Min… you are more than welcome. Johnny is a great place to look for many of these fundamentals. I would look through past pieces and note patterns about them! Also you may want to check out sites like boxesandarrows.com, 52 days of ux, pleasure and pain, and uie.com to start. Great literary resources are Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Don’t Make Me Think. If you’d like more detail please don’t be afraid to go to my site and contact me!

Having been in the military and having trained with swat/police units, the biggest take away I received from all of these groups was their knowledge about their own ‘game’.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a veteran, when a criminal with a gun is coming your way, crime cares not for experience. (Although the act of crime and dealing with it over time brings experience) What matters is if you know your game and how transferable your skills are from situation to situation.

The streets (sports court) are still the same, but each avenue can bring an different problem in itself. One avenue can be packed with drug dealers- yet another with prostitution, and yet another with car theft.

The fact is every situation brings on a new experience, but it is still up to us to be properly trained and more importantly to adapt and hone these skills continuously as we are introduced to new emergency situations, basketball courts and device platforms.

I know my example may be a little extreme, but I am thoroughly convinced that the UX community produces more fluff then real substances of value.
Once you are a trained officer and dawn the uniform before the public, the streets begin to throw anything and everything at you…regardless of your experience.

Once you are a trained special forces member, it’s your job to bring hostages back home safely regardless of the odds. If you don’t, you would not have done your job.

Lisa… thanks for sharing! I think these are great points that everyone can learn from.

Thanks for putting some of my frustrations into words! As a freelance consultant I am constantly being asked whether I have experience in this or that technique or this or that modality. The truth is much of my experience generalises across it all.

Actually the only way these clients can work out whether I can work with them is to try ,e out… which I have resorted to saying once or twice… without too much success! Although I agree with Matt that we do need to need to work out what the fundamentals are…

Patterns are a useful way to start… and also building up communities of knowledge like UX stack exchange (http://ux.stackexchange.com/), Concept Feedback (Conceptfeedback.com).

As for process it should be a continually evolving thing as techniques are learnt…

I am currently attempting to:
Research – Competitive, User Interviews, Relevent Patterns
Sketch – 1-2 minutes an idea
Ideation – using Balsamiq – 5 minutes an idea
Move straight to CSS/HTML – Prototyping solutions
Remote Testing/Guerilla Testing
Iterate and jump back and forward.

At the moment it is working for me… but I’m keeping it exploratory.

Important concepts that people need to :
- Design is choice of one from many, explore the design space
- You can never guess how your design with work in practice – test often and keep an open mind.
- Learn from the patterns that are out there.

If you know these mysterious fundamentals then you needn’t bother reading it and if you don’t you learn nothing as, Lis, you don’t share your views on what they are nor point to sources that might supply them. It’s like some cryptic UX journey the ‘novice’ must go on.

Smacks of the Emperor’s new clothes somewhat.

My working list of fundamental skills includes:

- sketching
- creative expression
- visual thinking
- creative stamina (being able to produce high volume)
- critique and shared design language
- observation and analysis

and more… this is a long list and it keeps changing in my mind. I have a hard time just agreeing with myself on what these are, and others have spent more time mulling over these details. Dave Malouf and Jon Kolko have both written great ideas on interaction design foundations that are worth reading.