UX Divas Never Win The Game
How to roll the right kind of UX hero
Imagine this, you and five friends are playing a role-playing game where you have to fight this powerful dragon. Your party consists of a defensive heavy-tank knight, a creative and powerful mage, a cleric who can heal, and roguish assassin. Your party has one more slot for you to fill. What would it be and how can you and your party defeat this massive dragon?
This may sound childish, but it’s a situation that every UX practitioner finds himself at multiple points in his career. You’re entering an already working team with multiple voices fighting to be heard. But at the same time, all these these voices only have one goal. Trying to figure out where your space and the space UX can fill can be a difficult and long journey.
The growth of UX
The entire UX field has seen a lot of growth locally in the past few years. Instead of fighting to be acknowledged and understood, teams in companies are now fighting over who has knowledge, expertise and ownership. This growth is mostly from the efforts of charismatic UXers who’ve been able to sell UX to stakeholders as this shiny philosopher stone that can solve anything and everything.
This hype came with a price. UX professionals are seen as the singular star players needed to make a winning product, leaving one of the core principles of HCD and Design Thinking behind—collaboration.
The UX diva
In a previous job where I was hired for my experience in UX, I had a supervisor who said she was truly invested in User Experience. She had attended workshops and studied it extensively having books on digital marketing, optimising web flows, and button placements.
During my first project she asked me why I was so dependent on other teams. I was going to get feedback from the rest of the project stakeholders on a situation and a possible solution we had, and I explained how I was making our process more collaborative so the rest of the team understands where we’re coming from. She scoffed saying “I understand collaboration but domain expertise is important. I have never seen you show domain expertise.”
Yes, expertise is good but a good UXer will know that they do not have all the answers, they are not the magic key that will solve every problem. This reliance on expertise rather than collaboration is what feeds UX diva behaviour. This kind of overblown ego tends to only alienate other team members instead of bringing them into your side as champions.
Other UX Diva symptoms include:
1. Using lines such as “this is based on my years of experience” as an appeal to credibility.
Why this is a problem: Experience is one thing but if you’ve had years of experiencing something that’s problematic, you may not be able to see innovation.
2. Denying solutions outright because “it isn’t best practice” also as an appeal to credibility.
Why this is a problem: Yesterdays best practice may not be best practice today for your specific context. As technology changes and evolves so do your “best practices.”
3. Shooting down ideas because they were not yours or brought to you “to be approved” first.
Why this is a problem: If there’s one thing that hinders collaborative environments, it’s HiPPO culture (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). This leads to very narrow decisions that may often come from just one view point overlooking other use cases that may be crucial.
But they get the job done right?
Yes, they get the job done. However, this creates a funnel in your processes that can’t scale and isn’t sustainable. Just like the RPG party at the start, if you focus and rely completely on one star player, if he falls ill or gets knocked-out, your party will be at a gross disadvantage.
Often than not a UX Diva will tend to antagonize other teams rather than evangelize the importance of User Experience. Remember, you cannot evangelize while you antagonize. Just like the RPG party, no one wants to play with someone who constantly picks fights with his other party mates or the DM.
What should you do?
It was an old colleague, Mica Diaz de Rivera who first introduced me to UX and the UX way of thinking. Mica believes that UXers aren’t meant to be stars. In a language that he knew I understood (because I’m a nerd) UXers are the quintessential support characters helping the team get to their goals, healing team mates and buffing fighters to beat that project problem.
No one should be the star, as everyone has their role to play. If you do your job well and support the team then the entire team gets loot and is rewarded with good XP.
Samantha Soma echoes this in her talk at UXHK a few years back. She mentions how we often focus so much on our end users experience that we forget that our team mates are our users too.
“Sometimes you are the broken interface”.
- Samantha Soma, UXHK 2014
The UXer, the Bard of the Product teams
Back to DnD, there is one class that can help harmonize your product team and that class is The Bard.
Being a Bard will help your team do a better job. In DnD they help out by inspiring allies to fight on. In the real world a good UXer can support a team well by helping bridge the gaps and getting the team the insight and information they need. Your research into what people need may be the key for your developers or designers to have the perfect solution to a problem.
Bards are also masters of lore and speech. Communication and storytelling skills are an important aspect of being a good UXer to help align a team and get buy-in from stakeholders. You aren’t there to solve every problem with your expertise but you can explain the situation to multiple stakeholders and team members so you can get to a solution together.
Remember you don’t have to always be on the frontlines, the bard isn’t meant to be a frontline fighter but your success depends on the success of the team.
Ending fanfare
Creative people (as most UXers come from creative/design spheres) I understand we all have that desire to be acknowledged, to shine, and to have our work validated by various people. However, this is what separates good designers from great ones. Good designers build from insights, ideas and feedback of their teammates. Great Designers care if their team is growing and is achieving their goals.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to be a fame-monster when you start. Trust me however, you will find more fulfilment seeing your team earning all that EXP and gold together rather than seeing everyone pissed because you’re the only one growing. So will you lead them — or should I say help them or will they fall? It all depends on you.
