Sorry about that, if that's inconvenient. I really don't think I can provide good service and stuff as a solitary freelancing contractor. So I'm looking for a business partner or partners, with whom to form an awesome team here in Toronto, or a job doing HTML & CSS where I also get to be a usability/info architecture junior at the same time as I'm a web design senior, or just a straight usability/info architecture internship. Or junior position or something. Or even if there's an awesome course on it that'll give me some experience actually doing usability testing. I thought I could do a bunch of it on spec like I did with graphic design and stuff, to get some experience and build up a portfolio, but I can't get anybody to even let me test their website on humans, even if the whole thing is for free and their testers are volunteers. Something about watching people who aren't on the project using the site and getting notes from that... I haven't been able to find anybody at all who wants to pay me to do it, or let me do it for free. And I've lost patience with having to "design blind," so to speak, making decisions based on arbitrary preference or best practices instead of on research.
I know I can't do good work without including usability and that has to include testing, so without testing, it's just too frustrating and soul-crushing to do design. I'm finding out that even the companies that do usability work mostly don't actually conduct usability testing... which to me is like saying you do roofing when really all you do is deliver the tiles. Or it's more like saying you do framing but you refuse to use a tape measure. Everything's by eye, because we're so great at eyeballing it. I mean, obviously nobody could get away with that in the housing market, but then again, once you frame a house, you can't just fix all the problems with the frame after it's finished and sold. With a site, you can. It's a pain, so it doesn't happen a lot, but it's possible.
I can't really say I've figured out why, at least in Toronto, there's no substantial scene for usability testing and research. I've kind of lost interest in it. I'll wait for the scene to mature or hopefully I'll just find a scene that I haven't found so far. I just need some time to let go of all this frustration and come back into the scene, if there is one, with a good attitude, like when I started doing web design back in the day. I did great with web design, but I just couldn't get anywhere with usability or information architecture. I just hit wall after wall after wall. I don't find sites made in Toronto that are easy to use, I don't find companies that are doing this type of work, I haven't found anyone here who's testing sites on people... I've found people who are developing user profiles and making flowcharts and organizing information, but it's all just based on theory and best practices. I still can't find anybody who's sitting down with a website and some user and watching what happens when the site gets used by someone who didn't work on it.
Luckily I qualified for ODSP, so the government pays me at the beginning of each month... about a thousand dollars, to stay out of the industry, and out of the economy. I'd love to just say "OK I'll do fifty hours of community service doing usability testing" but none of the community agencies that I've found will let me test their website out either. It's incredible. I can't even get some soup kitchen to assign a couple of volunteers to me, to test out whether people can find their serving times. It's just... too uncomfortable for them. Even agencies that I've volunteered at for years... even if I do have editing access to their site, I can't test it on someone. If I do a test on my own, I can't present the results. It's just so flabbergasting. Actually, I hate to get dramatic about it, but I really, really love design and human interaction theory and stuff like that, so for me, it's been heartbreaking. I found the most important thing at the heart and soul of the industry I'd been working in successfully for 10 years, and somehow it's destroyed my career. It's just not an ok thing to be interested in. It's really sad. This whole site is drenched in that sadness. It made me stop liking design, sort of. I always loved layout and stuff, and I still do work on stuff for myself and my own music publishing needs, which is great, but I have like freelancer PTSD when I start talking with someone about colour schemes or something.
So for now I'll just keep publishing my design and usability and internet and technology insights up in here, like I've been doing this whole time, but I'm not really trying to make money off web stuff at the moment, so I'm not fronting on that anymore, and I'm not getting any web work, so I'm not discovering new Dreamweaver bugs or anything like that. I'm discovering ShiftEdit bugs instead.
It's nice, for awhile, to do what I've been doing professionally for the past 15+ years, but to do it just for myself the way I did in the beginning. I'm actually still learning cool stuff about HTML and CSS, and typography and stuff. And I'm getting a chance to spend more time making music with computers and stuff. When you're doing web design full-time, I just end up not wanting to use my computer for other stuff. So it's nice to sit around for hours working on a song on my PC without having just spent the whole day making websites on it.
I don't get why every time I get some opportunity to do some web design, it's either as somebody's employee, working on my own, or as a contractor, working on my own, or I'm a puppet for someone who's on a team, but I'm not on the team. Or it's just me and my client, and that's the team. That's not the same as a real team. That's just them having more than one person in the meeting, so they can be more imposing. I really do feel like there's a great team out there or the makings of one, and I really want to find or build that team. I just think it's silly to develop on your own, or without doing research. And those have always been my only options.
