Weeknote: Waves of Design Value
Weeknote #4 (English)
Basahin sa Tagalog (at Tag-lish) ang post na ito dito.
1. Have you managed a team before?
2. Have you conducted a performance assessment of your members?
3. Have you needed to interview, assess and hire an employee?
If you said yes to any of these, then you understand the tricky psychological process of: valuation. Particularly, the valuation of a person.
How much is a person worth to your team or your company?
Well, whether you’re a consultant, an employee or a leader, this question is going to crop up in some form.
User Experience (or, for that matter — any multi-discipline “industry”), is peculiar in the sense that different people could have the same “job title”, but with totally different shades of value. What do I mean?
This week, we had to discuss our value to teams.
I have a qualitative-quantitative research and content strategy background. My way to “UX” was through usability research and human factors.
B has an industrial design and web design background. His way to UX is through prototyping and interaction design.
B and I are both called User Experience Designers by the teams we’ve worked for. To be more specific though, we see ourselves as a “design researcher” and an “interaction designer” working together.
Because we have different skills, we’re also “activated” at different parts of the process and for different reasons.
This also means that we aren’t valued the same way. Which isn’t a bad thing. It’s just an interesting thing to observe.
When does the team feel that research matters?
When does a team feel that interaction design matters?
Based on our observation, a designer’s value is felt most intensely during product creation. You can see it in how many people criticize and give feedback on design work. You pay people a lot to design because amazing design work has immediate, visceral, tangible impact.
Designers get a lot of heat during the creation of a product (and even after). This just goes to show how much their work matters to stakeholders and customers, and how much a great designer is worth.
Working end-to-end on a product can make a researcher feel pretty lost, however. Since your aren’t “creating product” (you aren’t writing code, or visualizing images that actually make up the website or app), the activities that you make people do (join usability tests and debriefs) are typically seen as “taking long” or detracting from “work time”. It takes balls of steel to continually communicate the value that early in the process.
(It also helps to do strategic work — Product Management, Content strategy, planning and creation — which are actually tangible parts of what goes on the site.)
B stated my lesson for the week very succinctly:
“Maybe you just have to accept that the impact of your work is felt at the end.” (Translated)
“Builders” and “Analysts” can work together, but we also have to embrace that they have their unique roles, even in the workflow. This was a great lesson in valuating people. Especially for people leading and forming teams. That you don’t just find the top shooters, you also have to determine who are the top assists.
What we know about work, we owe — not only to our formal education and our jobs, but also to the forward-thinking designers, developers, researchers,product managers and teams who choose to share their processes and lessons (for free) on Youtube, blogs, websites and MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) tutorials. This is the spirit of designing in the open. Where design teams show their process and what they learn along the way. This is done to grow the knowledge base of the industry, and also to get feedback and dialogue going about the work.
(If you’re interested in reading more about the beauty of open design, you can read this.)
We share what we experience in these weeknotes. To respect our clients’ confidentiality, we won’t directly post details about them. Everything we share here are the opinions (and life lessons) of the writer.
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