UX London changed my mind, and that ain’t bad

A couple of weeks ago I attended the excellent UX London conference arranged by the equally excellent people at ClearLeft.  I went there expecting to most enjoy seeing the big names in my field speak, and I must say that I did:

• Jared Spool’s usability stand up routine
• Don Norman’s confident authority
• The eloquent reflections of Jeff Veen

But unexpectedly, the real value of the conference was in the challenge presented to some of my own long held prejudices.

1. Stop selling UxD

Brian recently blogged about UX London and said some nice things about my Future Now presentation at Bootcamp ’09. Over the years I’ve been rehearsing my impassioned plea to give user experience design a try and now feel I have it honed to a fine point. At UX London, however, Luke Wroblewski convinced me that selling UxD is a waste of time.

Luke asked us to imagine any other arm of business doing the same thing – imagine the HR department selling Human Resources:

HR person: We have these competency models, and an appraisal system, and a whole new way to consider the business.

Me: Meh! Who cares! Get on with it.

Instead, Luke advocates that designers stop whingeing and use their design skills to acquire strategic influence in business.

1. Find data on matters of concern to the business
2. Apply design to clarify the issues in the data
3. Present your findings and solutions

As Luke pointed out, whoever can best articulate the nature of a problem is the person best placed to solve it. So I’m resolved to stop making the case for design and instead use design to make the case for business.

2. It’s time to put the design back into UxD

Many people in UxD roles, including me, have little or no formal design education. The field is comprised of psychologists, computer scientists, writers, editors, librarians, information scientists and all sorts of disgruntled users of information technology. The profession embarked on a crusade to bring a user centred approach to the software and web industries, which were dominated by engineering and marketing. But for the most part, they did so without much knowledge of design. In many cases, they were reacting to the excesses of graphic designers on the early web, UxD professionals actively devalued design.

That’s got to change.

I attended two excellent workshops that immersed us in the methods, tools and cognitive style of the design professions. Quick Sketching for Interaction Design, delivered by Mark Baskinger, an assistant professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon, and William Bardel, an accomplished Information Designer. They led us through a fun and informative half-day of sketching, storytelling and collaboration through design drawing.  It was an eye-opener for many there, me included. I came away with a renewed sense of the value of the methods and skills of industrial and information design professionals.

At Wireframing Web 2.0 for Design and Definition, ClearLefties James and Rich showed how this approach is applied in their own work, including how they use simple working prototypes to refine designs. Excellent. I am resolved to put more time into coding, sketching and the study of the practice of design.

3. Agile is out there, deal with it

On the last day of UX London, I watched ClearLeftie Cennydd run what is possibly the bravest half-day workshop ever attempted: Getting Real with Agile Design. Armed only with an assortment of slides, a flipchart and black-belt level knowledge of Planning Poker, Cennydd ran his workshop as an agile development project, which is to say he planned and executed the whole thing on the spot. Cennydd, I am in awe. Ask for a raise, or at least for an audacity bonus.

Now, I knew very little about Agile development methodologies going into the workshop, but I had nevertheless become a convinced sceptic of the practice. I’m an advocate of the Big Design Up Front approach, and consider Agile as a means for programmers to side step the paralysing bureaucracy of large development projects so they can just get on with coding. I’m with the programmers on side-stepping the paralysing bureaucracy, but I have serious reservations about rushing to code.

It has to be said that I did not come away from Cennydd’s workshop any less sceptical, although certainly better informed. However, I am convinced that I’m going to encounter an agile development project sooner rather than later, so I am resolved to stop whingeing about it and learn how to get my job done in an agile development environment.

Freedom from prejudice

I enjoyed UX London, the three days of total immersion in User Experience Design with more than 200 of my peers. But I really enjoyed the surprise: the challenges to my long held beliefs. Anything that changes your mind for the better is time well spent.