User experience is not brain surgery. Stop acting like it is.
Let me get this out of the way: I know it’s facetious. I know Ian is trying to make a point about the “UX is easy to do in three easy steps!” attitude pervading the zeitgeist of late. UX is a lot harder than simply reading some books, grabbing a random job, and three years later being handed a principal UX designer title.
And yet.
The user experience community, now 15 years on from Jesse James Garrett’s “coining” of the name, is still struggling to gain a foothold in the tech world, still struggling to get out of its awkward adolescence and moving on to what it wants to be when it grows up.
And here we are, again, sounding self-important, glib, and just a little bit smug.
User experience isn’t that important.
It’s not.
Do our wireframes remove blastomas from brains without causing more damage than necessary? Can our user flows bypass clogged arteries and give grandfathers a few more memorable years with their grandchildren? Our information architectures and content models, how do they feed the world?
They don’t.
All we can do is help.
We can create wireframes that design the right interface for a brain surgeon to use during the operation, saving cognitive load for the far more vital thinking skills of knowing how much healthy tissue needs to come with the tumor.
We can build user flows so that we can find the pain points surgeons and nurses have during heart surgery, providing them with better tools, more convenient UIs, and an overall safer, more effective experience that gives that grandfather the years his grandkids deserve.
We can create information architectures and content models to make the logistics and management of food aid simpler, more intuitive, and smarter, so that a famine-stricken refugee camp never has to worry about the process of delivering the right food at the right time.
That’s all we can do. Help.
We don’t cure anyone. We don’t save anyone. All we do is make it easier for people to be cured and saved (and even preventing disasters from happening.)
And that’s where Ian’s facetiousness falls flat. UX is hard. But it’s hard because people are hard. The same way surgery is hard, mind you.
Arguably, the things that makes a brain surgeon great are the same things that make a UX designer (of any stripe) great. Research. Practice. Never losing the hunger to learn, from others, from new findings, from mistakes.
And waking up today wanting to be better than you were yesterday.
In that vein, Ian’s “Really starting a career in UX” is a better primer. Still, it really only tells you how to go learn, rather than asking if the user experience world is really cut out for you.
When someone comes and says to me “I really want to get into the UX world,” I ask:
Are you curious?
When you find a bad experience in some app or website, do you wonder what the design decisions were that led to that solution?
How hungry are you? Will you “push pixels” if that’s what it’ll take to learn what you need to learn?
Can you take criticism? Can you separate the useless feedback from the useful?
Are you patient? Are you patient with yourself? How’s your expectation setting?
How are your listening skills? How are your communication skills? Do you know when to shut up? Do you know when to speak?
Can you mentor? Can you listen to your mentors?
Are you willing to be the dumbest person in the room? Do you understand why you have to be?
Lastly… are you willing to check your ego at the door and do what’s best for your users — and your employers — regardless of how it makes you look?
See, learning user experience is beyond book learning. It’s a willingness to embrace a sort of kenosis — the Christian concept of “emptying” oneself of self-will — and accepting that you are merely an instrument of empathy towards those using what you help build.
You’re not a hero. You’re just this person whose job it is to look after the interests of those who desperately need someone vested in their goals and values. The brain surgeon who really needs to be taking that tumor out instead of futzing with a UI showing MRI scans. The heart surgery team that would rather have a system that follows their flow instead of fighting it. The aid worker who is exhausted from 16 hour days and just needs to make sure the USAID drop is coming tomorrow and not delivering rations that aren’t halal again.
That’s all we are. People who put ourselves in the shoes of those who need us to be there speaking for them. We make it sound heroic, but in reality we’re just practitioners, not miracle workers.
You want to join the user experience world? Do what Ian says. But first, check your ego. You’ll just find it gets in the way, anyway.
