Daily Archives: 14 November, 2005

UX Magazine Matters

Back in 2000 when Boxes and Arrows began, it was a great source of knowledge for user experience practitioners. Since then, my feeling is that the type of material that’s typically found there has disseminated onto blogs, mainstream publications, and longer books on these topics. Blogs especially have likely been the ruin of many an online magazine, as writers skip the middleman/editor (sometimes to their (and our) detriment) and publish their work themselves.

This is certainly true for me. My last B&A article “Writing Smart Annotations” was in March 2003…a few months after starting my blog. Since then, most of my thoughts on design have gone into my blog, as have those of many of the early contributors to Boxes and Arrows. My list of design blog feeds is well over 50 now, and it’s more than enough reading on the subject matter on any given day.

Why then another online UX magazine, UXmatters? With Boxes and Arrows seemingly struggling to find content and its way in the new blog-centric world, do we really need another online magazine that covers the same thing? The audience and potential authors hasn’t grown significantly enough to warrant two in my opinion.

Online magazines like Slate and Salon exist and thrive (sort of) because they are able to offer premium content, written by paid writers and edited by paid editors, that no one else has. That no one else has. In this era of blogging, editors of the UX online magazines need to find the premium content that no one else has. They need to do the things that bloggers usually can’t do. Things like longer interviews with luminaries, and long, ground-breaking essays. This is, needless to say, very hard. I wish them both luck.

I’m going to reiterate Saffer’s Law again: it’s easier to create a content aggregator than it is to create content. I’m adding a corollary: It’s easier to replicate the form of something than its content as well.