UX design needs to be part of IT culture

It is obvious that there are a growing number of projects that will benefit from user experience (UX) work but in the past the judgement was that the benefits were not obvious, or not thought necessary. For a lot of people UX practitioners are some exotic animal that consultants and developers have heard about, but they never actually come across them in the wild!

I’ve worked in the application design space variously as a web designer, information architect, user interface designer, front-end developer, user-centred design analyst and usability business analyst. They are not the same thing – there have been subtle differences in the actual work, from being in effect a hands-on front-end developer to doing initial assessments of the service design touch-points between customers and a client’s systems.

I came across this interesting snippet about Mark Kawano on CoDesign, Fast Company’s design magazine on the web:

…Kawano was a senior designer at Apple for seven years, where he worked on Aperture and iPhoto. Later, Kawano became Apple's User Experience Evangelist, guiding third-party app iOS developers to create software that felt right on Apple's platforms. Kawano was with the company during a critical moment, as Apple released the iPhone and created the wide world of apps.

“I think the biggest misconception is this belief that the reason Apple products turn out to be designed better, and have a better user experience, or are sexier, or whatever . . . is that they have the best design team in the world, or the best process in the world,” Kawano says. But in his role as user experience evangelist, meeting with design teams from Fortune 500 companies on a daily basis, he absorbed a deeper truth.

“It's actually the engineering culture, and the way the organization is structured to appreciate and support design. Everybody there is thinking about UX and design, not just the designers. And that’s what makes everything about the product so much better . . . much more than any individual designer or design team. (Read the full article here.)

The key takeaway here is that a design engineering culture is very important to Apple. At Apple, everybody does design – it is not just one small part of the company. They have lead the push and now others in manufacturing and service industries can see now the results that are possible under a concerted effort to cultivate a design-based culture and some will want to find a way of emulating that culture for their own business.

Building culture internally

The ITC culture I see today is far more of a technical engineering culture than a design engineering based culture. This technical engineering culture is based on a need for quantifiable results. Emotion-free data. Fixed known deliverables. Minimum viable product specifications. These are metrics that techs understand well, and the pure design culture’s lack of uniformity in this respect is hard for technical engineering cultures to understand and embraced.

I see this technical engineering culture every day on chatting to the tech staff I work with, and taken with my experience working in large organisations, this insight allows me to engage on that level, even though I originally came from a pure design background. There is a willingness of people to engage in tech-focussed online forums and expand on their experience on projects and with technical problems and solutions. This is fantastic and a good way of promoting a change in culture. Yes, there are hints of tribalism, but there is comradery, healthy punditry and a community willing to engage and to contribute.

So the first thing to do is create these channels internally. Allow freedom of speech and ideas inside your enterprise and make sure the senior staff also become part of the conversation. Create an internal Meetup, use Yammer or build a wall of ideas in Trello. I've used them all and they all work as long as you have a UX champion to prime the pump.

Conversations with tech-heads

I recently read a comment from Nathan Barry in one of his monthly newsletters. Nathan is a designer/developer/entrepreneur and author of The App Designer’s Handbook, and these comments really say it all:

At the last software company I worked for, plenty of the developers completely ignored design. They even overlooked the most basic design mistakes. Sometimes I’d push back when they tried to put subpar design work into production; inevitably, one of the developers always replied: “Does it function? Good. Design’s not my job.”

They could get away with it because we had 4-5 software designers on staff who would come through and make the work look good.

I always pushed back because my goal was to get everyone at the company to care about the product. I thought everybody should make decisions and do work based on what made the product better, and not draw arbitrary lines between design and development.

As a developer your job is to release the best product possible. Which means design actually is your job.

All aspects of user experience and interface design are now part of the full stack of application development skills you’ll need in the future to move ahead.

Being a very tightly focussed specialist will make your career path smaller and smaller. You really don’t want to be the guy that excels at making CSS render round corners and transitions work on IE8.

Design Culture = Bigger work pipe

Any development team provider who wants to promote their ability to deliver flexibility and competency in the full gamut of design and development skills would benefit greatly by supplying core design and development team members whose work expands their sphere of influence at a client site. Having a client thank you for helping their team be more cohesive, provide a more holistic service and add value and knowledge to the project is an aim that will bring rewards.

And definitely extend your contract.

PS: Just remember you need to build skills; you don’t need to change horses.
If you are stuck in the same type of developer role again and again and think you want to branch out into UX, send this article to your boss. 

This post was also published on LinkedIn Pulse, June 30, 2015