Steve Miller and New Challenges

Today is Steve Miller’s last day at Syncapse. He’s taking some time to enjoy the experience of welcoming his first child into the world.

Steve Miller and I have worked fairly closely over the years – he as an Information Architect and myself as a Marketing Scientist. We were both part of the landmark NASA.gov redesign. Since then, we did major sites in the healthcare and retail sectors. He welcomed me into Syncapse on my first day, and since then, we’ve iterated on social media measurement experience design.

His contributions in terms of usability in data driven insight generation are well reflected both in the interfaces and in roadmaps. He’s a champion for user centric design. And, I believe that we have learned more in a 1 year period here than we ever could anywhere else.

As IA continues its inevitable fracturing into UX, their importance as a glue between Tech, Creative, Science and Strategy will intensify. With so much risk comes great opportunity.

Steve will return to a market that, confusingly, will still emphasize the role of waterfall IA. The market for that, at least in Toronto, is huge. However, Steve will be one of the absolute few that will be capable of taking on Lean-IA or Lean-UX. He’ll be one of the few to identify early feature creep. He’ll be one of the few to understand the challenges of MVP and speed-to-market.

I hope, for Toronto’s sake, that he’ll come back in such a role. We need more Lean-UXers.