I’ve finally started coming down off of my Interaction 11 high, but there is one talk, and the effects from it, that are still locked in my brain. Kaleem Khan’s Design for Evil: Ethical Design caused quite a stir in Boulder, as well as in me. Some people loved it, others hated it, but to me it just made one observation very clear, that a good amount of us may not be keeping it real with ourselves and our work. More specifically, we are not admitting, at least openly and with pride, that we do this work for money, and we do this work in a capitalistic, profit driven business environment. For me, this unveils a big problem in our community.

So let’s be real. The majority of UXers (whether in the US or elsewhere) get paid off of a company’s or an individual’s profit. In short, we do this for money. No matter how much we are trying to help others (which I believe we all are), and are being successful at helping others, we do this to eat, pay bills and survive. That does not mean that we are evil or greedy, and does not mean we are “selling out to the man”… it just means that we are trying to get by and do our best to live and provide a good life for ourselves and our families. The companies that we work for may or may not be doing the right things with their money, but we need to make a living right? Does this mean we shouldn’t work in certain industries? I would say No. Does this mean we shouldn’t work for certain companies? I would say that’s up to your own sense of morality. The problem comes in, I suppose, when we overconsume for the basis of status and self gratification… however, that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is to point out that we, as a UX community tend to think we are outside this fact (as so beautifully pointed out by keynote Bruce Sterling in his closing talk). We truly believe that we are only in design to help others, and more over we believe because of that fact, the main driver of our work couldn’t possibly be… gasp… money. But guess what… you are. One of the reasons, you are a UX designer is because you need the cash.

There are overreaching problems with ignoring and/or denying this fact. The first and most important is that by not recognizing the main reason why one is in “the biz” one is operating and making decisions based off of an ideal world vs. a world of fact. For example, a person might have convinced themselves that a group like marketing is evil because they want to increase sales, when in reality they want to increase sales both to get the newly designed product to the people that need it as well as to increase profit (which contributes directly to the UXer’s salary). Another example, someone gets frustrated working in UX because despite their attempts to help make the world a better place, the business and tech teams keep telling them that their design solutions are out of scope instead of focusing on how well the solution is solving the problem for the user. The biz and tech folks are not trying to hold the user back, but rather are trying to stay in budget in order to not over spend so that the company can continue to earn a profit and thus… you guessed it… pay everyone’s salary. If we remove ourselves from the reality of the situation, that we work for money, we fall prey to this frustration to the point of almost disillusionment, which puts UX on a whole different page than the businesses we serve, thus making our working environments ever more tensioned and strained. By not working in a realm of fact, we forget that UX is All About the Benjamins, and destroy our effectiveness inside businesses.

Thus, how do we solve this problem? Well, I believe that admittance is the first step. I think we need to really admit to ourselves that we do this for money and that we do this to help companies make money AS WELL AS to help others. Admitting does not mean that you are throwing your morals out the window, and it also does not mean that you no longer advocate for the user and do your best to help improve the things you design for them. It just means that you are keeping it real, and that you are designing and making things better by working in a world of reality vs. a world of fiction. By knowing and accepting the environment you are working in, you become a real force in helping to improve that environment, and who knows, maybe one day change that environment. We do discovery, research, etc. so that we know the context, users, and content that we are designing for, it is the same with your profession. Once you recognize the context, users, and content of your profession you are truly working within it and not around it. Then we can look at the things we decide to work on, know we are doing it for money, but create our boundaries around “selling out” and helping others. Otherwise we are just designing in a fairytale that doesn’t exist, and I, for one, and done waiting for Prince Charming to come and rescue me… I can get out of this tower on my own… just keeping it real.

This is an idea that I’ve been playing around with for awhile and I wanted to reach out to everyone and conduct some informal user research on the topic. I’ve been looking to *maybe* get into some speaking engagements (conferences, lectures, what have you…) and have actually even started submitting proposals which is scary enough in and of itself. But then I started thinking, would people even what to hear me speak, and if so, what kind of topics would they want me to talk about?

Therefore I’m throwing the topic out to you, the community, and hoping to get some insight into these questions. Please let me know in the comments if:

   1. You would want to or expect me to begin speaking to audiences (if not, please let me know, I won’t be hurt) and,
   2. The topics you would expect me to speak about.

Thanks for the help! Looking forward to hearing everyone’s opinions.

UX is such a great field to be a part of isn’t it? I’m constantly being told how awesome my job is, and thinking it to. I also, however, find myself thinking that I know so little about the vast array of items and activities that encompass the UX realm (I know this sounds crazy, but roll with me for a minute). I personally think that I need to read every new book and blog post, attend every conference, and listen to every podcast in order to just fit in and be in the know.

While the ability and motivation to continually learn in any profession is something I agree with, support, and advocate for, the problem comes in when I realize I simply can’t learn everything and retain it all. Thus, I feel defeated because I know it’s just not humanly possible to “know it all”. And if I’m feeling this way, I’m sure that there are others of us that are going through the same thing.

So, in order to solve this issue of anxiety and lack of self confidence, I decided to look at those around me that I admire and esteem to be like and try to see how they improve themselves, as well as what they were doing to be successful. Were they just smarter than me, better than me, have more opportunity that me, or did I need to go back and get some sort of masters’ degree or formal education component. Why wasn’t I as “good” as these people? What I found was both fascinating and very helpful in getting me to realize anyone’s potential staying power in this industry. Although I learned minor tips and tricks, the main take away was clear: Experience in the field, learning from it, and evolving one’s work around it is key to success… that is where the real UX knowledge comes from.

Let me take a moment to explain further. The biggest lesson to me, was that one can read all they want, listen all they want, discuss and argue all they want, but if they aren’t internalizing and learning from their career experiences, then they aren’t progressing in the most impactful way possible. By really paying attention to, absorbing, learning from and adapting to the experiences one is having, one can become much more informed. This is because the knowledge and experience comes from inside of them… it has been truly absorbed. It’s not just that if A happens, than I should do B because that book told me, it’s if A happens I know I should do B because it’s worked for me in the past AND the book told me something similar that I have adjusted to meet my personal needs. Further, it’s not just book smarts, but that gut feel that we’ve talked about before. Put simply we learn through past experiences much more than we learn through study, and putting the two together can make us unstoppable career forces. Thus, it’s not just that these people were smart, but that they had a TON of experience in the field, experience that they put to good use, and experience that they took advantage of and cultivated. This was great news, because that is something that we can all do too!

Thus, is has become clear to me that it’s not just about external learnings like books, conferences, etc that make us great UXers… that is not the only place the UX knowledge comes from. It is about the lessons we learn over time, internalizing them in order to become more knowledgeable and adapting them to the work we do. This will make us more confident in who we are as UX professionals, and will also enable us to concentrate our external learning experiences into the ones that we truly value and genuinely want to know more about (i.e. I’m building a new iPad publisher application and this podcast is perfect for that, as opposed to I have to listen to all of these podcasts in order to be “in the know”). Internalize the knowledge you gain, and the answers, or at least the start of the answers, will come from the inside thus boosting your confidence, and ability to be the best UXer you can be.

It’s that time of the year again, time for the 2011 edition of the Interaction conference put on by the IxDA folks. I’m absolutely psyched to be attending for the second year in a row because I know how much thought the planning committee puts into each and every detail, thus making Interaction a truly great event.

In chatting with one of my good friends and talented colleagues about the upcoming awesomeness, I was asked “what are your goals for the conference this year?”. I thought this was an excellent question, and realized that I hadn’t set any for myself up to that point. So, I started to think more and more about what I wanted to get out of the event.

After some thinking, here’s what I came up with. My top most goal is to observe and internalize the interaction community as a whole. Since Interaction is such a great event, and so many of the people there are insanely passionate about this profession, I want to take the time to observe how we all interact with each other, react to all the stimuli around us, and take in the large amount of information that we are being given. I want to get a pulse on what topics are popular with which groups/industry UXers and why. I also just want to see how this planning committee throws down one hell of a great experience, and try to gleam insights into how I can do the same in my work.

So despite the life long goal of learning as much as I can, I’m heading out to Boulder to look at and interact with my tribe. It’s going to be a great time, and I can’t wait to provide a recap of what I learned from my goals above… as well as from the speakers that are busily preparing to fill my brain with more UX goodness. This is going to be great… next stop, Boulder!

Agile / Lean development is all the rage these days… and for good reason. It is a great way to come up with and release solutions much more quickly than how we’ve been working for years. And the best part for UX designers is that no solution is ever “final”… iteration and change is a key component to the methodology which allows us to receive feedback on our designs and continually update them to be better. Seems like a perfect world right? The problem with Agile, for most UX people, and for companies, in general, is that they are not aware that there is a step, a very important one, that comes before they can even jump into the Agile mix of things. That step being creating and agreeing on a product / UX strategy for what needs to be designed and developed in the first place… or as I like to call it, discovery and scoping.

Not being aware of the need for a agreed upon strategy can cause several issues. The most common one that I have seen is that people jump into Agile expecting it to solve all of their problems. We’ll just take some ideas, write them up as user stories, throw them into the “hopper” and Whammo!… Agile will get them out the door quicker than before. Often though, this method fails. Either the UX team is unable to design “quick enough” because they are not given concrete, research based ideas to design to and iterate on, thus “slowing down” the entire development process. Or the development team is unable to release due to bugs and/or incomplete use cases, thereby not having even a beta product to release “quick enough”. There are tons of ways that this method can fail, but the problem occurs when people blame agile for the failure, and not their lack of planning and decision making.

Taking the time to come up with a strategy for what will be build is a very important, if not the most important, step for successful development of any kind especially in Agile. By interviewing and observing user behavior as well as analyzing the feedback on a current product or new product idea, and taking that information to infer future user needs and behaviors, we can create product road maps that map to our users’ goals and tasks. UX should be a part of this step, and should help lead people through the discovery phase, as it is our job to keep our eyes on the prize, which is, of course, the experience of the user has with our product or service.

Creating a product road map (or experience road map if that terminology is more comfortable for you) allows us, as a team (UX, business and tech alike), to sit back and prioritize based on business need, user need, and technological complexity, thereby bubbling to the top the most important features, and exposing the rankings of the remaining features. After prioritizing, we now have a list of what should be designed and developed, and when those features should be developed, which we then use in our agile development iterations to keep things moving as smoothly as possible (this is software development, we know it’ll never truly be smooth ). Also, by keeping in mind that your strategy will iterate and change based on changes in the competitive market, user feedback, technical updates and innovations, one should anticipate constantly updating the strategy, in order to amend to these changes.

Thus, strategy (and prioritizing and scoping that strategy) has a big place in the agile world. Creating and adhering to it, as well as updating and changing it allows us to have a successful agile design and development environment. By taking the really big, goal changing decisions out of the execution step, aka the agile environment, and putting them in a different environment (although closely related and perhaps having the same groups of people) we allow agile to do what it is intended to do, design and develop the features that the user needs in a quick, efficient way. Agile was never intended to solve all the problems of the design and development world, rather it was intended to make the execution phase of this world more efficient, and pulling the strategy & scoping decisions out of this phase and defining them prior to the start of this phase, help to clear up the confusion.

So, before you decide that agile is the way that you are going to go, take some time to think about what you are really trying to put out to your users, but also to determine what problem you are trying to solve by implementing a new design & development methodology. Discovery, as well as scoping and prioritizing based on discovery, is, in my opinion, the most important phase because that is where we will find out what problem we are trying to solve for our users. Then we have a clear vision of the goal of our design and development, and we can execute that vision with a clear mind. Agile will not solve all of the problems of the world, however by planning, and doing the proper upfront analysis, agile can help release the solutions quicker, can save money for, and can bring pleasant and enjoyable experiences to the people that matter the most… our users.