Category: Career & Practice

Making Promises We Don’t Know How To Keep

I left London after ten years, and moved to Berlin, for various reasons. There is a lot of UX work here, but most of it is in digital B2C Product creation in the lean / Agile / data-informed variety for start-ups (or companies that think they want to be start-ups). Showing up with twenty years of product facilitation and advanced concepts on the CV meant a lot of searching to find a good fit, and I now am working in scientific publishing, enabling an internal platform for many business units.

I recently noticed a core piece of anxiety I used to have almost every day at work in London at the various agencies and clients, is gone. It isn’t just the way UX in London is so over-hyped with its constant events and conferences that makes you feel just doing your job is not good enough, but something else has qualitatively changed for me. I sat with it for a moment and realized what it was: I am not asked to do the impossible anymore.

The higher I got, the more unreasonable the requirements I had to take responsibility for became. I have been the Director of UX for a client where someone included in the pitch the promise that our version of their new website would increase conversion by 10%. Just like that. Or I have been co-tasked with revamping a whole web product to be more socially conscious and long-term oriented, but then also told the lead-generation part of it could absolutely not drop, even though offering those leads were in direct contravention in tone to the new product. That sort of thing, mostly just blithely required so someone upstairs could get or keep their bonus.

So, increasing the business, not hurting the money they make, why do I call that unreasonable? The problem with those kinds of requirements is that UX doesn’t have the tools to evaluate them before the work is taken on. I have no way of conclusively starting out and saying, oh yeah I can do that. Asking me to sign up to goals I can’t evaluate, well, yeah that is unreasonable.

Every UX Researcher will tell you: users never stop surprising you. Every UX Designer who has had their stuff user-tested a lot will tell you: the version before first testing is trash. We can throw however many years of experience we have at any design, however many heuristics we have to get it right, and we will still be surprised at how users interpret some aspect of a page: the copy, not seeing a button because of the surrounding elements, the sizes of boxes misleading the eye. Add to that how every design these days is very often not the actual full page, but a piece that will be inserted into a system of modules, journeys, cookie banners, mail sign-ups, surrounding content, and unpredictable ads, and we’re unable to have any certainty even if we did have predictive tools.

But we don’t have predictive tools in UX. Just a mountain of ways to lower risk by gathering information pre- or post-design. So when during a pitch I find out I am being signed up to a 10% increase of conversion I can’t actually say No and keep my job. I can barely say “I don’t know”, really. I have gotten away with “I’ll do my best” or “Well, their site is fundamentally ten years old–I really think we should be able to do better”.

Programming, i.e. software development, switched to Agile methodologies because it turns out the intricacies of legacy layers of code and business-requirements make it impossible to predict scope and time beyond four weeks. UX design tries to do the same shortening by advocating repeating quick build-test-measure cycles, calling it a “product experiment” to “fail fast at”, but it is still not accepted everywhere, and the reason this methodology needs to exists, that fundamental inability to predict during design how good a design is, just hasn’t properly percolated back up to decision makers yet. We also haven’t let it: part of clawing our way to a seat at the top table has been putting up this facade that “finally” letting us do “proper” proper Service / UX / Customer / Product / User-centered Design will surely lower risk and increase profits by making better products. That facade is hurting us by not letting us push back against requirements we can not fulfill, and that desire for a place at the table is holding us back by stopping us from staring the business in the face and point blank asking “Instead of making me obsess over 40 colors of green to increase click-through rates by .1%, have you considered making a product at a price people actually want? Because if you did, I could hide that Buy button and people would still click it.”

But no. Industry does not work that way. Instead I carried around a tiny gremlin far away in my consciousness, a gremlin I could easily explain and wave away as the way things are, or that by the time the client would notice I did not increase conversion by 10% or whatever, we would be further along the path of doing other things. But it still gnawed at me. I only notice now that it is gone by how much.

My job now has problems of how to display the contents of a book online that has, literally, 20.000 chapters, and how to let users search in reference media without having to ship the whole catalog over in hidden javascript–meaty questions of weighing user needs vs technological capability, and how to best communicate the trade-offs and effects. It’s fun work, it is hard work, it is serious work, but best of all, when I say “I’ll see what we can do, but no promises–this is kind of weird and unprecedented and we’re going to have to make it up for a while”, everybody understands, and nobody waves a contract at me where they go “But we promised the client that…!”

‘Conversion’ is not the work I signed up for twenty years ago when I wanted to make computing easier for my mother. This is.

Selection

Maybe I am too deeply connected to the Lean Startup / Lean UX / Agile UX circles in London, and what I am about to say is patently untrue because of confirmation bias, but one reason I haven’t written here much is because I have gotten very few requests of the “I am totally uninitiated in UX for my start-up” kind. It seems like tech start-ups are convinced of the value of UX from the start; the only wrangling I am dealing with know is how much to invest in it.

Still, how much to invest? What level of person to get? I have complained about it before, but I think I need to repeat it: if you are investing heavily in developer talent, why are you trying to go on the cheap with a junior or part-time UXer? You seriously want to spend your investment in dev talent to make software of which you have no idea if it will function for your target population before you release it? You want them iterating on a confusing implementation of the core idea, without proper guidance and process how to break out of this rut and start making software that fits you market?

Looking for a UX Designer just based on whether they can tart up your app or site is not going to get you the best value. It may seem cheap to get an up-skilled digital graphic designer, but the value in UX is knowing the processes with which you find out how your idea is viably brought to life, which includes helping decide for whom it is, how to find out what is important and what is secondary in your product, how to track what is hitting the spot and what isn’t, what many forms on inquiry to use to get insights, and how to translate those into something to build. There is actual science, craft, and experience-based lessons to answering these questions. Can you afford not to get good answers?

I was recently asked by a founder how to screen for a good UXer if you aren’t in the field yourself. There are plenty of heuristics, and besides the standard question of making sure you find someone you want to spend 70 hours a week with, I recommended the following:

  • Make sure the portfolio tell stories of how the questions I mentioned above were answered by the candidate in their projects. If all you see in a portfolio about projects is wireframes and finished screens, this person does not understand what UX is supposed to bring to the table, and they were just a cog in a big machine.
  • When looking at the portfolio, make sure you feel a mix of both recognition (“Yes, this looks pretty straightforward”) and a sense of innovation, and sometimes even both in the same project. You want someone whose thinking you can relate to, but who will augment you and your team in ways you currently lack.

Since I am answering fewer questions for start-ups, I will probably open this blog up to discuss the practice of UX more–as much as I can working in a big agency that wants to keep its secrets, of course.

Adding A UX To Your Startup

Last year I consulted some on hiring decisions: what kind of UX person do different start-ups need? It certainly is not a one-size fits all decision. Even if the all of us were perfect blends of insightful user researchers, interaction designers, amazing illustrators and graphic designers, and hardcore coders (also known as ‘unicorns’ since they do not exist or are very rare), we would still not all fit everywhere. In fact, for most start-ups that combination of skill at that high level would be completely over-specified and those unicorns would be both bored and overworked. Bored because not all the work would be at the level they like to do, over-worked because invariably they would be asked to do the work of 3 people.

From observing start-ups you certainly want someone who can grow with the company, has the right energy and endurance for start-up life, but also brings the right mix of skills at the appropriate level for where the company is. And just like as a founder you would research (if not already know) the various disciplines that go into creating working, maintainable, source-controlled code so that you know what you need, you also need to either be well versed already in, or at least research, the various design disciplines. The sentence “Well, we need the interaction made simple, but they could also design the logo and slide templates” makes me worry.

On top of that, “design thinking” as a system to create new and better products at start-ups is very fashionable, but it means more than hiring a Graphic Designer early, or even as a co-founder. If you do not have a background in design, learn who these people are—even if by asking an expert.

Founders who are tech experts really need to evaluate designers, interaction or service or visual, by the same lines as they would coders. What level would they hire, how much do they think they can teach or need already be supported by? Would you really pay a lower salary for someone who brings the look, the feel, the ease of use that sets you apart, the experience that makes your site memorable and instills trust in your website so clients spend money on your services? I was a little surprised at one point when the salary range quoted was equivalent to one for a junior coder.

If you are a Designer Founder yourself, you can grow together with a junior or mid-weight, but if you re a Dev or Biz Founder, you will not be able to really grow your junior designer; in contrast to what many think, “Make it pop!” or “Make it easier!” or “Make it like Facebook” are not actual design critiques that will get you a good result from your new worker nor will it make them better at what they do over time.

The level and experience need to be the right fit, but so does the approach to problems, and it actually should be different from the code or biz team, creating a frisson from which new ideas and directions will spring. Evaluate this from the portfolio, but mostly by asking how problems were approached, and approaching a current issue in the start-up together. Never ask a designer to do a lot of homework for the interview for free; in the current market it comes off as exploitative. Pay a free-lance rate for a few days to solve a bigger problem together and try. And ask other friendly UX Designers for help in evaluating.

Notes From The Field: Insecurity Behind The UX Curtain

In his latest blog post, Boon Yew Chew bravely and honestly discusses the reluctance he has to use the term User Experience Designer for himself. We have talked about this a little bit more on Twitter, but there are certain elements of his post I wanted to think a little more about, and why not think aloud, right? We UXers ask that of our user-testing populations all the time, after all.

What do we know?

Much of the insecurity I read and see, when UXers talk about their advanced cases of Impostor Syndrome, is actually because we do not have a canon. There is no basic shared knowledge that is indispensable to have in this field, there are no rules and laws and basic theories from which the rest of our craft flows, really. There are tons and tons of ideas and guidelines and processes with deliverables and artefacts, but there is no underlying model that we need to know in order to do good work, and therefore there is no hook for us to hang our security in our craft on. Yes, I have studied Fitts Law and I know about the 7+-2 rule, but guess what, I almost never use them in actual practice. To the point that I can barely tell you what Fitts Law even is, and as a mobile-first designer, I actually do not even care anymore because all my targets need to be visible and fingertip-sized anyway.

Back in the very early nineties when I started studying this field, people who had been tasked to make user interfaces for their companies but felt they had no guidelines and no background, asked me if there was a unifying or basic theory of User Interface Design, or Human Factors studies as it was called. Twenty years ago I had to say no, because what that basically was asking for a fundamental theory of mind and cognition, and neuroscience hadn’t come up with one. We still do not have that in what is now called the UX community, we just have compendiums of thought like “Don’t Make Me Think” and “The Lunatics Are Taking Over The Asylum”, but a basic theory what makes a good User eXperience, statistically solid and lab tested, or even a simple process that practitioners can follow to get significantly better results? All we have is variations of research-produce-test rinse repeat, which is what all the new Lean UX or the About or Our Process pages of Digital Agencies come down to. Just look for the diagram with arrows in a circle.

It is hard to feel secure in what you are doing when what you are doing doesn’t really have strong fundamentals like, say, Medicine or even Economics. For all the flack Economics gets, a lot of thinking has been done about basic theories of what actually is money, what are good exchanges, or on capital and work. And it may often have shaky predictive value, but the field can at least talk about models and predictions, something UX as a discipline can not. I remember work done in the 70s and 80s–I even did my thesis based on some of that–about systems to tally concepts in a command-line User Interface so as to be able to predict whether it would be easy or time-consuming to learn, whether a user would be fast or slow in it. That work has now completely fallen by the wayside in the larger practice of making web pages and mobile apps. Can I call myself an Economist without being able to explain how Marx saw the relationship between work and capital? Not very credibly. Can I call myself a UX Designer without knowing the inventory of ways to visualize repeated data sets as explained by Tufte? You bet. Many UX Designers have no idea what happened before 1998, and rightly so as there weren’t learnings fundamental or rigorous enough to stand even the test of time, never mind any actual lab test, in our ever changing computing environments.

Next week everything will be different

We publicly pride ourselves on how our varied backgrounds, the many routes we all took to become UX practitioners, makes us stronger when we work in teams, but it does mean that the field therefore has a lack of coherency, or even shared values beyond “we want to do right by the user”. Then the field changes in five years in some fundamental fashion, and some new people feel their current process or insight isn’t covered by the existing field and we all need a new fashionable term to go to. (I remember when Information Architect first popped up. I have to admit my first, and in hindsight vicious, first thought was “Card sorting as the whole of a job description. Nice work if you can get it.” And then it took off and I had a new title to collect. And yes, I have seen the error of my ways.)

Or our tools change, and because everyone is so insecure, or because they are recruiters trying to make money in a field they just walked into without any knowledge, we all pretend they are vital to have had forever. Little secret: when I arrived in the UK in 2008 from having designed and delivered sites and desktop applications since 1995 in the USA, I had no real idea what Wireframes were. I had to look the term up when I saw it in job ads. As someone who worked in User Interfaces–oops, sorry, User eXperience, there was one of those shifts again–from a software engineering background, whenever I had an idea or a design for a UI I would just code it up and see if it worked. At most I would sketch on paper first. Seriously, this whole in-between wireframing stage did not exist for me, and I had to study it.

So I took some of my old work and made some wireframes for them retro-actively. Can you wireframe? Oh yeah you bet! and I got me some gigs. I have now spent considerable time working with this deliverable, but I can’t say it has advanced my thinking or my results beyond my pre-2008 process. Yet this deliverable has become so important that you can get or lose out on jobs depending on whether you know the exact wireframing tool in use inside the company. Wireframing as a deliverable is now less fit for purpose than ever in a world where the transition from one state to another in a website or app is the real interaction deal-breaker, which wireframes suck at demonstrating. I am wireframing in my current gig, but only secure in the knowledge that the programmers to the right of me will code up an interactive element for testing when I verbally explain to them how it will work in the flows, and the amazeballs colleague with a Visual Creative background to my left will turn our collective ideas from the prototypes and wireframes into a deliverable that does make sense to people. I may user-test my ‘frames, but only with me doing the test with the user as I know all the caveats. I am sure wireframes will fall out of fashion and be replaced by something else (please!), and then recruiters and hiring managers will talk as if Everyone Has Always Done This In Our Field about the new thing.

We are about tearing ourselves down

User eXperience Design is the art of making things that are so blindingly obvious everyone wonders why this would take longer than an afternoon to come up with. Everyone except the people who made it, that is; they know how they went through iteration after iteration. And the only way to do it by constantly exposing what you sweated over and thought about, to ridicule and scorn for being too difficult to use, in user tests. User testing in all its forms is all we got, and we have to do it, but as a practitioner it is actually not that fun to have to go down in flames repeatedly. In front of your colleagues. And manager. Who may not understand that this is what the current UX Process requires, because we have no models to work to, and you end up wondering if they are wondering why they are paying you if you can’t get it right the first time already.

We end up in the strange position where we have to advocate to the organization to make resources available for us to find out how bad we are. I once, at a start-up drinks meet-up, explained this process to an accessories designer. She couldn’t believe her ears and didn’t think she could have gone through with it. Throwing yourself to the wolves in public every time? “Well, yeah, kind of. You never get it totally right on the first try, and there is no other way to know which part you got wrong.”

So yes, when you can’t get full buy-in to make proper testing happen–we have no time, we need to get to market, this is so simple, we’ll release it as a beta, it’s Customer Development, we have no money, can’t you just make it simple the first time?–sometimes it takes having to be in a UX community to remind you that you must still test somehow. It’s easy to let that slide. I have raised plenty of eyebrows by judgementally proclaiming that “If you are not user-testing your design, you are not doing UX, you are just doodling” but even truly believing that I have to sigh hard and steel myself before every time my designs will be seen by fresh eyes that have instant opinions about everything. How hard we worked, in the end, doesn’t matter, just the result.

We don’t really do this in the best circumstances

Even though I try to explicitly style myself humbly as a co-designer–“I am not a guru. I have done research but I do not know everything about this field. You in my team are the experts, and have lived with your ideas for a long time, longer than me. I am just a conduit to take all your ideas and shape them into something usable by other people in your field”–instead of a designer expert sent from heaven, I still end up in many situations where I feel “I should have seen that coming.” I was talking to some very respected colleagues today about a situation where I, with the team, after a week of sweating over some interactive function, collating all ideas into this one workflow, got shot down on a phone conference at Friday 5PM with a remote division manager who had a far simpler idea.
–“And of course now I am thinking, he’s right, he’s just right. And wondering what he thinks of me that I as a so-called User eXperience expert didn’t see that solution myself.”
And my friend correctly says: “He could only see that solution because you made an artefact that showed him the problem.”
–“I still should have come up with [that simpler solution] myself while making the artefact.”
“So why didn’t you?”
–“I was too close, I guess,, too enmeshed”
“Exactly, and he was far and gets to see this once a week. You need distance for these insights. We don’t get the time to take that distance when we are on a project.”

And in reality, especially inside Digital Agencies, the client doesn’t want to co-design all that much with you UX expert. They want to give you some knowledge and then have you show them a solution like you promised you would in your tender, for that specific amount of money. Innovation? As long it fits in that one week you budgeted between research and wireframing the home page, and by the way, budget is shortened because the dev team says they will cut more, so that week is gone, just come up with that Wow-On-The-Richter-Scale (actual client quote) while you wireframe. Digital Agencies work best when they have a close, iterative relationship with the client, but they only get that when they prove themselves in the first project which, guess what, happens with the agency frantically trying to find out what the client knows so deeply it actually can’t articulate it to outsiders, and only getting to it by showing designs to the client that the client will initially be unhappy with. Client churn is basically a given. It’s only if you have a stellar Account or Client Services manager on board, who can make the client understand this is how the process works, that you get a second gig.

It is really no wonder that we are so loyal to, and count ourselves lucky when we end up in, a business or even division that truly puts the user first, over profit or retaining the client: the people running them know what we go through.

What we end up with

So, we don’t have a truly shared body of knowledge and predictive theory to feel secure in, just an ever-changing field that keeps making stranger and stronger demands on us as the devices that provide user experiences explode and span the gamut from whole walls down to wrist-watches. Our job, when we are allowed to do it in a way we consider right, is about breaking our own hearts and having our babies killed in plain view of everyone in our teams and labs, repeatedly, until we get it right already. When we don’t get the tools to do this process, we labor under the knowledge we are probably making utter crap, mediocre at best, unless our colleague at the desk next to ours, if we even have one and aren’t the lone UX designer, will be brutally honest when we let them take a look. We are surrounded by people who have opinions and of which most think just making the right pixels prettier will solve everything. There is constant in-fighting in our field about what it is we should know (coding? visual design? taxonomy management?) mostly by people who don’t know one area and thus need to be heard saying that the area is not necessary lest they end up without a job. And we hardly ever have the luxury of time or space or variety. It’s not surprising we often end up measuring victory by getting one little good piece of innovation included in what is yet another mediocre site. It’s basically what Dribble was made to showcase.

It is also not so surprising then that many UX designers can hear themselves asking their friends and colleagues “Am I really a Designer? Am I a crafts-person? With no theory or real process? And if not a Designer, am I the best UX person I can be? Can we all do better? Is this new book / pamphlet / site about ourselves / process / intermediate step with pretty pictures going to be the key to stop us from flailing and make us get to good results like an arrow?”

Honestly, I wouldn’t sweat the name and field much. That you care about making software and services a little less heinous to use is what makes you a UX practitioner. Document your ideas and solutions into a portfolio, go to some workshops and meet-ups, and most of all, talk to other UX practitioners about the work. If with all that you have enough of a story you can get someone to pay your bills doing the UX work, then just call yourself whatever is in the job title for a while.

Every job, every field is a racket. We are all winging it, from brick-layers to CEOs. We might as well then wing it in an area we love.

First Consult

The first consult was in the lovely “Inn The park” cafe in St James’ Park, where I went over a mobile and an online proposition with my first “client”, Chris. We covered a range of topics and technologies, but what I want to discuss now is based on an initial sketch he brought for the online service. It was appropriately minimal for a modern web service, asking for just a tiny bit of information to then show in return what the possibilities of the proposition were. While a huge step ahead from services that want you to create whole accounts and enter passwords before showing you anything about what the service really does, it was, based on all the user tests I have seen, a little too minimal.

The questions that every front page of a site needs to answer, are

  1. “Is this for me?”
  2. “Do I want this?”

Failure to answer these means people in your target population will almost immediately move on, as they are awash in an Internet sea of alternatives. During testing I have found that users switch off real quickly from the proposition if they can not for themselves answer these questions within minutes, reporting back with “I couldn’t tell who this was for” and “I couldn’t tell what I was supposed to do here” with always the corollary  “so I stopped caring / was frustrated / moved on”. That is not the response we want as creators.

While a front page or opening screen full of mystery works for certain propositions, it usually only does when the user has somehow already bought in to the idea that there’s value to be had there. If not, and especially when designing a page for a service, you have to answer these questions in a way that can be absorbed in seconds by a first-time visitor.

To help get to those answers, re-cast the questions as:

  1. Who is this for?
    Once you know, make sure all your font, colors, graphics, tone of voice, amount of text, and lay-out choices speak to the people this is for.
  2. What can they do here?
    Find a way to explain the answer to this within seconds. It can be that your prominent single Call To Action makes clear what you want them to do, it may be a diagram that explains your proposition in simple steps, it may be a list of actions to take. But it must communicate the proposition and the actions to take fast, in any way you can.

I would caution against addressing question 2 using only a video on the front page, though. Fashionable as that currently is, video does not serve users who come in while at work in busy open-plan offices and have a lot of noise to deal with, users with specific accessibility issues like vision or hearing impairments, people using constrained mobile devices, people in low bandwidth situations, people who for any reason only have a little attention available, and many more. Video is a great way to communicate, but make sure it is not the only one.

And it is surely also a good exercise: if you cannot explain your proposition in a few sentences or a simple graphic, should you be investing all these resources in making it? Are you focused enough, are you clear enough on what it is you are building?