Boosting the UX maturity survey

As I already mentioned in my post yesterday, and as Whitney Hess rightly pointed out (https://twitter.com/#!/whitneyhess/statuses/167248686634631168): the results of my survey on UX maturity (or Companies’ love for UX) will not be very relevant since only 20 people participated.

So in an effort to boost the number of submissions here’s a simple poll that will take you the full 2 seconds to complete. Counting on all of you here!

In case you’re not familiar with Nielsen’s stages, you can find the full explanation here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/maturity.html

Companies’ love for UX: The results are in!

In my previous post I was wondering how much companies really care about user experience. How well integrated is the whole user-centered design idea in our business processes? I posted a survey on several channels  - most of them aimed specifically at UX people. In total 20 UX professionals took the time to answer. And this is what comes out:

To know what the stages are all about, check Nielsen’s original posts: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/maturity.html

The bulk of the respondents to the survey report low stages of integration. Most don’t even work with a dedicated budget (that’s only from stage 4). I realize that there might be a bias towards the lower stages because people more easily complain than give praise. But 15 out of 20 UX professionals working without a dedicated budget, means that most of us do not influence the strategy of the projects we work on. That worries me.

All those working in stages 1-4 (yes even stage 4) are just patching and working at the grace of someone higher up. If anything changes higher up, you’re back to square one. Specially in times of crisis, at companies who have not integrated UX in their process, UX people are either removed from the project or have to start fighting for their rights all over again. New projects will start up. They will have an R&D dept., they will have a product management group and business developers. But unless your company is a stage 6 or higher, someone will have to step up and get UX on the map. I have seen it before – in fact it’s all I see nowadays… (hence this survey)

Things are moving

But, there’s hope. There are signals all around that user experience is gaining traction. Recently some of the most influential (online) magazines have mentioned User Experience as a key differentiator for companies:

• According to CIO User Experience Designer is one of 6 hot jobs in IT: http://www.cio.com/article/695585/6_Hot_IT_Jobs_That_Will_Pay_Well_in_2012
• FastCo Design thinks startups can make a difference with designers as founding members: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665795/silicon-valleys-new-secret-weapon-designers-who-found-startups
• In a similar vein as the CIO article, Inc. magazine mentions User Experience as one of the hardest jobs to fill in 2012: http://www.inc.com/keith-cline/talent-shortages-in-2012.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=button
• A List Apart even makes it feel like designers will rule the world in 2012 (wouldn’t that be something?) http://www.alistapart.com/articles/an-important-time-for-design/

Reading all that, I guess we should all prepare to be headhunted, right?

The least you can say is that things seem to be moving. So I hope if I do this survey again in 2 years from now, that the world is a different place. And yes it’s going to be a struggle, but we have a lot to offer, it’s about time we make ourselves be heard.

What can YOU do?

Here are some of my own suggestions (distilled from the answers to the survey and based on my own experience) on how to promote user experience:

• As a UX professional you are an expert. This means you know how to use your tools and techniques. DO NOT give those tools away to people in a watered down version, without the background knowledge you have in your head. All to often marketing guys or R&D take techniques like personas and run with it. This might be great to highlight UX in the short term. In the long run however they will be misused and you will be to blame. Instead of “teaching” techniques to newcomers and basically handing it over to them BE INVOLVED. Do the tests with them. Be there, instruct them on the little details that matter and make sure you’re involved in the evaluation of whatever UX tests they are running.
• Administrators of systems are also users. DO NOT leave the UI over to R&D. And definitely don’t be satisfied with  TRAINING as a compensation for bad UX. Yes, some companies live on the training they sell for there underpriced products. In my opinion: those days are over. Companies who still want to make money that way WILL LOSE MARKET SHARE to smaller, more agile companies that DO understand there user’s needs and cater for them. Even if they are system administrators. One company that comes to mind is 37signals.com. Learn from them.
• Remember that it is not an us against them battle. Talk to R&D, become friends with product management. If you can, read up on Agile development (or whatever methodology development uses) and make it your own. Be there at their meetings and demos. Speak their language and make sure UX tasks are part of the process. Spend time with product management and feel their pains. Ask how they get to their features and roadmap and see if you can help them in defining a clear bigger picture (because, here’s a hint, that’s what is usually missing: 1 big picture – you can help them with that) instead of focusing on details and individual features.
• Forget the ROI of UX – it’s the holy grail, I know, but there is no way you will be able to prove any ROI unless you have done several projects with the same team and you can benchmark against older projects. And even then your results will always be questionnable (and you will have spent a lot of time on getting them). Rather, get people involved in tests. Ask your product manager to facilitate a paper prototype test for example. Show R&D video footage of some observations and point things out that they would not have thought of. Bottom line:  involve your team in UX.

If there are any other interesting suggestions/war stories put them in the comments. Sharing is caring and all…

In conclusion

Yes there is a problem, obviously, but the time to change is now and YOU are in control. WE as UX people can turn things around. Today.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to this survey!

For the hardliners

The most important chart is at the top of this post, but there is some more data from the survey below.

Most respondents are from Belgium and The Netherlands (not surprisingly because I live in Belgium and studied in the Netherlands). But wherever you’re from, thanks very much for taking part and/or spreading the word!

More than 50% of all respondents are user experience designers or managers. But also looking at all the other titles – it’s safe to say most people who answered are true UX professionals.

Most of the other data is not very relevant to the maturity stage of UX, so I left it out, If enough people are interested I could make the raw data available (anonymized of course).

How much does your company love UX?

Yesterday, as I was browsing through some articles on UX lifecycle management I came across this gem: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/maturity.html. Already 5 years ago Jakob Nielsen listed 8 stages of usability maturity in corporations. They practically go from UX being outlawed to being part of the DNA of the company.

Reading through them I realized  most of the projects I have worked on the last 7 years could not be rated higher than stage 3. And I have a feeling that we are not alone in this. Talking to people, specially in larger corporations, you find that UX people are very often silos on their own or as a small team. There is little or no influence on the project strategy, let alone company strategy.

Yet, user experience is on many VPs lips as if it’s the core of the company. We all know we have to take these messages with a grain of salt. But I started wondering: “how big is the actual divide?”

How well do corporations score on Nielsen’s maturity scale as rated by the UX people on the team?

Well, why not do the test? I put together a small form in which you can rate the stage of the last project you worked on. If you are a UX professional, please take 5 minutes, read through Nielsen’s 8 stages and fill out the form. I will share the results on this blog shortly.

I hope many of you will take the trouble to fill out the form so we end up with some relevant information. Information YOU as a UX stakeholder can use to help integrate user experience as an integral part of your business. As it should be.

• Nielsen’s stages of maturity: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/maturity.html
• The form: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDU4RzVCd3NDVEQ0cWRTSGtocnFiRHc6MQ

illustration by Claire Murray

Why not start a designer head hunter service?

“Why not start a designer head hunter service?” This question has been haunting my head for a couple of weeks now. And honestly I can’t think of one good reason I shouldn’t. Apart from time, but even if I had time I would still have no time for that, so that’s not an argument (just check how long this blog has been on idle).

As a designer and user experience swiss knife I see all these interesting services popping up abroad, specially in the UK and the US but also India and China that offer the most amazing designer jobs. Specialized. To the point. With clear goals, profiles and wages. None over here in Belgium though. Not even in the Netherlands AFAIK. Why not?

Yes design jobs can be found on “regular” job sites as well, but their scarce and not tailored to the actual creative professions. A “process control designer” is not exactly a designer, yet looking for design jobs that’s what you find. Looking for “user experience” will get you lots of helpdesk employee jobs. Also not really what you are looking for.

And yes, there are other services like the creativeskills.be and ikzoekeenfreelancer.com. The first one being the best platform as of yet in Belgium for design jobs, so all hail to them. The second one a very poor attempt at headhunting paid for with tax euros that will almost always result in the lowest price (read: if you do it for free we might hire you for real next time, right…) winning.

So why head hunting? Because finally we are reaching a level of maturity in design jobs that exceeds just simple execution jobs. Design management (in all its variations) is kind of slowly coming of age. And so are highly specialized jobs. People in these positions, or people who are aspiring to be in a position like that, are not likely going to apply for a “general” design job of say “webdesigner”. Yet companies keep putting vacancies out there with these generic titles, hoping somebody will actually show up. Where’s the value in that?

What I have in mind is matching the right profiles with the right companies. In a direct and honest way. Companies need to be educated in what they really want. Designers need to match their skills with the demand of the market so they can specialize and grow instead of jumping from one junior position to another.

In the IT world these services are everywhere. For the silliest specializations people are hired. So why not in designerland?

I have a pocket full of designer contacts, feel the pain of the job market (from both employee as employer side) and have an HRM dad. So why not try? Right?

What do you think?

 

The value of being there

Today Getyoo launched their “Clickeys”. A Clickey is a small device that you can use to pick up virtual things in the real world like business cards or (RFID I presume) tags. All the info is stored on the device and can be synced with your PC by USB.

Sounds a lot like poken right? Or mynameise. Both of which had their 15 minutes about a year ago and now seem to be moving into the “event organizing” and business niches. They seemed very promising, heck it made us at touchatag think of doing something like it as well. We chose a different path (probably for the better as well).

So why try it again? Why now? Honestly, I don’t have a clue.

It seems the more we grow to like our social networks, the less we need to meet in person. I’m sure you’ve all been there. You spend days chatting with people on twitter, but when you meet them in real life – you probably don’t even recognize them. Let alone have a need to speak to each other.

Granted, having a poken (about a year ago) was a good conversation starter at drinks. But since most people you meet are already in your network anyway any gadget can get someone else’s attention. It doesn’t need to be a social media gadget. Try it with an iPad. Same thing as with poken a year ago.

Plus: meeting in person is expensive. Not in money, but in time. (But since time=money, it kind of follows the same logic). I have enough work as it is and a family who I like to spend time with as well. My days should be at least 30hrs instead of 24. But they’re not – so meeting in  person, for me at least, is something valuable. Not because I’m so important, just because there are so many things to do and so little time to do it in. So, if there is no added value in meeting someone in real life, why would I need a gadget to help me? (by the way, my palm m100 could exchange business cards in 1998, so it’s definitely not new)

Still, Getyoo might be taking a clever step. Since it’s also a collector a Clickey can pick up stuff on the go. And this is where it gets interesting. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to imagine Getyoo helping to solve the “last mile” problem for location services. Beware foursquare, brightkite and gowalla, competition might be around the corner…

Our own memes

At touchatag we’re such cool kids (‘hum ‘hum) that we have our own memes. Sometimes this leads to funny situations with outsiders and newcomers. Like our new consultant asking why we had a user called MassiveGaylord88

Well, this is the reason:

Help me help the unsocial

So, I’m a social media evangelist. Or so it seems. I got an invitation yesterday to help out with a (series of) workshop(s) people are setting up inside ALU to spread the word on social media. Good!

I’m always interested in sharing the knowledge and spreading the word on interesting stuff, stuff that matters. And from remarks and questions I sometimes get at demos I know a lot of these telecom peeps are not in the know.

Now, the question: where to start?

Do I assume people know twitter and facebook? Probably they do, right? But if they haven’t used it themselves, we have a problem. They won’t know about tinyurl, farmville, twitpic…

Do they know about the more established services (pre-social web) like delicious, flickr…?

Not to mention foursquare, gowalla, layar…

So I’m reaching out to all of you. Since you’re reading this blog you’ll probably be one of my peers. You know all the stuff I mention above.

• What are your experiences with the “unsocial”?
• Where do I start?
• Where do I stop? Do I HAVE to stop somewhere?

Plz help me out here. It’s for the good of mankind

Thanks a bunch!

Hans

Future jobs in ICT

Today I had a meeting with a bunch of people working together for a very good cause: get people interested in ICT. In fact the plan is getting secondary school kids so interested in ICT that they will actually consider making it their job.

I say this up front, because I absolutely believe that we should applaud the initiative. ICT is everywhere, so we better school people now. So two thumbs up for them…

BUT… when they started talking about the “future desktop” and mention a mainframe with thin clients as one of the possible future topologies I noticed we were not all on the same page. They went on to say that we will probably need a lot of ICT people because there will be ever more hardware and software that is not designed to work together. Examples of these future “issues” were (and I am  not inventing things here): different OSes that need to share a network, virtual machines will become increasingly important because again OSes don’t work together well – of course the VM will run windows – oh and the OLPC project is a nice example of the “moral side” of the desktop of the future.

Hmmmm… These people apparently live in a parallel universe. One where it is still 1999. I tried arguing that in fact compatibility (802.11, HTML5 …) is actually improving and that because every pc (or whatever client) is or will be online in the future, a lot of the software will run in the cloud anyway – who cares on what OS…

That the OLPC was revolutionary not because it’s a gadget for philanthropists but because it is completely open. This thing NEEDS a network – there’s nothing proprietary about it.

I stopped trying when one of the guys said that they were just conveying the vision of the sponsor. A sponsor that apparently still likes these silos where a lot of dedicated operational management is needed. To them Software as a Service is “an opinion” (in fact it’s probably their worst nightmare.)

I was just supposed to be there as an observer. I tried to make my point and I hope they will adapt their message because the last thing we need to teach kids is that things are going to get worse, and they’ll be the ones solving all the problems… if they choose for a career in ICT.

Apple patents include NFC – should we all get excited now?

Yesterday I read this post at Mobile Inc.: http://mobileinc.co.uk/2010/02/apple-patents-show-iphone-macbooks-to-feature-nfc-this-is-big/

And it made me wonder if this IS really BIG news.

On the one hand it certainly is. As you can read in the comments on the article Nokia is the one everybody was expecting this from and they never came through. In fact they just canceled their latest NFC phone. So for Apple to be playing with this is good news. And the applications and use cases envisioned by Murat are great. But I would also think this is not going to happen tomorrow.

As much as I am hoping that Apple will create the market for NFC, I doubt it (when I’m reading this back this summer, I hope I can say I was terribly wrong). Apple does not have the reputation of being an innovator. Sure they do innovating stuff. And we all love our MacBooks and iPhones because they are so much better and different from all the other tech we struggle with. And that is exactly the point. Since NFC is only just emerging on the consumer market there is nothing to be different from. iPods revolutionized mp3 players, iPhones revolutionized mobile phones, iMac lowered the threshold for many people to get a PC and get on the internet. But what can they do differently on the NFC market today? Nothing. All the initiatives around are still too small scale.

2010 will be an exciting year for NFC. We at touchatag are also hard at work making the contactless user experience less of a dream and more of a reality. But I have serious doubts about Apple being the one to take the lead. With the huge installed base of iPhones and gigantic market share in mobile internet traffic they might do it after all, but history tells us otherwise…

LICT workshop on the Future Internet

Last Friday I spoke at the workshop on the Future Internet at the KU Leuven’s LICT premises in Heverlee. I know I was probably not part of the target audience, so some of the topics were really far-out for me, but nevertheless, some musings:

• Do not go 45 minutes over your designated time and still have 30 slides to spare. Specially if 99% of your slides are text. Even to the most interested audience, this will be a very boring talk and other speakers will have to speed things up (we all want to go home on a Friday night)
• It’s probably better to use no template at all instead of a fugly one some overpaid agency once designed for you in the 90s. Get with the times, people will be distracted by the sheer ugliness of the screen.
• “These slides are made for the European commission” is not argument to present text-rich, ugly slides either. They asked you as a speaker, at least have the decency to prepare your speech.
• I think it is disturbing that on a workshop on the FUTURE internet only 2 people in the room are on twitter. Have the others already moved on to a future network? I think not…

As a token of good will, here’s my slideset – and in my defense I know I am not the best speaker in the world (au contraire) but I did prepare my slides.

Future internet workshop

View more presentations from touchatag.