How To Torture a User Experience Designer
We bounced this idea off the walls inside Adaptive Path and came up with a list of our favorite, excruciating scenarios:
- Sit them down in front of another awkwardly designed seat-back media player…on a plane….for 5 hours.
- Send them this photo, tell them it was taken somewhere in their 10 story office building…but don’t tell them which floor or room:
- Call a “collaborative working session” on a hotly debated topic in a room with no sticky notes, sharpies or whiteboards.
- Equate “user experience” with “user interface.”
- Insist they follow Jakob Nielsen‘s instructions to the letter.
- Make them work solo.
- Forbid them from taking photos of failures. Like this:
- Preface all design feedback with “Well, I’m a visual person…”
- Always mention being a Six Sigma blackbelt in discussions around user experience design.
- Ask them to answer the question “So…what do you do?”
* Photos by (in order of appearance): Kate Rutter & Indi Young
There are 20 comments on this idea.
Brilliant. Just brilliant. Bravo ya’ll, you nailed it :)
Haha,
I was just on a flight playing with the onboard media players and thinking the exact same thing and complaining about it.
Brilliant blog post title, Teresa! You had me drawn in. Hope this gets lots of additions in the comments!
Aww great. Just what my colleagues need to see…
I would add:
Tell them during a design review, that you want it to be “more like facebook”
Great feedback, everyone—we’re glad to hear you are enjoying this list as much as we enjoyed creating it! And nice add, Dana.
We just did #3. No markers! No stickies! No tape! But we had a roll of red-and-yellow stickers intended to identify trash that the cleaners can safely haul away. We used those stickers to glue together the different pieces of paper to assemble the sketch. In huge red-on-yellow letters, our design says “GARBAGE” all over it. But we don’t care because our thoroughly iterated design rules!
YIKES, I have the exact replica of #2 on my desk in front of me
Jerome—you guys are inspiring. Now we know that, in fact, you CAN’T torture a UX designer with hotly debated topic and a room with no stickies, markers or whiteboards…because they will just make their own out of scrap. Thank you for being our test subjects!
Cath…WHAT are you DOING?!!! Fix it QUICK!!
In the vein of nightmare UX experiences and seat back monitors….check THESE illustrations by Christoph Niemann
Even with two solid weeks of wireframing and a crushing due date of today, this was able to make me laugh..
This is great, you hit on major pain points, but one more: Title link that reloads the same page.
I Love this post! I’ve been sharing it with everyone I can think of who will get it.
Awwww, Aaron you made our day.
Yep. Torturous.
Thanks, Sam! Glad you enjoyed. We did too (making it).
Very creative and all very true! Thanks for some fun : )
Check out some answers to question #10 in our IxDA video - and early bird registration for the Interaction ‘11 conference in Boulder, CO!
My parents would like the copy for ” So, what does your son do? He is a User Experience Designer. ohhhhhh, ok they reply.
You are hilarious… love how you drive the point home with the sarcastic -humor.
You must write well, i remember it even after i have composed myself :-P
This is about the most true thing I’ve read on the Web. I can’t describe anything without drawing. I think I’d add to your list of torture, “Tell a user experience designer that there’s no time observe the design with users, it can be fixed later if there’s a problem.” So, is it user experience design if there’s no user participation?
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