‘Hope’ wakes: Turning UX from profession to movement
some thoughts on the practice of user experience
Updated April 15, 2022 and June 13, 2021; originally published June 6, 2021
“For those still fighting the good fight for hearts and minds, influencing how that meaning gets defined is now the heart of the challenge.” — JJG
A couple things hit my feed this weekend. UX is a shithole, visual designers caged UX inside product design, and agile or product management–or worse, agile product management– won’t let us out of our cages.
Here’s the run down:
User experience promised a holistic approach to business, to step back and understand people and their context, so we can make our products better, make better products, or find unmet needs for new products that haven't even been imagined. Business loved this promise, scooped UX up in droves, and one by one, as designers shipped off to fragmented product teams, we lost the holistic approach.
We lost the whole and were left with some of the parts.
Shithole companies
As Risdon notes, at street level, most UX lives on agile teams as product designers focused on incremental improvements. Most designers take the win when they move the needle in someone else’s haystack.
At street level, although designers live on teams, most designers work alone. Meanwhile, UX best practice assumes collaborative, cross-functional, multi-disciplinary teams. Risdon calls this the “in-house gap”, the difference in how we teach UX as an activity by a team of designers and how lone designers really practice. Garrett observes that for people who join the field, “the disjunction between the dream and the reality can feel like a terrible bait and switch... every chance for nobility and creativity has been carved out and cleaned away in the name of shipping product.”
At street level, when you want to try a UX approach you found on Medium, you have to swim against the prevailing current that pulls stories from the backlog and out to a sea of doing and done. A couple of weeks ago, one of my reports, staffed to a project team as the lone designer. The project felt like a constant fight to carve out the slimmest slice of time to do the work they asked for and do it right. On a team of 5-12 people, a lone designer can’t fight the current alone.
Why will it take so long?
We don’t have time.
Not how we do things.
Not in our scope.
And we don’t provide much support for lone designers at the manager level. As teams expanded and managers emerged, we took the win because we’d moved a needle in our own haystack. As Garrett suggests, we won hearts and minds, and “businesses cherry-picked the bits of UX most compatible with their existing agendas and eschewed the parts that might lead to uncomfortable questions that could influence more than the color of a button on a screen.”
We lost the whole, and they took some of the parts.
If we got a seat “at the table”, then we’d be able to really change how organizations performed design. But that’s not the case. Garrett coaches design leaders, and “over and over again, the question I hear is: Where did we go wrong?” Design leaders don’t like where UX landed, either.
UX has a three-body problem
In physics, the three-body problem refers to how difficult it is to predict how multiple independent bodies influence each other as they move around each other.
UX has this same problem. Only, instead of looking at planets or particles, design has a three-body problem with people. On a team of 5-12 people, how do lone designers create better experiences? Though teams have product designers, there’s a hole where UX’s holistic view should be.
Risdon rightly highlights the in-house gap, that successful UX needs a raft of skills, one person can’t have all the skills, and we baked this truth into our approach: “a diverse range of skills represented across multiple designers, who each went deep on a couple of the skills while others went deep on other, complimentary skills.” We’ve always known good UX needs collaborative, cross-functional, multi-disciplinary teams.
I’d like to suggest that good UX requires designers who collaborate. I’d also like to suggest they don’t need to collaborate with other designers.
In the agencies of old, maybe UX methods didn’t produce better outcomes because teams of designers collaborated. Maybe UX methods produce better outcomes because teams of people collaborated. Maybe you move more needles in more haystacks when you work together?
Maybe you don’t have to be a User Experience Designer to make the user experience better. Maybe user experience isn’t a profession. Maybe user experience is a movement, a way of thinking, a belief system anyone can share.
Maybe we can fulfill UX’s holistic vision of a better world if we move just three bodies.
The three-body problem with your team
Broadly speaking, most teams and work groups consist of 5-12 people. The designer isn’t the only person on the team who asks who the user is or what the user is doing or how they expect to do it. Why not grab a couple of co-workers and answer those questions together? And use a designerly approach?
How do you get three people to think with a human-centered, holistic, “UX” lens that uses a designerly approach of broad, narrow, broad, narrow and think, make, check? You just fucking do it.
“Why will it take so long? We don't have time.” Don’t take so long. Use 15-minutes, 30-minutes, whatever you can get.
“Not how we do things. Not in our scope.” You're figuring out requirements and how to implement stuff. Of course it’s on your scope.
When designers collaborate with their teams on product questions using UX methods, they solve the team’s three body problem. You seed holistic UX ideas into team members’ heads. You do this already. Do it more. And when you do this, instead of one person on a team who thinks from a UX perspective, you have three.
One UX Designer by profession, and three adherents to the movement who step back, understand people and their context, so they can make products better. You go from a single, outside voice to a significant minority who can influence team decisions. If you change your idea about UX from being a discipline to being a movement, then every project, every meeting, every kickoff offers opportunities to spread more UX.
Three bodies is enough. Every opportunity is an opportunity to seed UX’s hope of a better world.
We’ll lose the UX hole if we seed it with some of the parts.
Your own three-body problem
UX as a movement isn’t just about you, yourself as a street level designer, right now in your current team. You’re just one body.
It’s also about every designer who comes behind you. Your current teammates will all go on to other projects, other companies, and other teams. For every designer your teammates work with after you, you owe your teammates and that designer the example and the experience of how to collaborate, step back together, and approach every day implementation questions with a user experience lens.
It’s also about the designer you want to become in the future. If you can’t collaborate with your team of non-designers, bring a more holistic vision into your product, how will you have stories that illustrate the value of holistic, UX thinking to your directors, execs, or CEOs? If you don’t collaborate with your team of non-designers, how will you have the experience you need to manage the designers who follow you, mentor them through tough projects, staff them appropriately, or advocate for the time and resources they need to complete projects?
The three body problem isn’t just about starting with three bodies on your current team. It's also about the three bodies every designer occupies. The designer we are now, the designers who come behind us, and the designers we wish to become.
Hope wakes
I enjoy Garrett’s description of user experience as a culture:
“The culture of UX also seemed to necessitate a degree of respect, compassion, and simple humility toward the people who use what we make. To me, that imbues UX with a sense of hope, the naive idea that if we respect and have compassion for the people who use our products, the world will be a better place.”
For me, that hope continually looks to how we work in teams. That hope is our greatest strength, and if we want to change teams and orgs and the world, we have to leave our teams with our better viewpoint as they brush against us. We have to leave behind that vision of a better future, share the hope that drives us. Both hope in that there is a better way and also our hope for something better.
As I work with colleagues and clients, I want to make sure every interaction I have leaves a little bit of UX’s hope and holism and compassion behind me, that as I move through my career, I leave hope in my wake.
If you solve your own three body problems, street level design changes products to hope. For the individual designer, hope wakes, literally.
Maybe Garrett is right. UX’s first generation “underestimated how slow and messy a grassroots revolution can be.” Maybe we underestimated how long the grass roots revolution will take. Maybe we can seed more hope in our wakes, and the whole will grow into more than the sum of its parts.
Anyway…
Coda
Someone out there is saying, “that’s easy enough for you to say, Austin. Something something in my experience something something privilege something something aspirational B.S.”
And I get it.
But those aren’t reasons why you can’t leave hope in your wake, or why you don’t leave hope in your wake. When you step back, take a holistic, compassionate view, your objections become constraints.
Design isn’t a business problem you hire designers to fix. Business is a design problem. You have the skills to design the way you work. Go create teams, departments, and organizations with more holistic, compassionate views of the world.
I, literally, wrote a book about it: Collaborative Product Design, and it covers in-person, remote, and hybrid teams (before the pandemic because I'm a fucking seer).
You can also check out Leah Buley’s The User Experience Team of One and Undercover User Experience Design by Cennyydd Bowles.
Works cited
Garrett, Jesse James. “I Helped Pioneer UX Design. What I See Today Horrifies Me.” Fast Company (blog), June 3, 2021. https://www.fastcompany.com/90642462/i-helped-pioneer-ux-design-what-i-see-today-horrifies-me.
Risdon, Chris. “My Take on the Journey of UX.” Medium (blog), June 4, 2021. https://chrisrisdon.medium.com/my-take-on-the-journey-of-ux-7f4c315d3e3e.
