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Idols / Khoi Vinh of NYT.com

I've fol­lowed Khoi Vinh's excel­lent blog, Sub­trac­tion, for a long time. A cou­ple of years ago, he became the Design Direc­tor of the New York Times web­site, and in the mean­time the site has real­ly changed, for the bet­ter, most­ly, I'd say. This week he's doing a Q&A about his work, the NYT, design, and all of that.As I've always been curi­ous about what he does in his role, and the struc­ture of the NYT.com UX depart­ment, I was glad to see that some­one went there right off the bat:

As the design direc­tor, my respon­si­bil­i­ty is to over­see the cre­ative aspects of these con­tin­u­al improve­ments. Each one is a project of its own with some range in scope, from very short and dis­crete to long and drawn out over many months. And each project requires one or more of the mem­bers on my team: infor­ma­tion archi­tects (who are charged with orga­niz­ing the fea­tures and the flow of infor­ma­tion so that peo­ple can make use of them most intu­itive­ly), design tech­nol­o­gists (who do the actu­al cod­ing of many of these sites, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, etc.) and/or visu­al design­ers (who han­dle the over­all look and feel, includ­ing lay­out, typog­ra­phy, col­or, pro­por­tion, etc.).You could say that all put togeth­er, the final prod­uct of our efforts is the user expe­ri­ence, or the sum total of the con­tent and the frame­work as it's used by vis­i­tors to the site. Of course, it's not true that my design group is the only team respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing this expe­ri­ence; it's real­ly the result of con­tri­bu­tions across the board, from edi­tors and reporters to project man­agers and soft­ware engi­neers and many more.

More here.