You’ve hired the wrong guy. After reading David Airey’s forget about design and Andrew Maier’s User Experience Designer vs. Creative Director I’ve come to the conclusion that the role “web designer” is a cheap ass effort to fudge a graphic designer into a role requiring two entirely separate fields of knowledge.

Web teams still need graphic designers to communicate visually appealing messages. And graphic designers moving from a print team to a web team should stay graphic designers. What’s needed to compliment a web team’s graphic designer is someone to account for the complexities of human-computer interaction (HCI). Surely a manager in any field can’t expect staff to adopt a completely opposite, complex knowledge base overnight.

Welcome the missing link: User experience designer.

User experience design is a blend of usability, information architecture (IA), and user interface (UI) design.

A web-based user experience designer is charged with learning about users and creating interfaces that match website goals and user needs. They deliver interaction specs and simple mockups to the graphic designer as a framework for user-centered visual communication. Then, of course, the web developer makes the interaction work.

Don’t mix up the two roles, user experience designer and graphic designer. Neither should do the others’ job. They should never be blurred into “web designer.”

If you’re going to make the leap into a more complex communication channel, account for its complexities or it’ll bite you in the ass when your competitors “get it.”

While is why I am extremely proud of the evolution of the CMS that I designed and built for the Wimbledon Live player (see this post).

To understand the complexity behind designing the UX it’s important to understand the nature of the data and the critical effect of the workflow. First, video was being supplied from six sources, some to us using Saviant direct to our servers, some we pulled via FTP, and then of course the live streams (some HD and some SD). Then there were multiple parties…NBC (as the news reporter) needed editorial control over metadata, while iStream’s Managed Webcasting team needed to control the timeline over when items went to publication. My team, RnCS (Research & Creative Services) needed to insure that everything was tested before going live so we needed to throw the whole thing through a staging server before hitting a production server that then fed a cluster of edge servers on Akamai’s network.

So we structured it in several parts. First we put automated bots to determine when new assets had been dropped, specifically seeking out XML files that held the initial metadata, and dropped that into the CMS DB. Once there, the appropriate parties were notified by email (or in my case as PM, by SMS) – to update metadata, insert images, begin video transcoding, etc. Through the entire process, we designed screens to make it as easy as possible to follow the flow of assets, provide enough ability to each staff person so that overlaps in duties existed but that checkpoints assured data integrity throughout.

The grid above, for example shows the visual layout of the thumbnails that would appear in the cover-flow style playlist inside the player. Deep linking was provided so editorial users could create pointers on the MSNBC/NBCSports sites. Drag and drop allowed us to reorder objects to maximize the visibility of prominent players.

Each level of user had various modal windows to insert data. Even imagery was uploaded first to the staging, processed for size and then sent to production.

Because of the nature of edge servers, we also had to purge the cache after any update, so we provided a three-section grouping that allowed us to send the feed XMLs to production and clear the cache in one shot. And to make THAT process even easier, we built it so that it was accessibly by mobile phone so even if I was in transit, I could still update the CMS in a timely fashion.

Finally, the live streams had the ability to be toggled on and off so that the matrix of available feeds, particularly the Smooth HD stream, was optimized and prioritized. To be sure, there was still much room for improvement but given that the whole CMS was built in 6 days and now, five days into Wimbledon, has eased us into a steady, smooth workflow, speaks volumes for making it easy to use, intuitive (for example, the color designations on the player match the ones in the CMS, big text and extensive micro-transaction Ajax created an interactive environment), and overall a good experience.