Thread by @movito

This is a great thread. UX has inherited the studio traditions of graphic design and the processes of industrial design (like Archer’s 200+ step systematic method for design), ways of working developed more than fifty years ago, for a wholly other business and profession.

https://twitter.com/berkun/status/1136367689482481664

UX is woven into its organization. It isn’t a separate thing the way a nicely designed toaster can be wrapped in a bad box and be sold in a crummy store.

But, as a field, UX hasn’t quite figured out what the heck it is, or how it’s supposed to operate, so we lean on old models.

Obviously, these models don’t quite fit and don’t quite work, which is why we try new things all the time and change our titles and labels every 3-5 years.

I studied at @AHO_Oslo which has a really great design program (tip: the two year master’s degree is in English and it’s free) where a lot of emphasis was placed on working together and teaming up.

The same at @aaltomedialab / design where I went in exchange, which had a wonderful setup where biz / tech / design students worked together on a project. Wow, did everyone think differently. But we were better together.

And then at @livetibekk I came across this thing called Scrum where designers had to cough up everything during “Sprint Zero”. Terrible. But the devs had really interesting ways of working together.

It would take a decade before we could store design files in a versioning system. But we did find good ways to work together on designs, even via screen sharing, but designing and coding were very separate after Flash got the boot from Apple. (Flash Catalyst was cool.)

And so everyone started talking about should designers code. A symptom of unclear language. And insecurity about what designers should do in a digital world, when you could use Bootstrap.

Longread: link.medium.com/KnvrzrDbjX

Hey, I like coding too. But what really makes for a competitive digital product is a business that understands the space it’s operating in, including the enormous shift towards self-service in almost every sector. The latter is why UX is so popular.

But since we designers were getting all stressed out about not learning <insert this year’s popular framework / language / trend here> we didn’t notice that there was something much more interesting happening that needed improvement.

Namely, how we figure our what to make, and figure out how to make it, as an integrated, woven-in part of an organization, together with other excellent (hopefully) people with other first-rate (hopefully) skills.

While demand for UX’ers is high (adjusted for population, demand is higher in Norway than in the US, so I know it’s hard to hire), supply is low because …

- there are no systematic efforts aimed at bringing more people into our field (compare with efforts to scale up STEM recruitment)
- unless higher education is free, a degree is very expensive
- there is a large deficit of people who can teach UX/etc at HS / college level

- there is no clear path into UX for people with relevant backgrounds like anthropology, print design, political science, compsci, etc because UX is where medicine in 1910, halfway between quackery and professional associations

And as a result, people try to learn this themselves, or get a job at a place that is OK at UX but isn’t driving the field forward.

Where do they look for ideas on how to work? At everyone else, and sometimes to the past.

Which is great, I absolutely love design history (no Thomas Wedgwood, no industrial design, OK?) but that really is a different world. We don’t work that way.

Or, at least, we sure shouldn’t. But that’s how our tools generally work. You sit down and make stuff, someone else gives feedback, repeat. This is what my art director’s assistant job looked like in 1995. The tools have barely changed. (Symbols in Sketch? Please.)

But we *love* to talk about tools.
We don’t love to talk about how we design. Or what design is.

So let’s not talk about design. I like Rams’s Ten Principles of Good Design too, but they’re precepts for making physical products, not instructions for co-creating value with users.

Instead, let’s talk about how we:
- work on our own
- work in a cross-disciplinary product team (this is a new and intriguing cultural construction worthy of much study)
- work in a hierarchical organization
- work in all-edge networks inside / outside the organization

Let’s talk about how:
- our tools force certain ways of working upon us, and whether we should embrace or escape this
- our ideas of what design is force certain habits / expectations / values upon our processes
- we can learn to see organizations as a material for designing

Not to mention, how we can let go of “this needs to be perfect at launch” without succumbing to “it’s an MVP, just throw it out there”.

We think continuous design is the way forward. My awesome colleague Maria Skaaden has written about that here: link.medium.com/cSbPRJHdjX