Crossover - too much of a good thing?

A trend seems to be developing in the IA job listings for candidates that not only define, but also supply the user experience. That is, IAs UXDs etc that also develop code or design the pages.

IA has emerged from varied backgrounds, and wonderfully so. In trying to define what an IA does, it often distills down into 'broker respect and understanding between all the participants and stakeholders of a digital project'. So the more the merrier - IA practitioners who come from development and from graphic design can add valuable layers of shared understanding as well as new methodologies and insights to keep the field sharp and relevant (such as rapid prototyping with Flex or using colour to create powerful meaning in deliverables).

Oooh, but you can hear the 'but' coming, can't you...

But ...

While at first these new requirements made me feel vulnerable (for those of you who don't know and do care, I'm looking for work following an unfortunate dose of redundancy) as if I'd slipped up somewhere and missed a rather important boat as a result. But with a deep breath I remembered that I am constantly and actively preventing myself from building up skills that enable me to develop (not understand - it's important to understand - but the proficiency required to work effectively as a developer in a commercial environment) interfaces using any specific technology.

Here's why:

• to be a representative of the user, you have to be able to put yourself in their shoes.

Whether you are an expert in Flash, .Net, XML or typography, that expertise is bound to cloud your vision of what 'normal' people perceive if you are working with those skills daily. A press officer can't read a newspaper without reading between the lines. A good CSS dev will be almost thinking in stylesheets, and so switching that off to come at a problem from a strictly User Centred perspective is hard - divs, floats and positioning are bound to come to mind, resolving questions before they've been thoroughly framed.

• it's human nature to stick to what you know.

When you make a really good lasagna and you're new best friends come to dinner - do you risk that Thai curry with the tricky timing and deep fried fish? Or do you whip up your best bechamel and guarantee a good impression? Humans will want to impress, will be often risk averse, and are largely self interested. If the same guy (or girl) has to build the solution - won't they tend to design it to work best in the tech they know best, not pick the tech that best suits the user needs?

• jack of all trades, master of none.

OK, it's a cliche and often not true, but "where there's smoke there's fire", eh? As Joe Public, who would you rather have specify the experience you have to use: a practitioner who is focused on understanding users, content and context and communicating these needs to other expert practitioners who design and build those requirements; or an individual whose experience, focus and application is split across activities, jumping from conception to execution. One of the biggest problems I've seen in the past is a lack of respect on the part of either designers or developers for each other's skills. Perhaps IAs should take it as a mark of recognition if we are now also being subject to this 'anyone can do it' maxim.

• quality assurance.

"Two heads are better than one". Working in print you never ever had final proof of your own copy. Never. Even if you got the tea lady to read it last. Sanity-checking designs or specifications is best done by someone else - bundling the IA and Design and Development into a single role removes the useful handover stage, whereby clients, contractors or colleagues scratch their heads and ask awkward questions about what's being proposed.

Big IA vs. embedded IA (also known as common sense)

What I am delighted to see is a wider understanding of the principles and importance of User Centred Design (UCD), and a broader range of stages and people involved in digital solutions (including managers and content creators) becoming aware of and actively involved in delivering user requirements.

And IA is not necessary for every single web build under the sun. It might be beneficial, but it can easily be replaced by the term 'Common Sense' or 'Care and Attention' for smaller projects and narrowly focused targets.

I love my job - I'm proud of what I and my community have achieved. But we are magpies - we have thieved terminology, methodology and tools from everywhere we've collectively come from, evolving a distinct area of activity we call 'User Experience' (among many other things!) as we went. These porous boundaries have been beneficial to spread the word, bring people from other disciplines into the field, and create agility and speed as a community.

Will these edges become so blurred that we allow the discipline to seep back out into adjacent fields and we all return to our native environments, be that design, marketing, development, research, communications, publishing? I hope not.