Rule-based mistakes and my stupid phone keeps doing stuff I didn’t ask it to
You know how sometimes, say you’re in the middle of doing something on your phone, and then suddenly it goes off on one, like it’s got a mind of its own, and does something you didn’t ask it to do?
Well, the reason might just have been because you made a rule based mistake.
A postnote publication (2001) from the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology on Managing Human Error (PDF) was issued in the aftermath of the Cullen Report for the Ladbroke Grove rail crash.
The article describes issues around human attention characteristics:
Attention on a task can only be sustained for a fairly short period of time, depending on the specifications of the task.
One of the things that affects attention is habit formation:
Habit forming – if a task is repeated often enough, we become able to do it without conscious supervision, although this ‘automatisation’ of regular and repetitive behaviour can force us into mistakes.
The paper then quotes a great example:
The Automatic Warning System installed on all passenger trains in the UK is an example of a system that was not designed with limitations of human attention in mind. It is a device fitted in the train cab, based on the now obsolete mechanical system of signalling that used to signal either STOP or PROCEED. It sounds a bell when a clear (green) signal is passed and a buzzer when caution or danger is signalled. If the buzzer is not acknowledged by the press of a button, then the train begins to stop automatically.
In commuter traffic, most signals will be at the ‘caution’ aspect, and given the frequency of signals (spaced 1km apart), most drivers will face two signals per minute. Given the tendency for the attentional system to automate highly repetitive behaviour, many drivers lose focus on the reasons for carrying out this repetitive task, and act in reflex whenever the buzzer sounds. The end result is that drivers often hear the buzzer and press the button reflexively without actively thinking about train speed and location.
Source: Davies, D. (2000): Automatic Train Protection for the Railway Network in Britain [PDF] – A study. RA Eng., London
So – we are predisposed to automatically delegate repetitive actions to our subconscious whilst our ‘conscious brain’ deals with concentrating on other things that are going on around us.
How does this relate to the opening line above?
Well, did your phone really do something you didn’t ask it to do – or in fact did you make a mistake and select the wrong thing, believing it to be the right thing, because you were processing the action subconsciously – without time for the conscious part of your brain to recognise the current scenario did not confirm to the rules you believed were being adhered to and followed?
Here’s an example of how it can happen:
Android has a system of application updates. You can set the apps to update automatically, but when an app needs to ask permission to access more parts of the phone than a previous version, the app gets queued in the Play Stores list of apps requiring a manual update (at which point permission will be sought).
When you have a number of apps to update and you don’t want to ‘Update All‘, you have to go through a repetitive process of choosing an app in the list, waiting for the app page to appear and then clicking the Update button.
By the time you’ve done a few of these, you start to form a repetitive sequence of actions – select app, press update, accept permisions, go back, select app, press update…etc
You start to offload the process to your subconscious.
So when you get this sequence of screens:
Whoa! What’s going on, this app just opened without being asked!
Well, check the position of the update button in each screen. It’s in the same position on every screen (above the Uninstall button) – except the last one, where there is no uninstall option and the Open button has shunted the Update button down.
Because you’re in this subconscious repetitive action, you’re not even reading the words on the buttons any more. You know where the button is that you need to click. You know there’s two buttons and it’s the top one you need. There’s not enough of a different scenario for the subconscious to trigger an alert and raise the task up to the conscious processing.
The application opens – and only then do you take note of this unexpected event for what you believe to be inexplicable reasons. In all likelihood, if someone asked what you did you’ll say ‘I just pressed the update button and it just opened up instead of doing what I asked!’, probably followed by ‘Stupid phone!’
And that’s how it happens. We see this very often on confirmation dialogs and other scenarios where we just don’t read what we see, we just subconsciously assume away.
When designing small interactions, have a thought for whether they are prone to repetition. If so, think about what alternate designs might prevent rule based mistakes, because it might not be just an app opening up – it might be a whole lot more serious than that!
UX Cambridge 2013 – Reviewed, and An Apology
Last week was UX Cambridge 2013, mark three. I don’t know if three years is enough to establish a conference, but If I didn’t know, I’d never have guessed it was only in it’s third year. The whole event in the lovely grounds of Churchill College went without a hitch (as far as I know)!
Wednesday
Wednesday was Workshop day. I might be biased by the fact that my project was chosen on our table for the duration of the morning, but I found Tyler Tate‘s workshop on Designing the Search Experience so good I went out and bought his book right away. Of particular interest I thought was the framework for examining The Information Needs of Mobile Searchers (PDF), which serves as a great basis on which to start thinking about the people who are going to use your search tools.
Meanwhile Mike Atherton‘s workshop on Content Modelling in the afternoon was similarly engaging and could easily have been extended to a day or two. Adrian Howard’s table tried to apply the basics of content modelling relationships to Twin Peaks – something of a challenge possibly?!
Thursday
Thursday started with a keynote by John Thackara about ‘Doors of Perception‘. John started by saying that 5 minutes into giving the talk at a previous IxDA event, someone tweeted ‘What’s this got to do with my job’. Bad form, what!? I kind of see where they were coming from, but just because the message wasn’t written in 200pt Nexa XBold with a <blink> tag on the first slide doesn’t mean that the message wasn’t there, or relevant to us all. In fact, in a way, his talk was probably the most inspiring of the whole event, because he (indirectly) not only asks us to look inward at what we do in our jobs, but also asks us to look outward at our place in the world and see how we can connect the two in order to benefit as many people as possible. My interpretation was that of context – that there is always a bigger picture to the bigger picture. What I couldn’t immediately rectify in my own mind however, was how to expand my comfortable little world so as to benefit others – maybe some sort of geographical based matching of not-for-profit projects against skills available from volunteers?
Next up for me was Michele Ide-Smith – Getting Started with Sketchnoting. OK I thought – I can draw, a bit. I can take notes. Therefore I can sketchnote – all I need to know is the methods. How wrong was I! I was rubbish. Everything blended into a homogenous mess where nothing stood out and everything gravitated towards one corner of the page. Oh dear, this is more tricky than I expected. Samantha Hosea however, put everyone to shame. So the key here for me obviously, was practice, practice practice.
Lee McIvor‘s session on The Art and Science of UX and Responsive Design was riddled with tips on responsive design – but tantalisingly we didn’t get to see the results of his most recent project where all this had been applied.
Bonny Colville-Hyde talked about Content, Clients and Responsive Design. Whilst she partly perpetuated the fact that there are a lot of bad UX agencies out there, she also stood up for the good agencies who do things right. A lot of what she was saying was clearly resonating with many of the people in the room. Bonny gave away cool pencils at the end. Free swag is always good.
Paula de Matos and Jenny Cham rushed through their tutorial: Survival Guide for Complex UX reminding us that you can’t rush the simplification of complexity! I was sad though, to miss Alberta Soranzo‘s overlapping workshop on Taming Taxonomy.
Lightning talks followed and speakers were not to be hurried despite Ryan practically hopping up and down in front of them when their time was up!
A wonderful punting and BBQ evening rounded off a great day.
Friday
Friday started with Stephanie Rieger‘s keynote on the Designing for [mobile] Diversity. This was a fresh talk but it came across like it was being delivered for the 100th time. Crammed with bite sized facts and figures, this was an awesome awesome keynote.
I’m something of a fan of Caroline Jarrett, so her workshop on Design Tips for Forms and Improving the UX of Complex Transactions was always going to brilliant. I was not disappointed. Caroline was also giving out wooden spoons for deserving comments. I was proud to get the only spoon for lying [it was obvious], although Caroline said it was for (ahem) creativity. She was also extolling the virtues of Ginny Redish‘s book Letting Go of The Words (Second edition mind!) which was my second immediate purchase after the conference. I heartily recommend it if you write words. Anywhere.
Jessica Ivins gave a wonderful case study of Introducing the UX process into a Culture, describing how in the first year of being in her current role she introduced UX research, methods and analysis to the company and her colleagues at AWeber.
The day was rounded off for me by the great Whitney Quesenbery talking about Creating a Web For Everyone, extolling the virtues and outcomes of properly considering not just accessibility, but purpose; structure; interaction; wayfinding; presentation and plain language.
There’s lots of coverage of UX Cambridge on Lanyrd.
An apology
I don’t live far from Cambridge, so it’s a bit embarrassing not to have been supporting a local UX event until now, since UX is my passion, but nevertheless, this was my first UX Cambridge.
Earlier in the year, I heard Mark Dalgarno say someone had said UX Cambridge was better than UX London. Why, I nearly snorted in my cider as I exclaimed WHAT!! Not possible. I really really enjoyed UX London 2012. The speaker list was second to none: Buxton, Spool, Kolko, Rubin, Wroblewski, Anderson, Buley, Reichelt, Halvorson, DeRouchey, and many more. So hearing this made me chuckle in disbelief.
Well, I take my hat off and openly apologise for my apple flavoured outburst. UX Cambridge was better than UX London. Sure, UX London had the names, but UX Cambridge had names too, good ones. But UX Cambridge also had a dose of reality – workshops and case studies, tutorials and lessons learned in environments that more people will find relevant and useful in the real world. And that’s way more important.
But UX Cambridge was not just about the speakers, it was about the people who attended. UX Cambridge was smaller, more friendly, more social, more manageable, more comfortable. Just more.
I thought Mark, Ryan, Jacqui, Cara and everyone else all did a wonderful job. One thing though – the swag bag – maybe next year a little packet of delight with my lanyard – a bag of pork scratchings maybe?!
Responsive design does not mean ‘designed for touch’
Responsive design seems to have become this approach to design that says:
If we take our existing website and give it a responsive design, then we’re good for mobile, right?
Well, actually – NO!
I commented on this at a talk I gave on mobile UX last week to the Cambridge Mobile App Group.
I gave the Adobe products page as an example. On desktop browsers this is a 4 column page listing all their products, featured products, and other info.
A year ago, you got the same thing on mobile as you did on desktop – a ridiculously big page for a smartphone sized screen. You had to choose between
a) seeing more content but not being able to click efficiently on a link without hitting 5 at the same time
or
b) being able to touch the links but having to pan around a lot to discover and browse content.
Now, Adobe made the page responsive, but all the same content is still there on the one page. Yes, the headers have some less important items squashed together into a drop menu, but the result of the responsive tweak is that there is now a massive great long page because all four columns have become one long one. Hence – a hell of a lot of scrolling.
In a way, I’m actually torn between the non responsive and the responsive design of this page (neither are good). In the non responsive design, all parts of the page are reachable more easily – the two dimensional layout means no point on the page is really that far away. But on the responsive design, the bottom of the page is faaaar awaaaaay from the top, likely meaning more touch interaction required to browse the page. Features that were fairly oriented towards top right, (by virtue of being placed top of the fourth column), such as ‘Log in to Creative Cloud’, now end up being 80% of the way down the page.
Also the Featured Products area has become paged via a left and right arrow that is less than 1mm wide!
My complaint with many sites moving to responsive design is that a half-baked global responsive approach to large websites does not address the detail of interaction at the level where users will actually notice the changes. It’s a top down instead of a bottom up approach.
Designers need to think more about designing for touch and that means a bottom up rethink of the way users interact with content, not just throwing this responsive skin around it as a slapdash way of porting a website to the realm of mobile usability.
And as Brian Fling says, “Great mobile products are created, never ported“
Mobile UX – Cambridge Mobile App Group Event – 16 July 2013
I will be speaking at the Cambridge Mobile App Group in Cambridge (UK) on Tuesday 7pm about mobile user experience. There are still spaces available for this talk.
The talk will cover:
Considerations for the user experience when transitioning content from the desktop to the mobile platform, whether that’s websites, apps, or websites that behave like apps.
What you might want to consider when it seems to be too late for the ‘Mobile First’ methodology.
Designing the user experience around the constraints and capabilities that mobile provides and the types of user behaviour that mobile entails.
The relationship between desktop and mobile content and the cross channel experience.
There will be an in depth look at a couple of examples and the talk should be of interest to designers, developers, researchers (in fact, basically anyone) involved with, or just interested in, projects for mobile devices.
Google Glass User Interface Guidelines
As Google releases the new Developer API info (the ‘Mirror’ API) for Glass we also get a new set of user interface guidelines to go with the dozens of others that can be collected from around the web.
Here’s Timothy Jordan speaking at SXSW recently about Glass and building new experiences for Glass, including it’s timelines, cards, bundles, subscriptions, OAuth, examples and other API info. Note how many times he reiterates about the need to design for glass.
Oh – and in case you’re in doubt, don’t forget you can’t go scuba diving with Glass.
What is user experience? Exactly.
I’ve been asked a few times recently, “So what exactly is user experience?”
It’s a good question, but there’s a problem with it. The word ‘exactly’. Trying to define user experience exactly is like trying to nail jelly to a wall.
However, recently a Munich based user experience and interactive design studio Envis Precisely made an infographic (see below) outlining the disciplines of user experience.
I think they did a pretty good job, but a lot of people involved in user experience will be looking at it and thinking ‘Looks pretty, but where do I fit in here’. And that includes those with such titles and fields as Service Design, Content Strategy, UX Strategy and others.
The criticism won’t stop there. Others will complain that there’s no intersection between certain disciplines like HCI and Computer Science, or that the size of circle for their field is disproportionate in it’s importance or in relation to others, like Writing (content and micro-copy).
And that’s the problem – this infographic is not meant to define relationships between all these disciplines. It can’t, because there is no rigorous definition of the terms. Interaction design is not 37.34% user interface design according to some role-based equivalence of the SI standards. There’s so much that affects a person’s view of these disciplines, and it varies from person to person, project to project, org to org.
There is no way this chart could be fixed and keep everyone happy, and certainly not have it remaining accessible.
So this chart does not, and cannot answer the question ”So what exactly is user experience?”, especially as asked by someone already in the field.
No – what I like about this graphic is that it answers the question “So what is user experience”, as asked by someone seeking understanding and who does not already have an opinion, and in that context, I think this visualization is (almost) perfect.
An interesting question raised by Saffer in that article was that of ”what is user experience design by itself, those areas that aren’t filled up with other bubbles?”
It would be wrong to think of this as an empty or negative space. The opposite in fact, because as Dan goes on to say: the practice of user experience design itself is about the “management and coordination between the disciplines“, not solely the involvement in the disciplines themselves.
That, I think is a great way to look at trying to explain user experience – not just as a set of disciplines; not limited to the relationships between them, but the coordinated cohesion of the disciplines into an environment that produces not just a product, but a great product.
So – if you want a metaphor that uses bubbles: User Experience is not just the bubbles that float, it is the air that carries them, and the surface tension that bonds them.
Credit: Bubbles photo by flickr user sfllaw (source - license)
Luke Wroblewski interview with Joe Welinske of Blink
Joe Welinske of Blink recently interviewed Luke Wroblewski, and as the ConveyUX website reports, Luke discusses the reaction to his book Mobile First. He offers suggestions for UX professionals on how to gain support for a mobile first design strategy.
You can hear the interview over at at ConveyUX, but I found the audio a bit of a struggle to deal with, so here’s my rough notes taken from that 15 minute interview. It’s not verbatim so apologies if I’m putting words in people’s mouths!
JW: It’s been a while since Mobile First came out. You’ve had time to see the impact, talk to people? How’s the philosophy of Mobile First going?
LW: As ever, different people (mis)interpret these things in different ways, and that’s definitely happened.
It’s amazing to see the applicability in areas I’d not previously considered.
Mobile’s growing like a weed, and it’s been nice to see the philosophy really get extended over the years.
People sometimes ask: Am I screwing the desktop version? I’ve been through enough of these exercises in the past and in fact this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Plus, what’s the difference between some of these desktop and tablet devices. Folding or removable touch screens – some are not that different. With Mobile First you’re doing something to help with a range of other touch devices – working towards tomorrow.
Another thing that comes up in the press now and then is that it’s really hard to create native apps and make it succeed – that it’s a blocker to going Mobile First.
Fred Wilson said – Just because something’s hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to do it. Websites are hard – anything new is hard.
JW: Mobile First and expanding upwards – looking at implementation, what challenges are there with say practical issues like scalability wrt tools etc?
LW: My methodology is that the mobile version is a foundation to build on, so when you push to the web you enhance and layer in as you get more screen real estate.
That becomes the front end technical solution if you like. I see so many responsive web designs now that are great on phone, tablet and desktop.
JW: The use case of people working with content in a mobile environment is very different to expectations of needs for desktop content – is responsive web design still relevant there? Does mobile first methodology work there?
LW: Assuming mobile use is this moving on-the-go use case is a non starter. 20% of use is on the couch, with TV on. 39% use mobile in bathroom (61% are lying!), so usage is anywhere and everywhere.
Assuming mobile device usage actually means mobile (moving) context, and saying you’re going to change the interface or content to do XYZ is a mind reading/losing proposition. I don’t know anyone who’s made that work intelligently.
I’m not seeing anyone going about cutting out important functionality just for mobile. On mobile, if users come from a Google search and then find the stuff they were expecting isn’t there then they’re going to be pretty pissed off.
Just because my screen is small doesn’t give anyone insight to my behaviours, desires and needs.
I do believe there are certain contexts where you have certain information, then it’s common to have location based services so their mobile use has risen – but it’s still valid on desktop. But you just perhaps make the content less prominent on desktop compared to mobile.
So the question of context comes up a lot. You can tune the prioritisation or hierarchy of information, but the presence of the content is still valuable in either case. You can totally manage that with a responsive web design.
JW: How would you suggest people go about putting forward the case that Mobile First should be embraced.
LW: The easiest thing is to go look at your logs.
I spoke to 2 big companies yesterday – one has 30% mobile traffic, the other has during the week 40%, and the weekend 50/50
Chances are that’s the environment you’re living in. Look round at everyone else. Facebook has more than 50% mobile use. PayPal, eBay – use other people’s data as a proxy. These are actual use cases.
Lloyds TSB Statement Export – A Bad UX.
I had occasion to need to export a years worth of statements to an Excel file to help with filing a self assessment tax form.
This is a typical task completed by many people during January as the deadline for self assessment forms looms up at the end of the month.
I dread this task, because year in, year out, Lloyds TSB provides me with one of the most frustrating experiences I have found online. Past experience has taught me what constraints are in place and what sort of experience to expect, but…
This year, I thought I’d document my experience as if I were a new user, and write it up as a case study, because sure enough, Lloyds TSB did not fail to disappoint me this year either.
This is the Export Statement popup dialog which appears over your account page.
It looks innocuous enough. But right off the bat, there’s a problem – I can only download 150 transactions at a time. Well I have no idea how long it takes me to do 150 transactions. One month? Two months? Three maybe? If I enter the year period I’m interested, and find that 150 transactions only covered the first 39 days, I have to come back and enter a new start date corresponding to when the first export got truncated. And I have to make it overlap a bit because otherwise I might miss a few transactions from the date of truncation. So then I know I’m going to have to piece together these exports and find the bits that overlap and remove duplicated entries.
I decide I don’t want to do it in batches of 150 transactions, I’ll do it in batches of a few months at a time and try to ensure I never reach the 150 transaction limit. That way I can just piece the parts together without worrying about overlaps.
To kick things off I enter some dates 1 March to 30 June 2011. But I’m told that I’m only allowed to enter dates which are no more than 3 months apart.
Well – it would be good to know that constraint when I’m being prompted for dates. (See later in this article for why I don’t get told at the time.) If I’d known I was restricted to 3 month periods I might not have bothered worrying about hitting the 150 transaction limit.
Then I try 1 March to 1 June. I hit the Export button. Nothing. Export again. Nothing. Actually what has happened is it’s given me the same error. When it says the dates are more than 3 months apart, it means the dates are not less than 3 months apart, inclusive of dates.
I correct the dates to be less than 3 months – 1 March to 31 May, as I realise that I’m going to have to work out the last date of the month for each end period. Thirty days hath April, June…how does it go?
I hit the Export button.
Oh dear! I get a timeout message meaningless to most users. It really wasn’t any significant time before I submitted the form. Not only that, it’s dumped me out of the popup dialog into the main window without giving me any navigation buttons to return to my account.
Unhelpfully it’s cleared the dates I entered, so I enter them again and give it another shot now that I’m in this main window. I press the Export button. Nothing happens, but a few seconds later, the download appears in the browser bar at the bottom. No success message though, and the SOAP error message is confusingly still there.
But, ok, this is progress – I got a download! I change the dates to 1 June and 31 August for the next (less than) 3 month period, and press the Export button. Nothing, but hey, I’m used to that now because I got no message and had to wait a few seconds for the download to appear last time.
I wait a few seconds. I wait a bit longer. Nothing. I click the Export button again. Nothing. The form is dead. Dead as a dodo shaped doornail.
So here’s where I need that button to get back to my account page, but there isn’t one remember. There is no relevant link on the page. Even the Lloyds TSB logo is not a home page link. I have to use the browser back button history to get back to my account, and start over again.
Now if things had gone smoothly, without the SOAP timeout error, what would have happened is that the popup dialog would have simply disappeared (this being the standard albeit insufficient success indicator) and a few seconds later the download would have appeared. The form, it seems, is not meant to be re-used – it’s just meant to disappear when you’re done. However, because the SOAP timeout error had dumped me into the main page, it couldn’t disappear after the first successful export, but it did effectively disable itself from working again. Probably behind the scenes, each instance of the form has a unique id that means it can’t be resubmitted, but it’s impossible for users to see or know this.
It’s worth noting here that what is meant to happen from Lloyds’ point of view is that for each period you want to download a statement, you need to enter the dates afresh in a new dialog. No chance of remembering the previous dates. No button to do the next 150 transactions or the next 3 months, or anything useful, just an assumption that Right, you’re done. If you want more, do it all again. No thought as to what users might want to do next. It’s enough to make a grown UX’er cry.
Moving on, I go back to the Statement Export popup dialog and get back to downloading a statement for my second period. This time it works. Occasionally. Sometimes I get the SOAP timeout error and are dumped into the main window again, and sometimes, there’s just a ‘technical problem’, but at least there’s a button to get back to my accounts though!
Gradually though, I get more and more bits of statement downloaded.
When I get to the end of 2011, I make a mistake by making the second date as 31 January 2011, instead of 2012. Fair enough. My bad!
I change the date to 2012, but the error doesn’t go away. I change the month to February to see if that makes it go away. Well it kind of does in that the big box error disappears, but the error at the top remains.
It had helpfully changed the date to 29th for me (only 29 days in Feb 2012). Now I want to change the date back to 31 January. I change the date from 29 to 31, and click the month field. Whoaa! Error under the drop down list – what’s that say?
I click away from the drop down list to see the message underneath.
Well the message there has clearly been brought about by having an invalid date for the month, but I’m right in the middle of sorting that out thank you very much! I’m obviously expected to change the month and then the date, even though at every point up to now I’ve entered date, then month.
When I tried a bit later, I had a quite similar situation with an invalid date/month combination, but this time the message was Please enter a value. What – I did! Tell me what’s actually wrong with it please?
In this case I changed the month to January. The message remained:
But actually the form is now valid and you can go and click the Export button and get the download (if there isn’t a technical problem!)
Now some of this is down to when the form checks the values – it does it on the focus-out of a field in the form, but it could save a whole lot of confusion by doing it more interactively. It’s also why I was not told of the 3 month date constraint before I clicked the Export button – the click of the button forces the focus-out which kicks off the error message. There’s also a broken link between the message at the top of the box and the highlighted fields, in that if the form is corrected, the message at the top should disappear too.
Conclusion
All in all, a pretty abysmal experience trying to export something that should have been able to be done in a single step in the first place.
I make no attempt to disguise the fact that this article is largely a rant. However, this was a real documented experience, and I don’t believe myself to be alone in receiving this kind of online banking service.
This is nothing short of a great example of bad UX.
My hope is that by documenting it here, others will learn how not to provide such a service online, and that possibly, just possibly, by the time I come round to doing this again next year, something might have been done about it.
In an ideal situation where banks are the domain experts of the financial world, shouldn’t it be possible to log in to your account after the end of a tax period and find a message:
“To export your account transactions for the last tax year, click here.”
Wouldn’t that be nice!
I’d love my bank again if they did that.
User Experience – please don’t let it become a car crash
Late in 2009 Jesse James Garrett gave a talk at UX Week entitled The State of User Experience. He talks a bit about where user experience came from and a bit about where he thought it was heading. It was an inspiring talk – a must see, and surely a has seen, for anyone in the field of UX.
That was just three short years ago. I’ll be honest: at that time I wasn’t a UX practitioner. I don’t really know what I was. I did a lot of development. I designed interfaces. I did research into users’ roles and goals, and I tried to craft bespoke, engaging and appropriate interfaces for clients. I didn’t use the term user experience. I didn’t know it existed. Then I got made redundant.
It was at exactly the same time as that happened that I discovered the field of UX. To me, it was like falling in love. I didn’t have to learn exactly how to go about being a UX practitioner, but I did have to learn what UX was. It was immediately apparent, however, that UX was all about me. It was about all the things that I cared about and believed in, but hadn’t until that point had a name under which to call it. My resonance with UX (and vice versa) was nothing short of love at first sight.
Three short years. In that time I have embraced the field of UX. I’ve networked, I’ve read books, I’ve watched so many videos, I’ve been to conferences – and even spoken at conferences and events. And I’m more than a little active at UX Stack Exchange. But essentially, I carried on with what I was doing before – except now I run my own business doing it. Having this term User Experience seemed great – it seemed to encompass so many aspects of the work I did, that I could use it as this umbrella term for the services I wanted to provide.
So I tout myself as a user experience designer – it seems as all encompassing a term as I can possibly use for what I do and what I want to convey. And, I hope it means that my potential clients understand what I can do for their own users, because, let’s face it I do still have a business to run – and an income to generate for my family.
Three short years. In that time I have seen user experience become more and more sought after by companies, who realise that what they needed is someone to help them with their user experience. And I love them dearly for it because they are the ones who care about their customers. Many though, do not – not necessarily because they actively do not not care, (although there are some of those too) but because they have not yet realised they need to care.
I observe those in the UX field around me and they share one common trait. Like me, they feel that they were born to be doing what they do. This is a job they love. It doesn’t even feel like a job. It’s a projection of self. It’s a passion – a quest to improve the lives of those who use our products and services, driven by our very soul, that seeks to improve and perfect every tiny detail of engagement. As Jesse says in the talk above: The user experience mindset is an acquired condition for which there is no cure.
But I’ve seen a trend in a direction which is starting to bother me. There are those who are calling themselves user experience designers who were not born with, nor have acquired this soul-driven empathy for their users. Yes. I know! To these people it is just a job. A job. Period.
And that bothers me because it affects those experiences, that don’t get quite the love they should. It affects the users who don’t quite get the experience they should. It affects businesses who don’t quite get the service they’re paying for or the employees they should be hiring. And it hurts the field of user experience itself, that doesn’t quite keep the reputation it should.
I want the field of UX to stay this unstoppable force of goodness and empathy and care towards people. The thought has occurred to me that there’s a chance it may not.
And that hurts me – like having a partner being a victim of a hit and run driver. A partner that I’ve been married to for three short years, but known for so much longer.
Please don’t let user experience become a car crash. I love her too much.
Talk on the mobile user experience at MobileEast
Below are the slides from the talk I gave today on considerations for the mobile user experience at MobileEast but if you want to see the notes for each slide as well, then pop over and view it on SlideShare direct instead – or read the complete raw notes.
