We Should All Make UX Happen

Hi everyone! First of all I would like to say that I appreciate you being here this early and on a Sunday. I appreciate the time you give me. Thank you also to Campus Party for the opportunity to talk to you about stuff I believe is very important. UX is much more than what you think it is. Or better said, I really want it to be much more than what it currently is for many people.

My name is Darío and I went to school to become a designer. Well, more accurately, to become what I thought a designer was. Later in life I found out that it is so much more but I’ll get to that later. I run a digital product and services firm here in Guadalajara called Empathia. We’ve been in business for around 10 months now and it’s being awesome. This is my third venture in a career where I have designed things that millions of people around the world use every day.

Why make things?

I have been designing professionally for about 12 or 13 years now but in reality I have been designing since as long as I can remember. Let me tell you a little bit about what I mean. I enjoy making things. I’ve been making stuff all my life and that’s why I became a designer. The first thing I remember I ever made was a couple of scaled down soccer goals. You see, I am a huge fan of soccer and at the time – I was probably 10 or 11 years old – I was also a huge fan a my G.I. Joe’s. During my childhood I developed a pretty cool skill of manipulating their tiny body parts to move very human-like and so I started making them play soccer. I used marbles as soccer balls because they were proportionally correct in size compared to size of the action figures but I didn’t have any proper soccer goals and playing with a couple of dead Joes as goal posts just wasn’t working out. I didn’t know where to buy these things and I really wanted something better. I had a problem to fix. It was super cool because it sparked the maker in me so I decided to build them myself.

One important thing I want to point out here is that it all started because I had a vision. I wanted the best and most realistic-looking soccer goals possible to allow my toys to play soccer as God intended to. Every decision I was going to make while building them had to respect that vision. Otherwise it just wasn’t worth it.

So I went and grabbed my school notebook and sketched to the best of my ability what it was going to look like and how it was going to be built (wireframing and specs). When I was happy with it I made a list (requirements) of everything I was going to need to built them and went to get my materials. I grabbed three pieces of toy building wood blocks (development) and a cut out a piece of a sac of fruit and turned it into a net. I grabbed some tape and taped the sticks together and after about 4 hours of trying to attach the net to the sticks and give it some form using galvanized wire, needle and thread I had it. It was awesome. My first creation! I took it, placed it over my bed, grabbed a few G.I. Joe’s and started playing. At a first impression it was pretty cool but almost immediately I started to experience some design faults in my goals. Because of the way the sac of fruit is manufactured, its strings would start to separate and create bigger holes with the first couple of impacts of the marble and eventually, it would not hold the ball anymore. Also, I could not get the goal to stand after a shot was made without holding it with my hand. Finally what made it impossible to keep playing was that with the same impact from the ball into the net, the sticks began to break off. The tape wasn’t strong enough so eventually the goal broke apart completely.

All these things were mistakes in the design and they all contributed to me having a bad experience. I was not having fun. I was frustrated because I couldn’t play anymore and the little time I could, my imagination, that was just starting to go into this super awesome stadium in the final game of the World Cup, was constantly interrupted and brought back to reality because of a piece of shit thing that just wasn’t working. The net didn’t do its job and when it did, every shot would just throw the thing down and break off the posts a little by little. In this case the creator and the consumer was the same person so I knew what was wrong, I had gathered the information I needed to know why I didn’t achieve my goal (user feedback and analytics). I was sad and upset at myself.

But I didn’t give up. I re-approached the problem completely. The first time I had built them out of my memory. You know, what I had just seen in many matches in TV and what I remembered of them from when I played in school. This time I had to research because the problems became very evident when I started to use them. I had ignored the fact that real goals are buried into the ground. That’s why they stay standing. I didn’t know either how the nets maintained their boxed form or why they were tied up to two smaller posts a few meters back. And more importantly, I did not consider the context of where I was going to play. That defined in the end how I solved the problem.

Design phase began again. Of course I didn’t know that was what I was actually doing, I was 10 years old. Looking back however, it all becomes really obvious. Anyway, I studied all these things in the next few days and decided to do the following upgrades:

Posts

I needed to nail the pieces of wood together so that impacts would not be forceful enough to break them apart. I still taped them to re-enforce them but also covered them completely in masking tape because it helped to make them look more realistic. They were white…ish.

Net

I changed the material of the net and after extensive research I ended up using brides veil. A kind that was strong enough to not get ripped after every shot but flexible enough to absorb the impact of the ball and not move the posts. Also, you know the way in which a soccer goal net behaves when a goal is scored after a really powerful shot? It is awesome. One of the most beautiful things in the game. I wanted to see that in my goals and the veil allowed for it. Besides, they looked awesome and realistic.

Structure

To make the goal in a way that it could stay standing after every shot and to make the boxed shape of the goal with the net was going to be hard. This is the part where context defined the solution. I played on my bed. It was the field. It was the best place to play because while sitting on the floor, my head was just at the right height to see the field as a player would. My eyes were the field cam. I was not a spectator. I was the players. Also, the mattress proved to be the best material to play on. Hard enough to move around and soft enough to fix the goal to it. It is obvious that I could not bury the goals in the mattress, my mom would have murdered me and I wouldn’t be here talking to you today. But what I could do is stick curved needles coming from all around the bottom of the net and the posts into the mattress. This way I could fix it to the ground. If I had not understood that posts need a foundation, I would not have been able to reach this solution. I followed the same idea and tied strings from the corners of the net and stuck the other ends with curved needles into pillows behind the net. I used curved needles because they didn’t came out. Straight needles just came out of where ever I stuck them.

So now I had goals that could stand up without my intervention, they could hold a ball after a shot and they also looked great. And they were well made too. They lasted about 5 or 6 years until my younger cousins played with them when I was a bit older and completely destroyed them. I guess that if I had kept them they would probably be in good shape.

Connecting the dots and understand what UX means.

So now you might be asking yourselves, "well, this is cool and all but what does this have to do with UX". Well, all this stuff I did, building, researching for materials, for behaviors, nailing pieces of wood together, etcetera, was to fulfill the vision I had. To have the best and most realistic-looking soccer goals possible to allow my toys to play soccer the way I wanted to. All the decisions I made were filtered through that vision. But most importantly, this vision existed because of one thing. I wanted to have fun. I wanted my imagination to go free and to experience full-forced pure fun with something that allowed me to be truly happy in that moment in time. That’s what UX is to me. It is that perspective. That permanent goal of an emotional value that I can give to someone who uses anything I make. In this case, it was to have fun, but taking it to a new level when I played with my toys.

You see, in a way, UX translates into what millions of people are looking for in their lives. Improvement, fun, happiness, love, to name a few. It’s connecting yourself, your reality to your desires through your emotions. The stuff that we make has that power. We live in the era of experiences. This day and age companies succeed not because of their business models or marketing strategies. They succeed because of how well they solve the problems they set out to solve. Because of how positive the experiences are when their users interact with the products and services they offer. This is the new bar that people use to measure things. Companies who understand this are the ones winning the race. They are the ones ahead of the game. For them, Customer Happiness is the metric that matters. At the end of the day, when it comes to measuring the results of your efforts, customer happiness is the unanimous success metric. Remember that. That is why my first goals didn’t work and the second set did. If these were two competing products you know which one would win over the market. Don’t settle for good enough. You need to focus on quality. Not on how much money you can make, not on how good you can look or on how well can you sell, but on how good can you solve the problem for your customers. And try to top that every single day. That is your business.

UX is about phsycology, linguistics, neuroscience, sociology and philosophy. It is about understanding humans because we build things for humans. How can you make people happy if you don’t understand people?

Some companies measure customer happiness by tracking app reviews, customer emails and tweets, and by surveying their users. This gives them a sense of how they are doing on a regular basis. In their experience, the principles and ideas they apply to help scale any type of product or service are to:

1. Focus on creating a great app that people will love. Connect with them on the emotional level.

2. Enlighten your users on how to maximize their use of your product or service. Give them tips, help them to make the best of it.

3. Make sure you have excellent customer support. Because you will make mistakes and they will ask for solutions. All these problems are opportunities to be better.

4. Obsess about the happiness of your customers. That builds loyalty.

There’s problems with framing UX as a discipline because it brings it down to a level of something you do whether something that happens. I don’t think that we, as makers, have this super power of creating the experiences of someone else. When people interact with animals, objects and other people, in many different places in the world and in different moments in time they have an experience. A variable-filled subjective phenomenon inside a persons head. It is something that inevitably happens. It is not something that is done. The best we can do, is influence in what a person experiments through design.

What Design actually is

At the beginning I said that I went to school to become what I thought a designer was. There is a traditional misconception of what design means. The word is used in many different moments, by many different people, in many different contexts. However when you ask around what design is, we then get a very diverse soup of meanings. Supplements and glossy magazines often use ‘design’ as a buzzword denoting style and fashion. The general population confuses it with the visual character of things. ’This is a pretty design’, they often say about a thing they are looking at. Could be a chair, a poster, a website, a backpack or a salt shaker. This is an expression that doesn’t make sense to me, but I do understand it. What they mean is that what they are looking at is visually appealing to them, but that’s not Design.

When I enrolled into college I saw myself working at prestigious firms and agencies sitting down and drawing logotypes, making graphics and web sites part of marketing campaigns for top notch brands. However it wasn’t really clear to me what the actual job of a graphic designer was. I had met different designers at the time and some of them only sat down on their computers and execute what they were told to do. There wasn’t really anything exciting about their job. Others would be the ones who told everyone else what was going to be done. That was more exciting but what they managed was not only graphical or visual stuff but all other kinds of decisions that impacted our work. I figured it was a matter or growth and hierarchy but then I learned that some of them we’re not graphic designers but marketing, communication and business majors and that confused the fuck out of me. Then I met industrial designers who had their own businesses and they did the job that some of the graphic designers, marketers and company leaders did. Even my dad as an architect shared a lot of the stuff they did. That confused me even more. Everyone was doing kind of the same things but they were very different people and they went to school to become different things. I struggled a lot to piece all these things together because nobody ever really tells you whats going on. I think that is because not a lot of people really know what’s going on. Neither at school or at the job. We usually don’t ask ourselves how all the things in the world get done. What is the process behind them? We don’t ask even if we are part of that process.

So all these years doing what I do, and I have to say that this is something I realized not very long ago, I have understood design as the activity that translates an idea into a blueprint or specification for something useful, whether it’s a car, a building, a graphic, a service or a process. It doesn’t matter what it is. The important part is the translation of the idea into something (drawings, sketches, documents, models or anything else) that can give clarity about how that thing is going to exist. It is the plan that specifies how something is going to look, how something is going to be built and what things is going to be made of. Everything around what will allow its existence. That’s why all these people’s actions and jobs resembled so much. They were all designing what was going to be created from their own areas of expertise but they were in fact, designing. I learned that anyone can be a designer. Design is fundamental. Everything around us is designed and design decisions impact on nearly every part of our lives, be it the environments we work in, the way we book holidays, or the way we go about getting the lid off the jam jar. When those things work and people are happy, design is taken for granted.

Scientists can invent technologies, manufacturers can make products, engineers can make them function and marketers can sell them, but only designers can combine insight into all these things and turn a concept into something that’s desirable, viable, commercially successful and adds value to people’s lives.

This last part is where UX meets Design. When we design something we’ll make, what we usually want to happen is that whoever uses this thing, his or her problem gets solved in a way that delights and amazes them. This is where we want to innovate in. The only way to achieve it, based solely upon what I’ve learned in my experience, is that everyone involved in the process of designing and building something, whether its designers, engineers, managers, marketers or business people, have UX as a perspective present throughout the whole process. Everything they write, draw, animate, code or propose should be aimed towards the end-user having the most positive experience possible when using our makings.

Design and UX thinking is something that trickles down. Companies and organizations that get this succeed not because they were able to hire the best designers. There are great designers everywhere. They succeed because they are organized in a way that allows them to create the awesome things they do. Unless the people at the top get it, you will not get great design or UX. Great design is a symptom of a design-led organizational structure and development processes.

Our Responsibility is Above UX

Design and UX are important as hell. I think we’ve established that. But I believe there is something more important, our responsibility as designers. We have the power to change and manipulate the world but we’re so focused on what we can do that we forget to think about what we should or shouldn’t do.

This girl is Bobbi Duncan. A few years ago while she attended UT Austin she joined a chorus group at school. As many college students and basically as billions of people in the world, she uses Facebook. She is also a lesbian and the group she joined at school was the Queer Chorus. When she joined, the chorus president added her to the group’s Facebook page because that’s how he communicated with the members of the group. For her own personal reasons, Bobbi had not come out to her parents yet so she carefully managed those Facebook privacy settings to build a wall around what her parents could and couldn’t see. We’ve all seen what those settings looked like. They’re a pile of scrambled actions that nobody understands and they change it every couple of weeks anyway. So what happened to Bobbi is that when the chorus president created the group’s page, he made it open. It is understandable since it is not a secret organization. However, he did not know that Facebook designers had made three very important design decisions.

1. Anyone can add you to a group. They don’t need your permission. They don’t need to know you.

2. When you’re added to a group, it goes up in your wall for all of your friends to see.

3. The group settings override your own privacy settings.

The settings that Bobbi had very carefully managed were overridden by the group’s settings and notified all of Bobbi’s friends that she had joined the Queer Chorus at UT Austin, including her father. When he saw this, he later left messages on her phone demanding that she left same-sex relationships and threatened to sever all family ties. She was devastated. In interviews she later expressed that the problem had gone so far that she had considered suicide. She currently does not have any kind of relationship with her father and but fortunately she is doing a lot better now.

This is irresponsible design. She had made a decision of how to handle her life, she thought it through and did the work of setting it up and it was completely undermined by a careless design decision. It was a violation of her privacy.

The world is filled with stuff like this. Irresponsible designers that let bad business, technical and marketing decisions out in the world, allow for cases like Bobbi’s to be more and more common. Something that with a few use cases would have been spotted and probably fixed if they had wanted to in an afternoon. We have to understand the cost of what happens when we make shit. You have a limited amount of time in this world. Try to spend it on problems worthy of solving and not on stuff the fills the world with garbage, solving problems that we don’t need just to build businesses around them to solely make money. The world already is full of problems that need solving so we will have work for a very long time. We don’t want a world with more things but a world where things work better.

You have a responsibility to the world. Make quality stuff that works better. You have a responsibility to the craft. Every time that you agree to work on something that undermines design you put the rest of us in a hole that we have to climb out of. We as a The Hackers and Founders community try to create conscience with these talks and contribute to growth and knowledge. You have a responsibility to your clients. Be honest about what they need over focusing on what they want to just send them an invoice and get paid. Most importantly, you have a responsibility to yourself. This is in your best interest. We’re here to make money. If you take responsibility for you work, you’ll enjoy it more and it will lead to better opportunities. You will have the respect of your clients and your colleagues. You can choose who to work with and what to work on.

This knowledge is only as good as your ability to go to work tomorrow and convince others of doing it. It is only as good as your ability to sell it. It is only as good as your ability to do it yourself and it relates directly with the number that stands for your salary. Believe me, this number is responsive.

Responsibility is your potential to move human kind forward. This is the job. Design works in the service of a better world. Always has, always will. It is time to be aware of what we’re doing. Design should create, not destroy. In the end what we put out into the world will be named after us. Don’t contribute your talent, time and resources to build shit.

Remember, we want happy people in the world with what we create. We can all be designers. We should all make positive UX happen.

Thank you.