If you haven’t seen the slides for Jason Mesut’s EuroIA talk, Truth And Dare, stop reading and chow down immediately. With his trademark flouncy manner and withering snark, the lovely Jason has taken a pin to the UX bubble and exploded the bullshit within. Nice.
He makes some broad-shouldered, possibly sweeping statements about the state of the industry, and hopes to fend off slings and arrows by encouraging us to share which parts we agree with, disagree with, find interesting or indeed missing altogether. Well, here goes.
On Rockstars: Jason chastises our culture of deifying UX celebrities. The Spools, the Morvilles, the Garretts of the industry, and how we hungrily lap up whatever crumbs of insight they might choose to scatter as they drift around the conference circuit. He goes on to question their motives and credentials; are they doing this to sell books or raise their own celebrity (and thus consulting fee)? What work have these money-grubbing bastards [citation needed] ever done anyway?
It’s a thorny issue for me. A couple of years ago I attended my first major IA conference, and had much the same reaction. I was hoping for practical thought leadership from the teams behind major things that I’d heard of or even used. Insights into eBay, Facebook or Amazon. I did find cogent insight, but it came from luminaries that only appeared to shine in the context of the community itself. In fact I did learn some of Amazon’s design treasures, but not from someone with any connection to the company.
I see a visible and vociferous ‘UX community’; exemplified by the crowd of usual suspects that speak at or attend the major conferences. And then (I hope), there’s an outer halo of unsung-yet-experienced crop of thought-leaders; as @chrisfahey puts it, “people who don’t talk about it and don’t know what a UX Community is“.
But I’m one to talk, because increasingly I am one to talk at conferences. And while far from being a rockstar or even a folk-poet, I can’t exactly claim impartiality. But I know I don’t speak to sell books. Speaking at the IA Summit or EuroIA hasn’t thus far increased my market worth, or even helped me land my next gig. But Jason did make me question my own motives. At first glance, there’s really nothing in it for me; in many cases, I end up financially out of pocket on the deal. So why devote the weeks it takes me to write up a presentation, and the time, cost, and effort it takes to deliver it? Mostly, it’s the same reason I like to get up at karaoke. The sheer buzz of performing; to stand and hold an audience’s attention for 45 minutes is a rush like no other. And even more than that, the validation that comes from the applause, the questions and the tweets. That you stood up on stage, said your piece, and your peers confirmed that You. Were. Right. My imaginary analyst would no doubt tell me of the evils of relying on such external validation for self-worth, but hell – I’ve been a client-facing designer for 20 years. Dancing till other people are happy is all I know.
On Freelancers: I teasingly dub Jason the ‘UX Careers Officer’, since he does a lot of hiring these days, has much to say about effective portfolios, and, well, because that UX flag hasn’t been otherwise captured yet. He ranted at impertinent length about how his desk is awash with the CVs of junior freelance designers demanding north of £400 per day for their leet Axure skillz, and how these money-grubbing bastards (is there a theme here? Ed.) should presumably have been shot at birth.
Well again, this is an issue close to my heart. At 37 years old, with over 15 years experience behind me (to paraphrase Man V. Food‘s Adam Richman, I’ve held most jobs in the UX industry) I’m starting to feel a bit long in the tooth, or perhaps to quote Danny Glover, I’m getting too old for this shit. It irks me that relatively inexperienced interaction designers are charging premium rates (not nearly as much as it incenses me that sophomore interaction designers are being packaged and sold as UX rockstar thought-leaders, but don’t get me started on that) and I am completely behind Jason’s assertion that agencies and corporations alike should be giving their juiciest work to their in-house staff, and using freelancers to mop up the overspill. And I even sympathise with his whining that freelancers are total commitment-phobes looking to make a quick buck with a 3-month contract, rather than having the dedication to see a long-term project through to completion.
I’ve been a freelancer for 10 years. Almost half that time has been spent with a single client, and the rest with precisely five clients. So don’t talk to me about commitment (unless its about how to remember to spell it correctly). Only, we’re damned from the other side too. Four years continuously freelancing for a client? How dare I fleece them so? I’m obviously a de-facto employee! Why didn’t I have the good grace to go permanent with them, whether that was offered or not?! The short answer is ‘Why the hell should I?’.
It’s not just about the money. Although the money really is very much better. The £350/day currently being handed out to junior (2yrs+) wireframers equates to a permanent salary of – what, about £84,000? Good luck finding a permanent UX job at £84k that expects so little of you. But beyond that, what are creative agencies and corporations doing to tempt permanent staff? Certainly I’ve never seen any meaningful structure of advancement in either pay or duties, beyond the inevitable promotion out of being a practioner and into being a resource manager. A recruiter recently told me that most permies he places agency-side move on after 18 months. If you want commitment from me, how about a little quid pro quo? How about creating an environment that gives me somewhere to go, other than out of the door?
Speaking of somewhere to go, just what does one do when one is blessed with longer industry service? I’ve rarely seen a UX job posted that looks for more than 5 years’ experience. That either means that employers aren’t willing to reward financially beyond that, that they don’t consider their project requires more seniority, or (most worryingly of all) that they consider UX knowledge and experience tops out at the 5-year mark. Frankly, it makes me feel old and frustrated. Are we saying that for the last 10 years, my market value has only increased with inflation? Am I to compete for freelance roles with people 10 years younger than me? Or perhaps it is only dignified now to shuffle off and write my books and ride the conference circuit. Fear not – I’m not really so bleak about it, but I do wonder whether in such a rapidly-changing, trend-surfing industry, length of service has any real currency.
And finally on this, there’s the work itself. Perhaps this is another symptom of a world-weary, seen-it-all-before outlook, but many, many projects, especially agency-side projects, are worthless pieces of shit. Short-termist digital marketing campaigns for FMCG or automotive brands, or otherwise unwinnable wars of attrition against hostile, status-quo-loving dinosaurs who begrudgingly slouch toward a digital age. UX loves to throw around words like ‘passion’ and ‘excitement’. I fail to summon either for projects like these. Don’t get me wrong; I have integrity and ambition. I can feel St. Elmo’s fire burning in me. I want to change the world. I just don’t want to do it through the medium of Flash microsite or Sharepoint intranet.
On UX eating itself: Like many before him, Jason expressed concern over the growing ubiquity of the term ‘user experience’ and indeed the loathsome shorthand ‘UX’. As a prefix to any number of job titles (‘UX designer’, ‘UX developer’, ‘UX architect’ were some he cited) the phrase has become confused and even meaningless. Jason also alluded to a bugbear of mine; the conflation of UX and UI. The perception (mostly among clients) that ‘the UX’ is the top-layer sprinkling of fairy dust. What they mean, of course, is the user interface.
UX is clearly more than visual and interaction design, but I also rankle a little at the frequently-cited idea that it’s everything; from the way the website functions, to the way customers are spoken to when they phone the call centre, to the fact that you can return your shoes up to a year after you bought them. Of course, all these things are part of the ‘user experience’ (or if you will, the lower-case ‘ux’), but such a wide purview isn’t a particularly practical definition of ‘UX’. Should a ‘UX Consultant’ be equally qualified to advise both about ontological models for product classifications and maintaining a negative operating cycle for improved cashflow? I think not.
In fact your UX Consultant is probably a rebranded IA or IxD who’s done a bit of usability testing. And to that end, Jason asked us all to map our skills to quadrants of Experience Strategy, Interaction Design, User Research and Information Architecture. Here’s mine.
The blobs are where I think I am, the arrows where I want to go.
As someone said, ideally the phrase ‘UX’ will disappear completely into a collective understanding and we will once again call ourselves by titles that better describe what we do all day.
Truth and Dare covered much ground, but these are the issues that chimed most with me. As for what’s missing, I’d hoped to see some suggestions for reaching the hidden markets; the would-be thought-leaders who never speak at conferences, and the talented practitioners who aren’t expecting money for jam. Plus I could have done with a touch more positivity about the things we are good at. While he was right to kick the tyres on the dogma of user-centred design, he could have gone further on just why we didn’t have to abdicate product design to the public at large. I think it’s because as overpaid, over-celebrated User Experience professionals, we’re pretty damn qualified to make decisions on our own.
