being right, but to see bosses, clients,
marketers and other people on the
business end as idiots when they
don’t ‘get it’.
This is one of the main reasons I didn’t get on with one of my col-leagues. She was very knowledgeable but I found her approach bureau-cratic, defensive and impractical. She was often more knowledgeable than me but I could get more good, usable designs into the university thanks to my design ability, taking a collaborative approach by becom-ing part of client teams, and compromisbecom-ing a bit to keep clients happy.
Being a bit raw on the team skills front managed to get her back up by doing a poor job of communicating how I felt and acting like a smart-ass at times. She taught me a lot about clsmart-assic usability and accessibil-ity theory. She was extremely bright and very learned. But she also showed me a set of key characteristics of many other practitioners and approaches which have held back the potential for UX to help organisa-tions. Most of this comes down to education again. People need to be educated about the process, the web generally and go on a journey of discovering what they really want. People don’t read big, dense docu-ments and need to be walked through things. They are busy and often need to be nudged to get things done on time. You as a consultant need to take responsibility to get results and expect all this to be par for the course. People don’t by default understand UCD and its value ... get used to it, accept it, and reach out to them. Don’t clam up and hide be-hind a wall of process documentation.
A further problem is that our type of work needs patience, empathy and sensitivity. We put ourselves in the place of a range of users with a range of goals and perspectives to get the insights that we need to do user-centred design. I haven’t met many UX people who I’d describe as brash, hard-nosed or overly extrovert. We’re not natural marketers or sales people. And we tend to take things to heart.
It’s so good to see us as a profession now getting away from the “web-sites that suck” mentality. These approaches seem to have caused us-ability to get a bad name in some situations. People in traditional brand and marketing had the right ideas but were applying them in the wrong ways. They didn’t understand the web and the value of usability. Well,
why should they really? It’s not their area of expertise. But our reac-tion mustn’t be to get defensive and retreat into defending our turf.
We’ve got to go out and meeting them, bring them in, including them and showing them results that are within their reach. We need to give business people that “don’t get” websites the same amount of respect as we do website users we might design for and approach them using the same attitudes. They’re all doing their best.
It was 2005 and I had done a CMS deployment, two rounds of re-branding and redesign and a host of other projects for the University of Tasmania. It has been a great stint with plenty of variety, project man-agement progression and I could now jump into the manman-agement track if I wanted to. I did PRINCE2 training and kidded myself that I could do that stuff full time and like it. Big projects, lots of controls, full method-ology of reporting, stages, definitions of what’s produced and processes galore. A few years later, I eventually realised this wasn’t the path to career happiness for me personally. It’s the creative equivalent of eating dry Weet-Bix but without that nice wheaty flavour.
Moving Back “Home”
My father was very ill and it made sense for me to move back to New Zealand to join the rest of the family. A Web Team Manager role hap-pened to be going at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch on the South Island so I grabbed it with both hands and jumped countries.
It was a huge emotional experience being “home” after having left re-luctantly with my parents at the age of twelve. New family I’d never seen, all the familiar things that warmed the cockles of my nostalgia and a very conservative university going through major upheaval. The biggest learning curve, initially, was really getting up to speed with my management and leadership skills. But despite all this collabora-tive pragmatism I’ve been banging on about, I was still working with a very basic toolkit of techniques. For example, it’s scary to think that back then I didn’t realise how much traditional meeting formats suck
for many group work exercises. They’re good for general discussion on a topic or getting agreement on a simple set of points. But they’re ter-rible for doing lots of UX things, like brainstorming, ordering and pri-oritising large numbers of things like system requirements and moving people to think differently. Just using meetings with a whiteboard for all this is like having a toolbox full of nothing but hammers. I still wasn’t fully getting it. I could come up with the perfect structure for the meet-ing, prep the participants well, but at the heart of it the structure still sucked for doing workshops. It wasn’t truly collaborative and not ev-eryone was really engaged. I was yet to discover the full power of sticky notes, affinity diagramming and properly planning the participant in-teraction in structured workshops.
Here’s what happens when web meetings go wrong. Many of us have been there. An hour meeting is booked to discuss the new website.
Everyone turns up. The web consultant chairs the meeting. Vague dis-cussions meander around where each person in turn puts their point of view out about what they think should go on the site and what form it should take. It’s a fruit salad of features, links and vested interests and everyone wants to have a bit of their idea go into the website. As the meeting progresses, everyone hunkers down and defends their turf and it becomes a competition on who can think of the brightest ideas and have them acknowledged by the group. Say hello to Frankenstein design.
Working with a leading knowledge management consultant on a con-tent management project while at the University of Canterbury really opened my eyes to what I should have been doing all along. He coached me on some of his techniques and I was off and racing after that. Key elements were physical ordering of objects to prioritise them, struc-tured exercises to get people away from fixed thinking, the power of small groups competing with each other to generate results. All this was so much better than the standard things which went on in the
sec-tor. Good facilitation skills, a range of workshop formats and a range of exercises are so critical to the UX consultant’s toolbox.
I’m really, really lucky I feel the same level of passion now as when I was fresh out of uni a decade ago. That wasn’t the case back in 2007 when I was nearing the end of my term at the University of Canterbury.
It was a combination of needing a change, needing to see the world and also the role not totally fitting me. I went through different roles, each with quite a bit of challenge and variety. Still, the weight of a large organisation takes its toll. It’s the classic problem of internal politics, not being able to get things done, and in web, everything having to fit into the same template. It’s a world of overcoming restrictions. I was starting to stagnate and become a bit “institutionalized”. It reminds me of what Morgan Freeman’s character “Red” said in The Shawshank Redemption “These walls are funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.”
I became increasingly hungry for something new and ended up start-ing too many new projects. My attitudes to political challenges and obstacles were becoming more defensive. Most notably, I was a Web Team Manager looking for excuses to do hands-on UX consulting work wherever I could. I was still functioning well in my role overall, but I was running out of gas fast.
Luckily, a restructure brought a welcome redundancy. I took it with both hands. I’d just met the girl of my dreams and wanted to go travel-ling with her more than anything before we settled down into our mid 30s, got married, had kids and had to act all responsible. That would provide the opportunity and challenge I needed. That and the looming credit crunch I was landing in the middle of.
The Belated “OE”
I should explain about the “Overseas Experience” or “OE” (Colonial readers can skip this paragraph). When you’re an Antipodean, you’re surrounded by ocean and Europe is a very long trip away. So you take holidays abroad (we call it “overseas” because of that big lump of water around us) in large chunks to make the most of the long journey. And to experience Mother England and the Old World, you do an “OE”. It’s a rite of passage for many and some even stay on.
We went through Thailand and landed at a snow-covered Heathrow on Easter Sunday 2008. We stayed with parents of friends, relatives and in make-do short-term accommodation. I was dodging falling pieces of crumbling banking infrastructure. The credit crunch was hitting full swing and the Dow was plummeting along with the FTSE. It had been a tough slog. It took almost two months. During that time, I’d really had to think hard about where to head next. I could have got sidetracked into project management, web editing or a bunch of other careers.
Philosophically, I was thinking of it as a holiday job; practically, we needed something to stop the “cash burn”.
Shockingly, London wasn’t just a place where you magically get cata-pulted into your chosen career just by virtue of being from Australia or New Zealand. You need the right skills and direction and there’s all this sweating blood in between. I hadn’t properly researched the London job market. I was too much of a jack of all trades. I had this collection of role components in my past roles which were very broad, shallow and generalist by London standards. Management, web developer, project manager and IA. I couldn’t really imagine wanting to do more staff meetings, HR, position descriptions and organisational politics, so management was out. Web development was really becoming a com-modity and my skills were quite rusty for what the industry demanded in the UK. I didn’t really like pure project management—more Gantt charts, project planning, long documents, methodologies like PRINCE2 were all dry Weet-Bix variants to me. So I decided IA and UX roles
would be a lot more fun and I tried like hell to land one. It was the first time I totally let go of ladder climbing and just went for something modestly paid that I loved doing.
IA in London
I finally managed to get a permanent IA role at a little startup called MyVillage.com. They’d been a dominant force in local entertainment guides during the late 90s but had since been overtaken by the huge number of other players in that market. So they took an increasingly smaller share of the pie and were hoping to turn this around by adding strong social recommendation elements to their core product which centred around restaurant, bar and
gig reviews.
The working environment was total-ly different from anything I’d known.
I was interviewed at my boss’s house. My first task as IA was to run