How do you start a blog?

...I suppose the only way is like this, by putting one word in front of the other…

Weve been meaning to get this off the ground for quite some time now, as we want to share our joy, frustrations and musings on user experiences and innovation with a wider community. Yet the usual excuses have been used by me and others – we are busy, busy, busy.

When we have had the time, we’ve had to have meetings about how we use it, and what it’s for. However, my experience of social media is that the platforms provided are not prescriptive – there aren’t rules and defined information / communication flows. So the only way to test if this is valuable to us as a business is to see what interests you (dear reader) - what you want to read, and if we can start interesting dialogues and discussions.

So this initial blog is to lay out our blog narrative / dust cover of what we will be blogging about from now on. As the title suggests this is all about user experience, UX, UIX and experience led innovation. Bear with us on this I realise those titles aren’t going to make you drool with excitement..

Ive just spent two great days at the Design Management Institute Conference in Seattle where we listened, learned and debated design thinking and design doing.

The praecy of the 2 days is that we (the design community) don’t agree or have a singular concise and compelling definition about it, which clearly means that if we can’t express it, then what hope do others have in understanding what it is ?

The interesting thing is that almost every speaker showed that the title / brand doesn’t matter, the evidence does – that using the techniques we have been refining and honing for over a decade do produce results, and people do value it – call it what you want – it works.

Yet as a consultancy, that isn’t good enough – we need to help people understand what we do, and I think this blog is the perfect tool, as a pithy statement doesn’t cut it – it means different things to different people at different times, in different jobs and in different industries.

I think the best way to frame the narrative is to ask the simple question..

“Is there a problem ?”

Do we live our lives seamlessly encountering wonderful experiences that make our hearts sing and our minds boggle ? Of course not .. Can it be made better ? to paraphrase Obama – yes it can.