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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Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy and Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid are stuck at the top of a high clump of rocks. The summit was too steep for their horses, so now it’s just the two of them. They’ve spent days running from a posse and now they either have to turn back and face the lawmen or jump from their perch into the twisting, violent rapids far, far below.
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Problem-solving never happens in a vacuum. Culture creates the context for our solutions, directly affects our processes, and influences how we view our goals. That’s why the 1960s space race between the Soviet Union and the U.S. remains relevant to development work done today.
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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:
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.
When I talk about separating The What from The How, I suspect all some people hear is: “Blah blah blah THE WHAT! blah blah THE HOW! blah blah blah THIS WILL TAKE MORE TIME! blah blah blah.”
If you’re in a room full of 20 people arguing about what shade of blue to use, at least you know what your biggest problem is. To get the most out of your organization, expertise needs to be protected throughout the development process. I like to use a sliding scale of expertise to do that.
There’s nothing wrong with talking about things in a general way. There’s nothing wrong with expecting specific things from other people. There’s everything wrong with doing both at the same time.