Time to do away with the UX discipline?
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
I've worked with UX professionals who were the powerhouse behind amazing products and were sometimes the only people at the entire company batting for the end users (which is the point of the article).
It really is a great experience to be a developer when there's a skilled UX designer working full-time on such a hard problem upstream from you. And it's a harder job than I think most people realize. Balancing UI with the constraints of being human friendly is its own class of engineering.
Looking at all the UX turds that developers come up with because UX is hard, you'd think the top comment would be a bit more understanding or appreciative of UX work. I guess this hubris is why good UX is so rare, especially among "Show HN" projects. ;)
BTW, the article doesn't trash UX professionals as unnecessary which is how you and other HNers want to interpret the title. Rather, the article does the opposite. It points out that ideally you strive for good UX at the systemic/organizational level, not just depend on some UX hotshots to save your ass.
That only reflects the quality of people you tend to work with.
Wherever you worked, may be they were low in design maturity ie., without optimal ux culture. There would be 100 such places for 1 that has robust design driven product development culture.
Also, that place may be hiring poorly, which in turn reflects on the leadership of that place, and so on..
I'm trying to move away from front end/software and into a more UX/Product design role. I think my experience is valuable because I have have good 'digital taste', user empathy, and desire to make data-driven decisions. I generally lack the graphic design skills of visual designers outside of wireframes and low-fi mockups, but I make up for it in the ability to bring together business, creative, and technology. UX is building a 'sweet spot' balance of those things.
And by the way, it's totally possible to learn good enough visual design skills to be effective. IMO the idea that only certain special people can be visual designers is part of the same false narrative that causes us to trust people with no technical understanding to design interfaces.
Any resources you felt helped you in that switch?
I worked at a marketing agency from 2016-11 to 2019-06. Went from developer to 'Director of Software' in Jan 2019. Fancy title at a 15-person agency, really just part of the leadership team. I couldn't put my finger on what it was I wanted, and I thought I wanted to return to being an individual contributor to software. Management role was fine by itself, but I didn't feel like my seat had an end 'work product' result; and I also didn't feel valued since it was basically a dual role and was paid relatively poorly.
Any given day, I was working with strategy (client), creative, marketing/copywriting, and software teams to get on the same page. I was doing all of these things:
- story writing (user stories, criteria, and tests)
- wireframing and workflows
- low-fi mockups in Sketch
- information architecture
- data/analytics research
- technical guidance
I had input on every step of the process, from running ideation meetings with clients to launching new apps. And my work product was always well received and useful to every team.
So, I departed for a startup earlier this year, but realized quickly I wasn't missing deep coding. I came to realize I was missing the work I was doing outside of my management role. I read more about ux/product design and the type of work involved really spoke to me. So, now I'm trying to figure out that transition professionally.
You wouldn't be able to get away with that in most large companies where there are large and established ux practices. They, like other orgs have to justify their existence through value they deliver.
I don't disagree with the premise but it's pretty clear this is a thinly veiled piece of content marketing for his digital agency. Hey I'd love to get fat 6 month retainer agreements for "digital transformation" projects too!
However UX professionals tend to take a more scientific approach to experimenting and analyzing user behavior.
Not a new education or new field of study they did... It was just on Monday they were graphic artist... and on Tuesday they were a UX-Expert ! If someone tells me make this button yellow and move it down. I want to quantitative science on yellow and why ? Or at least a statistical test(call it A/B if you want).
I have no idea where all these sudden so called experts came from overnight.
As that one quote goes. "If we don't have data and only opinions let use mine.(sic ?)"
Maybe it's a coincidence, idunno. But Windows got this right like 25 years ago, and somehow it's gone away in spite of us now having "UX designers".
So, the article actually criticises how broad the term ux is and that we should have more specialisation and appreciate that.
http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/
> The role of “experience” is to hide programmability or even customizability of the system, to minimize and channel users’ interaction with the system.
>UX fills awkward moments when AI fails. It brings “user illusion” to a level where users have to believe that there is no computer, no algorithms, no input.
> It is achieved by providing direct paths to anything a user might want to achive, by scripting the user and by making an effort on audiovisual and aesthetic levels to leave the computer behind.
> We are giving up our last rights and freedoms for “experiences,” for the questionable comfort of “natural interaction.”
> But there is no natural interaction, and there are no invisible computers, there only hidden ones. Until the moment when, like in the episode with The Guardian, the guts of the personal computer are exposed.
This assumes intuitive UX forces you to use a product a certain way. There's no reason this has to be true. Good products can be used intuitively and can grant their users programmer-like powers.
Take Google Search, for example. It's easy to use; you can largely speak to it like you would to a human -- type "what time is giants game tonight" and you'll get the answer you're looking for. But you can also use operators and other power features to perform specific and precise searches. So good UX merely gives less savvy users a leg up; it doesn't force a mediocre experience on power users.
Tools have always guided their usersas much as users guided their tools; UX is doubling down on the former.
On the other hand, there are the endless 'corporate glitz' sites which look great but convey no immediately useful content (e.g. RSS links). If they do have it, their slick emptiness endeavors to obscure it. [Disclosure: I admire Zeldman].
*
"So layouts, graphics, scripts, tools and solutions made by naïve users were neither seen as a heritage nor as valuable elements or structures for professional web productions."
"I am mainly interested in early web amateurs because I strongly believe that the web in that state was the culmination of the Digital Revolution."
Wow these people are all in on the koolaid. Am I interpreting the meaning here correctly if I think they mean employees can work even longer hours to incorporate this?
UX is about cold efficiency and UI is touchy-feely.
Having someone do both UI and UX is like having your architect also be your interior designer. On the surface, it seems like one person could do both, but in reality they require VASTLY different skills and knowledge bases.
Good analogy since almost everyone needs an architect for their software as well as their buildings, but much fewer can be seen to benefit from a designer in either case whether they use them or not.
I wouldn't cry over it because I've been in favor of broader technical skills and emotional capabilities for a long time, just old fashioned I guess.
Nope, by the time Feld was complaining, it was one of the most fundamental things that had been sorely forgotten; that programmers are supposed to naturally always craft everything with the users in mind without needing a non-programming designer, and have it come out more usable that way.
Without programmers adequate enough at all levels, the shortcuts & workarounds can work out fairly ugly even if the interfaces look fairly attractive on the outside.
This whole article is about overcoming the technical debt in organizations that skipped the effort necessary to build their group with fully user-dedicated programmers from top leadership on down to begin with.
When designing a system you always need to start top down.
Too many times I see a developer sit down an immediately start from the database.
Start from the UI or API. Just like we have UX for UI, you should be taking experience into account when designing an API.
It's a known programming adage that you should start by getting data structures right, and proper algorithms will follow. In my experience, the shape of data and ways you work with it have so huge impact on what must be presented on the screen that I'm starting to feel it might be best to delay UI/UX work until you have all that figured out.
Exactly at the moment I read this, an auto-playing Volvo commercial started making noise just below that paragraph. Ugh. We're a long, long way from advertising putting "users" first.
Maybe because the first and most prominent products using this term had profoundly bad UIs.