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!

Building Business models is one of the most creative things we can do ~ Lou Rosenfeld, WIAD NYC 2013

It’s no surprise that I’m writing more about business and its intersections with UX. I see the many crossovers each and every day; from attending an event like World IA Day in NYC, to working on client projects. The theme even infiltrated the membership meeting at this years IA Summit. We are starting to see, more clearly, the rift that is being created by our field and it’s ignoring the need to understand better how businesses work. When I heard Mr. Rosenfeld say the above quote this year, it started to make me think that among the many misconceptions we have about business that help to cause this rift, the fact that we think it is not creative is probably one of the biggest.

Business? Creative? Is she serious? Yes, indeed! We as IAs and UXers tend to look at “the business” as the opposite of our field. Business is calculated and structured. We are adaptive and free flowing. They care only about profit. We care about and advocate for our users!

The reality is, our outlook is simply not true. Business is very much rooted in creativity. Especially when you think about the overall concept for how to structure businesses. Things like which roles should be involved, and how are we going to make money, these are, in essence, problems for information architects to solve.

However, we never get invited to help solve these problems, do we? We don’t even have the knowledge to go out on our own and start creating UX and IA led businesses, and this is why we all need to change our minds.

The reasons why we aren’t invited to the right conversations, or we aren’t using our creativity to create businesses are simple. We not only don’t know business, but we see it as the exact opposite of what we should know. This does not go unnoticed by our business partners who then decide that:

1. They don’t trust us to have their best interests as a priority.
2. They don’t think we “get it” so they don’t give us responsibilities outside of our little design sandbox.

No wonder you aren’t getting invited to the cool conversations to help make businesses better! Would you invite a person that not only didn’t understand UX, but saw it as “the enemy” to your UX party aimed at defining how UX should be structured? I didn’t think so.

But worse, if we don’t switch our frame of mind to seeing business as a partner, then we’ll never take the step to learn more about business. Further if we don’t know business, then we can’t start businesses. “No big deal”, you may be thinking, “I don’t want to start a business anyway”. The thing is, we NEED IA and UX first businesses to see our profession earn the respect we think it deserves. (Read more of my thoughts on this in my piece The Only Way).

What are we to do then? First we need realize that UX, as well as business, has a calculated side as well as a creative side. We have processes we stick to, and mantras (User First!) that we shout from the rooftops. Just like business has processes and mantra (Where’s the ROI??). Our professions are not so very different after all.

This mind shift, this realization, is really the only key. Because once we realize that business can be creative, and that it is not so different than us, several paths can unfold.

First, UX will see and take advantage of more opportunities to partner with our businesses to help make them better, instead of colliding with them. This will not go unnoticed by our business partners who will then be able to see our real value, instead of our omnigraffle skills. They will see that we can help them with their creative thinking around business and its necessary structures. Our sandbox will, in effect, grow.

With the walls down, many of us may also start to learn more about business. This can only set our profession up for more success as we move into an age where IA lead businesses will rule the day.

Thus, do we continue down this path of alternate reality where we see business as the opposite of us, uncreative, uncaring, inflexible OR do we start to see businesses and their ultimate potential? The choice is yours, but I caution you to choose wisely. The wiser of the two choices is the one that puts us in a place where we can help set our businesses up to be more geared towards our users, and how do you expect to do that, when you don’t understand how the business is run in the first place?

A little over a year ago I decided that I wanted to work as a User Experience Designer. About three weeks ago I made the step from my web development being a cute thing I did on the side to a full fledged commitment when I landed this internship with Lis. The next step was of course to quit my regular job so I could work at this stuff 24/7 (accomplished today at 1:30). A lot had to happen before I got here.

Keeping it real, I’m not a genius, I didn’t even feel terribly comfortable around computers before starting on my tech sprint (they were portals through which I could stream movies). It was a roundabout journey, marked with many pitfalls and digressions. There aren’t many colleges that offer degrees in user experience, and there aren’t very many entry level positions in UX. I’m assuming it’s because of the power UX designers wield over layout and productions in the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). So getting into UX is a little bit like getting into Mordor; you need to wade through a swamp and you meet some interesting characters along the way.

After I had concluded that I wanted to be a UX designer and nothing else, I casted about for something that I could UX design. There was nothing, so I was lucky when my mother offered to pay me a grand to split amongst my friends to redesign her site. My friends are programmers, so all the aesthetic decisions fell on me, which was both stressful and enlightening. I didn’t know anything of real value going in except that I was willing to work for every penny. In retrospect, after handing out most of the money to my friends I think I worked for around 1.50-2.00$ an hour. That willingness to just jump regardless of money has paid off tenfold.

A few months after finishing my first website I got another website job from a close friend. It’s taken me several months, but eventually I got to the point where I settled on a good CMS (WordPress) and a good hosting service (AWS) and the site is practically writing itself now that the hard parts are done. That site generated the lead for my current internship, and while I didn’t know enough to accomplish it at the beginning, I spent at least 40 hours on Lynda.com and Youtube learning everything I needed to. Knowing that it would be both longer and slower than I wanted was something that I had learned from the first website. Knowing that there was no quicker way available was another bit of Zen picked up by banging my head against the wall the first time around.

However, like I said, the internship started three weeks ago. I’ve read four books, looked at countless wireframes, brainstormed a concept into a sound information model (which I then put together in the shabbiest of fashions) and set up a contact list for my own personal professional development. I totally had a Zen moment when I realized that the user interface, site design and logo are all subordinate to the system, and that one probably doesn’t need to consider the specifics of the interface until after developing a sense of what the user will want. It stretched my mind. It’s also the kind of realization (and experience of vertigo) that I never would have gotten from reading a book.

So if the internship is so great, why isn’t everyone doing it?

Honestly, that’s a question for you, readers, that’s right, you! If you’re an expert, you probably know that you didn’t get a degree in UX in school, but you also know everything you need to know to be a successful UXer, so why not do the philanthropic thing and take on an intern? They would learn so much for every minute of attention you give to them. Lis has been showering me with support to the point where I just quit my job because I have goals in the field that I can reach with her help. It’s also the only way the field is going to grow, because it’s one of the few ways that someone from a different background can join your ranks. If you don’t have time or room for one, at least go on ohours.org and chat with a few, unless of course you want the field to stagnate, rot and die.

And for you newbies, go get an internship, go design a website, go mess with apps! I’m clearly no expert, but it worked for me. The actual nature of the project is secondary to the crowd of people you’ll find yourself with, the work is secondary to what you can learn from doing it, and convince other people you can do for them. It’s not fast, it’s not easy, but when you have the experience it doesn’t go away and people like a self made person. It doesn’t take that much time on a weekly basis, even if you’re just reading, you can pat yourself on the back for being productive and laying the foundations for a successful future. You can only hope that the professionals have actually read the paragraph above and are willing to share their process.

Currently, the majority of how we write and speak about our work is in ideals… myself included. I find myself saying “Ideally you would have already done personas” or “Ideally we’d be involved in every step of this process” or “Ideally we’d be taking all channels into consideration, but due to the scope of this project…”,

The thing is rarely, very rarely, (if at all!) do these ideals line up in real life. For instance, I have tons of great resources telling me how I should, in an ideal world, conduct a discovery and strategy project. These resources have provided me a great outline for doing my work (to be fair, many tell us that they are only outlines), but rarely ever do they provide me a real world scenario that is seeped in reality OR they do provide me a real world scenario of their’s, unfortunately, however, my real world is not as awesome. Don’t get me wrong here, we need the ideals, but along with them I’d like to start seeing some reals… and here’s why…

When knowledge we take in regarding this profession relates to only awesome projects or lofty ideals, several problems occur.

First, no one else really thinks they DO the work. Because they weren’t able to follow the ideal process step by step or because they didn’t have the ideal scenario in place, it didn’t seem like “real” work to them. Therefore, many practitioners aren’t embodying the work they do. It becomes a mystery to them of what “the real” thing is because they just can’t match these damn ideals.

Second, because these practitioners don’t embody the work, we have a HUGE lack of mentorship in our community. Everyone thinks that they are the ones that should be mentees, because mentors, afterall, should have done the “real” work step by step, and since many people think that they haven’t done “real” work, the assume they aren’t fit enough to teach others. You see the “ideals only” approach puts us in a place where we are an industry of self doubters, not of empowered practitioners, therefore it is hard for a newbie to think they can write a blog, mentor someone else, or speak at a conference.

Third, because no one really thinks they “do” the work, less people actually share the work they do! This sets the whole profession back because it means the new ideas and ideals only come from a select few (not their fault). This perpetuates the cycle of practitioners only hearing from the select, awesome few, about their select, awesome work, and realizing that their own actual work isn’t as awesome, and therefore they must be frauds… BAH!

But not to dismay, the world is yours! And, there are ways that we can defeat these problems.

The first solultion starts with the content creators. I think that more of us should write and talk more about the actuals. There is always a time for ideals, we need to understand them to have a direction, but I’m going to make it a goal of mine to write and speak more about my actual work, on a non-awesome project… because I sure haven’t ever followed an ideal process, but I believe and know I do this work (and you do too!).

The second solution is, if you aren’t writing and talking about anything, go out and start doing so and make some if it about your actuals! There is always room for more ideas on how to do something, or why to do something. So what if there are a millions posts about feature prioritization… we want to know how YOU do it.

Once we all have a more realistic view point of what “actual” UX work is, we see several outcomes. First an overall confidence and assurance increase throughout our profession. And, this is key because if WE are more sure about what our work “really” is then our clients and customers will have more faith in us as well.

Second, more of us will be writing and sharing our ideas which will perpetuate a growth in knowledge and ideas overall. Thus, we’ll have more options to use or craft in our actual day to day world, and thus more good work will be done overall!

You see there is nothing wrong with Should except that it is not Is. It simply is not… it just should be. And, if we look to Should as the actual, then we miss the point. The point of Should is to give us a compass, a direction, a focus, but not to blind us to reality. Once we realize that Should is “can be” instead of “is”, then we’ll be in a much better place to better ourselves, our profession, and of course our businesses and users. It’s a win-win… win!

“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.

“I am wondering if – rather than being a site without ads – Neighborhoods is really one big undifferentiated ad? A piece of content that is designed to hook you in and make you consume something? Maybe the next age is when we stop being able to detect advertisements…They’re still there, but they have stopped being rectilinear distractions from the main tasks in a page. I am thinking of Pinterest, which could be described (very well) as a big pool of ads or visual miscellany that is stoking consumption.”

It was this thought that eventually led me down the path to the realization that even though I architect for experiences, what that really means, in many respects, is that I am one hell of an advertiser.

The current state of ads on the web is, for the most part, for them to be explicit and, many times, intrusive. Because of this, many of us UX professionals, have started to see them as evil. They only get in the way of the progress of our user, and because of that we should try to decrease their presence as much as possible.

We hound the marketers by telling them that ads have no place in the experience of, say, trying to get an auto quote, or purchase a watch online. Ads simply are clutter and distraction. Because of this many of us have also pushed ourselves away from thinking about our roles as marketers. We are experience designers damn it! We don’t just sell stuff… right? Wrong!

Taking a step back, many of us think that we only design great experiences to make the world a better place for the user. We want to make their experience delightful and ensure that they have a voice in what they do online. But, why do we do all that, really? Our intentions are usually pure, meaning we really do want to help people. But is making it easier and more delightful to spend more money virtually really something that users need to make their lives better… is it really? Or, on the flip side, does creating a delightful and enjoyable experience work in the business’ favor to get the user to consume more, buy more, engage more. Thus, as architects and designers of these experiences that are created in order to hook users to get them to consume more, what we really are are some of the best darned advertisers around.

Granted, many of you IAs and UXers out there already know this. I’ll admit that it has probably crossed my subconscious once or twice, but that I have never fully embraced this fact. And, I’m also willing to wager that many of you out there right now are standing up, yelling at your screen, saying that you aren’t an advertiser (those greedy, manipulative people!) but you are an advocate for the user!

It may be true that you are an advocate for the user, but it is equally true that you are an advertiser, meant to manipulate (probably in a good way) user’s behavior in order to get them to use your product or service much more than they normally would. And, that, dear reader, is OK. The problem comes in when we don’t realize and own the fact that we are advertisers.

When we pull away from this fact, several things can happen. First, we leave the advertising of products and services up to a separate unit (usually marketing) in our organization. What this means is that someone else, who may be completely unaware of the intended user experience across channels, has a job that involves making sure their content gets seen. Because they have this goal, and because they are outside of your purview, they usually have no choice but to create something that will take the user out of their task flow. If this advertiser doesn’t know about the experience you’ve architected, then they surely don’t know how to fit their content and goals into it, after all.

Second when we as UX professionals don’t see ourselves as advertisers, we are not being real about our responsibilities. This means that we may not be aware that it is our job to figure out how to integrate advertising and marketing goals into our user flows and designs. Both of these issues can cause us to have ill relationships and outlooks on our advertising and marketing partners. The main problem with all of this is that we have a disjointed approach to crafting the user’s experience. And, a disjointed approach means a disjointed experience for all.

What then, is the solution to these problems? First and foremost, we need to embody our roles as supreme advertisers. Many of us, as I mentioned, have already done this. I would bet the farm on the fact that those of us who have embodied our roles as advertisers are creating more fluid experiences for our users.

In order for us to embody our role as advertisers, we first need to realize that advertising in and of itself is not always bad. If an advertisement is not a distraction, but is instead something that enhances the user’s experience by providing them more information that they need (ala Neighborhoods for Airbnb) than it is actually making the world a bit easier for the user, while better for your business.

Once we realize that advertising is not evil, we can begin to see our roles in it. By doing so, by embodying our roles as supreme advertisers we will better integrate with our internal, as well as, client teams to create products and services that enhance the user experience while helping the business to succeed. We will also stop seeing advertising and marketing as evil, and instead see them as partners who can help us do our job better. All in all, taking on and embracing this role makes us better at what we do, and that is how we really help all the users out there.

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!

An ode to the slash
Slash you have done me well up until now. For your efforts in helping me to pay the bills, you deserve a bow. But the time has come for you to go, for if you don’t, the real value of UX the world will never know.

The slash… if you don’t know what it is, you should. You have, after all, seen it many times. As the job posting emails roll in, and as they go up on the community and hiring sites, the slash is there… glaring its way through. It has made its way around the industry. From HR to the CEO… from designer to developer, the slash has been seen far and wide.

So what is this slash that I speak of? Well, let me show it to you.

<Begin example email>

Hello Lis. Our company is currently looking for a

Do you know anyone that could help?

</example email>

The slash is that dreadful character that we see in job titles for businesses hiring what they “think” is a UX designer. It is that mark that shows up between UI and UX as if they were the same thing. Where did it come from?

Unfortunately, the slash was added some time ago to help explain to businesses what the UX role is. By coupling UX with a familiar term, “UI”, businesses could easily see that the UX person is one that helps make interfaces easy to use (oh, and maybe they do some other side stuff too, like ensure your product will be used by your customers… but I digress). The slash was also a cop out… a shortcut to “getting” UX work (think “If I have UX in my title and I only do interface work I’m still a UX Designer”), and, unfortunately for UXers, adding it helped the two terms be viewed as the same thing.

However, As many of us know, UX and UI are not the same thing! UI work is a part of the UX Umbrella, but creating a usable interface does not mean you have designed for a good user experience. Further, to me, if you are hiring a UI/UX designer, you are probably looking for a UI designer who knows some usability practices. This is a far cry from all that a valuable UX designer does. Of course, this is not to say that UI Designers are not “as good” or “as important” as UX Designers… they are just two different, but related, disciplines.

Note: There have been many people who have written about the difference between UX and UI, but perhaps my favorite is UX is not UI by Erik Flowers. I encourage you to take a read to come up to speed if you are unaware that the two disciplines are not the same.

So now that we are all on the same page, you may be thinking “who cares that we have the slash? How can that possibly hurt the UX profession… it’s just a little mark on the screen?”. Or is it?

Accepting the slash, taking jobs with the slash in it, not speaking up and educating others when we see the slash, and not being aware that the slash can be our enemy are all just other ways that all of us let The Wireframe Machine define User Experience Design. This means that if we allow the slash to exist, we are allowing UI and UX to be seen as the same thing.

My plea today, is that we all start to work to get rid of this freaking slash. I think this can be done in a few ways (ways that I have mentioned before), but the root of all of it is in UX people knowing and educating others to the real value of having us around.

By removing the slash, by correcting people on it, we start to more clearly define the difference between UX and UI, which is a task that everyone should start to take on, from business, to design, to development. Why? Because in this the Age of Experience we all need the real value from UX in order for our businesses to find success. And, defining UX and UI roles with “UI/UX” just continues to hold all of us back.

For the past several months, I have been noticing a puzzling trend happening in the world of software development. Perhaps this has only been happening in my own bubble, but since it has been happening so often, I assume it has been seen elsewhere. That trend? That of the business team not wanting to take ownership of their requirements for a project or product. Not only do I see them not wanting to take ownership of the requirements, but they don’t even do, think about or have goals in mind for a project. To make things even more puzzling, the business teams have been looking to me, as the UX person, to define and maintain the requirements for the system.
Why does this seem so puzzling? Because instead of taking the opportunity to define what a product needs to have to solve their business problem, business team are basically saying to me “I have no idea the purpose of my product. I just think something that does something really cool like Pinterest would be great.” Then they want me, the person designing the solution, to come up with the problem.

If you are a UXer facing this situation you may be thinking a few different things. First, you maybe thinking “Lis who cares?? They are letting us define things, and we know best anyway!” OR you maybe thinking “Lis… right on!” OR you may be thinking “How weird is that?!”.

For those of you that are saying “right on!”… thanks. For those of you saying “this is weird”… you’re right! For those of you saying “Lis who cares??” my answer is you should. Why?

Because even though it is our role as UX designers to help facilitate the process of understanding what should be done on a project or with a product, when we get to the point of the business team handing UX the responsibility of defining the entire product without understanding their input, we have a big problem.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not a fan of large requirements documents just for the sake of having something written down, nor do I think that requirements have to be formal enough to catalog in the Library of Congress. I do, however, think that the intention of the product should be recorded and upheld, because if it is not… how will we know that we solved the problem correctly for the business as well as the user?

Requirements are the “what”. They define what the product should do. The outputs of our solutions are the “what” extended with the “how”. Think of it like a test. The “what” are the questions on the test, the “how” are the answers. If you have the person taking the test writing the questions to that test, they are always going to “do well” on it, and no real progress and learning is ever done. Thus, businesses, if you have the people taking the test (I.e. The UX and design teams) writing the questions for the test (I.e. The requirements) you’re going to get a “successful solution” no matter what, and probably no real value added to boot.

Put more frankly, someone needs to be responsible for defining and maintaing the business purpose behind the project, and that someone should be from… the business!

If you are facing this same trend and agree that it is a problem, you may want some quick tips on how to combat it. Well there are a few that I have been using that have helped.

First, I really try to utilize my facilitation skills to help my business teams figure out requirements. When they turn to me and ask me to write requirements, I tell them I can’t, because it is their job to tell me what they need. I then use my UX know how to get them there.

Which brings us to tip number 2, putting the requirements back on the business. Encourage and enable your business partners to take ownership of what they need and not of the solution. The solution is yours UXers! Take ownership of that, and keep asking the what from the business.

The last tip I have is when a business person asks you to, for example, make something like Pinterest, always ask “how will we test that our solution meets requirements?” or “how will we know we were successful?”. “Will that be a design test, color palette, functionality?” And then ask “why does this need to be like Pinterest? How does that help the business?”.

The outcomes of implementing these tips are a more engaged and responsible business team. The business team, however annoying, is necessary for balance within our companies. They help to make our company more successful from a different angle, and we need to partner with them in order to create a holistic product that means user AND business needs. By helping them to be more engaged you are helping yourself get the requirements and business insight you need in order to do great work that is for both the user and the business. That is one way UX adds real value.

The other night, as I was reading more of the book I started to think about the UX community and our reactions towards the Business community. I found myself making many assumptions based off of my own personal views, but realized that I should probably verify those assumptions. That is what this blog post aims to do.

I have included below a question that I’d greatly appreciate your response to. For being generous with your opinion, expect a follow up post with additional insight (hopefully good insight ).

More thoughts to come when the results are in!