Reading OK/Cancel: The User Experience Community is Thinking Too Big all I could think was dudes, can we collectively move on now? How small and petty is the community if we even ask questions like “who owns user experience?” (though admittedly it packs the seats) At the multi-organization panel on the previous question, I joked that fairly often IA has owned it, mostly because they tend to do what nobody else is doing (like neatly organzing pages), and often no one has bothered to think about the overarching experience. Odd, that.
But does the discipline of IA own UX? Nah, it’s not possible. In fact, UX doesn’t own UX. The best work ever for the “user’s experience” is done by multidisciplinary teams and by multidisciplinary team I don’t mean a designer and IA and a researcher, I mean the real kind in which programmers and product managers and marketing gets their hands dirty in the brainstorming and visioning and making and playing.
Still worried about the ROI of design? It’s done, people– read businessweek as well as alistapart for a change, and you’ll see everyone is already on board! Hass and Standford are adding design to their curriculum, the MFA is the new MBA, and so on and so on…. They are sold on what you do: now you have to actually live up to their expectations. Scared yet?
It’s time for all the usual suspects to stop sniping at their neighbor in the next cube, and start making– making new products, making new relationships, making new learnings, making new markets, making new ways of business.
Don’t worry about the professional organizations that are blooming like mushrooms in the rain– enjoy them, and grab some of the juicy templates and articles that show up on AIGA and AIFIA and so on. Don’t bag on the usability people, ask them to find out some new stuff for you to work with, and hey, ask them what they think of blue, anyhow. Design’s not so precious a power that you can’t ask for someone’s two cents.
YOU AREN’T YOUR TITLE, and if IA becomes the standard title, or ID, or IxD or whatever, who cares… let’s go design some cool new stuff.
The presentation I gave in Scandinavia reminded me of how exciting things are right now…. not since ’99 have we seen so many new interesting applications of data, technology and knowledge. Do you really want to be wasting your time fighting over who gets to choose if it’s a drop-down or a radio button when you could be jamming on the next flickr or newsmap?
Please.