
If We Don’t Care, Who Will?
UX Designers. Product Designers. Experience Designers. We get called a lot of things and we wear a lot of hats at times. I’m sure there are many of us who have told our family and friends what it is we do exactly, and they never really remember or fully understand.
My closest friend and I recently went on a road trip across the country. She and I had met while studying Photography in Nebraska and became friends while spending hours together in the photo lab darkroom. She really had no idea what UX is and she started to ask questions about UX design. With nothing but time to kill and the open road, I went into detail and tried my best to explain the nuances of human-centered design, Don Norman’s doors and kettles, different design principles and if there really is a “perfect process’ out there. She started to get it and pretty soon she was commenting about the “bad UX” of the new ATM interface at her bank. She started to understand the need for human-centered design and making it an integral piece of product development.
As UX designers we have a unique opportunity to care about actual human experiences. It is easy to tell which companies or brands tend to skip/rush/assume critical UX design principles. It’s like when you get a headache — you don’t think about how your head feels until it hurts. We do not notice good user experiences nearly as quickly as we notice bad user experiences.
My mentor once told me about working at a company that half-assed their research/discovery phases and manipulated user testing to get the results they wanted or their stakeholders wanted. Sometimes as UX Designers we have to be bold and push back against this type of culture if we want to actually solve real problems. Learning the soft skills of communicating user needs can be difficult but standing by your user research should be your guiding voice of reason to defend design decisions. This is why we have to care. We have to talk ideas until we are exhausted. We have to listen and observe. We have to be sketching on the train ride home or at midnight when the ideas roll in. Because if we don’t care, no one will.
