I hope you find it interesting, useful and empowering.

Creative projects have an emotional frequency. Being aware of this can help you successfully navigate the tricky peaks and troughs. You will likely encounter the following phenomena. If you know how to recognise them, you can at least reconcile how you are doing with how the project is doing.

A sense of excitement and limitless possibility

An idea or discovery arrives shiny and new, without the eventual scuff marks inherent in the process of bringing it to fruition. The sense of potential is empowering, yet rarely realistic. It’s like buying a Ferrari without yet having found a mechanic to service it. Enjoy this part as it happens, but not so much that you are afraid to let it go.

Overwhelming complexity

As soon as you dig into a [project], you’ll uncover a seemingly endless pile of emotional and logistical factors simultaneously at play. This is quicksand. Too much thinking here means trouble. When you are in this territory, focus on doing. Get right to prototyping through quick mock-ups and experiences. Acknowledge and categorise new issues as they arise, but prioritise – you’ll never be able to resolve all of them. Keep your eyes open for inspiration and direction away from the soup of complexity.

Unifying insights

These are moments of clarity when you feel you’ve got it all figured out. They are the siren songs: glorious but potentially derailing. Strive with all your might to get to this point, but diligently question this clarity when you arrive.

Complete loss of confidence

What was I thinking? I can’t do this. You can, and in fact, you are doing it. This feeling is mostly useless, although it may signal that you should enlist some help to tackle a specific issue. If so, get the help you need. If your loss of confidence is merely the legacy of some past experience, ignore it by taking new action.

The brutal realities of implementation

Almost everything you do will take longer than you think because there is a lot more to consider than is apparent. You will have to make compromises. Have the strength to stand up for the right things and the wisdom to let go of the meaningless bits. The ability to know how and when to do this often comes from the proof and intuition you’ll acquire through prototyping.

Completion

It’s done! Enjoy the sense of accomplishment. You may also experience some postpartum malaise. Fine – that’s natural, but don’t wallow in it. Do take time to celebrate your accomplishment and reflect on your process. You’re never really done anyway; you will likely repeat at least some part of this process someday. Reflection is important to make your next steps more efficient.

The Southern Alps are much closer to the West Coast than the East and it’s amazing how you can see Mt Cook (Aoraki) rising out of the peaks 150km to the south as soon as you exit Arthur’s Pass and hit Kumara Junction.

Our camp site for the first two nights was by Lake Mapourika:

After setting up camp and dinner we drove to Franz Josef and made our way through the dark up to the top of Sentinel Rock to take long exposures of the glacier:

The Waiho River that flows out of the Fox Glacier valley:

Two tourists died crossing this river at night in December.

We did a helicopter tour over Fox Glacier and Mt Cook; it was difficult taking well-composed photos through scratched perspex that caught the glare of the sun but here are a few shots.

It’s rather hard matching up GPS data with the hundreds of peaks and glaciers in the area so if I’ve incorrectly labelled any of these please let me know.

Mt Sefton:

Mt Tasman:

Fox Glacier:

Bismark Peaks:

North slope of Mt Tasman:

Lake Pukaki:

Douglas Peak:

Mt Du Fresne:

Chancellor Dome:

There’s a DOC hut on a large ledge below Chancellor Dome that we’re planning on being flown up to stay at next time we visit.

The following day we walked up to the terminus of Fox Glacier, past the high cliffs of Cone Rock, gouged by the glacier:

Plenty of warning signs around, including one forbidding access to certain areas unless with a guided tour:

Tourists just ignored the warnings:

A border collie named Tussock we met in the Fox Glacier township:

One of the friendly robins that flew over to check us out near our camp site:

Our last night was spent at Gillespies Beach. Nice view of the Alps but horrid sandflies and noisy partying neighbours:

We had just the weekend, driving down there on the Saturday and back on the Sunday. I fought the steering wheel most of the way down thanks to a strong west gale that blew across the Canterbury plains. It did make for some beautiful cloud photography so I can’t complain too much:

The plan was to camp in nearby Hampden but the weather decided to go to downhill as we drew closer:

The tent stayed in the car that night and we took a cabin. More like a dog kennel. Did the job though, and we rose around 5:30am the following morning and drove down to the beach. There were some flashes of lightning and we sat in the car rather than be human lightning rods down by the sea, but the weather cleared before the sun came up.

These are some of the photos I took of Moeraki Boulders while the sun rose:

My gumboots we had bought for the occasion proved only partly effective as I ran out into the surf with my 430ex-II flash to side-light the boulders. Studying my photos later it probably wasn’t worth the hassle.

I also borrowed Jenny’s 550D camera for a few minutes to shoot some video, using my tripod that I had modified using a hiking pole for smooth panning:

After the sun was well above the horizon and people started coming down onto the beach we headed up to the cafe for breakfast and headed back to Christchurch.

Here are some photos from Oamaru:

This worksheet is the first draft of a template I’ve put together based on similar questions I’ve been asking myself over the last month. My thinking culminated in a Venn-like diagram which then resulted in negotiating for a change in role description, responsibilities, objectives and KPIs with my team leader. I didn’t stop there and took a few extra steps to create something that perhaps you might find useful.

Download Role Analysis Worksheet PDF

Download Role Analysis Worksheet DOCX

The worksheet has two pages, although if you download the Microsoft Word format you can add extra rows as needed. The first page is for you to itemise what you’re doing today and what you’re currently responsible for, then tick off which of those things you want to be doing, what your employer expects you to be doing and which things you don’t think you should be doing any more. You can then go through the list and come up with an action plan to figure out how to cease doing things you like but aren’t expected to do, those things you shouldn’t be doing and how you might enjoy some of the more tedious activities.

The second page is for what you could do in the future, or optimistically, tomorrow. Go through and itemise all the things you could be doing and once again tick off those things you would like to do (that you think you might enjoy), those things you believe you are expected to be doing (but aren’t) and of the activities and responsibilities that fall under either of those categories which of them you don’t think you could actually do or start right now.

Again, go through the list and come up with an action plan of how you could start doing some of those things or creating the expectation to do things that you would enjoy and how you might remove some of the barriers to doing things that you aren’t able to do yet.

It’s a draft and I think it could provide some more guidance and prompts – so please have a play with it, let me know if it’s useful and provide me your feedback so I can incorporate into a later version, with attribution to you of course for any ideas.

Come up with some ideas for a calendar view that communicates information about upcoming appointments but is designed to visually downplay the appointments so they don’t scare people or make them feel overwhelmed. Think about what it is about a chock-a-block calendar that makes people feel that way and how else you could present the information to make them feel like it’s all under control, that they’ll get through the week and survive.

Ideas?

I’ve noticed that many professional user experience designers and related disciplines steer away from reducing UX to such terms but the rise of UX in web, software development and ICT has led to other people outside the field assessing experiences as “bad” or “good”. I often have people come up to me and engage me in conversation about “Hey check out the bad UX in this app” or “This has a really cool UX”.

I don’t want to get hung up on the semantics – although in some ways this blog post is an exploration seeking to properly define the adjectives associated with user experience – but I’m not going to be a snob. Oftentimes these people who describe the “UX” of a thing are onto something; it’s just that I wouldn’t use that language or boil it down to a single word. It’s not like UX is a tick box on a QA form and it’s not like software can have “the UX” or not.

As I’ve previously discussed, sometimes a “negative” user experience is exactly what you want. You want to scare the shit out of people and you intentionally design that in. Or you want something to feel abrupt and aggressive. That is appropriate.

So does it help to think of the user experience of a thing as lying on a continuum of inappropriate through to appropriate?

I also thought of experience as story, the idea that people should be able to talk about (hopefully in a positive light) the experience they had with a product or service.

Does that mean an ideal or optimal user experience should be remarkable? No.

There are some encounters that should be invisible, unremarkable, that just work without striving reach the lofty heights of gamification or persuasion or desirability. These products or interfaces know what they are and don’t try to be more than that. People use them then walk away without a second thought – and those experiences were designed to provide exactly that level of minimalist intrusion and awareness, like an invisible door. You can’t talk about something you never saw even though you used it.

I think a lot of business productivity applications fall into this category. Software that people use day in day out and stare at for 6+ hours a day. It’s not a game, it’s not selling something and the best thing it can do is empower someone to do their job and become an extension of their mind and hands so they can immerse themselves in their job without feeling like they’re wrangling their bloody computer all day.

In this case, software that fades into the background and just works provides the ideal user experience.

So back to our continuum where we have inappropriate user experience at the low end, and, what, appropriate user experience at the other? That sounds a bit lame. I think appropriate user experience lies somewhere in the middle. In some cases something can afford an appropriate user experience – but still be as boring as bat shit? Or does that then push it down into the “inappropriate” range?

Perhaps the upper end of our continuum should be more aspirational for those experiences we can push to be more and more exciting and fun and colourful and entertaining and all that. Up there you can have your gamification and persuade the shit out of people. That’s where your ludic design comes in. Sometimes that’s appropriate. The sort of experience where people share it on Twitter, Facebook … Pinterest.

Museums should be interesting, boutique art & craft shops should be beautiful, games should be exciting. Would you ever describe Microsoft Office as interesting, beautiful and exciting?

So what the hell is this continuum then? Budget? Effort invested? Do nothing and you get an inappropriate user experience, put some effort in and you get an average but entirely appropriate user experience, then go hell for leather and go for the “WOW OMG FIREWORKS AND BUNNIES!” user experience?

Am I less of a UX designer because I’m middle of the field with the work I do in business productivity applications, that I don’t seek to gamify my work or leave users with their jaw on the floor looking like they’ve just had a glimpse of God?

I think I’m just going to give up on this train of thought. Doesn’t help me do my job any better – but was interesting to explore.

What are your thoughts on UX as a singular metric, placed on a continuum and what sort of words do you use to describe those experiences that lie down the lower end and should all appropriate user experiences be considered peers?

PS: I did have another thread of thought that followed the idea of frictionless experiences and when they are appropriate, but not always. How would you enjoy sex without friction? Anyway, I failed to weave that thread into this blog post – but think about it.

I see graphic design or visual design as an artistic process. When I work with a graphic designer I feel they bring the intuitive and genius element of design to the table while I bring the analytical and rational.

I make a concious effort to avoid rendering to graphic designers the same circumstance that business often renders to us UX’ers in treating us as eye-candy specialists who just whack some pretty stuff on at the end. I try to involve visual designers in my process as much as I expect business to involve me in their process … although sometimes graphic designers just don’t care and don’t mind just skinning signed-off wireframes.

I realise that I over-compensate when it comes to staying out of the graphic design process. I do so because it annoys me how everyone thinks they’re a designer and has little respect for a designer’s tacit knowledge and skills … so I stay out of it completely.

As far as I’m concerned if I’ve done my job properly and given the GD an adequate briefing then it’s unlikely the work they do will stray outside the parameters that I’ve spend time discovering, defining, testing and documenting. So unless colours are meaningful from a UX perspective then I’ll be happy with whatever the graphic designer produces even if my personal preference is for a different scheme … whilst others are happy to poke and prod and impose their own ideas.

There is significant overlap and except for dedicated user research type UX’ers, many of us have a strong visual element to our work. Colours can definitely come under the purview of experience design and it’s foolish to restrict ourselves to the black-and-white of typical wireframes. There are times when we will drop an image placeholder on a screen and leave it up to the visual designer or photographer to fill and in some cases it’ll matter that we are more specific about what that image should be.

How do other user experience designers work with graphic designers? Do you collaborate throughout the process and invite them to bring their artistic creativity into your work? Do you consider yourself skilled enough in graphic design than you can work with them as a peer? Do you just palm off your design documentation to them and walk away or micromanage? How do you respect their profession whilst also communicating subjective opinion on their work?

You can also participate in the discussion on Google+.

I thought I might see if I can come up with a similar list; it’s a first draft, so let me know what you think and share your own ideas:

1. Show your working: Just as in maths at school, I believe that the journey to arrive at the result is as important as the result itself. I plaster my walls with all my ideas and sketches regardless of how silly they are so I can be confident that the outcome has been rigorously tested.
2. Cast wide the net for inspiration: Don’t be afraid of meditating, studying a map, flipping through a dictionary, calling up your auntie or organising an all-hands-on-deck workshop.
3. Respect domain knowledge: I see myself more as a catalyst and I need the knowledge in people’s heads in order to develop a solution. Bias towards expertise and experience.
4. Grounded but aspirational: Going blue sky is a fun and vital part of divergent thinking but make sure you’re also pragmatic or you’ll get booted out for being an idealist who “doesn’t under the business”.
5. Crayons, if that’s what it takes: Use whatever tools you need regardless of what people will think of you. Dance, if it helps you think or convey an idea.
6. Fight for the process: Research, evidence-based design, human focus, iterative prototyping, creative thinking, testing and review. It can change the world.
7. A balanced equation: Make sure you don’t focus on consumers too much – the shareholders will feel left out.
8. Trust your gut (but beware perfectionism): If a design feels wrong to you, it probably is – and at the very least you haven’t put the best you have to offer into it. However as per #1, don’t throw it out or shred it but build on it. Red pen, highlighter, Post-It notes, scissors, whatever works for you.

Some more I’ve added

9. Ally yourself with everyone (but don’t befriend): If you want to make fully-informed design recommendations or decisions that have drawn inspiration from all quarters and have the maximum chance of success you must form those alliances. That doesn’t mean being everyone’s friend, but make sure you have positive relationships of mutual respect.
10. Open door: I hate to use an oft-touted management cliché but it’s important to be available. Just like the previous point, you want to encourage people to talk to and engage with you. This doesn’t just mean sitting in your office and waiting for people to come to you but also actively approaching them and soliciting feedback, ideas, advice and information.

We do ourselves a disservice by labelling ourselves under such a broad title so that when an organisation recruits a UX designer they’re essentially looking for one quality: expertise. That’s the purpose of a curriculum vitae, right? To show that you’ve been doing this for a while and that you’ve worked for a length of time at each organisation that doesn’t raise alarm bells with some experience relevant to the job you’re hiring for … like the continuum from inexperienced to expert, as pictured on the left in the diagram below?

It’s more complex than that. Every UX designer is different – and yes it is possible to average their skills to come up with a single factor on that simplistic continuum it isn’t very helpful. You don’t want to hire any old UX designer, you want a specific flavour of designer; a particular mix of strategic, research, design and communication skills. You might be looking for a grunt who’ll just sit in the corner and churn out wireframes or someone more like me who won’t accept being pushed into a corner and will stir things up – both a liability but also a transformational force.

It’s a complex picture and the diagram below is by no means exhaustive but merely illustrative. There are dozens if not hundreds of factors you have to consider in building up a picture of what sort of designer you want.

Perhaps we should stop calling ourselves UX designers. Perhaps organisations should stop advertising to hire UX designers. How significant are these mismatches in expectations and skills affecting the industry?