What if the world were without stop signs, and a major corporation was charged with inventing one? You would probably get this:
The Process
The funny video was tweeted to my attention by Mike Stelzner, a white paper guru with some experience operating in this world. If it isn’t true, then it feels true.
But, seriously …
Even though Team Stop Sign worked together in a group, they were still operating in isolation. Demographic surveys aren’t a replacement for getting the end consumers involved with the process of design. Businesses may be embracing collective wisdom, but it still seems from a business perspective, developing a user experience up front—with the user—is a luxury.
The video reminded me of a blog draft that has been sitting idle for a loooooong time about a now two-year-old article by Scott Berkun, “The ideal designer & project manager.” Berkun is also the author of great O’Reilly book, The Myth of Innovation, that came out on my birthday last year.
In the blog post, Berkun asks what is the ideal designer. What I liked best about the answer was that it focused not on the individual but on the relationship with the team, in particular the project manager. The ideal designer is a thought leader, communicative collaborators with well-rounded ideas. The other side to that coin is the dysfunction of ego without a practical track record (we tend to build concepts, not products). Project managers are built for deadlines and balancing resources, but they can also succumb to power plays and emphasize team control at the expense of good collaborative decision-making. Success is attributed not to finding the ideal but in working the relationships.
Experience is still a hard sell
At the IU School of Informatics, the human-computer interaction group has made a point of emphasizing design and leadership as the key parts of our training. There are some graduates who will opt for usability or continue to construct systems and web applications. Even at the masters level, though, there is a strong emphasis on research and doing the legwork up front to better define that development space.
There have been some successes among the HCI alumni in changing business culture with this approach, but most will still tell stories of struggle to validate a true UX strategy toward the creation of better products and services.
Undoubtedly, it will get easier with each class of new alumni hires. The best argument, however, is to be able to translate early user involvement into that world of deadlines and bottom lines. That may be more efficient to do with a startup company.
Any startup will tell you how strapped they are for resources and how pressured they feel to get a product to market, particularly if investing has begun. That situation isn’t ripe for “experimenting” away from the perceived straightest and fastest line to completion. However, startups by nature are much more open-minded and willing to look for an edge. Those lucky few who start new companies with some financial security may be the best places to send our graduates to prove our process, rather than to the larger corporate organizations that might suffer from over engineering the stop sign.
2 replies on “Design in the Real World”
Couldn’t agree more. I’m finishing up a summer internship with a huge company and user experience is a foreign concept. They only care about the fastest way to get something done even if it’s just hacked together. Getting someone to consider basic design concepts is just preaching to deaf ears!
@Max – Sometimes you can’t tell someone, but instead show someone. You may have already tried this, but ‘making stone soup’ is a good way to go about this. That is, rather than asking permission or suggesting the team do X,Y and Z on your project, just start prototyping X, Y and Z.
Once team members/management start seeing the benefit of this ‘new’ idea they will almost always come around and start contributing themselves. A colleague of mine, Jay Zeschin (unstuck.zeschin.org) was a master of this at Deloitte. He has quietly and effectively changed the processes on one particularly stubborn old-school waterfall project to become almost entirely agile.
The best part is, the change is transparent; unannounced. Most of the management has no idea the change took place, just that they are reaping the benefits of it.
If people are told or asked to change they may not like it, but if they are shown the benefits of change without being cognizant of it’s presence they are always more receptive.