SoCal UX Job Fair & Meetup

Nerd heaven: learning about the latest in UX while meeting killer startups

On Sept. 17, I attended the latest SoCal UX group meetup in downtown Los Angeles, where 29o designers mingled with startups looking for talent, and honed their skills by learning about the latest trends in web design and marketing.

The whole UX field is still very much a tech sector that is under construction. I’ve seen UX described as everything from the process of identifying the potential users of a new site, to the graphic design of a site, to the utter stats-based refinement of online marketing.

Sometimes, working in UX feels a lot like the “Alice in Wonderland” quote from Humpty Dumpty:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

UX is a field of study and implementation that really didn’t exist even a decade ago. It’s not surprising that we’re still struggling with the nomenclature to describe what it is that we do, now that web design has evolved to become a meld between art & science. Even moreso, now that we’ve seen the rise of DIY, paint-by-numbers sites like Wix, Weebly and SquareSpace.

It used to be that to build a site required a wide range of knowledge (and to a certain extent, it still does). But the democraticization of tools designed to make to make it “forehead install easy” to publish content to the web, has meant that the differentiator in the market has moved from technique … back to content.

If just about any schmo can spin up a responsive site with integrated forms and CSS transforms, then what use all those coding skills we all burnt so many brain cells to acquire these past 15 years?

 

That’s a larger discussion, and one I have had many times over the past few years (and will explore in more depth in future postings).

Meanwhile, enjoy these candid photos of the attendees and speakers at the SoCal UX Job Fair.