I’ve never worked in an environment that I would call user experience friendly. That doesn’t mean I’ve had bad employers or clients. In fact, I’ve been lucky over the years to work at some pretty great places. But if you mapped my resume based on how highly each organization valued user experience expertise, the spectrum would be narrow and range from “somewhat tolerant” to “nearly hostile.”
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Quick: Explain why the long E sound in the word treat is spelled “ea”, but for the same sound in the word wheel it’s “ee”. Now explain how one-third is the same as two-sixths. Now explain why a ten-cent coin in the U.S. is smaller than a five-cent coin. But wait, you have to do all this without referencing the evolution of the English language, numerators, denominators or the price of silver in the late 19th century.
Welcome to helping my six-year-old daughter with her homework. Or, (in the universe’s constant reminder to me that everything is really one thing) helping a recently graduated designer tackle her first information architecture work. In both cases, the challenge is to build a foundation strong enough to support all the learning that comes after it.
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I’m always wildly uncomfortable when people use the term “creatives” to define the professionals who do the kind of work I do. It harkens back to the pre-digital advertising agency world where a copywriter and a graphic artist teamed up and waited for somebody else to tell them the direction the client and the agency had decided to take for a campaign. Armed with instructions from the agency’s account team, the creative team would churn out their copy and graphics. The creatives’ jobs were essential to their agency’s success, but their work was strictly constrained within a specific stage of the project.
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Design is what it does and what design does is solve problems. Online, we concentrate on designing user experiences because the problems that need to be solved always come down to a single individual and the decisions they make. User experience could be pretty dispassionate work with such cold logic at its core, but in practice, it’s hard not to feel a bit protective of our users. We don’t want to do a Hansel-and-Gretel, abandoning folks in some dark forest full of dangerous critters. We want to create a relatively safe place where they can interact with content, functionality, and other users. We want to design user experiences like petting zoos.
When it comes to curation, I think there’s good news and bad news.
Curation is “the art of plucking all the good stuff from a superabundance of crap.” (That’s the Cranky definition actor and dilettante media analyst Joseph Gordon-Levitt gave in a recent Esquire magazine interview.)
“What size shoe you wear?” a guy asks me over his shoulder as he glides by in the crowded ski shop. “How long you want ‘em for?” a different guy shouts from the far wall by the rental snowboards. “Uh, I’m not sure,” I stammer, “I wanted to …uh …” A third guy steers me over to a counter and tells me to look forward and stand up straight with my feet together.
It seems like everybody wants to think like a user experience designer these days. Consider this excerpt from IDEO President Tim Brown’s June 2008 Harvard Business Review article:
” … Unaffordable or unavailable health care … energy usage that outpaces the planet’s ability to support it, education systems that fail many students …
I’m catching up on some summer reading … from four years ago. In The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, Barry Schwartz highlights some research that’s particularly relevant for the online user experience.
I wasted a good decade worrying about how badly I fit into the big nasty corporations where I worked. Gordon MacKenzie eased my pain with his book Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace. MacKenzie describes Hallmark (where he worked for 30 years) as a giant hairball:
Somebody I used to work with sent me this question in an e-mail: