Spicy Web Designer Interview with Shirley-Ann Dick

Shirley-Ann Dick aka “Missy” is a web designer from the county of Berkshire, England in the United Kingdom. She started designing websites in her own words, “A very long time ago!” before CSS existed. Since then she has gained a great deal of experience and developed a passion for understanding and improving usability for her clients. Some of the recent roles she’s been held include New Media Developer and Senior Designer.

1. After reading your resume I see that you’ve had a lot of working experience and I was wondering when did you first begin designing websites.

A very long time ago!

When the Internet was first being developed I was working as a technical consultant for a company with close ties with the European Commission and CERN. We were running parts of the JANET academic network, and won various contracts to produce some of the earliest HTML-based applications for electronic distribution of academic papers.

There was no CSS back then, so content was limited to text, graphics, and only the simplest of navigation. Design was more about content structure in those days.

Over the next 5 or 6 years the internet became more public facing and browsers appeared on our desktops, but styling capabilities were still very restrictive. Anyone who complains that CSS 2.1 is limited would think again if they had to use CSS 1.0!

Some of the earliest public-facing sites I worked on were for Greenwich Council and the Citizens Advice Bureau. Since both projects were in the public service arena, accessibility was paramount. I’m often amused by those who think that accessibility is the “in thing”. The early internet was inherently accessible because back then we simply didn’t have the technologies to make content hard to access!

2. I see that you have a great deal of experience using web technologies like JavaScript, ASP.NET, HTML, CSS and Visual Basic.  Do you consider yourself more of a web designer or a web developer?

That’s a really good question, which I sometimes struggle to answer in interviews. Most of the roles I have held have been a hybrid of both but usually more inclined towards the visual design.

I’ve always been passionate about usability, so to me even the most stunning design is rendered pointless if it’s hard to use. Many back-end developers don’t have a clue about usability. It doesn’t matter how good their code is; if the interactions don’t make sense to the user, then we’ve failed to design a good site.

In my current role as Lead Designer with a major car rental company, I’m involved in various aspects of the development of the e-commerce websites. 70% of my work is based around UI design and browser stability; the other 30% is working closely with the development and requirements teams to ensure that what we’re asked to produce will result in the best user experience for our customers.

3. I see by going through your site that you’ve created an extensive and accurate portfolio of your work.  Why was it important for you to be so detailed in documenting your work?

Primarily I wanted to show that I’ve been in this game for a long time and my experience is broader than the average (younger) web designer. I’ve held many senior roles and that’s not something you can substantiate with a handful of screenshots. Prospective employers want to see beyond the visual design and understand how you met or exceeded the customer’s expectations.

It’s also important to let your personality shine through, which is reflected in the way I present my work alongside personal projects and my blog.

4. On your site, you say that you are looking for a specific position or role within an organization and I wanted to ask how has the feedback from potential employers been so far?

Obviously any career change has to be right for me, as well as the employer. There are many recruitment agencies out there that are only interested in their commission and who want to put your forward for roles that are totally inappropriate. I’ve also been stung a couple of times by smaller companies who have misled me about their stability and have gone bust.

So I decided to make it absolutely clear about what I’m looking for. If a role doesn’t meet my specification, I simply won’t give it the time of day.

The feedback I get is generally excellent. Having a broad portfolio means the recruiter or employer gets to learn as much as possible about my skills before any interview. Giving as much information up front makes for more interesting interviews. There’s less “tell us a bit about yourself” and more “we liked what you did for company X, have you used that solution anywhere else?”.

5. Missy, since you first started how has the web design industry changed? And, has it changed for the better or worse?  Please explain?

When I first started out there wasn’t a web design industry at all. It was very much an elitist profession, with hardly any specialist agencies or applications. Now everyone and their dog can produce a website if they want, which is why we’re now seeing so many “shake and bake” template-driven services.

The industry has definitely started to change for the better. Improvements in consumer hardware, bandwidth and JavaScript support for example have removed barriers that constrained designers for many years.

In many respects we’ve gone full circle. The internet started out as a distribution mechanism for information. From the late 90’s to early 00’s information became entangled in graphics and video – everything became designer-centric and increasingly inaccessible.

With the advent of SEO, blogging and social networking, content is king again. And rightly so.

6. What is/are the biggest challenges that you face in web design currently and how do you manage to overcome them?

Standards support always has been, and always will be, the biggest challenge.

In my job I have to make sure the websites (all 13 of them) are stable on as many as 8 browsers at any given time. The browsers our customers use are reviewed every three months, which means if there’s been a new release of Firefox (say) the list can shift dramatically from one quarter to the next.

Working with legacy mark-up is a challenge too. Migrating mission-critical e-commerce sites from table-based layout to valid semantic mark-up is a massive task, one which has at times been hampered by the bad habits of well-intentioned developers.

To get around this problem I’ve recently developed an intensive training course, centred on UI best practice and CSS. Even thought the course hasn’t completed yet, I’ve already seen a huge improvement in the quality of mark-up coming from the developers, which means I can return to focussing on the visual design rather than validation errors and browser bugs.

7. Missy, what advice could you give to young professionals starting out in web design today when it comes to finding full time web design work?

1) Be realistic about the industry.

Web design isn’t just about creating awe-inspiring concepts with your Wacom; your designs have work in practice and deliver a great user experience. Learn as much as you possibly can about usability, accessibility and design patterns and put that knowledge into everything you produce.

2) Be your own worst critic.

Deconstruct every project you complete to identify what you could have done better, so that next time you will do it better.