semantic web with flying robots that interpret code and stuff?

Chris: Compliant code doesn’t limit you in any way. There aren’t things you can do with non-compliant code that are super cool, but put you in some kind of “bad kids” club. Non compliant code just means you screwed something up somewhere. You didn’t close a div, you used an attribute that doesn’t exist, you forgot to include an attribute that is required to make your code more helpful. Validation is just a tool to make sure you are on the right track. The real test is if your page works and looks right (i.e. doesn’t look broken, not necessarily exactly the same) across all browsers, and validation can help you get there.

Jeff: There are a lot of tools like content management systems (CMS) that allow people to create websites easily without a lot of knowledge about setting up, planning, organizing, designing, usability or even coding. Is this good or bad for web design? And, if you had to pick one CMS out of the 1.2 trillion available (last I checked) which would it be and why?

Chris: WordPress. I chose it 90% of the time. I feel like I can do just about anything with it. But, this choice is because I already feel very comfortable with it. I can crank out a WordPress powered site very quickly and I know that when changes and things come up with that site, I’ll have to power to get it done. Ultimately our work as web designers comes down to getting things done, so sometimes you have to make choices based on what you already know. Learning the ins and outs of 10 different CMSs just isn’t practical. If you are super comfortable in Joomla and can really get it done with that, more power to you. But I definitely feel like WordPress is a pretty amazing system.

Jeff: Is there anyone on Twitter that uitrends visitors should be following? You know, other than uitrends and Jeff Noble – that guy pretty much rules.

Chris: Well, other than Jeff Noble, you could always follow me. This account is pretty amazing. I think you should use Twitter however makes sense to you. Follow your friends, follow people you think will be interesting to you. Don’t follow some list of SEO experts you found on a list somewhere because you think you’ll get a bunch of hot SEO tips you can’t live without. That’s lame and boring and your twitter stream will turn into a bunch of nonsense. I suggest looking over at least the first page of a persons tweets pretty carefully before following and seeing if they look interesting before following, and then not being afraid to unfollow people if they turn out to not interest you. Twitter is only valuable if you get something out of it, and that you have to manage yourself.

Big thanks to Chris for the interview!!!