To be crystal clear, here is my position on the recent discrimination in UX. Ian, thank you for encouraging me to say this in 458 characters as well as 140.
Discriminators: Stop it, now.
Victims: Draw strength from those in similar situations, talk to them. (Sarah, Relly, Leslie, Whitney, Amy, Jessica). Speak up publicly to raise awareness so the rest of us can help make this treatment culturally unacceptable.
Everyone else (incl. conference organizers): Listen. Believe. Don’t suppress discussion, even if it makes you uncomfortable or you think it has a negative short-term impact. Don’t stand by and do nothing.
Amidst so much bashing of the term User Experience, I was delighted to read Robert Hoekman Jr’s post on Boxes and Arrows recognizing the weakness in the term but acknowledging it’s momentum and calling for it to be defended.
Why are we so readily abandoning the term just when the going gets tough? I am reminded of quote from Denethor, Steward of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings:
‘Yet,’ said Denethor, ‘we should not lightly abandon the outer defences the Rammas made with so great a labour.’
‘Much must be risked in war,’ said Denethor…. ‘I will not yield the River and the Pelennor unfought — not if there is a captain here who has still the courage to do his lord’s will.’
Well Lord Hoekman, here’s one captain still up for the fight!
(we should of course ignore Denethor’s delusional belief that he could win that fight – every metaphor breaks down somewhere!)
In his excellent article, KPIs are Metrics, but Not All Metrics are KPIs, Jared Spool states: “Finally, to be useful, the metric needs to predict the future — that’s what makes it an “Indicator.””
The last time I checked the dictionary definition of “indicator” it said:
in·di·ca·tor – noun
a person or thing that indicates.
a pointing or directing device, as a pointer on the dial of an instrument to show pressure, temperature, speed, volume, or the like.
an instrument that indicates the condition of a machine or the like.
an instrument for measuring and recording variations of pressure in the cylinder of an engine.
No mention of predicting the future there. In fact Key Performance Indicators can take two forms, “leading indicators”, which as Jared states – are used to predict the future, and “lagging indicators” which measure past performance.
Now I happen to agree with Jared that leading indicators, if you can discover them (it’s hard!), give you the most value – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give any thought to lagging indicators. A powerful dashboard or scorecard technique is to define complimentary leading and lagging measures that show cause and effect, this can help you validate your indicator selection and give stakeholders confidence in your measurement framework.
This was followed by a short twitter conversation (a twersation?) between several people about kids, family and compartmentalization. The fact of the matter is, of course, that people think differently – it’s actually wired into their brains.
Now before I go any further, a warning: I’m going to talk about men’s brains and women’s brains. There are going to be generalizations, but I do not believe (contrary to the title of this post) that all men or all women think alike. I think it more likely that there are patterns of thinking that anyone can exhibit, it may just be more likely that women will tend toward one pattern more often and men to another.
In this video Mark Gungor speaks (humorously) about men’s brains being full of little boxes, with one topic in each box and the boxes never touching. Women’s brains, he continues, are more like balls of wire, with every thing connected to every other thing and emotion running along the wires. This is why, he contends, men can only do one thing at a time and why women can multi-task and remember everything. (The video is well worth watching for the laugh!)
It turns out that there may even be scientific evidence (this is now my own conjecture) to support this:
“The connections between the two sides of women’s brains enable them, on average, to be better at expressing emotions and remembering details of emotional events and communicating them. They use language to talk about feelings and develop consensus more efficiently than men do. Men’s brains, more specifically organized and with fewer connections, enable men, on average, to focus more intensely and not be as distracted by superfluous information.”
Suppose that a “Wire Thinker” (man or woman!) was shopping for a car. As they’re looking at cars and specifications, might they be (subconsciously) influenced by the context of their family, their job, pleasant memories of cars in the past, just about anything in fact?
Contrast this with a “Box Thinker” (man or woman!). They would be in their “car box”, which is not connected to their “family box”, or “good times box”. Might they be more focused on the task at hand? At looking at specifications and features? Less emotionally connected?
So men and women aside – perhaps there are “Box Thinkers” and “Wire Thinkers” (or times when a person thinks box-like and wire-like), and perhaps this accounts for some people’s inclination to separate or conflate their home and work lives – neither of which is right or wrong of course.
If there is any truth in this, the question becomes – how can we design experiences that resonate with both types of thinking?
Last week, after a conversation with a colleague, I tweeted “A User Experience is greater than the sum of it’s Touchpoints”. It seemed such an intuitive statement, but almost immediately after hitting [Enter] I started to ask myself “what on earth does that really mean?”. Since it was retweeted quite a lot I thought i’d better spend some time thinking about it!
Space Time; the Final Frontier; As User Experience professionals we expend so much effort on the visual (layout, navigation, aesthetics, etc.) we sometimes forget that our users experience things over time. Whether a few seconds – page to page, or a few weeks – visit to visit, the time between touchpoints causes things to happen to memory which changes the context of the next (and subsequent) touchpoints.
Human memory; Users may remember or forget particularly good or bad interactions, changing the context and their perception of the next touchpoint, a perception they would not have if they only interacted with that single touchpoint.
Computer memory; The system may remember or forget information from one touchpoint to the next (usernames, reference numbers, last items viewed, last state, etc.), changing the context of the experience (for good or bad) from that which they would have experienced if they had only interacted with that single touchpoint.
The takeaway? Do what Kirk did to Khan, but go one better – think in the 4th dimension, time.
After 13 years in various User Experience roles at Vanguard I have decided to leave to pursue a new opportunity. I enjoyed my time there, I made a lot of good friends, and I learned a lot – the most important thing being the importance of an organization’s mission, it’s reason for being, WHY it exists.
While looking for a new opportunity it became clear to me that i’d consumed enough Vanguard “client-owned” kool aid that I would struggle to work in an organization that focused mainly on making money for it’s owners or stock holders. I was open to moving away from the financial services field – in fact I thought I would have to – I used to joke with friends that there was really only one other financial services organization that I could work for, since they were also required by their corporate structure to put the interests of their clients first.
That organization is USAA, and fortunately for me they thought I could add value to their talented UX team. I’ll be joining them in late July as Assistant Vice President of User Experience. See you in San Antonio!
So a couple of years ago I made this diagram/poster thing because, well, apparently that’s what I do. I liked it enough to present it at the IA Summit, I even created a separate blog for the idea, but I could never really find a real-world project to apply it to.
Well, I found one. We’re starting a large “blue sky” design project at work and we’re in need of some UX principles – so I thought i’d dust the Characteristics & Principles of UX off, rework the diagram slightly to include everything on one page and see if it works “in the wild”.
