One of the challenges of building one's own web site (personal, business or otherwise) is just making decisions. Everything is possible so nothing is likely. I'm resolved to the fact that this site has been and always will be something of a laboratory. 

The fact is, we're still building stuff here so I've added this image of a crane building a crane to illustrate that aspect. Make what you want of the double level metaphor, somehow it feels right.

I've made two decisions that are critical to the viability of this site from the point of view of content.

Decision 1 - Integrate business content with the personal

The first is to mix the business content with the personal. I agonized (if that's not too strong a word) over this for quite a while, possibly years. All the conventional wisdom out there seems to say you should have one site for business and another site for blogging (read, 'personal' viewpoints). But a better wisdom I've heard over and over is that one has to be passionate if one is to achieve anything worthwhile.

The conventional wisdom effectively stifled my passion. It is inconceivable for me to write about user experience without introducing personal viewpoints and experiences. I don't pretend that UX design is a science. It's an art. If you read my articles, you'll note that I will repeatedly present my critique of 'objective' views being touted as superior to 'subjective' views. As an artist working in the medium of user experience design, I'm very interested in the Subjective.

I'm in this business because I get a great deal of personal satisfaction from it. So I want that to show in the writing on this site.

Decision 2 - Create multiple content channels

As a usability expert who happens to place a lot of emphasis on understanding the technical realities of the medium, I like to come at content from a variety of angles. While I have a lot to say about how technology should be designed and built to work well for real people in real situations, I also have certain ideas about how to do that. This presents the problem of multiple audiences for whatever I might want to say - and either group could get profoundly disinterested if I fire the wrong content at them.

My current solution to this problem is a multiple channel blog, integrated into this web site. These channels allow me to speak in an appropriate voice to whoever has decided to navigate to a particular channel. For example, if you're reading this article (and thank you for doing so) you've decided you are interested in reading something that is more than a paragraph or two and you apparently are comfortable reading about 'shop talk'. Not everyone has the time and interest to get into the details of web site design so I have other channels that speak in few words and lots of pictures.

In some cases I'm using short videos to make a point about UX design that might appeal to a wide range of people. These are intentionally off-the-cuff but minimally redundant video blogs that I produce as I encounter situations that raise usability issues or solutions. I want to respect people's time so I've limited these to 60 seconds max - hence the name 'UX Minute'.

I've also created the UX Observer channel as a means of sharing some of the thought processes that come from simple observations. As an artist this is a natural means of carrying out analysis of problems. If you've ever sat down and made a drawing, you'll know that this activity is both intense observation and analysis.

My initial assessment of the multi-channel approach is that it's removed the gridlock that I was experiencing in earlier narrow channelled approaches.

Past Incarnations

Past experiments with TUAG web sites have followed a path of singular focus. The first was a Wordpress blog with a pretentious 'corporate' feel (I didn't even get the business and personal separation right!).

The second was built using Drupal 5. It was really a sort of venture into Drupal-land to see how it worked. Much time and energy was spent scaling the infamous Drupal 'learning cliff'.

No sooner had I launched that site than Drupal 6 came out so I rebuilt it, tackling the ominous job of 'upgrading' (not 'updating') from one major Drupal release to another. With that in place I began to experiment with Drupal's theming capabilities and produced what essentially could be seen as the theming equivalent of the embroidery samples that young pioneer women used to create to prove they could be useful wives. An interesting exercise but it missed the point of what I'm trying to do with this site which is bridge gaps between end users and engineers. 

So my interest in geeky theming techniques subsided to deeper questions about the meaning of Information Architecture in the context of a dynamic content management platform such as Drupal. In short, I see Information Architecture as the juncture between the back-end logic and the front-end presentation and control systems. This led to a long period of focus on clients sites in which I explored those concepts and developed a set of modules that allow me to treat content as I think it should be treated from an IA perspective. During that time this site was either turned off or completely stagnant.

It was only recently that I've had the time to finish those IA modules to the degree that I can reuse them on multiple sites and have tried them out here. Hence the re-launch one week ago today. Ironically this coincided with the release of Drupal 7. I'm resisting the urge to upgrade to D7 at this time.

Your Feedback is Greatly Appreciated

If you've read this far, you must be very interested in site design issues so I'd like to invite you to kick the tires on this site and let me know what you think. I had some great feedback from someone yesterday, reminding me to use a favicon - a detail I'd completely forgotten about. Also, I don't have RSS going on the site just yet. I'm still pondering how I want to handle that with the multiple channels.

So what do you think? Do the mix of business and 'personal' and the multiple channels work for you? Thanks in advance for taking a look.