UX is the death of UX(?)
by Brandon SchauerAll practices of design have had a history of incorporating a human-centered perspective. That’s the realization Mark Baskinger, Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design, shared his recent article in UX Magazine. But unlike industrial design, he argues that UX doesn’t have a concreate tangible artifact, which puts it at risk as a practice:
As UX and UXD migrate toward the strategic center of design practice, UX practitioners run the risk of becoming marginalized as specialists equipped to handle only the front end of the design development process. What is currently missing in much of UX practice is the delivery of a concrete tangible artifact—a synthesized outcome.
And to me, that’s the value of designing for experiences. We’re creating solutions with a heavy consideration for the situation and context, often stretching between artifacts (web page, device screen, call center), not just the artifact itself as the start-and-the-end.
Mark — who admittedly is one of my favorite designer educators — goes on to write:
As we trek toward 2011, the articulation of design and user experience will continue to shift from design as an entity (the “it”), to designing as a behavior (the “ing”). It’s really the act of designing that matters, so we should focus on designing rather than design.
As we wrote about in Subject to Change, design as an activity is much more powerful than design as a thing.
But Mark’s warning about real artifacts is important to heed. While experiences can feel intangible, organizations can rally around tangibles. That’s why Adaptive Path is largely made up of “makers,” folks who bring experiences to life through the things we make — screens, interactions, service guides, and tools for communicating and deploying new experiences.
And for more thinking along these lines, see Service Design Deliverables, a post by Jamin Hegeman of Adaptive Path.
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June 9th, 2010 at 10:38 am
Brandon: you raise some good and interesting points. How do we in UX make tangible such a gerund (or is it a participle) as “designing” — especially in lieu of having genuinely standardized or ubiquitous forms of design artifacts?
What can we learn and perhaps appropriate from other sibling disciplines (traditional architecture, space planning, movie production, etc.) which have codified and standardized artifacts? Does it really come down to a foundational notion of timeline which unifies the experience while giving a sense of action/dynamism to it?
June 9th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Thanks for chiming in, John. Can you say more about standardization? I’m not sure I would have immediately thought of that as a solution, but hey, I’m ready to listen/read about it.
June 9th, 2010 at 9:41 pm
Nice article Brandon. I think in part the issue with UX is that it is part Project Manager, part designer, and part six-sigma (in understanding the business). Most recently I think the area of UX has started to get into and will get into some topics related to behavior economics. As a person who is trying to get into the career of a experience design (with a background in Java, Unix, business analysis, and e-learning) I find it hard to explain to my boss what a UX or experience designer actually does. I can show her but its not clear as Brandon discussed on the tangibles. I think John is right about standards. Some of those questions are:What are the standard techniques, standard tools, standard artifacts created, and standard processes within a project defined by something like PMBOK. I think even how a UX or experience designer fits within our traditional roles is unchartered territory for many.
June 10th, 2010 at 12:13 am
Personally, I think any insistance on tangibles is absurd. What makes one restaurant better than another? What are the tangibles? The food? Hardly. You can get a salad lots of places. I assure you the salad you get in McDonalds is not the same as the salad you get at Chez Panisse over in Berkeley.
The Michelin Guide does look for tangibles (for example, you can’t get a star if you only serve lunch, but not dinner). But it’s the quality of the food that is the real kicker. And quality is delightfully INtangible.
The advertising industry has been looking for tangibles for years – without success. The only metric that is relevant is whether people buy your product or buy into your idea or service. But there are no “tangibles” in the advertising itself. Deliverables, yes, but these are NOT the same at all.
After over 80 years of scientific advertising methods (with Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, and John Caples showing us the way), there are still a lot of clueless clients out there. The same applies to industrial design, despite the best efforts of Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfus and Brooks Stevens back in the 40s and 50s (and despite Mark Baskinger’s otherwise excellent remarks).
The sad fact is, there will continue to be clueless clients for UX, too. But that doesn’t mean UX is dead, or a dumb discipline to pursue. It just means not all clients can be helped. As Jared Spool says, “If a client insists on sticking a peanut up their nose, well, there’s nothing you can do to stop them.”
But here’s a simple solution: stop treating UX like a product and start treating it like a service. Suddenly the parameters that really are important will start to show themselves. Karl Albrecht and Ron Zemke nailed this in “Service America” back in 1985. I’ve quoted them on slide 64 in this presentation:
http://www.slideshare.net/ericreiss/reiss-on-e-service-ux-london
Tangibles aside, I was delighted to see your holistic view of UX. I’m sick and tired of folks insisting this is something that only has to do with the web.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, Brandon.
June 17th, 2010 at 11:16 am
After mulling this over a bit, I think both Brandon and Eric are right.
We need to be delivering something tangible in that it can be easy transmitted and discussed. However, it need not be tangible in the sense that you can physically touch it or be able to print it and put it on the shelf.
The tangible that’s useful is of ideas and shared understanding. That’s why, when we find a way to describe something or illustrate it people get so excited. They understand the idea, and they can also take it, own it, and tell others about it. These tangible ideas are like magnets around which people can collect. The more powerful, or tangible, the idea, the most people are attracted to it, and the larger the effect on the organization.
That tangibility is one of the main strengths of UX. We look to find connections between the customers and the org, then create ideas for ways that will satisfy both. For users, an experience (regardless of channel) is the tangible artifact. For the organization, we should continue to evolve how we construct and communicate our ideas so that they result in that magnetic, or tangible effect of understanding.
Most tangible of all is the a shared organizational vision, one that’s shared both by the employees at all levels of the org and by the customers. I hope that we continue to evolve how we create our tangible ideas and help organizations get them into a form where everyone has ownership.
Thanks for the post, Brandon.
June 17th, 2010 at 12:09 pm
I agree with Chris about the tangible aspect. Design whether good or bad creates activity in the form of comments so both in affect create tangible although virtual results. Good design can be measured in many ways but one is specifically in the amount of positive communication generated (through social networks). In the end we all know that if you can people talking about a product (because of a design) in a positive way (especially consumers) then those are tangible results. This is especially true if your virtually platform for communicating this design collects add revenue based on high activity. Group dynamics (think of the birthday paradox) helps good design spread and cements great design (Apple) in the minds of many. The traditional focus on ROI doesn’t make sense. Traditional economic theory doesn’t take into account things like behavior economics. UX in a sense is the virtual method of communicating meaning and when people take in that meaning their actions are sometimes irrational (as compared to standard economic theory because we are sometimes emotional not logical). So to save UX we have to look the social collective (social networks) affected by great design (in terms of social activity) and understand how when we communicate meaning people make it their own. There are many behavior economic studies involving how just picking two different words changes behavior (statistically significant in small studies)
If one of the acknowledge benefits of UX is to focus on the experience including the emotional experience generated then we need to see UX as a sub-component of behavior economics.