In Holland, we have two words for design. One is vormgeving; in German formgeben. And the other word is ontwerpen; in German entwurf. In the Anglo-Saxon language there’s only one word for design, which is design. That is something you should work out. Vormgeving is more to make things look nice. So for instance, packaging for a perfume or for chocolate in order to make things fashionable, obsolete and therefore bad for society because we don’t really need it. While ontwerpe means, and the Anglo-saxon word, but its stronger, means engineering. That means you as a person try to invent a new thing—which is intelligent, which is clever, and which will have a long-life. And that’s called stylistic durability. It means you can use it for a long time.
via Gert Dumbar, jacecooke
Regarding this article, and specifically this point:
8. You don’t use UX methods. User interviews, usability tests, personas, scenarios, card sorts, affinity diagrams, concept models, sketches, flow diagrams, sitemaps, wireframes, prototypes, web analytics, A/B tests…
Y’know, there are a lot of people using User Centred Design (the process) interchangeably with UXD and the two aren’t the same thing. How many of you have seen UCD consultants come in and wield that shit to scientifically craft a horrific train wreck of a product? Too many. Then someone else said,
…the user experience of a product/thing isn’t the sole domain of the “ux” person. Every one is responsible for it. The UX person just needs to do the actual work around documenting/formalizing it, they cannot magically make it better if no one else is thinking about how to make the product the best from the start…
That’s right of course, but the biggest part of the job is to get people thinking about this from the start. Product design means getting design people and design thinking baked into the product at the beginning. If you think about what Dieter Rams said about the politics of designing at Braun — having to talk to the business people, the financiers, the marketers and the engineers to get their ideas realised — that’s a huge part of UXD, of any design really. It’s having the conversations and building the relationships that pave the way for good design by creating empathy for customers within the business. If you want to be making stuff that people love, you’d better be making stuff that loves people. And that people in the team will be able to love (take pride in) making. But Nat was the one who touched the nerve. He flicked the little wooden ball that’s been rolling around in the back of my head since I started this gig.
UX people spend way too much time thinking and talking about UX and how important and special it is.
Exactly.
UXD isn’t anything other than just plain old good design.
Great design is great branding is great usability is great experience is great design. The specialisation of design into razor sharp skill sets isn’t necessarily a bad thing, so long as it’s well directed. The problem comes when the mindset of design is splinted and you start getting visual people who elevate styling above function (and calling it emotional cueing if they have ‘UX’ in their title) fighting with IA guys who are obsessing about card sorting the nav labels fighting with the BDM who can’t get past the idea that if people are paying for it it must be good — so make something that’ll sell. And all of them claiming to be practicing some kind UXD because they have a hand that influences the UX. Great UX, as far as I can see is, by definition, a bit of a mish-mash. It’s great Creative Direction with a head for what business value really is and a eye for engineering, because the big idea, the product and the technology are converging (and users are remixing products and messages and all kinds of messy shit). But the essence of great UX isn’t any different from what the essence of great design is or ever was. As best I can figure, the crux of it is understanding how design can be used to create and exchange (between people and business) value, and employing that to show the business you’re a part of what the future might look like. Development cycles might be faster, the tools are more diverse, and maybe the audiences are more fluid but that’s still no different that what great design has ever been. The great CD has always been a conceptual thinking, a great understander of materials and production with a great sense of (empathy for) the man on the street he’s speaking to or producing for.
Like a love relationship, a camera man must make an actress feel loved. You must have trust. You musts share something. If you don’t feel trust, if you don’t feel loved, then you cannot give. If you don’t give it won’t go into the camera and out onto the screen and touch other people.
Basic, intuitive, human empathy is so under-emphasised in the whole UX field that it makes me cringe. It’s the reason I hate to see UX treated as a separate discipline to design or implementation. The heart of great UX is empathy and compassion for users, and getting excited (and getting others excited) about making something that will be awesome by some users’ definition.
If you do your job right, you council clients on how to work back from that to a common ground of awesomeness between user and business, to build complimentary business models based on that empathy. You want to help them begin to get set up to profit from doing real, actual good in the lives of the people they touch through their products and interfaces. It’s Quality! And the sharpest knives there are to bring to it aren’t testing, or prototyping, or any kind of “analysis” or wireframing. They’re are intuition, empathy and care. The output will speak for itself.
And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good — need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
