I finally got around to reading JJG’s The Elements of User Experience last night. It makes for a quick read, and I think I polished it off in about an hour or so. I’m not sure why I put off reading it for as long as I did now, it made for great mental fuel for some things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately in terms of project planning and what should drive each part of the development and design process. I think that I already conduct projects where I have the ability to dictate process in a very similar manner to the one he suggests in the book, but it was interesting to see the way in which he presented the material, and to see what distinctions he drew in defining his process and the various components of it. I believe that most Web professionals I have worked with over the last couple of years know that there is a right way to do these things, and have a decent idea of what that right way might be, but I find that most resign themselves to not being able to actually conduct business in that manner because of clients and other factors. I’m not one to resign myself in this way, and it bothers me that people just give up on doing things the right way because it has either always been done another, less effective, way or because they are too tired to fight for the right way. It just seems so obvious to me that approaching these things in a methodological manner yields better results, and my anecdotal experience mirrors this.