Matt's Brain

Opinions no one asked for inspired by a talk I didn’t hear at a conference I didn’t attend.

I was really impressed by the slideshare ‘Truth or Dare’ that Jason Mesut posted recently from his Euro IA talk (which I wasn’t able to attend unfortunately). I didn’t agree with all of it, but the gist of it is really thoughtful and timely, and is very close to my own thinking. This isn’t really one of the critiques he asked people to post but his talk has prompted me to brain dump a few thoughts about the London UX scene & design in general. Some of these are responses to Jason’s talk, most of them are just general thoughts I’ve been meaning to get of my chest for a while.

On User Experience Orthodoxy

The ease in which we fall into orthodoxy is suprising considering we are supposed to be problem solvers and thinkers. But we definitely have a tendency to grasp the end expression of an idea instead of the reasoning behind it. If an idea has been expressed in a book or by a design leader it seems to takes on an immediate authority. And if it can be expressed in a pithy quote then forget about it, tweets are fired off, it’s an unassailable law of physics.

An example: I often encounter the use of quotes to add weight to an idea. One told to me recently was ‘The definition of complexity is one control that does two things’. Often, yeah, designing one control to do two things does introduce unwanted complexity, the user has to learn two different ways to manipulate it to get different results. But sometimes the alternative of adding two controls to an interaction can introduce complexity by forcing a user to identify which control they need as well as then needing to figure out how to use it. For example a keyboard with one button for each alphanumeric function (one control, one function) is appropriate as one design solution, a track pad that can be manipulated in many ways (one control, many functions) is appropriate for another.

The point is, one control to perform two functions is not complex by default. It’s certainly not the definition of complexity. In one context it can be unnecessarily complex, in another not (Who decided that complexity was always negative anyway? Surely there is such a thing as an appropriately complex tool?). We’ve confused a specific (and valid) solution with a general and absolute rule. But worst of all we’ve gone on to make it irritating by making it a catchy quote. Actually the fact that an idea is expressed through a quote is really only a fault if you have the same collection of personality defects that I have. The form of a quote (although making it more likely it will be circulated out of context) is incidental to the fact that the quote has been removed from it’s original reasoning (and an excellent example of how the more a thing irritates me, the more likely I am to be guilty of it myself). The fault is in our confusion of a specific solution with general truisms.

This is compounded by the way we tend to latch on to these ideas as absolutes. We treat the rule as true until proven otherwise which in’t appropriate for a design idea I think. Any design idea that involves the words ‘never’ or ‘always’ should be treated with a great deal of suspicion. Always. See what I did there? Comedy gold.

On Fear Marketing & Our Amazing Ability to Tell the Future

When we feel very confident about an idea we tend to think of those who question that idea as not understanding the issue as well as we do. In our case this often manifests as the feeling they don’t ‘get’ the world we live in and the word we are all going to be living in in the near future. We (inadvertently I think, through the strength of our certainty, our confidence in our own insight) fall into the old marketing position of trading on people’s fears that we know something they don’t, their fears of being irrelevant and not understanding the changing word we are designing for.

This whole mobile thing is a good example of that. There seems to be a feeling that if you are not mobile first you are Beta Max. You are the CEO who gets his secretary to turn his long hand notes into emails, you are Microsoft predicting the internet won’t catch on. While we are already riding hover boards & feeding rubbish into our Deloreans. Mobile first is probably a bad example, it is actually a pretty engaging idea, it may be right, it might not be, I really don’t know. The thing is we trade a lot on our understanding of what users want, and also want they are going to want in the future. But we of all people should know that the future doesn’t always deliver what we expect it to. And although I think its essential to think ahead we need to make sure we are not absolutists in our declarations and dismissals. Scaring people to get them to engage with our ideas is really effective but it’s also self defeating as it closes down discussion. And fear makes people less likely to critically engage with an idea, to risk looking like they ‘don’t get it’. I think the confidence with which we think we know what the near future will bring, and the absolutism with which we express that certainty (and by extension with which we dismiss other, particularly older ideas) is unwarranted by our actual ability to peer forwards through the mists of time.

On UX Eating Itself

We need to chill out a bit about how people use the term UX and who is and isn’t a true UX person. People in my office talk about ‘putting some UX on it’ when they format their XL sheets, if you get stressed when someone gets UI designer and UX designer confused, you would shit yourself where I work. The important thing is to talk about what we do and how we work, express our role by explaining our value & not relying on the correct use of this term we just made up anyway. We can’t stop people calling themselves UX specialists when we don’t think they should be, we probably can’t stop people advertising for a UX designer when they want a CSS specialist.

Maybe it’s more productive to instead make sure we don’t rely too much on these terms, I’m not sure we will ever be able to control their use. We feel like some of us have earnt the title of UX practioners and that now people who haven’t earnt it are just running with it, living of our hard work at reputation building and destroying the value of that work. We played the small clubs, they went on X-factor and told a story about cancer. But we didn’t earn the title of User Experience professional ,we just gave it to ourselves. It’s a title not a qualification. We would be better off focusing on the quality of our own work and effectively communicating how we add value I think, people who are chancing it may be undermining the term User Experience but that doesn’t necessarily mean the are undermining our value as practitioners.

Mmmmm … Well, maybe. I’m still thinking about that one but that’s how it feels to me at the moment.

Somewhat defensively, On Contractors

The rates for contractors quite rightly stress out agencies who need contractors and even agencies who need permanent UX talent. It makes it unaffordable. But this isn’t unique to UX. I have a suspicion that it is financial services that is to blame. The rates they pay are so much higher than other industries that it distorts the whole London design scene. And not just design either, it steals talent and pushes up rates in every industry, offering questionable value to the greater economy outside of finance and making life more difficult for any other economic model.

But if you are making bucket loads of money as an agency by working for financial institutions, that same distortion is what is allowing you to charge so much. And especially when you are able to charge high rates at least partially on the strength of the experience of your contractors it seems strange to complain about it. Contractors charge the most they think they can get just like agencies do, and aren’t likely to charge less than they can get because it is better for an agency any more than an agency is about to pay contractors more because they are sympathetic to their desire for longer holidays. That’s not being greedy on the contractor’s part or mean spirited on the agencies’ part. Unless you’re working for Oxfam, that’s just business.

Most good senior contractors are only partially motivated by money anyway. I’ve taken on contracts for lesser amounts because of the promise of interesting work (I’ve also chosen a project because of it’s higher rates when two contracts have been very close in other factors, especially since I’ve had a baby). I am sympathetic though to how frustrating it must be to have to deal with just how high banking has pushed the rates for senior contractors. They are offering hundreds more a day and particularly if your own clients aren’t in Financial Services how do you compete with that? I think Jason Mesut is on the right track by talking to contractors about the quality of projects he works on and the other non monetary benefits of a project. Most designers I know will jump at the opportunity to do good work.

As Jason notes contracting’s limited time engagements and high rates can mean long holidays and lots of cash, which is massively appealing. But there are still lots of really good people who want permanent positions if you can find them. Declaration of interest: I’m a contractor. In my case its the freedom, cash, diversity of work and opportunity to work directly with companies on great projects that I like. I also genuinely feel there are many projects where I can often offer a client more through a direct relationship with them than I can through working though an agency. And for a client, however high a contractor’s rates may be it’s till much cheaper (and sometimes better value) than engaging an agency.

But this isn’t the problem really, I know for a fact that RMA pay reasonable contracting rates & have good relationships with their contractors. I think what really annoys people is inexperienced contractors asking for high rates. This risks the preputation damage to us as practitioners I mentioned before and frankly, it is just plain annoying. But again, if they can get those rates they would be foolish not to take them, although there is a strong argument that they are doing themselves a disservice in the long term by not placing themselves in situations where they can learn from more senior practitioners. My attitude to that is the same as my attitude towards the use of the term User Experience consultant, I try not to worry about it and instead focus on my own work. And yeah if you’re an agency, explain to them the long term development benefits of taking on a more junior role with it’s associated lesser salary. Or if you don’t think they are worth it, just don’t hire them.

Shortly I’m going to be opening up my own design practise, so check back with me in a year and see if I have developed an distaste for high contracting rates. Entirely possible.

Finally, On UX Celebrities

I’m fine with speaking and writing by non practising UX celebrity types. It’s harder to judge with UX speakers but I know that most web/graphic design webcelebrities usually aren’t the best designers. However they are often the best communicators, and often good thinkers as well. I’m glad there is a movement to encourage more skilled practice based designers who aren’t that interested in self promotion to share, we are definitely missing that. But if a speaker or writer has ideas that are valuable to me and can express them in a meaningful way then I am ok with the fact that they might not be the best real life practitioner.

This post is too long. I really should have saved these up and done them as 5 different blog posts. Then I could have published them a couple of weeks apart and put my feet up for a bit. Nevermind. Well done for making it to the end.

Babies’ heads, maps, whiteboards, everything

I was fortunate enough to attend the Guardians UX drop in yesterday afternoon. We learnt how content is organised for the website (everything is tagged basically then sections can be created pulling in content based on their tags, e.g. music & photography), how the UX team (or duo) work and where digital and UX is placed in the organisation. We also got to peek at the upcoming Guardian Android and Windows phone apps, got to sit in a pod in the middle of the building where every morning editorial staff sit on large low comfy couches and discuss each days issue and got an inside look on the design process behind their ‘9/11 Your Memories’ interactive feature from developer and journalist Jonathan Richards (what an intriguing combination of skills). I’m not going to do a ‘My Holiday’ type essay on it (although looking at what I just wrote I guess I just did) as the Guardian’s head of UX Martin Belam has a good run down of what was discussed here: UX drop-in at the Guardian. But there were a few things that might slip through available notes that I thought were interesting enough to quickly share:

Location

The Guardian is not produced in a grey and smokey news sweatshop as I sometimes imagine, but is actually on 3 floors of a rather plush building (Kings Place) that has a lovely outlook over Regents Canal. Frustratingly they have access to good coffee beans (Union) in the cafe downstairs that are then butchered by mediocre barristers into very average coffee.

Satisficing

A couple of interesting experiences came out of their initial designs for the 9/11 piece which invites people to submit what they were doing when they first heard about the attack on New York and Washington. In a facebook page inviting people to submit these experiences through a link to their interactive feature many people recorded their experiences on the comment field of that post. A classic example of satisficing behaviour and something to think about when creating pathways to controlled experiences.

Attention Misdirection

The other piece of user behaviour they discovered was on a section that asked people to pinpoint on a map where they were when they first learnt of the attack. The interface had a greyed out submit button in the conventional location next to the input box users entered their location into. It became active once the user had identified a location. However because the map updated dynamically as the user typed in their location users attention was diverted from the button and many users missed the change of state from unavailable to available. Some users consequently couldn’t proceed as they hadn’t realised the submit button was now active. There are many possible ways to solve this problem, they responded by moving the button to the location shown in the map where the users attention was directed, asking them to confirm that was the correct location.

Users This Week

The thing I saw at the drop in that I liked the most was Karen Loasby’s experiment with trying to talk to 3 users a week. Specifically her technique of writing up how many users they had talked to so far that week on a prominent whiteboard, causing nagging guilt when the number was low. In a busy organisation where reaching out to users needs to be very self directed this is an excellent idea for ensuring that you keep trying to test your ideas against reality when it is so easy to just let it go.

Danger Will Robinson

Any journalists can potentially enter any piece of HTML or Javascript into the Guardian CMS. So they can communicate using private APIs or custom code as well as just photographs, drawings and words. Even though this is risky security wise they value openness and innovation enough to tolerate a certain amount of risk in order to give their journalists the ability to communicate in unconventional ways. I wonder what the demographics are of the journalists who engage in the possibilities of that opportunity.

As You Were

Very interesting overall, particularly the idea of the Guardian being an open organisation and how that manifests in terms of their UX design, CMS and how they handle data. I thoroughly recommend you jump in if they hold another UX drop in. They are recruiting for UX people by the way if you are interested. Applications are here: UX and Information Architect

By far the highlight of the trip was the proximity of the Guardian building to my home, which meant I could meet my wife for lunch and had the rare treat of being able to smell my new daughter’s head during my lunch break. Lovely.