About

Andrea Hill

Andrea Hill doesn’t like writing about herself in the third person.

I am currently employed at Resource Interactive, an independent digital marketing agency. My job title is Business Analyst/Senior Developer, but I consider myself a Social Interaction Designer/Developer.

While the coining of the term “Web2.0″ really brought the notions of user-generated content and social networking to the mainstream, these are the same activities that drew me to the Internet over a decade ago.

I helped foster online communities by serving as a community leader at Geocities before their 1999 purchase by Yahoo, had a livejournal before they required invite codes, and started a non-profit online magazine in 2000 that shot up to Yahoo Canada site of the week within a month of launch, “just for fun”. Before anyone outside of California had heard of the PageRank algorithm, I was busy mining the web for sites to include in the Open Directory Project.

I worked through a Bachelor of Arts degree in French and Spanish and a Bachelor of Science degree in Digital Communication. Communication is the driving force behind my work. I can safely say that if the Internet were solely about information gathering and not about people sharing and communicating and collaborating, I wouldn’t be working in the field.

In the late ’90s, I didn’t have the luxury of blogging or twittering or tumbling(?), so I learned to code. I do glean some pleasure from developing a robust, cross-browser, standards-compliant site, but my greater interest lies in the overall user experience. My focus on the user also makes me a strong advocate for accessibility. The research focus for my Master of Computer Science degree was Accessibility in Rich Internet Applications.

One person’s preference is another person’s real need. It may be that a group of users finds it easier with Ajax, but if another group of users finds it completely impossible then you’re cutting people out, and you’re doing it for basically nothing.

I think of it as a hierarchy, basically, where accessibility is the most important thing, and usability comes next, and preference and design and aesthetics comes next. All of those things are important, but if one affects the other then you have to think which is the most important.

And to my mind, accessibility is always the most important, because accessibility impacts on what people really need. Everything else is just preference.
James Edwards (co-author of “The Javascript Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks)

I devour social sciences books like “Freakonomics”, “the OPEN Brand”, “Microtrends” and “Why We Buy” ( and more), and I’m particularly interested in how online communication is altering individuals and society as a whole. I used to work for LexisNexis, a “a leading provider of information and business solutions to professionals” in the legal industry (as well as others). We learned that the industry is changing as more web-savvy law students graduate - they do broad searches (a la google) rather than performing more targeted research. The courts are still structured around the old model, but the rules are changing.

I love the idea of watching the changes, and perhaps even being able to drive them. I’ve served on advisory boards and sat in on focus groups and attended some fantastic conferences. I’ve been able to learn from some of the most intelligent people in the biz. It’s a exciting, ever-changing field and I feel so fortunate to be a part of it!

So that’s me.