Where are we?
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?