Earlier this month, I got the opportunity to attend the Healthcare Experience Design conference in Boston, MA. Overall the conference was great, and there are likely to be several posts in the upcoming weeks that refer to my thinking while there. But this one has to do with one thing… designers being wimps.

In one of the talks the speaker, a managerial figure, referred to designers as wimps. Straight out, no apologies. They were basically talking about how designers always fold when it comes to confrontations with other groups (including business and IT) and how this produces less than optimal design solutions… even going so far to say “our design is bad because…” about their own business’ site. Being the laid back personality that I am, I just let this slide… ok obviously I got pissed off. So I started to reflect on his point more and more. I came to the conclusion that he was right… we are wimps. But we are viewed as wimps and act like wimps for some seemingly very good reasons. Put shortly, in these situations where we are confronted by other groups regarding our designs, we have no fiscal or executive backing to give us the “power” to stand on our ideas. The business and IT will always overrule us because, quite frankly, they have bigger budgets, and actual people to stick up for them when an issue is escalated. But I would argue that there is something that we could be and should be doing to make this right.

The problems with this current situation are obvious. We as a design community continue to work in the “yes sir” realm, speaking up as much as possible, but being backed into a corner of giving in more often than not. This leads to several issues including us losing our will to continue to produce high level, creative designs as well as keeps our profession from progressing beyond the detailed design realm into the strategic decision making realms, mostly because we can’t find our way “to the table”.

This is something we’ve been trying to solve since the beginning of the web. Today I’m proposing one solution that hopefully will get us thinking about and building even better solutions. I think that we need to own the many things that we do and then speak up about how important we are because of these things. What do I mean? In his talk at MidwestUX, Geoff Alday spoke about how to tame the nine headed monster. It was a great talk, but afterwards, I found myself thinking how is it that I as a UX Designer am expected to be the consensus point of all these roles, yet still get no respect?? Then, the answer came to me. Put simply, we just are not demanding the respect we deserve. Respect is something that is earned… but what are we putting forth to earn it? So, yeah I said it, it’s our fault we are wimps.

I’m proposing that we start to try and work our way up the food chain one manager at a time. I think it’s time we begin to rise up as well as begin to document all of the different things we do day in and day out to make a project run successfully and to make our sites and products awesome. Then we need to own those things, and demand both monetary reward as well as respect in return. By documenting all the responsibilities you have and showing your manager, their manager, whomever will listen (hopefully there is someone), you now have solid proof of why you should be included in more conversations as a lead and why your team needs a higher budget. Thus we start to earn our respect. We need to start using our taming skills to push forward and advocate for ourselves, not in an emotional way, but in a cognitive fact based “here are all the things you need me here for” way.

Once we step up and begin to do these things, we can “earn” the respect we deserve. Maybe that speaker had every right to call us wimps. If we are too intimidated to fight the system and begin to demand the things that we need to progress, maybe that makes us weak… who knows? But how about we stop letting these guys be right for once… let’s earn the respect we deserve by owning all the many things we do!

I’m sure I’ve said it before, but I love living in NYC. One reason is that there is a plethora of lectures, panels, and other information sharing events for me to attend. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to view a panel that focused on designing for the new age of the magazine. It was very interesting indeed, however there was one thing missing on the panel itself… a UX Designer. Then it hit me. It’s not often that I see a UX Designer speak outside of our tight knit community. This was a panel that was focusing in on the experience of the magazine and how that was changing across a medium, and no experience designer was to be found. (That being said there was a creative director from a well known design agency there, but for several reasons they didn’t fit into the experience designer criteria for me). Where are we, and why are we hiding from the remainder of the web world?

There are some obvious problems with us being cocooned up within our own walls. The first is that most people are not yet aware that we even exist. They turn to other sources to determine the “user friendly” “experience” of the product. If they hire a creative agency to do this, and the agency assigns an experience designer to the project, they are seen as only pertinent at the point of interface. NOT at points further up the chain such as how to influence behavior outside of just the interface or how to help bridge the informational gap for the user outside of the interface. So, we end up only be seen as interface designers, since that is the part of our profession that people are aware of, and thus know how to charge out on an hourly basis.

How then am I suggesting that we work to solve this problem? In particular to being present outside the UX realm I guess I’m thinking of a couple of things. First, I think we need to start becoming part of the global conversation. Meaning we need to start attending and being apart of the web community as a whole, and not just our UX community. That means attending other conferences, meetups, etc. We need to start finding interest in the entire web life cycle and exploring those interests. If you are the speaking type, put in proposals for the atypical conferences and events, those that aren’t just specific to what you do. If you are a content creator (blogger, speaker, etc) begin to reach out to other communities and tailor your content to helping them see the value in what you do beyond the interface. In short the only way that we can begin to be recognized as more than the wireframe is to insert ourselves into conversations outside of the interface.

Once we do these things, I think we’ll start to see several things happen. First, people won’t raise their eyebrows in confusion every time we tell them what we do. But more importantly, people will respect our role as more than just the interface and see us as integrated into creating the whole experience. By hiding within our UX realm and expecting that to provide us with all the answers, we are just “cocooning” ourselves up more and more. We need to get out there, make ourselves known for who and what we are, and fully integrate ourselves into the web community. Until then… you just do the wireframes.

For more thoughts on this topic see Whitney Hess’ awesome closing keynote from the 2010 IA Summit – Transcending Our Tribe.

I’ve been mulling this one over in my head for sometime. We all know that we, as a profession, are in this state where the Wireframe defines us to outside communities. When we interview for jobs we are asked about our wireframing skills. When businesses talk about us they say “and you’ll do the wireframes”. This has been an ongoing problem in our world, and it is one that I see coming to a head.

Of course the big problem with this view point is that we are SO MUCH more than wireframes. We know that, and we also know that what goes into creating a wireframe is so much more than mere drawing skills. But outside of the UX kingdom, our message is not being heard. Instead the message that we are the Wireframe is becoming ever stronger to companies thinking about budgeted projects and setting dollars to project activities. I believe that we are slowly but surely either being folded into the low paying wireframe only business, or that we are being pushed out of it completely, in lieu of more low budget staff.

I think there are a couple of ways to approach this. First we could just all start outsourcing wireframes. I ask you, what would this mean to the UX community? How would this work out for us in positive way, if at all? Another option is that we hold on to the wireframe more tightly and let it take over our entire being, something that I doubt many of us wants.

Therefore, I’m raising the question. Is the wireframe process outsource-able, and should it be outsourced in order to rid UX of the term wireframer (gah I hate that one)? Is it time that we started looking at and dissecting our profession, as other businesses do for us, and shave off the shaveable parts? Can the process even be outsourced? What would the outcome be of this process? Maybe it would just harm the profession overall?

From my point of view I would say Yes this work should absolutely be outsourced in some way, but I’m wondering if I’m jumping to conclusions. So, I’m looking to you, the UX community to tell me what you think… and don’t hold back.

We all know what’s it like right? You could have designed the best experience in the world, created the most usable website out there and no matter what, if someone from IT or the Business disagrees with you for whatever whacky reason, your opinion and expertise on the project gets trumped. This. Always. Happens. Or, it happens way more than it does for other groups (such as business or IT).

There are so many problems we, as UX Designers, see from this chain of events. We tend to become frustrated and demoralized. It begins to feel like the whole organization is against us and there is no way out. To make matters even worse we, along with our management teams, begin to make the wrong compromises in order to try to increase UX’s rank in the organization. We try to take shortcuts to get on our executive’s and project teams’ good sides. We use the wrong weaponry to win the battle instead of using our expertise and user research to prevail. This, in turn only hurts our end user because instead of focusing on their needs and the priority of those needs in order to make decicions, we make decisions and compromises based off of our own ambitions to get UX up the organizational ladder. This method very often fails because we are not showing our value to the product or project like the business and IT can. Instead we are seen as “yes” men/women who will just compromise to get ahead.

How do we get to a place where we can promote UX in the organization or even within a project team so that we can see the value of our work come to life? How do we make it so we are making the best compromises for the user, business and technology? It all comes down to being creative. Yes, that’s right you are not being creative enough! We need to get creative and find a way to come up with measurable data-driven experiences that contribute to the project’s and, at a higher level, the organization’s goals. We need to know the data (yes numbers *gasp*) behind our solutions. We need to understand the project goals and success metrics and how we contribute to them. And then we need to document how our UX decisions contribute towards these metrics. In short, it’s a numbers game.

Let’s use an example to make this data talk less scary. Let’s say you are on a project whose goal is to increase application conversion rates. Currently users are coming to this application at a high rate, but at some point in the app they are dropping off. You, as a project team, need to increase these conversion rates by 2% (threw the % sign in there. I know it’s scary but we’ll get through this I promise hehe). You are the UX person on this project, what is your first step? Well some might say we need to categorize our users, understand form design, understand the content, do a content inventory, do an inventory of questions and see which ones are necessary, etc. Yes, that would work, but what about a different approach?

The first step I would take? 1. Understand how many people 2% is. How many users is that in total? 100? 1000? 2. Talk to the folks down on the click analysis team and see if there is blatant fall off point. 3. Figure out how many people attempt to get through the app a day/week/whatever. Then estimate how many more users would get through the app based on fixing of the problem area (heuristic evaluation 101). 4. Document, I don’t care if it’s a sticky, that fixing this problem will increase user flow by X users a day. 5. Solve the problem using UX/Design, and back up your reasoning with numbers and solid rationale. (i.e. Right here in LukeW’s analysis we see that putting the form fields on separate pages encourages users to do bla. He has tested this a trillion times. If we want to raise our conversion rates by X people a day then we need to do something of this effect. I talked to analytics and this is our dropoff point, etc and so on) 6. Walk out after kicking butt, buy myself a beer, then go to analytics the day after release and see if my estimates were correct.

Ok that was a lot, but you get the point. What you have now done, is proven your worth to a project. You have been given a number, shown how UX gets the project to its goals and most importantly have kept the user in mind without compromising your soul away. You have earned the respect of your peers because you understand the project and know an effective way to see solid results for your users. By using data as well as project goals and metrics, you have now been heard, and can continue to be on other efforts. But most important of all, you have advocated for the user, you have projected their voice, have solved their problem, have gotten them heard. Good job!