Visual Designers Are Just As Important As UX Designers | July 19, 2011
As I explained in my previous post, user experience design is a multidisciplinary activity which includes psychology, user research, information architecture, interaction design, graphic design and a host of other disciplines. Due to the complexity of the field a user experience team will typically be made up of individuals with a range of different specialisms.
On larger teams you’ll find people who focus on one specific area, such as user research or information architecture. You may even find people who specialise in specific activities such as usability testing or wireframing. This level of specialism isn’t possible in smaller teams, so practitioners tend to group related activities together.
Conceptually I believe you can break design into tangible and abstract activities. Tangible design typically draws on the artistic skills of the designer and results in some kind of visually pleasing artefact. This is what most people imagine when they think of design and it covers graphic design, typography and visual identity.
However there is also a more abstract type of design which concerns itself with structure and function over form. The output from this type of design tends to be more conceptual in nature; wireframes, site-maps and the like. One type of design isn’t any more valuable or important than another, they’re just different.
When products and teams reach a certain size or level of complexity, one person can’t undertake all these roles. When this happens, natural divisions occur. So in small to mid sized teams it’s quite common to describe people who specialise in tangible design as visual designers, while those who focus on more abstract activities are known as user experience designers.
Now we all know that visual design is an undeniable part of the way people experience a product or service, so it may feel a little odd that user experience designers don’t actually design the entire experience. It may also be confusing that when user experience designers talk about “the UX” of a product, they are often referring to the more abstract essence of the product as described through wireframes, site maps and the like.
This ambiguity can lead many visual designers to misunderstand what user experience design is, especially if they’ve never worked alongside a dedicated user experience designer. This has also led a lot of visual designers to mistakenly believe that because the work they create results in some kind of user experience, that makes them a user experience designer. While this may be true in the purely philosophical sense, this isn’t what people mean when they talk about user experience designers (try applying for a senior UX position without understanding user research, IA and Interaction design and see how far you get).
The term user experience architect was coined in 1990 but the roots reach back to the 1940s and the fields of human factors and ergonomics. We’ve had dedicated user experience consultancies for the last 10 years, and internal divisions before that. We’ve got numerous professional conferences attended by people who have been working in UX for much of their professional life. In short, User experience design is a distinct and well understood discipline that stretches back many years and isn’t simply a new buzzword to describe “the right way to design”.
Over the last 12 months I’ve come across far too many visual designers describing themselves as user experience designers because they don’t fully understand the term. Instead they’ve seen a few articles that explain how UX is the new black and decided to rebrand themselves.
I’ve also come across many fantastic visual designers who feel pressured into becoming user experience designers because they think this is the only way to progress their careers. It seems that due to a lack of supply, user experience design has somehow come to represent a higher order of design, or design done right. At best this is nonsense and at worst this is actually damaging to peoples careers.
So here’s the truth. Good visual designers are just as hard to find as good user experience designers. They have exactly the same status in the industry and earn pretty much the same rates. So you don’t need to became a user experience designer in order to take your career to the next level. Instead, surround yourself with experts, hone your skills and take pride in your work. With so few good designers out there, don’t go throwing away much prized and hard earned skills under the mistaken belief that you must become a UX designer in order to grow, as that’s just not the case.
Three talks touching on science fiction's view of the future | April 6, 2011
Chris Noessel & Nathan Shedroff from UX Week.
Toby Barnes from Interesting North.
Matt Webb from The Do Lectures.
Redesign outrage | April 4, 2011
It’s surprisingly common for redesigns to cause outrage amongst their users. People complain that they weren’t consulted, criticise the quality and appropriateness of the new solution, and state that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” However if you leave the site for a while, you often see the most critical detractors become the most vocal supporters. Why is this?
I think there are three fundamental cognitive biases at play here.
First off we have the concept of status-quo bias, the idea that people tend not to change existing behaviour unless the incentive to change is compelling. So you could argue that many people chose not to switch from DVD to Blu-ray because the benefits of higher definition viewing just weren’t attractive enough. In the context of a redesign, many people may not understand why it was even necessary as the existing site allowed them to do everything they needed and wanted to do.
Next up we have loss aversion, the idea that people prefer to avoid losses rather than acquire gains.So in the context of a redesign, people’s sense of loss may be overshadowing the benefits they have gained.
Lastly we have something called the endowment effect. This bias says that people often place a higher value on something they own than something they don’t. This may have something to do with the memories associated with that item. So in the context of a redesign, users will probably have bonded with the old site, while the new site has yet to create an emotional attachment.
Of course all of these cognitive biases are intertwined so it’s very difficult to tell which ones are having an effect and to what level. I’m also sure there are other factors at play here so I’d be interested to see if anybody has done any original research in this area.
This post was inspired by a recent interview in the Indipendant.
Practical wisdom | April 4, 2011
A few evenings ago I watched a really interesting TED talk by Barry Schwartz on practical wisdom.
Although his examples were rooted in education and law, I couldn’t help but feel that practical wisdom was also the core of good design. After all, what is design except the ability to improvise novel solutions to new problems based on your knowledge of a set of rules and your ability to apply them with flexibility?
The talk also made me think about my own personal feelings towards project management. I believe that project management processes are often used as a series of inflexible rules (or sticks) intended to ensure average teams reach a minimum level of performance. However this will have the opposite effect on good people, constricting them and eventually demotivating them. I’ve seen this happen with numerous friends who have wanted to do good work but ended up being crushed by industrial age management and forced to leave in order to protect their own sanity.
Instead I think it’s important to hire good people and give them the flexibility to set their own agendas and apply their own rules. This is obviously one of the goals of the agile manifesto. Reduce bureaucracy and let the genuine good nature of designers and developers flourish. Sadly a lot of agile processes seem to be reinstating these rules in order to manage less experienced teams, starting the cycle all over again.
Barry Schwartz talked about two kinds of people who find themselves in this situation. One type of person tries to work within the constraints of the system and bend or subvert the rules in a way which allows them to do good work. Many of the best University educators I’ve met fall into this category. Then you have the change agents. The people who are so incensed by the rules that they want to create systematic change. These are the people who interest me the most. The people who can come into organisations, tear down the walls and build up new structures and new teams who are able to effect real progress.
So in order to become better designers we need to think flexibly, learn through doing and cultivate that sense of practical wisdom.
Big design up front | March 24, 2011
Like most designers and developers we’ve come to the conclusion that big design up front doesn’t work. Six month requirement gathering exercises which result in thousand page specifications don’t work. In the time it has taken to produce these requirements the business landscape has almost certainly changed. So new requirements appear and designers and developers are forced to battle scope creep and keep these documents alive while at the same time trying to build something that is ever shifting and changing.
So instead we’ve seen a move to agile development and an almost zealot backlash against detailed planning of any kind. However just because big design up front doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean we should ditch design planning altogether. As a race we tend to flip flop between polar opposites rather than exploring the middle ground. So the problem doesnt lie with requirements gathering, design or planning—it’s about the amount you do.
Too much planning and you get bogged down in nuances. Sometimes it’s just easier and quicker to design something than it is to discuss it. Too much documentation and you end up spending more time managing the documentation than you do managing the design. The converse is also true. Too little documentation and it’s easy for large teams to lose their path. It’s also easy for the fidelity of the solution to suffer. Just as with too much planning, too little planning leads to inefficiency as work that was done several sprints ago needs to be redone based on decisions made later down the line.
So I don’t think the argument should be agile vs waterfall. Instead it’s about knowing the skills, abilities and interests of your team and initiating a level of planning which is appropriate for the project at hand. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to developing good products, so I really wish we’d stop chasing the Holy Grail and having holy wars in the process.
Instead let’s go back to the core commandments of agile and prefer conversations to documentations, while understanding that in some instances documentation is necesary. Similarly, zero design won’t work, while all design may be a fiction. Instead you need to find the right level of fidelity and tweak the smaller issues as you go along.
It’s all about balance people, so let’s start finding ours.
The Power of Info-graphics | January 4, 2007
There has been an interesting story circulating in the press today about food labelling. The government are trying to encourage food manufacturers to label food in such a way that shoppers can clearly tell which of a number of similar products are healthiest just by glancing at them.
The food standards agency realised that the current labelling system—while very good by international standards—is still quite complicated. If you want choose between two products for health reasons, you need to spend a considerable amount to time looking at the two labels, and even then it is difficult to tell which is better unless you know exactly how much salt, fat or sugar you are supposed to eat each day
Two rival labelling systems have emerged. One system is called the traffic light system and studies have shown that it provides shoppers with a clear indication of which product is the least healthy. It works though a colour coding system, so green is healthy, amber is medium and red is unhealthy. Four main metrics are communicated; the amount of fat, saturates, sugar and salt an item contains. So by quickly glancing at a product you can tell if it is “unhealthy” by the amount of red and orange displayed on the info-graphic.
The problem is, it turns out that when faced with the traffic light, shoppers naturally (and some would say instinctively) avoid the products containing a lot of red traffic lights. This has obviously upset many manufactures who prefer a less emotive system called the GDA system.
This system shows how much of an adults guideline daily amount (GDA) of calories, sugar, fat, saturates and salt the product contains. The info-graphics the manufacturers prefer don’t include the traffic light system, making it much less emotive. They argue that the info-graphics provide more information to the shopper and leads to an informed decision.
Supporters of the traffic light system say that the GDA system is flawed because many people don’t have the time, ability or inclination to do mathematical calculations while shopping. This is an interesting argument from a usability, user-centered design and accessibility standpoint, and is actually supported through user testing. They argue that when you are in a hurry, the traffic light system gives the shopper the information they desire at a glance, and is therefore superior.
However supporters of the GDA system counter with the argument that some products like cheese, which are naturally high in fat and would therefore always have a red label, can still be eaten as part of a healthy diet as long as more than the GDA isn’t consumed.
I find it very interesting that a story about info-graphic design has been all over the TV and newspapers today. I also think it is very interesting how the two different camps are reacting to the two different types of info-graphic. To throw salt (sugar, fat and saturates) onto the wound, one option would be to combine both techniques. It would be very simple to add colour to the GDA info-graphic, but desaturate it slightly to make it less emotive. That way you would still be able to see which elements were high, medium or low at a glance while hopefully placating the manufacturers. I was planning to knock up an example but I’ve just got a new laptop and Adobe are forcing me to phone them up again to prove that I own my copy of Photoshop. This is starting to get tedious.
