Information Architecture | Elisabeth Hubert

Guest Post by: Kofi Aidoo, Intern

It’s been 6 Mondays since I landed at O’hare and came directly to the famed Merchandise Mart ready to begin a new chapter. After spending 3 years placing designers and putting my own creative needs on the back-burner, I was here to start again and begin my journey towards becoming a UX designer. So, exhausted from my last 4 days in New York, I walked into the 1871 space at the Merchandise Mart, luggage in tow and duly impressed by what I saw.

After several years of going to IxDA events and flirting with the idea of UX as a career, I decided that it was time. In making my transition I had spoken to a good number of people in the industry and received some valuable advice. I knew I wanted to dedicate myself to the practice and also that I didn’t want to pay too much money. The ship and build philosophy, the location, and the very reasonable price made Starter League, my current focus, a very attractive option.

For those who don’t know, the Starter League is a 1.5 year old “school” that teaches different aspects of web design and development. The Starter League was founded by Neal Sales-Griffin and Mike McGee, two friends who had faced the challenge of learning the skills needed to build their own digital products. Realizing that there weren’t that many opportunities and resources available that truly help the uninitiated, they began the Starter League. The root of their drive and methodology is to help people learn the skills needed to create and ship viable products fast.

They offer classes in Beginner and Advanced HTML/CSS, Web Development using Ruby on Rails, Visual Design, and User Experience, the class I’m taking. All courses last 3 months and attendees are encouraged to take more than one course to round out their education. The UX class is taught by Carolyn Chandler, co-author of “A Project Guide to UX Design” assisted by Veronika Goldberg, a visual designer turned UX designer and alumnus of The Starter League.

A typical class starts with the review of the homework, Carolyn asks us about any insights and pain points and then we delve into the lesson for the next 3 hours with a ten minute break at the half-way point. We’ve already learned about visual design, heuristics, personas, user stories, surveys and research, as well as, have begun to do some initial wireframing and site maps. All work is project based and done in groups that were formed in the second week. Groups… which leads me to one of the over riding tenets of the course. Collaboration!

Collaboration forms the spine of the learning. In the programming classes, students work in pairs during class, but for the design classes, students work in groups on one “real – life project”. They work together, as practitioners, looking to develop and launch an idea. The high point of all this collaboration is Starter Night at the end of term when teams from all the classes will join together to build an app and then present their app and their process to the rest of the League. Think of it like a 6 week Hack-a-thon without the begging for money at the end. One of the taglines displayed heavily on the Starter League homepage reads: Start Careers. Launch Products. Build Companies. But after 6 weeks here I can definitely say the emphasis, besides being on collaboration, is more heavily on the last 2 tenets.

With such an emphasis, in the UX classes especially, the process can sometimes feel a little lacking on feedback. With 3 months to cover everything there is a speed that is obvious but not overwhelming. However, our homework assignments are mere discussion points and serve ultimately as a roadmap to the construction of an app. Topics and processes are well covered, but we seem to touch on them only once or twice and don’t come back to them as we move on in the class. More than one of my colleagues and I have raised this point, and Carolyn and Veronika have responded admirably. Homework review is taking up a little more of the opening minutes in class while some information that can be consumed as reading material is placed in an extra file. The emphasis on in-class activity and familiarity with the UX process has gone up, and that is great. But enough about Starter League, the question for me remains:

As one of the many here focused on making a career change, and on making UX my livelihood: How do I KEEP IT REAL and become a UX professional while I’m here?

I was trying to keep it real even before I started the program. On deciding to come to this program I have not only left my job but have also made a not so insignificant financial investment. I wanted to make sure I would use the time wisely and be efficient. So, the first thing I did when I was accepted was to prepare myself mentally for the challenge.

Inspired by a Steve Martin quote, “So Good they Can’t Ignore You” is a book by Cal Newport, a Georgetown Computer science professor who’s been writing since high school on different tips for academic success. This latest book looks the idea of Follow your Passion dead in the eye and forces it to blink. To summarize, his claim is that a successful career isn’t about “Following your Passion”, instead your passion arises from using deliberate practice to build career capital, build valuable skills in your industry, gain more control over what you work on and then couple that with a mission statement that drives success and that elusive Passion. Skills are the foundation and that foundation takes work! This has become the backbone of my practice.

But deliberate practice isn’t just about work it’s about receiving critical feedback on that work and then working to make it right. So when my friends in the NYC IxDA community alerted me to this internship I jumped at it. I had known Lis from going to IxDA events and knew she was a well respected straight shooter who would definitely help me refine my craft. Along with this internship I was pleasantly surprised that the Starter League had also put some thought into mentoring and would provide anyone who wanted it with a professional in the city as a mentor for the duration of the course. I was lucky to have been assigned Patrick DiMichale, a colleague of Caroyln’s at Manifest Digital.

The most important thing I’ve done is immerse myself in the work. The Starter League is full of people working to put their ideas to market. Regardless of their experience they are developing projects that require good User Experience design. I’ve aligned myself with 3 of these projects (including my own), and have been using the things I learn in class to look at the projects from a user perspective as well as a business perspective. I’ve given both my mentors a lot to chew on in the past weeks and it’s been invaluable to have their input.

As I look at the next 6 weeks the end seems both far away and right around the corner. I’m not 100% sure if I’ll be ready to start a UX career by the end of my time here, but I do know I’ll be on the right path and will have built a solid foundation from which to move forward. No matter what the challenge, being mindful about the skills that are important, as well as coveted, and working on those will be the guiding principal in my practice. I urge you to read Cal Newport’s book and look at his 4 principals to a happy career. No matter what the environment Keeping it Real starts with knowing your stuff!

“The only way we are going to get recognized for what we do is to make money doing it” ~ Lou Rosenfeld, World IA Day NYC, February 9, 2013

When I heard Mr. Rosenfeld speak these words, I thought to myself “Yes, that’s it! That is the only way that this UX thing can work.”. It’s no secret that information architects and designers are sick and tired of being seen as ‘just the interface people’ churning out deliverables to make our project teams feel productive (whether those deliverables are paper or electronic). We all know that our skillsets are more than just ‘Yes people’, and we are waiting patiently for the day when some one or some thing emancipates us from this stronghold. And up until this moment I, along with many of you, had been racking my brain to couple this complex problem with a simply stated solution. I think that Mr. Rosenfeld brings us just that (Thanks Lou!).

Associating IA, UX and Design with business, and making money doing the things, all the things, that we say we can do and should be doing (instead saying that we should be doing one thing, and only creating the interface) is the way, the ONLY way, for information architects and designers to get recognized for our true expertise. The problem is… none of us really wants to get into the money side of things.

The Current State of UX and Business

It is no surprise that our industry currently sees business and business people as immoral, evil, greedy and only motivated by profit and gain. Businesses and advertisements that profit and gain by taking advantage of consumers are exposed daily in the news. Further, not only do we see this immoral business behavior in the news, but many of us see it within our own companies and project teams as well. Thus, it’s no wonder that when I put out a short, informal, non-statistically based and some would say biased poll (I think I covered all the rants here), that the responses I got were fairly skewed.

In this poll, I asked respondents to finish this sentence: “Most business people are motivated by”. Of the 30 respondents, 24 replied “profit” and only 1 answered “the best interests of the user.”. Other answers I received include “client deadlines and money”, “their own beliefs regarding what is best”, “winning”, “their personal interests”, and “the two are not mutually exclusive”. (A big thank you to all that responded!).

As you can see profit and gain as the motivator for business people was far and away the winner, and I agree with this notion. I also most definitely agree with the idea that user interests and profit and gain are not mutually exclusive options, and that is part of the point of today’s post. As architects and designers, hell as people, we tend to view profit and gain as greedy and evil, as the opposite of helping our users. But, who said that profit and gain is wrong? In fact, profit and gain can be quite good! For instance, we all love Apple products. They are not only beautiful but they make our lives easier, better and more delightful. You can bet your bottom dollar (pun intended) that Apple profits and gains from our consumption, and yet we still love them for it! But that same emotion is not garnered for a rival company… let’s say Microsoft. Microsoft makes similar products to Apple, but the love for them is not nearly as strong. In fact that company is construed as ‘only in it for profit and gain’, and that makes them… evil.

We should ask ourselves, what makes Apple a good business in our eyes and Microsoft a bad business if both are motivated by profit and gain? We can say that we support Apple because in return for the profit and gain they get, they provide us actual value. Apple has, in essence, earned their profit, whereas, in most cases, Microsoft has not. With this example, we can see that being motivated by profit and gain in and of itself isn’t morally bad, it is when you are motivated by profit and gain without giving value in return you are acting immoral. More, because we usually only hear about profit and gain in these evil business scenarios, we start to associate being motivating by profit and gain as evil. Lastly, because we see profit and gain as evil, and because businesses and business people are motivated by it, we then associate business and business people as evil too.

Whew, ok, let’s get to the point here. The 24 people who said that business people are motivated by profit were right. And we, as a community must not see this motivation as wrong, or our business partners as evil, because that is holding us back in a big way.

The Problems with Viewing Business as Evil

Perhaps the biggest problem that we face when we view business and its hunt for profit as evil, is that we as designers and architects separate ourselves from our businesses and business teams. We see ourselves in opposition to them instead of thinking of ourselves as their advisors and partners. They want profit and gain (bad for our users), we want delightful experiences (good for our users), and this must mean that we aren’t like them. Thinking this way means that we don’t see our businesses for what they are, the organizations and systems that we are hired to help and support because they are the ones providing a good or service that will make our users lives better.

This separation and opposition holds architects and designers back because it 1) prevents us from seeing ourselves as business people which 2) means that we can’t get better at being business people which means 3) we have to continue to work for the bad companies in order to ensure an income because we are scared to leave these jobs or to start our own awesome businesses.

If only we were armed with business knowledge we’d understand the economics behind this and then we could strike out on our own or to better places with real experience work. But, alas, we’d rather keep up the UX and Business divide. We’d rather push back on the idea that we, too, are business and as such should learn more about business to be better. But, let’s face it, you are a business person too!

A businessperson (also business person, businessman, business man, businesswoman, or business woman) is someone involved in a particular undertaking of activities, commercial or industrial, for the purpose of generating revenue from a combination of human, financial, and physical capital. ~ Wikipedia

You may not rack up numbers, create product goals, attend board meetings, or wear suits to work, but work designing and architecting for good user experiences… i.e. Experiences that generate more company revenue, is what you do.

Shunning this fact prevents us from learning more about and understanding business. And business, is what drives our economy, feeds us and our families, and provides us homes. When we don’t understand business, we have to become more dependent on the “business people” (both good and bad) to make money for us and to pay us (and our bills). This setup, one in which only the “real” business people know how to be fiscally successful, makes it even harder for those of us working for the bad business people to leave to find morally good work that is UX based.

And finally, if we don’t associate ourselves with and better understand business, we can’t negotiate better work or start our own companies that do great work. Meaning, we will never, ever really make money doing what we say we should be doing (facilitating experiences that are delightful, doing real ethnographic research, creating useful research based personas, need I go on?)… and therefore we will never be recognized for that really fun, awesome, valuable stuff that we should be doing.. aka we’ll still be only involved in the interface.

Solutions

It may be obvious to you at this point, but the first steps that we should take to combat our separation from business is to 1. See that each and every one of us is “in business” and 2. Realize that the occupation of business is moral, noble and worthy. As Rabbi Daniel Lapin writes in his book Thou Shall Prosper – Ten Commandments for Making Money, most people believe that business is inherently bad, but as we saw above, this is not the case. In fact, it is time to start seeing business for what it really is: The way that we create and exchange valuable goods and services that people want and need. And, doing this in a way that upholds morals and virtues, while still making a profit, is not only morally good, but it is the entire point of not only a successful business, but of architecting and designing for delightful user experiences! Therefore, not only are we business people, but we aim to be great business people who stay moral, nobel, and worthy by advocating for our users, while matching their needs with business needs.

Outcomes

The outcomes of us realizing we are business people, and seeing that business and profit can be good (if done through moral means) are us not only closing the gap between UX and business, but making it almost invisible. This enables us to be not only user advocates for good businesses, because we know more about business and don’t fear losing or changing jobs as much, but can even help us decide to start our own morally good businesses with IA, and great UX as the output of great IA, at the forefront! In either case, knowing more about business helps us to do what we say we should be doing, what we want to be doing to really provide value. It helps us to not only do the work, but to make money doing it, so that we can be recognized for our true value and not for our software manipulation skills only.

I’ll leave you with this…

The only way we are going to get recognized for what we do, for the value we know we provide, is to make money actually doing the things we say we should be doing. The only way to get to do those things is to learn more about, and get closer to business. It is your choice which path you go down, but I recommend the business path… otherwise plan on keeping that Omnigraffle file open.

Saturday was World IA Day both here in NYC and around the world. World IA Day is a day set aside for all of us to have a global conversation about Information Architecture, and this year’s theme focused on discussing the “Architecture” part of Information Architecture. It would be an understatement to say that the team who organized WIAD NYC did an amazing job. Instead you could say they put together one of the best conversational and educational days that I have been a part of! So before I get into this post, I’d like to thank them for stirring something within me. That something is the resurgence of Information Architecture in my career. You, WIAD organizers, have done a great job bringing me back to my roots, and for that I am grateful.

For the past several years, IA has taken a back seat in my career. It is not the discipline of IA that has taken a back seat for that is something that I still carry with me and something that I heavily practice (for example, every problem I solve is through the lens of users, context and content). It is the term IA that I have lost sight of. Instead, I have been focused on and tied myself solely to, User Experience or UX. UX is what I advocate for, it’s what I DO. And let’s be honest, as a consultant, it’s a buzzword that has gotten much more attention than IA. It’s glamorous, everyone is talking about it, and everyone wants a UX Designer. Therefore, I thought that calling myself an IA, well that would just be bad for business.

It’s a game of semantics, but UX and IA are two different, although related things. When asked by fellow WIAD attendee Nathan Gao what I thought the difference between the two were I responded “Well, IA is what defines and creates the construct, and UX is what occurs when someone moves through that construct.”. It was at this moment that it hit me. I may design for great user experiences, but I do that from an architect’s point of view. It is through the architecture of information that I set businesses up to be able to facilitate great user experience with their customers. How had I lost sight of that?

By focusing in solely on UX as a discipline and not as a result of disciplines working together, I haven’t seen the “forest through the trees”. UX, when defined as a discipline is so broad that without having a focus within it, I was starting to become confused and diluted in my own thinking. I asked myself questions like “Should I call myself a user researcher, a UI designer, a strategist?”… and so it goes. And, forget thinking about my future, and where that was headed! That was impossible to do when I didn’t have a clear view of my present.

Thus, I have been fighting this fight of defining what UX is and is not (a definition that hasn’t changed for me btw) for so long, that I have lost the focus of the discipline through which I facilitate great User Experiences, the discipline of Information Architecture. Being reminded of my IA roots, has helped to clear this perspective for me.

How did being reminded of my IA past help me to clarify who and what I am as a professional? The speakers there (both on the stage and in the crowd), helped me to reflect on what I really love about being a part of the UX Umbrella. Of course I love helping to facilitate great experiences for users, but I don’t so much enjoy doing that through designing interface, nor researching users. I enjoy understanding and creating a common language for a company and/or project and watching that language generate the structure of an experience. I enjoy defining the Whats and Whys and not the Hows. I enjoy making things good, not just making good things, and Information Architecture is the lens through which I do these tasks.

So that is what you will be seeing a lot more of here. I will be writing and talking much more for an architecture, and information architecture lens as opposed to solely speaking from a UX point of view. By owning this lens more, I’m assuming that my posts and thoughts will take a different turn, which may confuse some, and may help others, but it is something I need to explore, and vet, in order to find out more about how I can help make products, services and companies even better.

Hopefully you’ll join me for this ride. Because it is from you that I have learned more about my successes, my flaws, my interests and my abilities, and by having you here along the journey, we can all become “more good”.
Thank you, again, to the peeps at WIAD for helping to remember who I am, why I do what I do, and how I can do that better. Onward and upward!

Earlier this year I wrote a blog post about how a lack of service design got under my skin. In the article, I talked about a trip I had to a popular beauty brand’s store. A couple of months later, I found this article which details how Sephora updated their website experience to better accommodate online shoppers. But I couldn’t help but wonder, ‘what are they doing to help their in store experience?’. Enter service design.

As I mentioned in my previous article, I’m still on the fence regarding whether service design should be separate from user experience design. I think the main issue with it being this way is that user experience design gets construed as ‘designing for the mobile or web interface only’ by both UX practitioners and those that hire us. Thus, UXers begin to leave out the service part of their solution, either because they are oblivious that it is their responsibility or because their boss tells them that the service part of the solution is for the service designer to figure out. Because of this a gap in the product forms between the web and any other channel experiences. In the case of Sephora, this could be ringing true.

I would say that the solution to this problem is to stop separating service design from user experience design, but that opportunity has already passed. The title user experience designer has fallen flat, and has been misconstrued so many times that many people don’t even want it anymore. Service design provides an out in this way, and allows people to work on different types of projects besides just the interface ones. However, I do think that one solution to this problem is for all of us in this profession who design for a user’s experience with a product or service to go back to basics and really understand the pillars that this profession stands on. To me, these are the pillars of Information Architecture: users, content, context. Understanding that we design for the intersection of these three things covers most any situation one can imagine, and brings us back to our discipline’s center.

The outcome of us going back to these pillars, is that we, as service providers, become aware of what our job really is. It is to facilitate, as best as possible, a user’s experience with a product or service. No matter what we call ourselves, that will never change. And, the sooner we all become aware of this, the sooner we can stop creating and arguing about new disciplines, and just sit down and get to work.

Last week marked my first ever IA Summit (for more details leading up to the event check out My First Time). I would be lying if I told you that I wasn’t the happiest IA on the planet once I realized I was able to attend. The event was little short of amazing, and I can’t wait to attend next year’s Summit in Baltimore.

Not only did I get the chance to attend, but I was also granted the opportunity to speak. The topic I chose pointed out the importance of bringing the business along with us in our IA work. I mentioned that to do that we needed to Learn the Business Behind the IA Business. If you missed it, I have provided the slides here. Also, if you are local to NYC and missed the Summit, be sure to check out the NYC IxDA Redux where I’ll be presenting this talk for a second time. Lastly, if you made the talk and have feedback or thoughts please contact me as I’d love to hear them and incorporate them into upcoming presentations. Thanks!

Learn the Business Behind the IA Business

View more presentations from Lis Hubert

When I was first introduced to the field of user experience it was the summer of 2005. After leaving my job as a Java Programmer in Hartford, CT I moved to San Antonio, TX where I randomly fell into a UX job (talk about lucky). It’s an understatement to say that I had no idea what the hell I was doing, and I scraped along for awhile trying to figure it all out. Back in those days, my role was not UX Designer or Interaction Designer, in fact, the term UX didn’t even exist in my world! Instead, those of us that weren’t visual designers were called Information Architects, and that was exactly what we did. It was our job to architect, organize and make sense of the information within a website or application. After we mapped that out (either in an IA doc or some sort of concept mapping), we worked with a visual designer to put our mapping into an interface.

Unlike a lot of what we see today, the first thing I did on the job was NOT learn how to wireframe. In fact I didn’t create my first wireframe until I moved back east to NYC almost three years later. Instead, the first thing I was instructed to do was visit Jesse James Garrett’s site. I was tasked with understanding what the Visual Vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design was from a conceptual standpoint, and was then expected to map out IAs for my projects. There are several reasons why this was my first step. Reason one was that we IAs and VDs simply needed to know how information was related and prioritized within a website or application before we could design the interface for that system. How else can you design a proper interface solution unless you understand which information types need to be included in that solution, and which are most important to the solution? Without knowing this information, we would have been guessing at the interface. Reason two was that we didn’t want to show an interface to our non-design partners and stakeholders as our first deliverable because what we really needed from them was not feedback on the visual, but feedback on the content and context that related to the system. It’s seven years later, and, sadly, it seems that the time I’m speaking of has come and gone. And, because of that we are facing a huge problem in the world of UX.

The problem UX is facing is, simply, we are devolving. The definition of de-evolution is to degenerate through a gradual change or evolution, and it seems to me that by removing the information architecture step from our day to day process we might be on that path. To be fair, I’m not saying how that IA phase should be structured in detail (that is for another post), but I am saying that this type of thinking needs to be done and signed off on by certain team partners before we can move into interface design (including wireframes).

We see several problems that come out of skipping the IA phase. First, the team (UXers, Visual Designers, Project team members, other stakeholders) won’t all be in agreement on the prioritization and context of the information to be designed for which will cause disagreement in later phases. Second, by showing wireframes without agreeing on IA, we are focusing our stakeholders and other partners on the interface and not on the real thing we are designing for… content and context. Third, we are, in essence, beginning to lie to ourselves. We are lying to ourselves by telling each other than UX is not just about form, but it is about function as well. Because if it was about function, we’d spend time on the information (the IA phase) before we went right into talking about the form that the information should take (the wireframe phase).

To make matters worse, we, as an industry, have been trying to validate the discomfort that many of us feel subconsciously with skipping the IA step, by turning to “sketching” as the end all be all answer. Of course, sketching is important, but it all matters what we are sketching and when. What I’m talking about is that we UXers think that since sketching doesn’t involve putting our wireframes into an electronic format, than it doesn’t really count as skipping straight to wireframing. But guess what, even sketching the interface without first sketching the structure of the information means you are skipping the one step that will make your designs truly successful. That step is where you think about the content, context and users, and force your stakeholders to do the same, WITHOUT thinking about the interface (also known as the IA step).

So where do we go from here? How do we stop this process of devolution and backwards movement? Well, we bring back IA! Ok, ok, I’m not saying that we should all learn Jesse James Garrett’s Visual Vocab (though it wouldn’t hurt) or that we need to institute a structured process that we follow the exact same way every time. But, what I am arguing we need to do is slow down, put down our sketching pens, and our omnigraffle and just think. Think about, draw out and get buy in on your content, your context, and your users. And do so without a wireframe or a sketch of a wireframe. Pick up the Polar Bear book, and ignore the wireframe chapter and learn IA.

By bringing the IA phase back and by concentrating first on the information, several things will happen. First, your sketching and interface design becomes much, much better because you have prioritization and buy off on the content, context, and users you are designing for. This means that your wireframe/prototyping phase becomes a lot more about the interface and not what content should go in the interface and why. Second, you are showing your stakeholders that UX design truly isn’t just form, but really is also about function. We are moving away from the interface, which is how we started, and towards a real solution of which the interface is only a part. Third, we stop lying to ourselves, and we stop saying that the best UX solutions aren’t just the coolest or the best aesthetically, but they are those that take content, context and users into consideration while creating an aesthetically appropriate interface. Most importantly we stop UX’s slide down the evolution scale back towards the time of print design and outputs, and instead continue our climb up the mountain towards being the user experience experts.

This March will mark my very first time… attending the highly-regarded IA Summit! I couldn’t be more excited to finally attend the event. I literally have a feeling of joy and “going home” welling up in me. Like many of you, when I first started in this profession the term User Experience was not yet rolling off the tongue of anyone that looked to build a website. Back in those days, we were all Information Architects, and the IA Summit was our only chance to meet and exchange ideas about the new field we were a part of. I have heard tales of how amazing the Summit is, but, sadly, I have never gotten to attend, and thus part of me has always been missing.

Finally, the time has come, and I wait no more! I am coming home to my IA roots and I can’t wait to get back to them. To me attending the IA Summit is so much more than just going to another conference. It means:

closing the circle of my life as an Information Architect, and me to finally feeling whole.
that IA is still very much alive and well, and that I am a part of that community and can still explore the industry.
that there is still a large group of us out there dedicated to this side of the “UX Umbrella”; a side that introduced us to thinking user first.
that I didn’t completely F up when I started working in a profession that no one else had heard of before.
that our passion for our users and profession has not diminished, nor has our passion to explore it further.

The best part is, I’m actually getting to speak at the event as well! (Be sure to check out UX is All About the Benjamins… Well, Partly the blog post that inspired my talk) I look forward to sharing my thoughts and hearing your feedback on them. If you plan on being at the Summit too reach out and let me know. I’d love to meet up and chat!

This winter, I was asked by the awesome folks at Web Designer Depot for some predictions about what will happen in the world of web design in 2012. After I told myself to stop be baffled that they asked me, and after I got over the fear of putting my thoughts out there to their wide audience, I was able to come up with a few ideas. You can read them below.

Now that HTML5 and CSS3 have been unpackaged and utilized, and given the emergence and popularity of responsive and adaptive web design, 2012 will bring us back to the future of the web. After years of driving the two apart, 2012 is the year that we will begin to bring mobile and desktop technologies back together by using the web to bridge the gap between the contexts. From that, we will be focused on designing for a holistic product experience.

Expect to see an explosion of mobile/desktop web solutions that can work on many different devices and platforms. Mobile First as a methodology will grow in popularity, and people will also be thinking more about how their product extends across these many different contexts.

Look for an outbreak in designers and product developers wanting to better understand users in order to create appropriate solutions for coherent experiences. We’ll be looking more and more towards psychology and user research to better understand our user base as well as better translate our product into an interface.

From this we’ll see the appearance of new ways to navigate through site content (in order to stay responsive), as well as new patterns for creating delightful and engaging user experiences online.

There are many more predictions to review! Be sure to check out the full article: Web design predictions for 2012

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.

Painter painting a house cartoon — 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 have a confession to make, I’m an observer. Much like the majority of us in this field, I observe others’ behaviors, and notice patterns that creep up over time. One of the recent patterns that I have noticed is the lack of job satisfaction in the UX field specifically with people that are new and have finally landed their first “real” UX job (I’ve assumed this to mean that they have a title like UX Designer, Information Architect, Interaction Designer, etc). Over and over again I have seen people excited to be in UX, and then deflated at the reality of what this means in their actual roles. These professionals are expecting to jump into a role where they are designing solutions based on the user research that they conduct, and the analysis that comes out of that user research (i.e. persona creation, scenario creation, etc). However, more often than not, the role they find themselves in is less about observing behavior, doing research, analyzing research and designing based off what we find out about the user, and more about designing something really quickly, throwing that into a wireframe, all without user input, so that we can get something over to the client.

From this huge letdown, comes an immense amount of disheartenment and confusion. People are left feeling unsure if UX is really for them. They begin to wonder things like ‘when do we get to do design studio?’, ‘when do we set up user interviews?’, ‘will we ever test this with users?’, ‘how about bodystorming, when do we get to do that?’, and… well you get the point. Basically they want to know when they get to do all the cool stuff that everyone is always writing and talking about. Honestly, this is not too far off from what some of us long time UXers think about in our own roles. And the problem, with never being able to actually do the fun UX stuff is that, well, nobody wants to be in UX anymore. The profession is not a reflection of the education around it, and becomes a sort of farce. People are left out in the cold wondering which way to turn, and our users receive less and less of the representation than they deserve.

How do we bring the gap between people’s expectations of becoming UXers and the real world implementation of the profession? I’m going to start by breaking down where these expectations come from. I think there are three distinct sources. First, the education that people receive both in a formal setting as well as a informal setting. Second, their perceptions of that education. Third, the way that the implementation of UX work is advertised.

Thus, one thing we could do is change the education in the UX field. We could stop teaching and lecturing about the way that UX should be, and begin to talk to people about what a UX job really is. This seems extreme, because if we aren’t talking about the way that UX should be, the profession would never evolve into something better. However, maybe we can stop ignoring what UX in an organization is today in our classrooms, lectures, and workshops. This would mean more people and companies being real about what user experience is in their organizations and why. This could help people new to the field understand that UX is not all roses, and that most of the time the business model is deliverables based (especially in client services) and thus deliverables will be created. Although this is a possible solution, I’m not sure it would work on its own.

Another option, is that we do nothing. Meaning, we let people make up their own minds about what they think UX, and if they want to believe that it’s all wondrous, let them. At some point people are responsible for setting their own expectations, and if one is not equipping themselves by asking the right questions in their interviews (i.e. How often do you do research? How do you test solutions with users? What are the chances I’ll be working in those roles?), then let them fall hard when they meet reality.

Another option would be to advertise the reality of the professional domain. Meaning, explaining that there are only so many jobs at IDEO, Frog, and the like that really deal with the cool stuff, and the chances of you getting one, at least as your first UX role, are pretty low. I think that it is important for us to recognize great experience design in this field. We need to examine it, understand it, and then apply it to our own professions. BUT, I think it is even more important to balance that recognition with reality. Once we are able to view UX through a real lense, only then will we be able to repair the broken pieces. Even people that work at these big firms are stuck doing wireframes, in fact many of them are. However, the really good ones are out talking about the exact opposite, thus, hiding this fact and throwing off expectations.

I think that it comes down to a mixture of these solutions including us admitting what UX really is in most organizations. This is the core of bridging the gap. The point being by admitting where we are we can move forward from it. But, by denying where we currently are, pretending we are in a way better place, and then making that better place our view of “reality”, we are doing a huge disservice to those that are looking to enter the field as well as to the field itself. Put simply, we need to start keeping it real. We need to admit to ourselves that our industry is flawed, and then admit to others the flaws that we see. We also need to spend more time solving those flaws in a real way. This means not just talking about a new way to do ideation, but also giving a case study of how to implement change in organizations, even from the lowest level, so that new ways to do ideation can take root. We need to start to look away from just the activities we want to do, but look to ways to bring those activities into every workplace, not just the really cool ones.

The intended outcome of bridging this gap is two fold. Not only will we keep new people passionate about the UX field, but more importantly we will be in a better place to evolve the UX field. By admitting our flaws we’ll be able to change them into something better, and move the UX field forward so that we can better utilize the huge amount of talent and value we can bring. Once we do this, only then can we really look at the ground breaking players and think, wow I could really use that methodology on this project I’m working on, otherwise, we are just looking through the looking glass.