I’ve been thinking about this topic for awhile. I believe that UX is in the middle of an era where we are ready to put a stake in the ground and define who we are and what we do. We all talk about this, sometimes in similar ways some times in different. We argue about this… every single conference has a speaker that encourages us to do something about this, but we are still hesitant to draw the proverbial line in the sand and really define ourselves. I couldn’t agree more with Jesse James Garrett when he said… “UX is a mindset for which there is no cure”. And I think by coupling that point with the knowledge of the material of our craft, we can come to a good place in understanding who we are and then move UX forward as a profression.

The problems with not defining and owning who we are have been talked about since the dawn of UX. But spinning this issue another way and looking at the problem with trying to define these things (as opposed to not defining them), one can see that a major issue that we face is that once we have a definition for what a UX professional is, someone, somewhere, feels that they will be “left out” of that definition. Said in another away, many of us feel that if UX is defined in a granular way, then we will no longer be able to call ourselves UX professionals, and will once again be roaming soulless around the career desert. This is anxiety provoking and thus we hold onto the churn and arguments in order to keep ourselves “in the game”. This, of course, only sets UX back as a profession because it makes it harder and harder for those outside of UX to understand where and how to invest their money in our talent.

Therefore, in order to quell this fear, and calm our nerves, I believe that we all need to understand that UX really is a mindset that we are all born with or grown accustomed to, and that we not only share that mindset, but couple it with the materials of our craft in order to create this thing called UX. What am I defining as the materials of this craft? Code. Yes that’s right, I said it, code is the building block for digital products, and since that is what we all come together to design, I’m calling code the material of our craft. Thus knowing that UX is a mindset that designs and manipulates digital products, we can begin to see that yes, this field is large, and yes, you are still included. Of course some of us have expanded outside of the digital realm, but this is where our roots still lay, and many of us, myself included, still work heavily within these roots. There was an awesome post a few months ago that inspired me to think more about UX and the problems we face in owning who we are. It Doesn’t Matter Which Pill I Take; I’m Still in the Matrix, does a great job of talking about the roots of design. Of course we can always have the argument on whether or not you need to know how to code and how much of that you need to know and bla bla bla. The point I’m making is that the argument is just a distraction. All of the arguments we have on what UX is or isn’t or what UX people do or don’t do are just distractions. They distract us from owning this mindset that we all have from which there is no cure. They distract us from understanding that yes, code is that the base of what you do, and yes, your designs will manipulate it in someway. So instead of building this profession up, these arguments create internal turmoil that hold us back.

Thus, we need to stop arguing and define this thing already. We need to say “I’m a UX designer no matter if you think I am or not”. I know this because I have a UX mindset, and I work and manipulate digital products. So there. Now what is the argument?

Follow up to UX it’s time we STRIKE.

In a recent post, UX… it’s time we STRIKE, I wrote about the issues that we UXers are feeling in regards to working with and for companies with executives and cultures that don’t understand, nor are open to understanding the value of what we bring.

I mentioned that the biggest problems that stem for this scenario deal with the feelings of UX professionals feeling useless, hopeless, unfulfilled and under-appreciated. Without having a certain level of buy in from the company, we don’t get the chance to do the things we love and that we trained so hard to do in order to bring value.

The solution I propose is that, after we have tried all we can to convince those around us of our value, we just boycott these companies that can’t appreciate us and reward the companies that do appreciate us by bringing our talents there.

Imagine my surprise and joy when a few days later, Jared Spool wrote about the same exact topic. His post, Why I can’t convince executives to invest in UX (and neither can you), is one I just love. I like this post, not only because I enjoy Jared’s writing and his lessons, but because I felt that he was echoing my message. In reading this post several times, and thinking more about Jared and his company’s success one can see that in combination with their hard work and intelligence, they have been successful (and I’m guessing fulfilled) because they only take on work where success can be guaranteed. They aren’t in the business of trying to convince executive teams of the value of User Experience, but are instead, in the business of giving executives and their teams the value that they were promised when their hired UIE. In not so many words, UIE boycotts companies that don’t value UX, or whom aren’t open to valuing UX because they realize that there is no secret formula to convince people of UX’s value. Even Jared Spool himself is telling us that he can’t move mountains and performs magic by convincing these companies that UX is valuable… so then why should we think that we can do the impossible? Jared does mention that convincing executives or at least guiding them further is possible only if we work to understand their focus and make our UX value custom to that focus. However, this means that the executives and culture of the company have to be open to even thinking about understanding UX value, and we know that is not always the case. Mr. Spool goes on to ask us in the situations where you just can’t move forward through the executive and cultural wall, “Why bang your head against a wall when you can be doing those things you love?” In effect… why even work for these places if they don’t value what you bring? I couldn’t agree more… Thanks for the inspiration Jared… as always.

A few months ago, I wrote a post entitled, Where Does UX Knowledge Come From?. In it, I talk about the one way that we can find and have confidence in the knowledge of our profession. In short, that is by combining both external knowledge sources (blogs, articles, etc) with our own professional lessons learned. I claim that by internalizing these professional experiences and combining them with the information we take in from books and more, the UX know-how comes from within us and we get better at our work.

The question I asked myself after writing this post is simply… what next? Let’s say that we go through this process, as many of us have, and internalize our lessons learned, as well as, couple them with external knowledge, then what? We can only progress so far in this regard, this path will only help us move forward so much. What happens when we hit the wall again, and how do we take our UX knowledge growth even further?

After thinking long and hard about this one, I’ve come up with an answer… the next step in UX knowledge gathering: Open your mouth and speak to your experiences. Share them with others. You need to get out of your shell and let others know about what you’ve done in your career. It is well known that by talking about your thoughts and experiences, you can get feedback and additional thoughts from others that may not have always been apparent to you. Thus sharing your insights, no matter how mature those insights are, is always a good way to expand on them, learn, as well as help others to learn. There are several different scenarios in which to do this. You could share them with a more junior professional whether in your organization or not. Another easy way to share these experiences and learn more about them is to use them in order to provide rationale for your designs… further in order to explain the rationale for your designs. When you are talking with your project teams and explaining why you did or did not do something, quote the lessons that you have learned from past projects & external sources. Lastly, of course, you could create some sort of blog or presentation to share with an even larger community. All of these types of sharing can, and should overlap…. there is not one path to sharing as well as no right/wrong way. Whatever your comfort level, whatever your style, the next step in extending your UX knowledge is sharing it, and learning from that process of sharing.

Sharing our UX experiences (can we have user experience experience? I vote Yes!) will cause many different outcomes to unfold. First when you go the route of sharing your past lessons learned to educate another you are ensuring that the same hard lessons don’t have to be learned twice. Thus, the UXer that you have educated is starting a leg up, and that means they can learn more lessons further up the scale and share those with others in their own realm. UX as a whole profession benefits. Second, when you share your past lessons to provide rationale, you are doing several things. You are reaffirming that you are a expert in your field, and your team will begin to show you more respect in that regard. You are also allowing yourself to talk through your own solutions which will enable you to gain more knowledge as well as clarify your thoughts. Lastly, by sharing your ideas to a larger community through something like a blog or presentation, you are allowing yourself to extend the reach of your ideas further and thus also extending the amount of potential feedback and input you can receive from the rest of the community. You are also, again, learning from explaining, but you could be learning a whole lot more due to the amount of feedback you could receive. Overall, there is only so much you can learn by yourself, after sometime you need to start involving others in order to learn further. There are many different ways that you can do this, but it is most important to remember that working in a vacuum can only take you so far in any profession. You need to get out of your own head in order to expand what is inside of it.

Several months ago, I came across a post on UXmatters, entitled Power or Collaboration — What’s Most Valuable to a UX Leader by Jim Nieters. I made a note to myself to write about my thoughts on this post, and have just recently dedicated the time to do so. When I first read the post, I thought I would write something about UX Leadership, however, after rereading I have determined that a much more important topic is raised here… that is we, as UX, need to stop the madness within our own profession. That madness? Taking any scraps we can get from the organizational dinner table. Obviously, I’ll need to explain this further.

Let’s start with what we, as the UX profession, have got going on currently. We are, per usual, trying to do a lot of things to further ourselves as individuals as well as a profession. In order to do this, we take every step we can to evangelize and promote the awesomeness that is UX. We do this as leaders and employees within the organizations and agencies that we have committed ourselves to helping make better. In these roles, we work our butts off in order to gain more respect and ultimately power for ourselves, so that we can see our design solutions released out into production for our beloved users to use. Doing these things is all well and good as long as they are getting us the results we need in some capacity. However, I believe that we have reached a point where taking any little bit of respect and power, even respect and power that doesn’t help us progress in our roles, may no longer be good enough. Maybe we are working our butts off too much in some cases, going down too many useless rabbit holes and trying to serve too many different masters… has UX progressed beyond this?

First, let’s focus on the main problem with taking any little bit of recognition and respect that some of our organizations, executives and non-UX colleagues might give us. The main problem is, despite these little bits of acknowledgment, our hard work might not be able to get us very far inside of our organization, the effort does not equal the reward. Think about it this way, what if our organization at its highest level, will never support UX as the huge value add that it is? Is the fight even worth it? And does our hard work really pay off…. most importantly what if you are working in an organization where UX will never be valued? Even after all of your hard work and evangilizing what if your value will never really be seen? I think we have all been in a situation where no matter how hard we try, our words and actions are not getting through. You’ve followed all the rules, all the articles, blogs, video how-tos on promoting UX and gaining concensus, respect, power, and all of these things “should” have worked… and in some places they do work, however in your case nothing is working. Thus, all your hardwork has been for not. This is a problem because it then makes you either feel completely devalued and thus give up the fight, or it makes you so mad that your job at this organization is not longer about great UX, but about being bitter and angry and just getting through the week. Nobody wants this for themselves. So, how then, do we get through to these non-UX loving organizations and get UX the executive support it needs for all of us to be successful?

One solution: you leave. Yes, that’s right, you quit your job and find a new one. One in which the executive level either already understands and supports the value that UX brings or even one in which the idea of providing that support is welcomed. Not only do you leave, but be sure you tell them why you are leaving. Let them know that they are losing your value because they refuse to support it. I believe, that UX has reached a level where we no longer need to take however little we get when it comes to respect and power. I believe that we have proven our value over and over again so much that it is time we start using that value to our advantage. There are companies and organizations out there that would kill to have the type of thought leadership and skillset that we as UXers provide… we need to start rewarding them with our value, instead of rewarding the organizations that don’t see our value. Of course, this is easier for some of us than others of us. I realize that being someone who lives in a large city, I have many more job options than some others. However, given the nature of your work, how valuable you are to organizations, and how much you give for so little, I think that any of us could do this. So, yes I’m proposing a UX strike! It’s time to punish those organizations that only see us as non-thinking, interface puppets who are supposed to make things “look good”. Why do we work for these people anyway? They don’t deserve us! We don’t need their stinking table scraps anymore… there is a full course meal that we can get somewhere else.

From our Strike, there are many possible outcomes. The most obvious to me is that these old school, non-UX valuing organizations’ products and services begin to die out. Because they don’t have great, or even good experiences, they will begin to lag behind their competition and the market will punish them for not valuing us. Thus, perhaps through peaceful resistance, we can begin to change the system. On an individual level, the benefits of internalizing your own value, and only providing that value to those organizations that deserve it, will enable you to work for an organization that not only sees and appreciates your value, but in an one that will allow you to grow professionally into an even better UX employee. Making you feel satisfied in your work, as well as enabling you to improve the work you do which increases both your confidence and your knowledge. All of this obviously also enables us to help the people that we serve even more, our users. So let’s do it UX… let’s go on Strike against all of these companies that don’t value us… let’s fight the power!