five minutes a day

Meaninglessness

Published on

For months I have been trying to write a post about Detroit. Why Detroit? One, because it has been in the news so much. Two because, as an IA, I think the downfall of Detroit is quite obvious. The city is a manufactured city, instead of a natural place of settlement. It was put together to help fuel the auto plants, and now is faltering in a huge way. But, this isn’t surprising to me. It reminds me of all of the new ideas that startups and even large businesses have that just seem so meaningless. Why are they meaningless? Because they have zero to do with natural human behavior.

Scott Berkun wrote this piece about Google Glass, and I couldn’t agree more. I think we get distracted a great deal, by the coolest and newest technology. Sometimes this is important, but many times it takes us away from our roots. These are, understanding and designing for, and to enhance human behavior. We want to make our users lives better, but in a sustainable way, not in a way that will fall apart.

So the next time you see something new and shiny, I’d like you to ask yourself is this meaningful? And if so how will it help people in real life (not just how it could help people, one day, maybe, with a whole bunch of changes). We IAs are no different than city architects. We have a responsibility to our users and our businesses to not throw together ideas without an idea of how they can sustain, but to vet them, to make them better and to make them help people live better lives.

Where are we?

Published on

It’s been a long time since I sat down, just for 5 minutes, to write. As I sit here today, and try to relax my brain into a topic, the first thing that came to mind was a conversation that I had yesterday with Mr. Erik Flowers. In this conversation, we were talking about Service Design. One of the things I mentioned was, isn’t service design, and the idea of looking at service as part of the entire experience, something we’ve always been doing? Erik pointed out to me that, much of UX has always associated itself with digital only, I may have not had that experience, but that is for sure what he has seen. Either way, the memory of this conversation made me question to myself: Where are we as professionals?

Over the years, we have been, and still remain, trend chasers. We look for the newest term to describe ourselves, or a new buzzword that will help businesses to understand what we do. We are, in effect, acting like the people that we hate… you know the ones, the ones the “visual people” who just “need to see what the homepage will look like”. We act like them in the sense that we are looking only at the surface when we chase terms and trends, and doing this doesn’t seem to bring depth to what we do. In fact, we don’t make progress in the what we do category at all.

Which brings me to where we are. Are we any further along then 10 years ago? Are we working to define a profession and not a term? Where are we?