That lesson? Learn to be a teammate. The first step in learning to be a great teammate is to earn your teams’ mutual respect and acceptance. To do that you need to being willing to swallow your pride, be the bigger person, and admit when something is and is not your responsibility. Sure, you can have opinions about anything, but to be honest, the marketing numbers or the coding, or other non-UX design focused things are not your responsibility. Might you be a better marketing representative that the person on your team? Sure. But you aren’t the marketing person responsible for this project, you are the UX designer. Respect the other person’s role. Offer up suggestions to them in a kind way, in a way that you want people to offer up design suggestions to you, and then… leave it alone. You are not the saving grace of this company, you are a part of the company team. By recognizing and taking control of your responsibilities and by letting your other team members do them same, you are showing that you have faith in your teammates, the overall team and the team philosophy.

The outcomes of taking this first step towards being a great teammate are mutual respect and acceptance on both parts (yours and your team’s). Having these makes it a lot easier for people to trust you as an expert, as well as, to respect your thoughts and comments. This, of course, gives you a greater ability to sell UX and your UX ideas. By letting your guard down you are inviting your teammates to do the same. And once they do, they will start to see you as a valued part of the team and will then be a lot more likely to help you to curate the best solutions possible for your users.

In the field of UX it seems that mentors are lacking more than ever, and that we may never get the help we seek. What then happens if we never get the mentors that we are looking for? Do we just sit down and sulk. No, indeed we do not. What we do instead is turn towards a lesson learned from sports: Mentorship comes in many different forms, it’s up to us to recognize it.

Every sports team has a captain, right? Unfortunately, that person isn’t always the best person to lead the team to victory. This is the same in the field of UX. In fact sometimes, in UX, this person doesn’t exist at all. Thus we have two choices in order to solve this lack of mentorship. We could sit down and grumble or we could make like an established athlete and recognize our other options.

When I found myself on sports teams that did not have the mentorship I wanted, I went out and looked for it elsewhere. I observed other team members who I wanted to play like, and whenever they had a free moment, I asked them to show me a new move, or explain to me their line of thinking. I would also play sports outside of my ‘official’ teams, and there I would find mentors as well. The important thing to note is that by exposing myself to different experiences, and not rooting myself in my anger at not having a mentor, I was able to see beyond my situation and grow as a athlete. You see, mentorship is a two way street. Sports taught me this.

By applying this same methodology to my UX career, I was able to find mentors without waiting for someone to assign them. I could then extract the type of information and insight I needed to grow into the UX professional that I wanted to be. Mentorship is something I’ve learned both how to do, as well as to extract from others. By doing so, I have become the master of my own destiny, and you can too. Thus, the best UX mentor for you is out there, just maybe not all in one place. It’s up to you to find them.

It’s no secret that working in teams and having an outlook for success are attributes of a successful athlete. Today I want to talk about our first lesson from the field: success is all about strategy.

Well I believe that there are many lessons that we can learn from sports in order to enhance our UX skillset as well.

Think about your current project… or even past projects you’ve worked on, during these efforts were you clear on your strategy for success? Was there a team sit-down in which everyone agreed on what success would look like and how it’s defined? From that did your team talk about the strategy for getting the project over the finish line… and I mean talked about it as a team. Sure maybe your internal design team had a strategy, and the development team might have their strategy, but what about the team as a whole…. what is that strategy?

Team strategy and consensus is extremely important for project and product success. Without having a shared end goal, and then a road map for getting to that goal, everyone will begin to chase their own ambitions and goals. This, in turn pulls the product apart at the seam, and real progress and success never sees the light of day. Do you think that a professional sports team goes out there every week without talking about how they are going to win? How could a team of many active players win unless they all have the same idea of success. In short, they just can’t.

So, in order to avoid the problems of team distrust, discontent, and lack of success, you got to have a game plan. Sit down with your team and make it happen. Talk about what success is, how the team will get there, and what part UX should play in that strategy.

By doing this, you get everyone on the same page. Tech, marketing, business, project and account management, are all heading in the same direction. Sure everyone has their own individual talents and value adds, the same as a quarterback has a different set of skills than a linebacker, but being able to combine those talents in a productive and successful way, and knowing how you fit into that production is a huge part of what being a better UX professional is all about.

Source: Forrester Research Inc.

But these jobs aren’t made for us. We’re not even considered because UX isn’t a business discipline like sales, marketing, and operations. Those disciplines are tied to profit-and-loss much more than we ever have been. They also produce people who can maneuver through complex organizations much more easily than the typical UXer can.

Indeed, how many UXers can hold their own in a board room, or in front of the CEO alone making the (expensive) case for revamping the CX? Read The Customer Experience Fiasco and honestly ask yourself if you can imagine the typical UX designer in the role of the fictional Dana Chase. Her job is to find all the organizational problems that are leading her company to create a bad CX. She has to make a complex business case to senior management and ask for $80M as a starting point, and better UI’s don’t come into it. We’re not equipped for this. We’re not trained to look at our organizations this way and make these kinds of business cases.

Why? UX design has done a great job in the last decade of redefining (for the better) how we define requirements for products with digital UIs. There is no doubt about this. But this has come at a cost of upward mobility in our organizations. We’re functional players that make tactical work more efficient. We’re not strategic players that help our organizations transform themselves. The closer we look at UIs, the more pigeonholed we’re likely to be.

I agree with Leisa Reichelt when she writes, “Given the choice of having a Chief Experience Officer (CXO from a UX background) or a Chief Customer Office (CCO from a marketing/CX background), I’d probably choose the latter – for the more comprehensive, well rounded view of the organisation and all its working parts than the interface obsessed UXer is likely to be.”

(This is, of course, different if you’re a UX professional in a tech product company that values UX as a core part of the products they sell. In this post, I’m focused on the vast majority of other companies.)

Whether or not these jobs should be ours is one way to think about the issue. Another way to look at this is honestly understanding what we bring to the CX initiative. What can we do to get a seat at this table and move up the organizational food chain?

Alliance Building

Samantha Starmer addressed this about a year ago: “We need to act now to be part of the broader CX solution. If we don’t proactively collaborate across divisions and organizational structures, we will be stuck playing in the corner by ourselves. If we don’t figure out how to manage partnerships with other departments in a collaborative, creative, customer focused way, the discipline of UX as we know it is at risk.”

Where do you look for these alliances? It depends on your organization. I recommend looking into Jeanne Bliss’s discussion of the Power Core in The Chief Customer Officer. The Power Core is “the strongest skillset in the company or the most comfortable to senior executives…. [it] is one of the biggest determinants of how success, metrics, recognition, and company growth are defined inside the corporate machine.” Aligning with the groups that make up the core competencies of your organization gives you the best chance of success.

That said, for the UX designer, a promising place to look is in the relationship between the CCO and CIO. Even though CCO’s tend to come from outside of IT, the scope of their work inevitably affects the way technology is used to transform customer experiences. Take a call center for example. The agents may have incentives to achieve “one call resolution,” but this doesn’t happen unless technology makes this possible. When the issue is integrating a coherent CX across multiple channels and devices, then the relationship between CCO and CIO is filled with opportunity for UX practitioners willing to step up to the strategic challenge.

But stepping up may mean stepping out of our comfort zones. Whatever alliances we build, we can’t go in waving deliverables – our standard bulwark. We have to step out from behind our wireframes and prototypes and think strategically.

Call it UX strategy or digital strategy or whatever you want. The basic idea is this:

From the CCO’s perspective, a strategy-oriented UXer has the ability to understand the organization’s desired customer experience and can translate that into appropriate product and service concepts and designs that occur at each customer touch point.

Focusing on the Touch Points

The term “touch points” (as CXers and Service Designers use it) is important and can help shift the way we UXers think about what we can do. This is how The Customer Experience Fiasco defines them: “any interaction between the company and a customer, whether face-to-face, over the phone, on TV, or otherwise.” The touch points are going to be a mixture of people, processes, and technologies.

To be effective, we have to set aside our penchant for finding solutions in UIs and embrace the “experience design” part of what we do. (Is this starting to sound like “Service Design”?) Again, Samantha Starmer: “I view [CX] as an extension of UX, where non-digital experiences and services are just as important as screen interactions, and the full range of touchpoints with a brand across time has to be explicitly designed.”

To be sure, technology will almost certainly play a role in any high priority touch point, but the UI will not always be the primary consideration. We need to free ourselves from the bias of fixing things with UIs so that we can see more effective CX solutions.

For example, a common CX problem occurs when a technician is dispatched without the right equipment to fix the customer’s problem. This happened to me recently when my stovetop stopped working. When I called the company (otherwise known for good CX), the rep knew which model it was without me having to tell her. I described the problem in enough detail that the company should have known what the likely problem was. (The technician confirmed this when he told me that there only only two things that can go wrong with this stovetop.) So, armed with their knowledge of what stovetop I own and what the symptoms were, first-time-resolution should have been a slam dunk. But it wasn’t. Two trips were required — one to figure out the problem (which could have been diagnosed over the phone) and another after the part was ordered and in stock a week later.

Diagnosing the root of this CX problem and designing a solution is not likely to be UI intensive. More likely the issue is related to a communication process or poorly integrated trouble ticketing, inventory, and dispatching systems, not to mention training. The UI perspective that we typically bring to the table narrows our focus to the point where we can only think about and design one channel at a time. But the CX specialist has to be a multi-channel thinker. The CX specialist needs to see how touch points interact. The CX specialist is a business person who has to prioritize solutions according to budgets, cultures, and politics — and present the multimillion dollar price tag to senior management for approval.

Making the Transition

If UXers want to play in the CX world, we need to lift our heads up from our desks and step out from behind our clickable prototypes (“lean” or otherwise) from time to time. To finish this, I’ll discuss two different ways to begin the self-transformation: seeing CX problems that are often disguised as UX problems, and embracing the emerging discipline of Service Design.

Seeing CX Problems Disguised as UX Problems

UXers need to cultivate their ability to understand when we are dealing with CX problems disguised as UX problems — or even as a usability problem. This happens all the time. We just need to learn how to see it, and when we see it, call it out.

For example, I was asked recently to do a “usability” evaluation of a proposed new system for a financial services company. The system hinged upon two key assumptions about the customer. If either assumption proved wrong, the system would fail no matter how well-designed the screens were. Those assumptions cut to the heart of the CX that the company wanted to create.They were also out of alignment with the new brand image the customer was pursuing. I talked with executives, who expressed some trepidation about betting success on these assumptions. The project needed a CX strategy defined at the highest levels of the company before my project could or should become a UX project. We adjusted the work to focus on validating these assumptions.

How many times does this happen to us — we see a situation where the fundamental assumptions about “the user” are obviously flawed, but we plow ahead trying to design our way through these flaws? If you find yourself asking for personas and scenarios that don’t exist, chances are good that there is a larger CX problem, not just a UX problem. If you are designing a customer-facing system and you can’t get a straight answer about how it relates to other customer-facing systems from the customers’ perspective, then you have a CX challenge. Call it out.

The Career Case for Service Design

It seems to me that Service Design is another place for interested UXers to start looking for career growth in CX-oriented organizations. I’m no expert, but Service Design is so closely related to Customer Experience that at times I think of Service Design as a tactical extension of strategic CX. Service Design is about designing experiences that are appropriate to the larger CX strategy, which itself should be aligned to the company’s brand promise.

This discipline stretches our strategic thinking abilities more so than exclusively UI-focused methods. Being able to assess the customer’s experience across multiple touch points and understand the full scope of operational challenges in making this a good experience will bring you face-to-face with some sticky challenges that will stretch your skills significantly.

Closing Thought

The closer UXers can get to customer touch points in their organizations, the closer they get to where the strategy lives. Getting there will mean fine tuning our sense of profit and loss, improving our abilities to maneuver within complex organizations, and build alliances where we haven’t had to do so before. There’s nothing but upside in doing so.

Today on Radio Johnny, Jeff Parks talks with Dane Howard about the evolution of an engaging design culture at eBay – by modeling PeViz. Dane shares how Pre-Visualizing inside eBay is allowing for an engagement model that works effectively for multi-disciplinary teams. This in turn is fostering a corporate culture allowing for designers to not only be at the table in business decisions, but also aid the company in the creation of the table.

Quotes

“I run the design groups from our fashion markets place, for instance. What we really enjoy is just a better understanding of the fashion market. So I’ve got designers who’ve come from Banana Republic or Gap that have worked in the fashion industry. With Motors for instance, these are people who have a fascination with having rebuilt some of their own cars or love that parts and accessory space, globally. A designer isn’t someone who works well particularly well in mobile or works well in social, works well on the web. It’s someone who has the capacity to think at scale on large interactive problems, cross-platform.”

“There are a lot of things that can happen to a company that can starve innovation…what we started to observe is that if We started to behave as designers differently we could use the discipline of design to make things and to surface a prototype or an experience that allowed the organization to make a decision around it… if we did that earlier in the process it would naturally force design to not only be at the table but help create the table!”

“We borrowed from Hollywood. We found that some of the great films that are being created today – particularly the big budget films have made quite a bit of investment around this stage they call Pre-Viz. Simply put, Pre-Visualization is a way of visualizing complex scenes, before filming, to experiment without having to incur the cost of actual production…We’ve got high stakes strategy that we would love to be able to visualize, to help us make decisions, before we invest in the product and decide to better scope it…this way of thinking…then allowed us to have a group inside of eBay that basically partnered with different parts of the business in order to help use design as one more input to help them make decisions on where they want to go.”

Notes

* eBay Design Built by design for design to help recruiting and conversations towards elevating design talent at eBay.
* FastCmomany Article – Six Bite Sized Innovation Lessons from eBays New Design Think Tank
* Follow Dane on Twitter @danemhoward
* Follow eBay design on Facebook
* Learn about others who will be presenting at the MX conference this year.

Minimum Viable Products–what does this mean?

If you read any article or listen to any talk about minimum viable products, you will notice that the word “confusion” shows up early and often:

• Steve Blank: “This minimum feature set (sometimes called the “minimum viable product”) causes lots of confusion. Founders act like the ’minimum’ part is the goal.  Or worse, that every potential customer should want it.” (Perfection by Subtraction – The Minimum Feature Set)
• Eric Ries: “One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. Its power is matched only by the amount of confusion that it causes, because it’s actually quite hard to do. It certainly took me many years to make sense of it.” (Minimum Viable Product: a guide)
• Marty Cagan: “One of the most important concepts in all of software is the notion of minimum viable product (often referred to as “MVP”.)  But if you’ve been around software products for a while, you know that term is used in many different ways, and while the term intuitively resonates with people, there’s often a lot of confusion about what this really means in practice.” (Minimum Viable Product)

It’s not just that the concept is confusing. It is. And it’s not just that introducing articles with the promise of clearing up confusion is a common trope. It’s an effective one, and these articles cited above are great pieces that do clear up a lot of confusion. The relationship between confusion and MVPs runs deeper than all that.

MVPs are born from confusion:  the “extreme uncertainty” that Ries defines as a fundamental condition of a startup. Hypothesis by hypothesis, MVPs allow you to run head first into the uncertainty and chip away at the confusion. The creativity necessary to invent effective MVPs makes it hard to specify a formula or procedure for MVPs in general. This makes MVPs confusing, compelling, and energizing all at once.

Making Sense of MVPs

Rather than trying to definitively make sense out of MVPs, I stress that “making sense” is what MVPs are about:

MVPs are mechanisms to create meaning where little or none currently exists.

It doesn’t matter if it’s actually a product in the traditional sense. It doesn’t matter what the words “minimum viable product” really mean. It matters that the work you do makes meaning:

• What is a meaningful set of features for customers?
• How do we produce meaningful lessons learned from what we put in front of customers?
• What does this concept mean for how we go about defining a product strategy?

Each one of these questions has an impact on how we go about our work as product strategists and designers. That meaning-making breaks down into three areas:

• Meaning as vision
• Meaning as learning
• Meaning as method

Meaning as Vision

An MVP is a down payment on a larger vision. This larger vision gives meaning to what your customers are buying now. Here’s Blank on the importance of vision:

“You’re selling the vision and delivering the minimum feature set to visionaries [“Earlyvangelists”] not everyone….These Earlyvangelists are first buying the vision and then the product. They need to fall in love with the idea of your product.  It’s the vision that will keep them committed the many times you screw up.” – Perfection by Subtraction – The Minimum Feature Set

The here-and-now meaning of the minimum set of features you’ve delivered lies in the “idea of your product,” the realization of which lies somewhere in the future: Earlyvangelists “will need to hear what your company plans to deliver over the next 18 to 36 months.” Meaning is stretched out over time and therefore requires adept storytelling.

Here sense-making is an artistic endeavor—telling a story of the future that gives a greater meaning to what you are doing right now. It’s more art than science because it’s more about tapping into emotions than appealing to the intellect. An earlyvangelist is emotionally connected to what you are doing. Simply presenting a list of planned features isn’t going to do it. Part of our work as entrepreneurs, designers, or product strategists is to convey that meaning – to tell that story over and over again and make it emotionally resonate. The story is as much a feature as any code that is written.

To be sure, selling vision has always been a part of the relationship between software vendors and customers. MVPs just push vision to center stage in the relationship because uncertainty is at the heart of the matter. For established markets, there is little uncertainty to contend with.

Rather, you are contending with the relative certainty of competitors where vision can be a differentiator at most. But in the extreme uncertainty of a startup, you don’t even know if there is a market for what you want to do. Uncertainty is fundamental, and vision is how we make sense of it to ourselves and our early customers and prospects.

Meaning as Learning

The fundamental skill required for defining effective MVPs is the ability to isolate exactly what you need to learn and line up a prioritized set of hypotheses: what sense do you need to make of the situation you face; what confusion do you need to overcome right now?

In discussing Lean UX (with its strong ties to Lean Startup and minimum viable products), Leisa Reichelt makes this point beautifully in comments she made on a recent blog post:

“This is the thing, for me, that makes Lean different to Agile or Guerilla or all the other ways that we’ve packaged up sets of UX/Design techniques over the years. Not the MVP, not the guerrilla testing, but making LEARNING the measurable unit rather than the stuff we make.”

A disciplined approach to sense making; a technique for learning: these are the fundamental qualities of MVPs. Product strategy conducted in the realm of science – hypotheses, experiments, definitive answers. This is clearly articulated by Josh Seiden on the Luxr blog:

• “First, you declare your assumptions, and express them as a testable hypothesis.
• Then, you write your test–what signal will you get back from the market that will let you know if your hypothesis is true?
• Finally, you ask the question, “what’s the smallest thing I can do or make to test this hypothesis? The answer to this question is your minimum viable product, or MVP.”

The production of signs and signals (the vehicles of meaning) are at the heart of scientific sense-making: “what signal will you get back from the market” that proves (or disproves) your hypothesis? Indeed, what sign will we receive, what meaning will be made from our MVP?

But there is more to it than just experimentation for the sake of learning. There is a sequence and a priority that needs to be respected. We are pursuing a larger vision with our tests. The artist creeps back in: our storytelling must guide our priorities and help us understand what comes first in this larger story we are telling.

To be a little more concrete: the first thing the product strategist must figure out is what should be learned immediately. Sometimes easier said than done. There are several ways to break down uncertainty and confusion when creating a product strategy using MVPs:

• Value: Will people find value in the product vision enough to express genuine interest in using initial releases?
• Hurdles: Are people willing to get over the fundamental hurdle your product vision puts up?
• Sustainable Differentiation: Can you hold off competitors long enough to establish differentiation that is not easily copied?
• Love: What will make customers love your product, use it over and over again, and encourage others to use it?
• Scalability: Are there enough people out there that will find value in what you are doing?
• Money: Can you turn that value and scalability into a sustainable revenue stream?

Knowing what you need to learn right now is fundamental to defining the MVP. Figuring this out starts with being brutally honest about what you already know. What sense have you already created about your situation?

Let’s say that you have signed up a bunch of customers for your initial release. Your analytics tell you that they are going into the system, but they’re not returning over and over again as you had once hoped, or as your financial model requires. It’s usually not a disaster. You’ve learned that people will sign up based on some portion of your vision. That’s the first step in overcoming uncertainty. The product strategist must now get out of the office, talk to customers, and make sense of the situation:

• Exactly what part of your vision has been validated?
• What exactly are the hurdles to engagement?
• Have they found a competitor as a substitute?
• Is the problem you think you’re solving not the one that customers want to solve?

This is a systematic meaning and sense making enterprise—a scientific enterprise—but guided by the vision of the artist who imagines a better and more fulfilled future.

Which brings us to meaning as method.

Meaning as Method

The idea of the MVP has given product strategists another concept that helps us make sense of our work in new ways. It’s not that we haven’t gone about systematic learning before. We have lots of techniques for this – ethnographic research, analytics, focus groups, surveys, A/B split testing, the list goes on.

It’s about a disciplined ability to know what we need to know right now and devise ways to end the confusion and uncertainty about a particular issue – “LEARNING as the measurable unit”. It’s also about the ability to keep that artistic vision of a better future visible to ourselves and our early customers as we create our experiments. MVPs change the way we make sense of product strategy by forcing sense making as the heart of method.

Here is where meaning-as-vision and meaning-as-learning ground the discussion of method. Without vision, MVPs make no sense. Without a mindset obsessed with validating (or overturning) that vision step by step, MVPs make no sense.

Just as vision gives meaning to MVPs, vision gives meaning to the work of defining the longer term product strategy. The product strategist must know what needs to be learned now and what can wait for later. The product strategist always knows what he definitely knows right now and what he needs to know next. The product strategist is at home when she is sorting out the confusion that stands between the here-and-now and the future. She is unfolding a story. It has a general direction guided by vision, but it may change—a “pivot” in Lean Startup terms. The product strategist is comfortable with that.

MVPs and Interpretation

This uncertain space between the here-and-now and the realized future is where flexibility and creativity rule; but it is also a place where discipline and method must guide creativity (and vice versa). It is a place where the mind of the product strategist is constantly looking for signs and interpreting meaning. “What signal will you get back from the market?”

Interpretation is an essential skill of the product strategist, along with creativity in inventing hypotheses and experiments. There is no one way to do MVPs. This is why so many of the discussions of MVPs involve piling up examples. Many of those examples don’t even resemble products in any traditional sense of the term – as Dropbox famously proved with just a video to measure interest.

Even when shown to be a method, the method itself is very specific to a larger context. For example, Zynga’s approach to “Ghetto Testing” has a lot of great techniques. Their systematic approach is very specific to a business with an existing high volume of traffic and a need to create a large pipeline of new, viable games. A lot of uncertainty has been removed from the equation.

For early stage businesses without this kind of volume, other approaches to MVPs are more appropriate and will require adept skills at collecting and interpreting more qualitative data. For many entrepreneurs, working very closely with your earlyvangelists as a “concierge” may be a better approach. It takes creativity and imagination to understand what experiment is best.

To make sense of MVPs—to interpret what they mean for conducting product strategy—the entire context needs to be explained. This is why “The Lean Startup” devotes so much space to detailed, context-rich examples. It’s very difficult to nail it down to a reproducible method – first do this, then do that, and out comes this. We need to continue to pile up examples, not in the hope that final meaning and method emerge, but with the purpose of sparking the creativity necessary to make sense out of extreme uncertainty. Seeing how others do it helps the rest of us figure it out for ourselves.

Final Thought

MVPs are not formulaic, as Ries put it in “The Lean Startup.” “It requires judgment to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense.”

There are those words again hanging out inconspicuously at the end of that sentence, easily dismissed as a standard way to bring a sentence to an end. We do it all the time. But “makes sense” is actually the heart of the matter. MVPs must make sense by creating meaning out of uncertainty and confusion.

In Berkun’s talk picked by the audience of Puget Sound SIGCHI, he ran through the biggest issues and advice. He goes into details on the mistakes in the post, so instead, here’s a table to see both the mistakes and the advice at the same time.

I thought it particularly interesting how he approached the talk:

Rather than talk about tactical mistakes, such as in prototyping and running studies, I focused on the ones we overlook the most, about attitude and culture.

So what do you think? What other mistakes do UX designers make?

Today on Radio Johnny Jeff Parks talks with the President and Managing Director at Adaptive Path, Brandon Schauer. Brandon discusses the skill sets required to be a manager in the UX space today and how this translates into success with the interdisciplinary teams that make up most organizations. Brandon also articulates the necessity to differentiate that of a UX thought leader and a UX manager, as well as some of the top trends that are emerging in this young field for designers interested in making this transition.

Quotes

“You have to realize that great UX designers don’t always end up making great UX managers. Some people’s career path is going to be about being the rock star designer… getting those 10,000 hours, getting to that expert level…other people, maybe they weren’t great UX designers but for some reason their brain really connects with UX management…”

“What I saw in 2011 was really a change to organizations realizing they needed a staff of people…it wasn’t staff of production or visual designers, it wasn’t a staff of coders… it was a staff of people who could actually do UX work. The mindset of many organization has changed from a UX team of one to a UX team of plenty…as soon as you have that you have a necessity to have managers.”

“One of the things I love doing is hosting events that are just targeted at people who manage user experience…there are a lot of conferences out there that help people around UX and what are the basic skill sets but not a lot where people can exchange ideas about what’s working for them and what’s not…like I said these people don’t have a mentor or someone who was in their position before…so the best thing we can do is provide a forum where they can talk to each other.

Notes

* Follow Brandon on Twitter @brandonschauer
* Learn about others who will be presenting at the MX conference this year.
* Leah Buley on Being a UX Team of One

Design has never been more accessible than at this moment, and design is getting more and more accessible. Not only are design tools more user friendly, design thinking is a skill-set that is used from call agents to CEO’s.

…what is this unique element that separates the designer from the marketeer, copywriter, programmer and the rest of the world? I believe that design ethics separate the designers from the rest of the world. In fact, the stronger the design(ers) ethics are, the better of a designer he is.

Designers naturally have the urge to do the right thing. Historically, this was to make things look pretty rather than ugly. Today, I think the right thing to do is to make things good, rather than bad.

Read Anyone Can Design, Only a Few Can Be Good

If Apple had the option, would they replace their store employees with programmable drones, flash-baked with spunk, knowledge, and an insatiable desire to help patrons find the ideal Apple product(s) for them? Perhaps they would succumb to the over-hyped controllability and precision afforded by robotic employees. Who could blame them? Designing a consistent user experience that hinges on human engagement can be a sticky business. Apple Store employees, like us, are flesh and blood people, with their own agendas, dreams, passions, and personal histories. Homogeneously trained, though they may be, each employee is an individual with the potential to bring as much uniqueness to the job as they wish. Loosely controllable, yet immensely valuable variables in a massive service web, these employees embody a notion I’d like to refer to as the democracy of systems design.

The idea that part of designing any successful system is to be able to let go of control and to truly embrace the power of the parts of a system that cannot be controlled – namely, the human and natural elements. To plan for collaborative shaping of systems by the people who use them, on a massive scale. So until we are all replaced with programmable drones, I propose that humans be considered as much a part of systems as online or physical touchpoints. And what better way to think about the influence of a group of people on an outcome than the democratic process?

A good democracy

Part of any good democracy is a leader who is willing to leave (at least some) major decisions up to the majority of their constituents. And even the decisions made quietly in a backroom somewhere often lead to unexpected and irrational human behavior. Presidents, CEOs, Prime Ministers, managers of fast food restaurants – all leaders in their own right; none, any more than the others, able to truly control the citizen experience within their dominion. Strive as they may for public safety, behavior change, “customer” satisfaction, there will always be uncontrollable and unexpected elements stitched into the patchwork fabric of the world. A good leader, therefore, can focus on establishing a framework within which their desired outcomes most naturally and most probably occur. A mayor cannot guarantee a 0% crime rate, for example, but he or she can facilitate the design of a better communication system for police officers and reward citizen policing with social incentives, thereby improving the chances of crime reduction.

Is it such a stretch to think of systems designers as such leaders – doing their part to build the infrastructure, dream up the various experiences associated with their products and offerings, but also embracing the unknowns involved with human employees and human users? For it is those unknowns where the democracy happens, and that can be magical. Allowing systems to grow and evolve as people use them in different ways is to allow the world around us to be crafted by those who use it the most. A constantly shifting democratic modeling of the systems that keep us fed, deliver our mail, and take out our trash, serves to improve those systems in ways that can be unimaginable to those who first created them. It is precisely the system designer’s inability to control every detailed experience within their service web that allows for it to grow and shift in mysterious and often beautiful ways.

The hacker, DIY communities know this inside and out. Constantly pushing the boundaries of design intentions, they jailbreak, reverse engineer, patch, and crowdsource their way to completely new applications. This is democratic re-shaping of products, services, and systems at it’s absolute (although often illegal) best. If you followed the drama that enveloped Microsoft’s X-Box Kinect, with it’s proprietary, locked-down systems that were eventually cracked open for all to use freely, you’ll know what I mean. Several very smart people around the world saw a potential in Microsoft’s new sensor-laden gaming platform, that the Redmond-based tech giant did not support (to put it mildly). Skipping ahead to the happily ever after part, the people won, Microsoft acquiesced and began developing public-facing API’s. In a show to cover up their initial (dare I say?) communistic control efforts, they claimed that it was their intention all along to open up their closed platform for hackers and developers to imagine future applications. Realizing only too late the inherent value in the democracy of systems design.

Perfection is unknowable

As we learned from the ending scene in Tron: Legacy the thing about perfection is that it’s unknowable, and it is often the imperfect bits that are the most interesting. While it probably doesn’t make much sense to try to convince designers to stop trying to make perfect things, perhaps they can be convinced of the perfection of the unknown, the magic of human and natural elements. As Jeffrey Zeldman puts it, “The architect creates planes and grids that facilitate the dynamic behavior of people. Having designed, the architect relinquishes control. Over time, the people who use the building bring out and add to the meaning of the architect’s design.” While we will always need the architects to design and build system frameworks, we should also embrace the democratic nature of human endeavors. More often, we ought to trust that our systems can ride safely without training wheels. That they can learn to fly, naturally, in the wild. And who knows what tricks they may develop on their own?!

This sort of thinking extends to things that are not yet systems but that may want to be. By that I am referring to “dumb” water bottles who want to communicate their owner’s hydration level back to them via sensor networks and web services. “Dumb” refrigerators who want to relay their contents to their owner before they open the door and suggest healthy meal combinations and recipes pulled from the internet. Imagine the possibilities if all of our “dumb” things had API’s, could have their software updated remotely and wirelessly, and above all – allowed themselves to mutate and evolve in step with the desires of their owners. Matt Jones, one of the thought leaders in this Internet of Things field, as it is known, arrives at several conclusions from Bruce Sterling’s seminal book on the subject, Shaping Things: “The network is as important to think about as the things. The flows and the nodes. The systems and the surface. The means and the ends.” Drawing from this, it feels as if things want to become services, to be the physical handles and textures on top of democratically designed service layers. Sterling calls these Spimes – “manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes begin and end as data. They are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means and precisely tracked through space and time throughout their earthly sojourn.” [Shaping Things, p.11] He goes on to say, “In an age of SPIMES, the object is no longer an object, but an instantiation. My consumption patterns are worth so much that they underwrite my acts of consumption.” [Shaping Things, p. 79]  Bingo. The beauty of spimes, and systems for that matter, lies in the ways in which people use them and how they learn and adapt to their shifting environment.

Image by: BERG Studio

Back to Microsoft and Apple again. It should be pointed out that a potential benefit to locking down key aspects of a system is a more consistent and controllable user experience. Microsoft spent a lot of time designing the ways in which users should interact with their Kinect system and so had no interest in letting people figure out other interactions that could muddy the waters. Apple is notoriously strict with apps that modify their software UIs, seeking to control the UX in as many ways as possible (the main exception, of course, being the human factors mentioned earlier). In many ways, both are wise for locking down their systems to provide only experiences that they consider ‘perfect.’ But as I’ve been arguing, and as Matt Jones references, perfection is not in seamlessness, rather in “beautiful seams.” As Jones explains, “This term was coined by the late Mark Weiser, a pioneer of ubiquitous computing and the Chief Technologist at what was at the time the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Instead of the discourse of smooth, distinction-obliterating, disempowering seamlessness which was then (and is, to a significant degree, still) dominant in discussions of ubiquitous information processing systems, Weiser wanted to offer users ways to reach into and configure the systems they encountered; ideally, such seams would afford moments of pleasure, revelation and beauty.”

By giving users the power to affect the systems they are a part of, designers and leaders allow for a more democratic, and I argue, interesting and potentially magical world of possibility. John Thackara, in his book In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World explains it this way:

“…the challenges and opportunities that face us will not be solved by designers acting on our behalf. On the contrary: As we suffuse the world with complex technical systems – on top of the natural and social systems already here – old-style top-down, outside-in design simply won’t work. The days of the celebrity solo designer are over. Complex systems are shaped by all the people who use them, and in this new era of collaborative innovation, designers are having to evolve from being the individual authors of objects, or buildings, to being the facilitators of change among large groups of people.” [In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, p.7]

Let us not forget that with good leadership, guided stewardship, and a network of engaged users, systems can blossom and mutate, becoming unimaginably awesome.