You may have seen that Johnny Holland has a great new series of posts out entitled “What I bring to UX from…”. I love these posts because they help us to think across talents and professions to gleam lessons from other fields. One article in this series, What I bring to UX from… working with delinquents & young offenders, caught my eye. I started to recall a blog series that I started last year and never took the time to finish, Reasons why UX Designers Are Like Therapists. This article inspired the #5 reason that we are like therapists. That is, to be successful, we both need to practice diplomacy. (Here are links to Reason #1, Reason #2, Reason #3, Reason #4.)

In the Johnny Holland article, the author points out the skill of diplomacy. In short, ti is the ability to lead someone to see the errors of their own ways without pointing out their errors directly to them. If you have ever been in therapy, you probably know that this is the goal of your therapist. Not so much to “tell you” what is bothering you, but to use his/her skills to get you to see it for yourself. By doing this the therapist is empowering you to be self sufficient as well as to change your point of view in order to make you more successful at seeing better results in your therapy.

One could argue that as a UX Designer, you need the same skill. First, you need diplomacy within your project teams and client relationships in order to advocate for your designs and help people to better understand, for themselves, why your role exists and the value that you bring. Further, you need to use diplomacy to help persistent, opinionated team members and clients to see where and why their genius design solution ideas may or may not work as well. For example, you have a client that insists that his/her site needs to utilize breadcrumbs to help people navigate through the site more easily. You know the type of clients that I’m talking about, right? The opinionated ones (put nicely). After doing some analysis and informal research you realize that the client’s idea of using breadcrumbs is not the correct solution. How do you decide to solve the problem? You can push your ideas on them, OR you can utilize the skill of diplomacy to help paint a picture of why one idea is better than the other.

Help paint a clear picture.

Second, you need the skill of diplomacy to help guide your users through the different products and services you are designing. You cannot just shove a site or a design at a user without first thinking of how that site or design helps to paint a clear point of view of how to complete the task or get the content the user needs. Thus design 101 is really a type of visual diplomacy (in a very high level sense).

By utilizing diaplomacy, the outcomes are similar to those of a therpist. You are allowing your project teams, clients and users to be more self sufficient as well as helping them to shape their own point of view. This is one of the artistic parts of UX design, getting people from both sides of the product (back end facing and front end facing) to see the narrative that you are creating for mutual product success. Teams and clients become better at understanding your role and your expertise, and users become better at being successful while using your products and services. It’s a win-win.

I’ve mentioned several times before how I have the opportunity to attend many UX and technology events (mostly because I live in NYC and am a consultant, but also because I try my hardest take advantage of these situations). I’ve also mentioned before that I got to attend this year’s NY Internet Week (see UX… so you wanna work with startups for more thoughts on this event). What I haven’t mentioned here before is that I have discovered that we, as User Experience Designers, are unicorns. Meaning, we have skills and talents that technology companies want, need, but don’t truly understand, AND we are super hard to find.

Now, these technology companies, especially startups, are creating a ton of new products and updating a great deal of old products all the time, and they are going to these technology events and discussing lessons learned and tips to success from their experiences. Unfortunately, when they are doing their creating and updating and reporting back to the tech community, they aren’t talking about user needs, goals and tasks in the least. Not one company, at least in the events I’ve attended, has talked about how they went out and did user research to understand current user behavior. They do market research, at times, but that isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the real, down low, getting to know your users. Instead, these companies talk about giving users new functionality they didn’t know they wanted or giving them functionality that they should want without knowing why or how the user might use it in real life.

Of course, in the UX world, this is a problem that we are well aware of. By not taking user behavior, tasks, needs and goals into account, these companies are designing for solutions to problems they haven’t yet defined. How can they be successful in this regard? We’ll leave that discussion for another day. The problem I want to talk about today is one for our UX world. That being, these companies have no idea who we are, what value we can bring, and that we are sitting right in front of them watching, listening, and shaking our heads in disappointment. This is a problem for our community, because it means that the people and companies that need us the most have no idea how to engage us. Thus, we are unicorns. We have the power to heal these companies “sickness”, to make their products better… but they don’t know how we do it (must be magic!). Further, we can only be captured by a virgin… ok that’s a long shot but the idea is that we are really hard to find. This is something we need to change.

So, what is our solution, how do we stop being unicorns? First thing is first, we need to be in the room. We need to be around the people whom we want to help (see UX… so you wanna work with startups for more thoughts on this). Whether startups or larger corporations, we have to get out of our shell and make our presence known. We can do this by attending events local to us, participating online in conversations that are related to the work we want to do, and ensuring we are branching out, beyond UX, in our search of knowledge.

Second, when we are in the room (or online), we need to be vocal. We can’t be flies on the wall. Instead, we need to speak up and make sure we are adding the UX perspective and educating others about the value that we bring. This, of course, should not be in a condescending way (don’t say “you idiot, you aren’t even thinking about the user.” but instead “how have you integrated the user perspective into your product roadmap?”).

Don't be a fly on the wall.

Third, we need to have empathy for the business and technology folks that we want to work with. We need to understand why they aren’t looking towards UX, or if they are what are they hoping to find. A lot of companies, especially startups, don’t realize that we can help them with their product definition and roadmapping. They just think we are UI! We need to gain understanding of their point of view of what UX is so that we can solve the problem of them not thinking of UX in the early stages.

By taking these steps, we stop being that unicorn. We make our presence in the technology and corporate community known, and we make sure that those involved realize all the value that we bring. We become tangible, real, but no less valuable. Once companies are better able to find us and understand us, then it becomes easier for UX to work with the businesses that we want to. This, of course, allows us to do what we do best; help define and solve problems for the betterment of our user base. No unicorn can do that.

Yeah that’s right… I said it. After getting up and talking about how we need to do more research, and knowing that many of us would kill to be able to conduct more user research, I make this statement. Now, of course, I realize that I have been extremely lucky to be able to conduct a great deal of user research, and I’m grateful for each and every opportunity. But, in reality, conducting research isn’t all that we hope it to be. Yes, you should do it and yes, you will get a large amount of insights to design from. But don’t be fooled into thinking the research part is glamourous, because it isn’t.

The problem with thinking that user research is going to be as exciting as a Vegas show is that our own hopes as well as those of the larger team, get set too high. We are expecting major breakthroughs and “answers” to all of our user experience questions. Having these high expectations can deter you from understanding the true purpose of user research, and from sticking to your user research goals. You, and more probable your team, will start to throw everything into the research agenda and your goals will become a distant dream. You and your team will then wait for the research day in extreme anticipation, and your hopes and dreams will be deflated once you begin talking to people and realize that they aren’t the saving grace that you were hoping for. You’ll then begin to “tweak” the research approach and questions in order to try and elicit more direct responses, which will bring your further from reaching your research goals, as well as further from conducting valid research and gaining true user insights.

The solution to these problems it to first realize that research is a means to an end. The analysis, more specifically YOUR analysis is the real Golden Nugget (see the Vegas theme here?). Your ability, and your UX team’s ability to create a great interview which gets at the user motivations you’re trying to understand, as well as helps to disseminate from that interview persona needs, goals, and tasks is the real gem of user research. User research sessions are usually pretty boring, especially after you have conducted many of them. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love talking to people and enjoy understanding their motivations and behaviors. When I say user research is boring, I mean that you and your team will not get direct answers to your product questions from the users lips. Don’t expect to walk out of the sessions with answers to your problems. Expect to walk out with insights that will help you better understand your users so that you can better fulfill their goals.

By realizing what place user research has in our “toolbox”, we can better set expectations for our teams, as well as better sell the more fun parts of conducting user research; the analysis and problem solving that comes after. Of course, your team would still be encouraged to take part and observe, however they are now more aware of what to expect, and are more aware of the importance of your role as the UX professional. You are not just a wireframer, you are also not just a researcher, you are a problem definer and solver, and better setting expectations will expose this to both your team, but more importantly to you.

About a year ago I was sitting in a bar in NYC grabbing a drink before heading to one of my basketball games. As I was sitting there, a woman walked into the bar carrying a large painting. This is, of course, the type of thing that happens to you in a NYC bar on a random Tuesday night. So, she started to tell me about her career as an art curator. As she delved into her story, she said something that changed my perspective on design. That is, “My job as an art curator is to see the internal narrative of the artist and their work, and then put their pieces in a placement that reflects that narrative.”. A few months later, at another happy hour, someone posed the question “What is the difference between art and design?”. “That’s easy”, I said, “Art is the reflection of someone’s internal narrative, whereas design’s purpose is to satisfy users external behavior/narrative”. Right or wrong, I have been going with this outlook ever since. As related to design, what I’ve observed is that at times designers look at what they do as art, when it is really design. Meaning, we try to reflect ourselves in our work and describe our own internal narrative through our work. Done right, this might be a positive, however most of the time I think that it only ends in trouble.

By trying to reflect ourselves in our work, and looking at our work as art, we are putting ourselves and our opinions on how the output should function, look, and feel before those of our users. We are using our own narrative to create products for others, and all that does is heighten the problem that we are trying to solve. We all have been trained to think that we are not our users. Thus, treating our work as art, is going against that training.

That is not to say that I think that our field is absent of art. But I do think that most of the time, we need to use our natural artistic talent in a better way. In order to do that, we need to do several things. First, we need to admit the difference between design and art. Yes, of course, there are some overlapping areas. However, for something to be truly usable, it needs to be designed for the users it intends to serve first. Of course, just because something is usable doesn’t make it the best designed product or service. Thus, second, we need to use our artistic talent for the good of our users and not ourselves. We need to understand the taste of our users, our brand, or of the product and service we are designing and reflect in the product. Sometimes our own internal narrative will be reflected, but this should be coincidental as we should be designing first and not creating art first.

By taking these steps, we create products and services that our users delight at as opposed to beautiful products and services that aren’t used. We push ourselves above the rest, and make a name for ourselves as great designers, and ultimately this is better for the people that we have agreed to serve… the users.