Nobody eats the last doughnut at PBS Interactive.
Somebody will take just half of it. Then somebody else will take half of what’s left. And then another person will eat half of that. Typically, a tiny clump of stale doughnut will still be in the box at the end of the day. I’ve spent most of my career in hostile, tense environments so I had a hard time figuring out how to act in a place where nobody wanted to be seen as the kind of person who would snatch food away from their co-workers.
In the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, a princess avoids losing her baby by saying the secret name of an evil creature who would otherwise collect the child as payback for the spinning of straw into gold. When the princess speaks his name, Rumpelstiltskin disappears never to be heard from again. The story was published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, but like most Grimm fairy tales, its origins are much older. (Part of the legend of Saint Olaf, who lived a thousand years before the Grimms wrote their first book, involves the discovery of a troll’s true name.) Gaining power by knowing a demon’s real name has come up in movies (The Exorcist) and is relevant to the workplace as well.
I’ve been lucky enough to work with really smart, talented people over the years, so you’d think my exposure to mediocrity (other than my own) would be rather limited. But it turns out that staffing with mediocre professionals is just one way to produce lukewarm work. Here are three other heavily trafficked roads to hell:
These examples explain it better than any blah blah blah from me:
If you’re in an organization where you feel some resistance to user-centered design, it may not pay to be an all-out UCD evangelist. It may be more prudent to experiment with ways of making the user unavoidable. Alignment can be a pretty good tool in making that happen.
A colleague and I were talking about improving our presentations, specifically how best to curtail little, avoidable mannerisms that can distract the audience. (Like saying “um” before main points or talking too fast.)
The conversation reminded me of something I learned from coaching my nephew’s wrestling team.
I just changed jobs so I’ve been interacting with a whole new bunch of folks lately. It feels like the things I’m saying are getting treated as if they have a greater gravity and for awhile I was feeling cocky about my growing wisdom and leadership skills. Then it occurred to me that the extra respect had very little to do with any improvements in my delivery.
It’s my hair.
The 1995 version of me believed what he read about the inevitable and simultaneous increase in both hardware firepower and available content and he got all hot and bothered picturing millions of users joyfully surfing waves of data just for the fun of it.
The 2007 version of me thinks that the younger me was cute, but to quote Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now: “Charlie don’t surf.” Oh sure, the verb “surf” held up over the years because users do in fact glide from page to page and site to site, but it turns out that folks on the Web in the 21st century are as goal-oriented as a soccer team.
So Ryan Singer from 37signals starts his presentation at the Future of Web Design conference in NYC by saying that words like information architect, interaction designer and user experience consultant are all crap and a sure sign that somebody’s trying to bullshit somebody else. It was mildly irritating because I have no tolerance for bullshit and yet I still find value and meaning in each of those terms. But what I think Singer was really trying to do was to demystify Web design and that’s a good thing. He just chose different words to pick on than I would have.
I would have gone after the word “intuitive.”
By the end of some days, I can’t stand to hear my own voice anymore.
I think I end up talking so much because of the complexity of the user experience. The types of users, the diversity of user goals and the many elements that make up the user experience … there’s just a lot going on there and it frequently takes a lot of words to dissect or explain or address.