How to Pretend You Know UX When You Don't

"There is no such thing as a “design perspective.”"

Hello? There's a whole theory of design: grids, colors, hierarchy, typography, etc. It's not as simple as "drawing something pretty" as most may think. This may of course clash with UX and a good professional will know how to balance them. (And of course some may pull this card as to push their personal preferences, as developers pull the "this can't be done" card often for the same reasons)

About 7: yes, it's a bad idea if you do it blindly, but it may often be your best guess. Adapt to your situation and check if it works for you.

Before there was UX there was UI. UX is a modern concept that basically came with the web. Yet people designed effective interfaces in applications long before the web (which is why it was called UI). Back in the 80's the idea that artist type people could design interfaces was not common at all, in fact it was more of a programmer speciality (today people laugh at this). The point was that you were trying to identify how people could effectively interact with your application and generally you had to do that in code. There was no Photoshop to draw pictures in. I used Hypercard in those days when I needed to show how I thought it should work to product managers or other programmers. Then I did the implementation. In those days you usually had to figure it out yourself as their were few resources to even look at.

Today the concept of UX is very different and few UX people would ever consider implementation part of their job of even consider it in their design work.

Left with nothing more than having spent some time watching the OP pat his own back.

(I Still don't know how to pretend I know UX or feel any better at sniffing out fakers)

It's often repeated that "developers don't know UX", but some has taken that to mean that UX/UI decisions should be taken by anyone other programmers.

That's not to say I disagree with what it says. As a UX designer I've been on the receiving end of most of these - and probably perpetrated a few as well.

(Slightly off-topic: I don't think the term Information Architecture is helpful even though that's what I do. IA, UX, UE, EA, whatever - it's all design. Though Information Architect or Experience Architect does sound fancier than just Designer.)

Design perspectives are vital as good design is about finding creative solutions to problems, best practices and patterns are useful as they help avoid common mistakes and research and testing is useful for refining and developing existing ideas.

However, the main difference between a blagger and a real expert is that the latter is able to articulate where and why each rule, guideline, finding etc. should be followed or broken.

I would be interested in an article that explains how a good conversation proceeds. Any thought?

I am amazed at how many times I've heard from charlatans, "We have data that shows..." which is analogous to your "The research says..." Then when you ask for the non-existent data it turns into a "don't look behind the curtain" discussion straight from the Wizard of Oz.

Don't let the angry designers commenting here make you think that your post isn't accurate. It is. I suspect a lot of people erroneously think you're talking about them merely because they've never had the displeasure of working with a true fraud who uses these techniques constantly.

This article would be awesome if every point is related in the sense of situations. For example, you're in situation A where you probably will need to use the infamous X argument, don't use it, try to argue Y better. That explains both problem and best exit and, also denotes the process you need to do for making a seriously good UX.

Unfortunately, the info is mostly helpful in hindsight. One must have had an experience with a so-called "UX expert" to really appreciate this article, but I'm not sure it would have helped me in occasions I had the clash with some self-appointed UX "guru"... But it was a fun read nevertheless and very very very true! Thanks!

Funny in the context of an article peppered with the term "UX". I know what it means, and I suspect most people on HN know what it means, but does the average "client, boss, and colleague" know what it means? If not, then it's jargon.

Oh, and "eye tracking, card sorting, .. , A/B testing". Ditto.

I enjoyed this article and agreed with all the points. However, I am calling bullshit on the title "Experience Architect"

When you collect the data you can test things 'from a design perspective' and 'best practice' standpoint and see if those hold true. Any other way and you're making stuff and justifying your decisions after the fact.

If you're not talking to users then you're not doing USER experience design, you're just making up an experience design. See Whitney Hess: http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2011/04/23/youre-not-a-user-expe...

1) "From a design perspective" - bad wording, true, but the underlying idea is "from a user-centric perspective" as opposed to "from an implementation, engineering, or data-centric perspective". The latter still being unfortunately the driving force behind most interfaces, any designer will need to use some form of this phrase fairly frequently in most real-world situations.

2) "Best Practices say" - again, this can be misused, but heuristic and expert evaluations of an interface are the bread and butter of most designers' toolset. A/B testing, on-site user testing, user interviews, et al, are all great tools, but in many cases, they're luxuries. When you're part of a small team trying to hit a MVP, starting with baseline best practices is the pragmatic way to go. Insisting on reinventing every dropdown or tabset is a sure fire way to singlehandedly sink a startup.

3) "Let's use an analogy" - generic, applicable to any problem-solving endeavor. This has nothing to do with UX. This is where the whole article started really stinking of linkbait.

4) Jargon - industry jargon is a powerful way of communicating specific, granular concepts to a peer audience. Yes, if you're using UX jargon when presenting your ideas to an outside audience, you're doing it wrong. But saying jargon is wrong is just dumb, and once again, jargon is hardly a UX-specific phenomenon.

5) "The research says" - let's just repeat #2 and blather on some more

6) Again, see #2.

7) Ok, so the basic idea here is that the True Pure UX involves coming up with brilliant new concepts in a vacuum. Leveraging successful ideas is verboten. I'm not sure how this guy could get anything done without the support of a 20-person UX team, with the other 19 people covering for his theoretical brilliance.

8) To be perfectly honest, I don't think I've ever heard the term focus groups used by anyone in the UX field, and I've been at it since '98. But you need 10 bullets on that list, I guess.

9) Probably the only point on this list that I agree with, and something I'd never seen until very recently. The concept of "stupid users" has obviously been entrenched in the development side since Day 1, hence the need for UX in the first place. But it's definitely disturbing to start seeing supposed user advocates start to toss this one around.

10) Big numbers are bad unless they're the right big numbers. Gotcha, mate. Misusing statistics and measurements is obviously an epidemic confined solely to the UX sphere, and not a basic human foible.