Social media will save this company! How many times have we heard that one before? We’ve heard phrases like this popping up for a long time now, and, to an extent, I agree with them. After all, social is extremely important, and, if done correctly, can change a company’s path in very positive ways. However, the UX designer in me can’t help but roll my eyes each time I read and hear these statements. I’m willing to bet that many of you UX Designers out there feel the same way, but have you ever stopped to wonder why?

The eye rolling phenomena

Why do we continue to get frustrated when the talk of social media arises? Well, there are many reasons, but the eye rolling catalyst that I want to highlight today is: we are frustrated because we realize that social media is not new, nor has it been new for several thousands of years, and even though we have been saying this for some time, no one has listened to us.

Human beings are social, who didn’t know that one? In fact, UX has been evangelizing the need to be more socially interactive since the beginning of our profession. We study users, we know their behavior, and we know that humans and social interaction go together like peanut butter and jelly! We have brought this up numerous times but have always been battered back with talk about budget, scope, and system constraints.

Thus, the frustration we feel comes from the fact that people today are overlooking UX as the champion of social (Thankfully big names are starting to raise the issue again. See Paul Boag’s Smashing Magazine article Social Media Is A Part of the User Experience for more on that). And, these same people are overlooking UX as the people who can really design good experiences with the social tools and processes that continue to crop up. Instead, our companies look to put into place random social media tools without thinking about how to use them properly in hopes that these tools will save the day.

What This Means

But you see, businesses, putting random tools into place simply isn’t the right approach. One off tool integration is not the answer. The answer lies not too far away from you sitting inside of that UX designer that you hired to use Omnigraffle. It lies in understanding the intrinsic human need to interact and create communities, and, luckily, your UX designer is the one that can help you do just that. 


What this means for UX professionals is that we need to be prepared with the right answers. That means that we need to have a much better understanding of human behavior in order to design social experiences. We can increase our understanding of human behavior through several means.

First, we gain a better overall understanding of psychology. Second, we conduct more ethnographic and behavioral research. If your company doesn’t allow you to do that, figure out how to do so in your day to day life because just knowing more about people will help you gain a better understanding of their behavior.

Third, we stop rolling our eyes at the marketing team (or whomever) when they walk into the room and say we need to be more social (duh!). Instead, we need to educate our clients and organizations about the true value that social provides from an experience standpoint. Then we educate them to the fact that we are the ones that can and should be architecting social solutions based on our knowledge.

What Happens Next

The outcome of UX increasing our knowledge of human behavior and then educating our businesses to our value in the social realm is that we begin to turn the page. We bring the focus of social back to UX as the ones who know about human behavior and the ones who design social media interactions that are effective, profitable, and delightful. We harness our talent to design the experiences that we have been longing to design since we first stepped on the scene, and we prove our immense value to our business partners, thus securing our rightful place as experience innovators.

Social media is ancient. We know this. UX has always known this. But have we explained, in an effective way, how we know this, why it’s important we know this, and what businesses can do with this knowledge? I think not, and thus my challenge to you is to do just that, explain our value in social media in this effective way. From here, let’s see if we can start to turn this tide of whacky buzz terms to a tide of effective UX thinking. The choice is ours.

I’m about to expose a deep, dark secret about experience strategy, and it ain’t going to be pretty. Some of you may already be aware of it, some of you may not, but either way today is the day that I am going to get the truth out there. I hope you are ready to hear it.

You see I wasn’t always completely aware of this truth either. It just so happens that some time ago I came across this post/presentation from Zachary Paradis (PS I highly recommend that you listen to the entire presentation.). In it, he dispels 3 myths of customer experience, however, those myths are not the secret that I want to expose today. The secret that I want to expose happens around minute 10 of the presentation, and boy what a minute it is.

It’s at this point in the presentation that Zachary breaks down for us what Experience Strategy really is. He defines it as Business Strategy combined with Experience Modeling, and I think this is a great way to define the term. But the secret is this (queue suspenseful music): Experience Strategy comes directly from Business Strategy. Oh the horror! Yes, what we do is modeled directly after what those pesky business strategists do. The thing that sets experience strategy apart from business strategy is, of course, our ability to model user experiences in cooperation with knowing and attempting to couple them with the business strategy.

But wait… what does this all mean? Lis, what do you mean that experience strategy is based off of the business? How can that be? Isn’t what we do really based off of our empathy for our users as well as our ability to be the opposite of the “business-only” focused people in the room? Isn’t that where our creative and empathetic value comes into play? Well, that is only partly correct. What this means is that not only is this stuff we call experience strategy not new, and therefore we are not the first ones doing it, but it also means that in order for an experience strategy to be successful it has to include and help to progress the business needs and goals. This means that at the heart of what we do lies a business strategy that drives us forward, and that it is our job as experience strategists and designers to be very familiar with that business strategy.

Thus, in order for us to truly add value with our experience strategy work and thereby attain more of it (as opposed to the wireframing we are so well known for), we have to learn about our business’s strategies, as well as continue to learn about our user needs and goals. It is then that we apply experience modeling to those strategies and needs in order to create holistic and valuable solutions. By doing so, we create a competitive advantage for our products like few others ever seen; one based off both business need and user goals. The products and services that we wish we were designing have this competitive advantage, and it’s what makes them so attractive to both us and to our users. So I implore you UX, learn the business, model the experiences from it, and then, I promise you, you will create some of the best experiences of your career. And, how can that not make the world a better place?

UX designers have split personalities… well, at least most of us do. We are this rare mix of designers, psychologists, developers, writers, artists, and more. Lately I find myself leaning into the psychology realm. Learning about people from this stand point is really starting to cultivate my interests. I have begun to think somewhat whacky things due to this new found passion, and often find myself in heated debates with friends and colleagues around the topics that I have been diving into. It is with this frame of mind, that I settled in to hear Luke Williams speak at Interaction 12 about The Disruptive Age. The talk centers around, what Luke defines as the first of the step of disruption; that of crafting a disruptive hypothesis. During the talk, I couldn’t help but think about Luke’s ideas in relation to who we are as people as defined by psychology, and it was at this point that I realized that disruption, by its sheer definition, cannot be the norm.

Let me explain. You see disruption is defined as “an act of delaying or interrupting the continuity”. This means that when disrupting you are taking something from a state of plateau, certainty, and order and pushing it into another state that is no longer a comfortable one. We designers are trained to disrupt. We see it as our jobs to look beyond the plateau into the future of what could be if only we could break our businesses out of their normal routines. However what we don’t realize is that people do NOT like to be disrupted. Think about it… disruption is against our need to feel safe and consistent. Back in the day (I’m talking way back in the day… think cave man, saber tooth tiger days), comfortable was good because it meant there was no danger. That comfort could only be disrupted by one thing… danger! There is a huge piece of us that is stilled wired this way… to stay comfortable. Thus, the disruption that we seek to create is not really wanted, even when a business says they want it. More often than not, the first time they get an uncomfortable feeling (or that feeling of danger) they are going to want to stop the disruption.

Of course, this creates a huge problem for us designers. First being a disruptor becomes very difficult, close to impossible in some organizations, because it makes everyone feel so damn uncomfortable. We tend to look at the businesses that we are trying to make better as not “getting it” or not “valuing the user”, but in many cases they are just down right scared because they have that uncomfortable feeling in their stomach. Second, because all of this makes being a disruptor hard, we disrupt much less than we would like. This can make us pretty unsatisfied in our work. We begin to get disgruntled and unconfident, which leads to a lack of passion for what we do and a feeling of wanting to stop playing with the mean kids, and take our ball and go home.

But do not fear, there is a solution to what ails us. I think the first thing that we all need to come to grips with is the realization that mass disruption all at once, will probably not happen in 99% of situations. Disruptions like Luke points out in his talk (i.e. Apple and Google being in the cell phone business) are not everyday occurances. And most disruption will not be widespread. Second, we need to realize that, that fact is OK, in fact it is natural. Of course that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to distrupt, but it just means that we should be accepting of the fact that we probably won’t create large organizational changes (so if you really, really hate where you work you may want to look elsewhere). Third, in order to disrupt anything at all in the places we work, we need to make ourselves a part of our business partners comfort zone. Which means we need to make UX Design part of their plateau state, because it is only when they are comfortable with us in this state, that they’ll trust our ideas to disrupt (even a little).

Let me break it down even further. We humans like to have a constant, something to lead us to safety in all scenarios. Ever see Inception? Remember that spinny thimble thing Leonardo kept bringing out, that was his constant. The cup of coffee that you have every day, your constant. Picking up the mail after work every day… constant. Without these constants we start to anticipate things being “off” and thus we assume, you guessed it, danger! The businesses that you work in are the same way. They want a constant. That waterfall process they are holding onto… a constant. The huge requirements document they “need”… another constant. These constants make them feel comfortable, and slow their ability to be disrupted. Now you come in, and you show them how UX can help the business. You Learn the Business side of things and cement your value. You, UX in general, become a new constant. So when you start to try to disrupt something in the business with your amazing design ideas, what becomes the one thing that is present before, during, and after the disruption… that’s right… you!

Thus, once we shift our thinking around disruption and thus our businesses hesitation to be disrupted, we can start to think about how we can disrupt things more easily. We can see that once we become the new constant in the business’ world, that disruption becomes a lot less uncomfortable because there is always something constant… UX! They trust us to take them to the next level of creating experiences and become much more open to letting us help lead the process. We also become more successful at disrupting and thus have a lot more confidence in ourselves. At the same time we change the focus of measuring our success just on disruption to that of measuring our success on solving problems and making things better. By looking at disruption differently, we can successfully move our business partners away from their fear of disruption danger, and into the realization that disruption is needed in order to create a better business for all… and yes this includes increasing the value to our users.

Today I want to invite you on a journey in which we UX designers take a step outside of ourselves and look closely at our world. In doing so, we can see that our kind is a splice of two different personalities. We are a cross of those that want to lead the world in designing a better place for everyone, and those that want to be directed as to which problems to solve and when to solve them. Being natural perceivers we operate on our own wavelength and thus find it annoying when people screw with our genius. On the flip side, we are generally not always great at staying grounded because our creativity takes us to new heights and allows us to go places with our ideas that others could only dream! The impressive amount of imagination, creativity, and innovative thinking that we posses contributes to the fact that we expect people to recognize the power of our work and the immense value we bring. At the same time, we are unable to reign in our own genius to the biggest design constraint of all, that of our reality.

Of course, in order to put our untapped creativity and genius to use, we have to look outside of reality. I mean, that is the whole point of what makes UX Design so powerful, is the ability to look beyond the now to the how it should be. However, there is a time and a place for everything, and I would argue that there is a time and place for us to come to the realization of the world in which we work. The problems that we see due to our natural personality types coming into combat with our economical way of producing success are many, however, there is a specific problem that I think we should discuss today, and one that was brought up in Cameron Koczon’s post on A List Apart, An Important Time for Design. The simple fact is that design thinking, although it is the latest word on every company’s lips, is still only seen as important for executing the idea, and is not seen as integral to coming up with the ideas in the first place. Cameron does an amazing job of illustrating this through his narrative on how startups view design. He also points out to us that another group was in our same position not so long ago. Who was that group? Developers (seriously, read the article before you continue this post. Here it is again.)

As you just read, there are several solutions to the problem of UX Design being seen as useful only during execution of an idea, however the big one is that we need to see the forest through the trees. We absolutely need to admit to ourselves that we work within the world of business, and thus we need to recognize that world as the biggest constraint in which we do our work (for more thoughts see UX… It’s Time to Start Keeping It Real). This means that we need to stop playing by our own rules without considering the rules of business. We need to stop designing solely for design’s sake or only for the user’s benefit, and start realizing the environment in which our solutions are developed. We need to stop waiting for the day when someone else realizes the genius of what IA and UX really is, and figure out how to sell that genius to others. In short… UX it’s time we wake up, rise up, and take our place next to our development and business partners instead of hiding behind our processes and methodologies… instead of hiding behind our users. This means that we take responsibility for our fate, and we aim to change that fate by coming out of our community’s shell and integrate UX into the world of business. How do we do that?

First and foremost, we need to take responsibility for the cultivation of the UX industry. We need to push ourselves to stop talking only about how to do UX, and start talking about how the constraints around the UX world (i.e. business, startups, etc), work. We then need to figure out how we can fit UX into those constraints. Lastly, we need to admit that we do this work, not only because we love it, but because we love doing something we love in order to provide for ourselves and our families. We need then, to start keeping it real and bring that fantasy part of our personalities out of the clouds for a moment or two, and start realizing that we aren’t in our own little bubble anymore, in fact that we never were in that bubble in the first place.

By taking responsibility for improving UX over and by admitting that we work within businesses and that is our biggest constraint, we begin to create a profession of people that can work within the business structures around us. This doesn’t mean that we sell out and become a part of the machine, but that we study and learn the machine so that we can change it from the inside out. Right now we are only on the perifery… only there to execute… not there to think. But in order to be the thinkers we need to know more than just UX, so that we can navigate UX through anything that comes at us. Cameron was right in his article… it is an important time for design. My only question for us is will we answer to our call of duty or hide behind what we know to stay safe. The choice, is up to you.

Recently, Johnny Holland Magazine graciously offered me the opportunity to share my thoughts on UX with their audience. Together we decided to create a series entitled The UX Athlete in which I use many of the lessons that I’ve learned while playing sports to highlight how we can all be better designers. The first post, UX Success Starts with a Good Strategy, just recently launched and I have been receiving some great feedback on it. Be sure to check it out along with the others that will be going up in the near future. And, as always, I’d love to hear any thoughts or feedback that you have on any of the posts, or the series in general. Enjoy, and thanks again to Johnny Holland for allowing me to participate.

Several months ago I had the pleasure of meeting with a founder of a NYC startup in one of my ohours sessions. This happens quite a bit, as NYC has an amazing startup scene with a good majority of these startups looking for UX help. A lot of times startups (due to the nature of their business) are not sure when to engage UX. They know that they want to have UX as a part of their business, but their budgets are tight and they aren’t sure of the best way to allocate that budget for UX in order to receive the biggest return on their investment. As UX professionals, we have been trained to tell people that UX should be involved from the very beginning and stay on until the very end, and although I agree, the simple fact is that the cost benefit analysis for startups doesn’t allow for this. So when startups come to me asking for advice on when to include UX, what I end up walking them through is a process for figuring out how much they can do on their own before they bring in someone with my background and expertise. This is usually extremely helpful to them as it helps them to insert UX into their product but also keeps their budgets in line. It is also helpful in changing their thinking from their current state into that of design thinking.

The problem that we see with startups not knowing the “right” time to bring UX into the fold is, simply, that they bring UX in at the wrong time. Most times this means bringing UX thinking in too late, and at a point where we can’t do any user analysis or problem analysis and are expected to just make the interface more usable. Or, they may bring us in at an awkward time in the process flow where they expect us to solve a problem that is ill defined, and then refuse to listen to our reasoning and solutioning due to schedule conflicts. Whatever the case, UX is not properly understood which causes frustration on our end, and waste of funding on the startup’s end. It also can cause even further misunderstanding of UX and its value.

The first step in attempting to solve this issue of when to bring UX into the startup fold is for the startup to figure out how much about UX it really wants to learn. Some founders do not have time to learn much at all, while other clients of mine have done a great job of figuring out the ins and outs of our UX work. Either way, I think that in order for founders to be successful, they need to show some attempt (however small) to figure out what UX can contribute to their bottom line. As a UX consultant, I know that this is part of my sell, and it is a service and narrative that I provide, however I would recommend that startup founders at least start to orient their mind to what UX really is. The biggest step that a founder can take is to begin to open up their mind to moving UX and Design beyond the interface. I read this great post the other day, What is Design Thinking and Why Do Entrepreneurs Need to Care?, that reminded me of how non-UX folks can start to change their points of view. Doing so, even at a small level, is a useful start.

Next, once founders have changed their thinking, it’s about figuring out how much they want to and can take on themselves. This always depends on budget, but there are many “low hanging fruit” that startup founders can find just by understanding design thinking and UX principles at a high level. If one is less inclined to learn UX they better have a bigger budget so they can bring us in early on and keep us there throughout the process. If one wants to learn more or lacks the funding to bring a UXer on, they can pick up a good deal of this low hanging fruit on their own. I usually suggest that startups call me when it gets to a point where they are no longer able to clearly define the problem, understand their user, and improve the experience. This is the point where higher UX thinking and expertise will help to catapult their business.

The outcome of following these steps is not only that startups will begin to save money and time by bringing UX in at the right time, but they will also have a better understanding of UX and this will lead to more successful products. By taking the time to change one’s thinking in order to institute design thinking one successfully takes the first step in understanding how UX can help a business. Once they know where UX fits in, they can strategically use it to improve the experience of their product while maintaining a solid budget. Until then UX is just a buzzword, or a phantom that one expects to come in and solve all of their problems… magically, on time, within budget, etc. Well, I hate to say this, but what we do isn’t magic (ok maybe a little of it it), it involves thinking, knowledge and process that aims to take the experience for a user from zero…. to hero!

As I have mentioned before (see I’m Dublin Bound! for more), I had the opportunity to travel to Dublin, Ireland earlier this year to speak at the Interaction 12 conference. It was an amazing experience, and I hope to get the chance to attend next year’s event! For everyone that was able to make the talk in Dublin, I’d love to hear any feedback from you. For those of you who missed it, the video is now available. I’d love to hear what you think… Enjoy!

Last week marked my first ever IA Summit (for more details leading up to the event check out My First Time). I would be lying if I told you that I wasn’t the happiest IA on the planet once I realized I was able to attend. The event was little short of amazing, and I can’t wait to attend next year’s Summit in Baltimore.

Not only did I get the chance to attend, but I was also granted the opportunity to speak. The topic I chose pointed out the importance of bringing the business along with us in our IA work. I mentioned that to do that we needed to Learn the Business Behind the IA Business. If you missed it, I have provided the slides here. Also, if you are local to NYC and missed the Summit, be sure to check out the NYC IxDA Redux where I’ll be presenting this talk for a second time. Lastly, if you made the talk and have feedback or thoughts please contact me as I’d love to hear them and incorporate them into upcoming presentations. Thanks!

I have always been a big proponent of the idea that we make ourselves who we are. Although I believe that environment, genetics and all that jazz has a part in this play, I was raised with the point of view that if you want something to happen in your life, you have to make it happen for yourself. This outlook has helped me to push forward throughout the entirety of my career. Imagine my surprise when I found myself going against my own beliefs, not so long ago!

The issue I was having is one that I imagine (or hope?) many of us go through throughout our lives. For the past few months I have been working on many different projects. Each of which has been rewarding in its own way, but few of which are glamorous UX ventures. Don’t get me wrong, I have loved and continue to love working with each and every one of my clients, and I would never take a project that I didn’t think was worth doing, but these projects which I speak of are not the ultimate places for UX knowledge and growth. After thinking about this for some time, it sent me into a panic. “Why”, I said to myself, “am I not getting the super, awesome, coolest projects of all time? Am I bad at this UX stuff? Should I throw in the towel!? Is this no longer for me?”… and the list of self doubting questions continued. The main issue that was happening was that anxious thought upon anxious though began to pile up inside, and it got to the point where I wanted to explode. It was at this point that I stopped and realized that I was going against everything I have been telling myself for all these years. Let me explain further.

I saw that I was putting all of the value of the work and knowledge into the opportunity, and not attributing it to my ability to make each opportunity mine. I had been thinking that I needed to land the perfect gig in order to make myself better, practice what I knew, and learn more, but that is the biggest myth of all. It wasn’t the opportunity’s job to make me better… it was my job! I realized that I am the one that has the ability to use these opportunities to learn more, apply different methods, and think differently. Further, it doesn’t matter where I am working as long as I can change my point of view in order to make the opportunity a knowledge profitable one. That is not to say that you should take the wrong opportunities for the wrong reasons. However, sometimes you’d be surprised how much you can learn from an opportunity that doesn’t seem golden.

Thus, our lesson for today is that it is not just the job that will make you a better UXer. Instead, it is your ability to take a less than ideal job and learn something from it. If you rely on external factors to determine your internal success then you are looking in the wrong place. Remember that time spent looking for the perfect opportunity is, more often than not, time wasted. It is the time spent turning a not so perfect opportunity into a life and work lesson that is the most valuable. That, dear friends, is the most important UX lesson of all.

One day, as I was drifting off into one of my frequent reveries, it came to me. How, I said to myself, can we really call ourselves Interaction Designers, when the majority of us aren’t really designing any new interactions? I know what you are going to say. “But Lis, surely you agree that we design interactive sites, apps and other digital products all the time!”. But we need to ask ourselves, are we really creating new interactions based on human capabilities or just reusing old digital interactions in new ways. Chance would have it that this amazing article crossed my path, A Brief Rant On the Future of Interaction Design, and it greatly helped to clarify my thoughts. In this article, the author talks about how many of the videos and hypotheses that we see of “future” interactions are really just riffs off of technology that we already have. He uses the example of touchscreens heavily throughout the article, and points out something very key; that these so called “future” touch interactions are not really based off of the gap between human capabilities (how humans are capable of interacting) and current human interaction (what people are already doing today). Instead they are based off of the fact that we have touchscreen technology and thus feel the need to figure out more interactions that people can do with it. The author’s plea is for us to “be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities.”, and to me, the people that do that… are the real interaction designers.

So what if my whacky theories are true? What is the big deal? Well, I’ll tell you what the big deal is. The problem with us believing that we are interaction designers without really taking into consideration human capabilities is that we are stunting the ability to design new and meaningful interactions for our users. We stunt creative and innovative design growth because we plateau and refuse to push ourselves further. “We’re already interaction designers”, we say. “We’re the creative ones, the ones that can see into the future of digital interaction, so we must be right.”. Wrong. We are a big part of the gap that users have between interactions today and their physical capability to act further. Thus, what we end up really designing for are technical advancements as opposed to human capability, and our tools are not really for use by real people, but are just pushing the limits of technology to see how far we can take it. That is not design, it is selfishness and greed.

But, I promise you this, we can solve this problem, we can make ourselves part of the solution. The first step in doing so is to take a minute, stop and think. We need to, at a minimum, take the time to understand human capabilities. That is really what user research is all about. Bret Victor, the article author above, mentions that user research is all about understanding how people are already using interactions and tools, noting user goals and needs and then noting gaps and hiccups in the interactions the user is having. We need to go back to the roots of the user, the human, in order to design for them, and not for our own technological progress.

By understanding human capabilities and the gaps in interaction between those capabilities and the user’s potential for the interaction, we become interaction designers. Real interaction designers. We can create more meaningful digital interactions (and physical if that is the space you are in) and we then come even closer to meeting and exceeding our users’ goals. Being an interaction designer means that you have taken an oath, an oath to make the world a near effortless place to interact with. So, take that first step and understand your users capabilities so that you can begin to design for them as opposed to designing for the technology. By doing that you are making this complex interactive world an easier place to interact.