Interview with Amber Case
Author, Calm Technology
This year we’re celebrating 10 years of UX London! In the run up to our special anniversary conference, we caught up with Amber Case to hear her thoughts on the evolution and impact of UX, and how her own career has developed in this time.
On the evolution and impact of UX
Thinking back to 2009 how and where did the discipline of UX sit within the industry and what role was it playing in business at that time.
I think that first time I ever heard about UX was in 2008. It was basically somebody calling me up one day and saying “hey you might want to work at this company!”. The conversation went something like this:
Her: We have a really good opportunity for someone like you. The job is in user experience design.
Me: “What’s user experience design?”
(It was 2008. I was fresh out of college with an anthropology degree, and the only thing I could find was ‘seo’ work. My clients were getting sick of me telling them where to put buttons on pages, but I didn’t know there was a field dedicated to how things worked.)
Her: “Don’t you care about where buttons are on pages?”
Me: “Yeah I really care about where buttons are located. I care about where doorknobs are located. I care about doors and windows and how things work and if they’re smooth or not. And I wish I could make things better.”
Her: “Yeah, well you probably have the mind of a user experience designer!”
User experience, to my knowledge, was very new and a lot of people didn’t have even a lot of conferences about it to go to. It was really exciting to know that other people cared about things the way that I did, and that there were processes to make things better.
How has UX changed in the past 10 years?
I think that in the past 10 years UX has been elevated from something that not that many people knew or hired for, to something that has become crucial to almost every software company. I’m so excited by that. I’ve encountered large companies that forced development through a requests sent to a ‘graphics department’ where a user interface would be developed without any understanding of the final product. Once the request was completed, it would be sent to the engineering department and there’d be no communication between the two. I was terrified by this concept. I felt that user experience designers could make lives easier for developers, customers, and managers by really understanding what needed to be done.
It’s so exciting to be a part of an industry that’s grown this much. Philips Corporation is one of my dream companies, because design is high up in management. Early on at Philips, the ‘designer’ role sat at a high level with the CEO, and I think that’s why that company did so well over time. This was elevating design at the level of the CEO back in the 1920s! It was incredibly exciting to discover. Companies that take design seriously can really outperform other companies. I loved following the path of the 50K design fund (50K invested for 10 years in 10 companies with a focus on design). The fund returned a very nice profit. I show that to anyone who tries to downplay the importance of design and overall profits.
On your career
Tell us about your first design/UX role. Who did you model yourself on?
My first UX design role was at Vertigo Software in 2009.
I began blogging and taking screenshots of sites and experiences that I really loved.
And then I used those skills in pattern libraries. I used the Yahoo pattern library as big of inspiration. Yahoo’s days of incredible UX were on the decline, and a lot of great people were gone, but the Design Pattern Library was still around, and even if it was a bit outdated, it really taught me a lot about how to think about UX. I was just so excited about everything. I couldn’t believe that I would get paid to do anything like this.
I modeled my work on Don Norman, Peter Morville and anyone else I could find that cared about information and design.
My boss was incredible. He was so patient with me. I was really junior and we’d sit there on the phone with a client like eight hours a day. He would get the requirements from the client, and I would prepare the wireframes. The first major project I worked on was a redesign of a enterprise grade video encoding system. The workflows were incredibly complex, and I got to learn a lot about screen sizes, streaming and video compression. It took six months to work on this project, and it was just my boss and I. Two people for an enormous deliverable! In the end, we had
150 pages of work with an outline of every interaction. But it was also kind of disappointing, because I left to start Geoloqi a few months after that, and I’ve never worked on anything that complex since.
What are the qualities of a good UX practitioner?
The qualities of a good UX practitioner include the ability to put yourself into the minds of many different kinds of people in a variety of contexts. You need to be a very good listener and set up environments where you can encounter real frustration from people and get excited about making things better. You need to be sensitive to the world around you, and realize that everything human-made has been designed. Everything can be changed, and with the right amount of thought and cleverness, things can be made better. Great communication skills, contextual understanding, a kind of science fiction-based mind that can expand or extend interaction into thousands of timelines at once in your head, to see if something could go wrong or something could be confused.
It’s kind of like the qualities you have as a kid. A child looks at a bunch of Legos and imagines hundreds of opportunities. You would want somebody who could come up with lots of different imaginative scenarios, because that’s what you have to do: you’re anticipating things that could happen, and as a user experience designer, it is your responsibility to make every interaction good.
How do you motivate your team?
I’m not sure how I motivated my team when I ran Geoloqi. It was a little startup and I just I felt like there was this kind of zest to everything we did. I found people from non-traditional backgrounds and let them learn. We weren’t trying to do just run of the mill software, we were trying to do something that was more of an extension of an art project — connecting people to locations and each other. And we just thought that the right people would show up at the right time — and they did. People from all sorts of different backgrounds, people at the intersections of different fields, people with college degrees, people without college degrees, people with experience, people with only paper experience, print experience and it was amazing. I remember going on the radio and this woman called me and she said “hey I want to work for your company!”. And we didn’t have a lot of budget, but we were able to make it work. She had this really incredible, deep software knowledge — and she’d had a kid, so had been out of the workforce for a while and wanted to stay in Portland. And I remember just saying: “OK, well we’ll do a trade — we’ll teach you iPhone development if you write this really complex piece of code for us”. And so she spent all summer spending half of her time writing this incredibly complex piece of code. And then the other part was learning iPhone development. And then I called up her dream company and got her a job there. I said: “Look this person is amazing, you have to hire her!”. And they said: “OK we’re really excited”. And it was a fun time! I always wanted everybody to finish things two months before launch date. We would routinely finish things really, really early and then we’d take a break and build some software for fun. If you can’t have fun, I don’t know what the point is. You have to have silliness because all the silly projects that we worked on turned into real software later on.
What advice would you give practitioners who are just starting out in their careers?
Create your own library of user experience patterns that you love, get really excited about how things work, read a lot of books, use a lot of sites and products, and write up your opinions on them and put them on a blog. Attend lots of meetups, and find people that you enjoy spending time with. That’s really how I got started. I took screenshots of things, put them on Flickr, wrote blog posts about them, and went to as many Meetups as I could. I was so excited to meet people that cared about buttons and interactions.
I would be very careful, too. If you’re not super excited about buttons and where they placed and how they’re placed and who they’re placed for, then don’t do it as a career. Do something else or find a way to get really excited, because you’re going to be working on buttons and details for many years. You’ll need to really like it. And it’s important to get excited about improving boring interfaces, too. Improving the mundane is some of the most important work you can do. I’m always more excited to work on something that exists than something that is new. I’d rather improve a fax machine interface used by 20 million people than work on a new social network. I care about what happens when conditions are sub-optimal. I think the worst thing someone can do is assume that everyone can read the same 10pt font you can, or that they all have small fingers and high dexterity. We’re all going to age with our technology, and how it works when we have arthritis is just as important. My grandmother’s hospital call button was too small to click, so my uncle rigged up a super sensitive touch pad so that she could lightly touch it and help would arrive. That’s an improvement! I think it’s increasingly important to consider interfaces at this level. Affordances for people who are outside of the age of 14–25. Let’s make the world better for everyone — not just those with great Internet access.
The quality of interfaces matters more than ever before, and if you look at old interfaces like ancient technologies, vintage technologies or antique technologies, chances are they’re designed very very well. Consider things that are part of tradition, or items that have such a history and a quality that they can be handed down for multiple generations. Think about how to improve the old in a way that respects the old and brings on new things to make things easier to use. It’s a really exciting field to think about.
What does a typical day look like for you? Is it all meetings?
A typical day for me is different now that I’m in the middle of writing a book again. I’m working on an O’Reilly Book called Designing With Sound. I don’t like to set alarms, but I try to sleep around 10:30–10:45pm and wake up around 8:30am. I make coffee in a Chemex and make the same shitake avocado and egg breakfast tacos every morning. I’ll start writing from 10 a.m. to around 2 or 3pm. Sometimes if I’m in a good flow I’ll go all the way to 4pm before taking a break for lunch. I will try to spend the rest of the day doing silly things, like making music or hanging out with friends. Sometimes I take an interview or a call, but I try to schedule those for 8 or 9am to get them out of the way in the morning. This is the opposite from when I did a startup where I worked 100 hour weeks, and it left me pretty lopsided and eventually depressed. If I haven’t done enough in the day, more time is spent usually preparing for a speech interview request, or researching new material late at night. If I stay up late, I usually go on an Internet binge where I go on archive.org and try to find weird things. It’s really enjoyable!
If I’m on the road a typical day means waking up at 6am and doing a mic check. I’ll do 20 minutes in the hotel gym. Jetlag prevention is key: I’ll eat at precisely the same local times, and go to bed at the same time every night. I’ve gotten pretty used to it by now. I can fall asleep and wake up pretty easily no matter the time zone. The first five years of speaking internationally was very difficult because I didn’t have a set routine.
I read about famous authors who sleep at 8pm and wake up at 4am. They get 3 hours of writing in before they do their day job. Maybe I’ll try that one day. I’d have to have a typical job first. I’m hoping to meet a company that’s working on something really difficult — like hospital alarms or better healthcare. I’d join a project like that in a heartbeat. I have a dream to work at a Dutch or Swedish company someday.
What’s your proudest achievement?
I think my proudest achievement will be when I’ve finished ‘Designing with Sound’, because it’s in memory of my Dad who was a sound engineer and a synthesizer maker, and he’ll never get to see it. But hopefully I’m carrying on a little bit of his legacy with that.
Anything else on your mind at the moment?
I keep thinking about is ‘alarm fatigue’ and how many deaths it causes in hospitals. It’s really upsetting. Really, really upsetting. Just improving that could take 20 years, but that’s the kind of problem I want to tackle.
I want to think about the mundane invisible everyday problems. When I sat in the hospital with my dad while he was going through cancer, the alarms were constant, uninformative, and anxiety inducing. And I thought how they could be made better.
I need to get really good research, design, writing and so many things in place to be able to do that; it could easily take the rest of my life but I want to tackle that problem head on.
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Join Amber and a host of other fantastic speakers at UX London 2018 — the 10th anniversary edition of Clearleft’s trailblazing UX conference. UX London takes place 23rd-25th May 2018 at Trinity Laban — tickets are on sale now at www.uxlondon.com
