Link: Best of 2010 Social Higher Ed

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Good list of ideas from Patrick Powers's blog. 

I know that I'm often tasked with thinking of ways to incorporate social media on homepages, landing pages, websites at large, and it's always great to get a curated list of quality ideas. Campus tours on YouTube, social streams at Savannah College of Art & Design...good stuff. 

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Link: Favorite Pattern Libraries

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UI Patterns is a great site for inspiration or problem-solving. Perfect for when you need working examples, and also great because it is very web-app focused. 

Also helpful: Morville's search patterns. Some are dated now, though. 

Last thought on pattern libraries: I read somewhere something that stuck with me. Just because <famous site here> is doing something RIGHT NOW doesn't mean that it is the best way or even the right way. You don't know how it is performing, and you could be modeling your work after someone else's already-failed idea. 

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Comments on "UX: The Enemy Within"

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From UX: The Enemy Within by Karen McGrane

We need to embrace the idea that UX is necessarily multi-disciplinary—not just within different communities of practice, but within individual skill sets. People are surprised to hear that I speak at conferences about content strategy and yet still do interaction design work for clients. Why can’t I love them both? I loved them both when I called them information architecture.

So that’s why I hope that everyone working in this space feels like they have the potential to develop skills in multiple areas. You can be an interaction designer and a content strategist. You can be a user researcher and a visual designer too! You can even still be an information architect. 

Though I agree with this article, I still think that there are people who are more comfortable and who possibly do better work in certain parts of the discipline. People who are great at user research/testing, people who like to deal in content, people who like to deal in function, etc. In general, I think you excel more at what you like, and what you are more naturally inclined to do. But, someone who focuses on content is no less valuable than the person who does application design.

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