1. What do you think about the experience and knowledge (etc.) that you gained through that course, now almost year after finishing it? Did it help in getting a great and desired job?

I think different students get different things out of the course. What I wanted out of it was some real experience doing ethnographic fieldwork and good exposure to the user experience industry. I got both of that. The course is good, but if you don’t know what to look for, you will most probably not get as much of your worth of fees out of the course.

I would recommend “keeping an eye” on your classmates – especially those who work hard, are active in HCI-related activities outside of class, and have a strong purpose of what they want to get out of the course. For someone who hasn’t had any experience in the real world, it would really benefit to learn from others who have.

I think the course is really good for that because it attracts both new and experienced students alike.

2. I am also concern if I’m doing right choosing that course and rejecting ergonomics at Loughborough. My background is in psychology, I am PC literate but have no idea how to programme (willing to learn though) etc. I also do not have any professional experience whatsoever. Now, obviously HCI is mainly about (as far as I understand) the USER, his experience and performance within various technological settings, so I guess it is more about psychology than Computer Science, but I’m not sure about that. So my concern is: do I actually have any chance of getting a job (HCI-related or ergonomics-related) after this course?

The course is skewed towards psychology and human factors. No programming needed.

However, if you are going to seek employment after the course, some jobs may require a bit of knowledge of HTML/CSS/etc., which are mostly front-end languages. It’s no harm picking it up and getting that extra advantage over someone who doesn’t.

I am currently working in a company where, incidentally, 3 of my friends from the course are working as my colleagues. One of them has strong programming knowledge while the other two don’t. We frequently get into arguments about the way interfaces should be built within the given time constraints, and it’s usually due to misunderstandings about the underlying technology.

However, it’s not a life-and-death thing. I work in a company where we build our own software. Your mileage may vary. I know other students who don’t even touch programming.

3. How many students are there each year? Is it about 30? In the UCLIC 2008 Newsletter you can find this info: “UCLIC’s teaching programme accepts about 30 students per annum, with backgrounds in psychology, computing and design disciplines.”

My year had about 40+ students. This year’s batch had 60+. Two years ago, the numbers were more like 30+. I actually prefer a smaller group. 60 is too much. 40 was just “large enough”.

I don’t know how the numbers are going to be like for this year. I don’t think they can handle more than 60, to be honest. But I’d encourage you to ask this year’s batch to find out more about their experience.

4. How strong is the ergonomic part of the course? Is it more like HCI with “elements of Ergonomics” rather than “Ergonomics”?

Ergonomics is fairly strong. Strong industry links through Rachel Benedyk’s contacts. Good opportunities for projects and hands on experience. The industry is fairly lucrative – you can get to work with Transport for London, air traffic control systems, nuclear power plants, etc etc.

5. Do all students there have a vast professional experience?

In my experience, it has been a mix. The faculty encourage that mix as well – in groupwork and otherwise. Good to learn from other students.

When I finally succeeded in recruiting a participant a few days ago, I was elated. Okay, so it was someone I met on the London IA Ning group, but nevermind – she had still some experience in a domain I was keen on doing some research in.

I based my interview method roughly on the interview method outlined in Holtblatt’s Rapid Contextual Design book, which I was also reading for this month’s UX book club. Unfortunately, the book describes an interview method that’s suited more for researching existing corporate processes, which didn’t quite fit the work I was doing – understanding a completely new domain for which there wasn’t an existing application for. Thus, I focused the interview strategy on understanding the subject area – shared ownership.

Here’s an outline of the questions I roughly had in my head (I didn’t prepare a script, because I wanted it to be more open and conversational):

• How did you get into car sharing?
• What motivated you to do it?
• Can you explain the process of what’s involved? (activities)
• What tools/devices/media did you use/consume in your tasks and activities?
• Can you tell me the various social aspects about the whole thing, if any?

Actually, this is a pretty bad list of questions. When I was going through the data, I realized that I had missed out some very important questions, like -

• were there any problems you experienced in any way? how? why?
• can you explain to me in detail (about a particular activity)?
• how often did you schedule the use of a car? why?
• asking questions about the user’s technical abilities and expectations
• a storyline of a typical scenario of a common activity
• what did you enjoy most about using the service? why?
• what activity was particularly easy/user-friendly to perform? why?

I could probably go on, but the thing was – I used this interview as an opportunity to fail, because I needed to learn from my failures and reveal my blind spots. Of course, I didn’t try my best to fail – I tried my best to do the interview, but I needed to know how I could improve.

This became more apparent when I went through and talked my colleague through the things I learned during the interview. This is where more than one person in a research process can be extremely useful. One of the key things we looked for were gaps in the research – things we failed to address during the interview or research sessions. This helps planning for subsequent interviews and research.

I learnt in this exercise that interviews in user research isn’t just about learning about users (which is like ethnography). In fact, it’s more about problem solving, except that the user may not even know he or she is experiencing a problem. When problems aren’t obvious, it can seem very hard to convince yourself that there are problems to solve, but problems always exist. There’s always something you can do to make a user’s life better.

But, despite all that, that project was a failure from a UCD and “business” perspective. Firstly, the interface felt too much like Flickr. Then, our team was fairly novice so our interview data wasn’t very promising. This caused the personas to feel sort of half put together. The end result was somewhat lacklustre – in some ways, we could’ve delivered the same thing by getting inspiration from other websites and not having to use Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design.

However, to stop there would be to completely miss the point.

Introducing UCD – the first round might not count

I insisted on using a UCD process not because I wanted to deliver something spectacular, but because I wanted the team members to see the value of a UCD process. Or, perhaps more accurately, it was mainly just me who was keen on seeing the value of a UCD process (and to see if I could do it).

This is where I think a lot of projects tend to reject UCD – when they can’t see any results.

It’s easy to run a company with an “efficiency” mindset – it’s sort of built into the status quo. Everyone is reluctant to change – not just management. So, I didn’t just have problems with my line manager – I had problems with my team members. (thankfully, my interviewees were really helpful). No one except for myself was really looking to see this succeed.

So, of course – how could I expect it to succeed?

The process reveals not so much results, but opportunities

The effort of building applications is often a team effort – not just one UX person calling the shots. But valuable lessons can still be gleaned from UX failures, much more than they can from plain old technical failures – mainly because that additional perspective from the user is so raw and tangible that it almost creates some kind of “why haven’t we done this earlier” response?

When team members get thrown into a UCD process – they don’t realize the potential “failure” of the outcome, they look at the process and the value of that access to users they finally get – something they never used to have in the past. Suddenly, they realize it is possible to build applications based on user research, user feedback, and purposeful design.

Developers and designers all need to realize that there are many ways to build an application, and sometimes it makes sense to learn a new tool so that the right one can be used for the right job. Introducing UCD to a conventional software team can sometimes help them gain ideas to make things better.

I took those lessons I learnt from the failure with me, because you never unlearn an experience like this. You just get better. And now I realize just how much more UCD is like craft than science.

This is only a small part of what user experience design attempts to accomplish, and depending on how you apply ethnographic methods in UXD, it can add as much value to a design as it can damage it.

Here’s an ethnographer’s take on how usability tests (usually done after or during implementation/prototyping) and focus groups (typically done during the research phase) may not be of *any* benefit to a user if the cultural context has been completely misunderstood.

“While usability tests and focus groups are useful for specific phases of app development, they aren’t as useful for understanding cultural frameworks and practices because by the time an app is being tested, it already has accumulated so many cultural assumptions along the way in the design process that users are asked to test something that functions in the programmer’s world, not the user’s world.”

- Tricia Wang, “My Suggestions for Making Google’s Services More Relevant for Non-Elite Chinese Users“

While working on my MSc dissertation with Abigail Sellen from Microsoft Research’s Socio-Digital Lab and Jennifer Rode, my previous supervisor from UCL, I learnt how quickly and easily it was to misunderstand the work of ethnography and anthropology. These fields have had a much longer history than the field of user experience has, and yet – they’ve become instantly popular because of UX, and its terms can often be misinterpreted and misused.

I don’t claim to be an expert on the ethnography or anthropology, but having read some classic ethnographic literature (e.g. Clifford Geertz), it’s clear that there’s a lot more going on compared to something like Holtzblatt and Beyer’s “Contextual Design”, though both of the authors have fairly strong academic affiliations.

Designers and UX practitioners need to read beyond commercially popular business and design books if they really want to get at the heart of how to understand cultures, humanity, and people. The fields of ethnography and anthropolgy tend to be more academic and research-focused, and there can be complications over viewpoints between different schools of thought in the related fields – thus it takes time to really go through the literature, but that’s the cost you pay in order to re-skill oneself in the art of understanding people.

The myth of ‘Us vs. Them’

The point I’m trying to make is that the concept of an “Us vs. Them” is becoming increasingly outdated – not just from a global job market perspective, but from a career perspective as well. As we become more aware of this, we will begin to exchange our services more effectively, and navigate our careers in more dimensions than before – across cultures, social levels, languages, skills and geographical spaces.

However, there are huge risks in making the transition from a conventional job mindset to a more open, radical global job mindset. This could mean shifting from one culture to another, changing the way we communicate, adapting our products or services, and so on. But it is inevitable – the world is becoming increasingly advanced, and it requires a lot of expertise, collaboration and innovation to get there. But it can only do so if the solutions are applied in its proper context.

I’ll try to illustrate this from my own work experience.

Absorbing culture in the workplace

In October 2001, I got a job as an undergraduate research assistant at the University of Kansas’ technology research arm, and they got me programming Java interfaces for a NASA-funded space project. I was a newbie, but they made sure I stuck to the best practices and I learnt a ton from that. It was partly the culture, process, and project opportunity that I absorbed from the job. I took this with me to my next job after I graduated and returned home to Malaysia, after having no luck finding a job in the US at the height of the dot-com bust.

Cultural differences can create opportunities, and take them away

It was unfortunate that my new Malaysian job resembled primordial soup in comparison with the NASA project, with very primitive software practices, spaghetti code and other monstrosities (a work practice difference). It was also my first job in a completely new culture as almost all of my colleagues spoke in fluent Chinese rather than English (a language/cultural difference). This caused considerable tension that I was mostly assigned to projects where I worked by myself – but this proved to be somewhat profitable as I was capable of solely implementing entire systems from the database to the interface, due to expertise I gained from my previous work experience.

I left after 2.5 years, after realizing there was a corporate ceiling above me. The experience I gained developing bespoke, well-designed web applications was well-received by the next company who hired me, which was more diverse in their staffing. This was also reflected in their products, as cultural compatibility was less of a concern, allowing them to handpick developers that were truly proficient in their technical trade. Thus, the company culture mostly revolved around technology itself, and it was a very positive atmosphere to work in. This was an example of cultural diversity resulting in a positive work culture.

At this point, I was experiencing how culture made a difference to my opportunities and work perspectives in the two different companies, but it was only in my next job that I felt I needed to seek a better cultural fit in my career progression.

Seeking cultural fit for career reasons

Due to an unfortunate legal battle in the “diverse” company, it downsized and I joined a multinational telecoms company for my next job. It was here that I took part in projects that spanned multiple countries like the UK, France, Netherlands, Malaysia, India and Singapore – becoming sensitive to how damaging misconceptions about another person’s culture can be. I was also increasingly frustrated and confused when I found it hard to relate more Western ideas about innovation and design to my Malaysian colleagues. And as more people misunderstood me, I felt increasingly out-of-place and isolated.

Leaving my home country of Malaysia and coming to London to pursue a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction was an attempt to find a “career common ground” – and this is the point I want to stress: I believe that the boundaries that used to mark “Us vs. Them” are dissolving because job seekers everywhere are becoming more specific about their career goals, and because of this they may journey much farther out of their comfort zones (culture, family, language, etc.) to find a right match. It may not necessarily lead one to move from one country/state to another, but the movement of employees seeking “cultural fit” in their careers is already happening.

Some of us are taught to accept whatever opportunities that are presented to us, and not to be overly idealistic about our goals. But I believe that it’s in everyone’s hearts to serve in the areas they fit in best. I feel that as we move deeper into the 21st century, there will be an increase of savvy job seekers who are willing to sacrifice their previous experiences for new ones – and in so doing create new movements in job industries everywhere.

Aim for the finish as a team, not for the journey

And so, a few weeks ago on the eve of Christmas last year, we launched our site live. My client, my boss, was happy with the results and our effort to implement tiny changes at the very last minute, and I admit I’m happy with the outcome myself, despite all the ranting and heated arguments about things like how consistency in design isn’t everything and about not adding more ‘unnecessary’ features. It was satisfying to know that my client was happy – that we had produced something that was ready for launch, live. And I think that’s something all designers and developers need to keep in front of their minds, rather than the course at hand.

The opportunities are in our hands

We live in a world that’s increasingly complex, and we appreciate and learn of each other’s strengths in bits and pieces at a time. To this end, I admit my own shortcomings of not being able to bridge the gap between business, marketing, design and engineering more effectively for my client. I now believe that creative freedom comes with caveats, and it is rare that clients will allow designers all the freedom in the world. It is increasingly becoming the designer’s responsibility to seize the opportunity to educate and collaborate with clients to solve problems ‘the design way’, meeting both design and business goals.

I see this as a major opportunity for creative types – designers, content managers, UX consultants, even developers. This is because clients know they are partly ignorant about design and are willing to hear what we have to say. At they same time, they’re not going to back down on what they know best about business, and we need to be sensitive to that.

Putting things to practice

So how would I react this time around?

I think, for a start, my attitude has to be right. I need to stay positive and not try to put down the ideas that come from clients. I should give credit where credit is due, and understand that not every solution is ideal. In fact, some of them are hacks due to various factors like time or lack of knowledge. As iteration is always possible (especially for the web), this isn’t a big problem. Solutions can always be improved, and it’s best to allow some “hacks” to pass, and learn from it through testing and user feedback.

I also feel documentation is key, and putting things down in black and white makes it easy for everyone in the team to see how the design has progressed from day one. Everything that’s documentable is valuable – wireframes, sketches, screenshots, feature requests, reasons for change, points of argument, etc. While I don’t think everything has to be documented, our team did make use extensive use of tools and artifacts to facilitate communication. So, use them wisely.

Finally, the success of the design should be celebrated at the end of a major phase. I somehow feel the best person to do this is the client, but this doesn’t always happen. In some ways, the client’s utmost satisfaction acts as a major milestone in the outcome of a project. In my case, it was my boss’s satisfaction and decision to launch the site live. He brought in a bottle of champagne and we toasted to the launch on Christmas eve, which helped to finalize a major phase in the project and ease fears that we might be carrying on throughout the holidays.

Whatever it is, we all crave to closure to our efforts, some space to regenerate and look forward to our next big task.

Good life, slower life

I’m quite happy about the progress. Comparatively, there’s a lot more junk on the internet, and being able to consume quality experiences in a much longer duration (preparing a meal, reading a book, going out for dinner with my wife) has been more satisfying to say the least.

One thing that bugs me is the sheer amount of experiences out there I feel I ought to try. And it’s a bit scary – because it feels a bit unsafe, a bit edgy… something that demands a bit more commitment and resources than clicking buttons all day. Because I know I can read the best tutorial about designing a chair and it won’t come close to what it’s really like to build a chair (just as an example).

Today I attempted to cook fried rice again – a dish I’ve cooked countless times, but have never perfected. And although it tasted a little better, it wasn’t good enough. And, it seems I could spend more time perfecting a good fried rice, or I could go learn to cook something else… but again that’s like another lesson all over again.

More risks, more planning

The thing is – I’m at the point in my life where I am calculating more than I am taking risks. I don’t want each attempt to be wasted. Not all risks that are taken will lead to learning and success. Idiots do exist, and I don’t want to end up being one.

I’m shifting my focus away from the younger generation, a generation I learnt a lot from in previous years. Some things in life don’t change, and there’s a reason why history repeats itself. In a single lifetime, I believe it is possible to learn from our past, and make a difference a day at a time towards a better future – my future.

In a sense, I’m going to stop looking to the future in order to fix my past.

Is UX really making a difference?

I have nothing against user experience people. But I’ve been noticing a trend in the user experience industry – that it looks too self-referential (as though to say that “good UX” is demonstrated by “good UX”). There’s rarely talk about how real people’s experiences were tangibly or directly improved because of X user research or Y design solution (the ones out there now aren’t very convincing). And this is the thing that bugs me, and bugs me a lot – the lack of real world stories about how UX is changing the way products are being built and how it’s actually impacting real users.

Maybe it’s because many user experience professionals work mostly on deliverables that don’t themselves represent the final outcome of the product. Wireframes, personas, hi-fi prototypes, site architectures – they’re kind of back-stagey, iterant, and somewhat disposable. In essence, they’re mostly design tools, but they’re not actually the design in and of itself. No doubt they impact the final outcome, because they shape the process in which the products get built – but there’s very little “actual doing” that other professions can speak of, whether it’s advertising, marketing, management, or engineering.

On the other hand, maybe it’s because of the way user experience people can really get reflective, like drawing on inspiring things such as multitouch tablets or surface computers or geeky font artistry. That’s in contrast to something that’s more generative (and often more straightforward), such as producing reports, writing software, closing a sales deal, or editing a draft of a copy.

Process is not the end in and of itself

Increasingly, it seems that the credibility of a UX designer is based on how well that designer understands the process of doing user-centered design, as opposed to how many successful products have come about as a result of that process. This came to me when Darren Smith told me how he noticed that many UX portfolios have a consistent theme of explaining how well these designers understood the process of user-centered design.

Why don’t designers talk more about how their UX work has resulted in the success of a product? I mean, IDEO does it (and does it very well). Even Apple does it (and does it very well). In fact, I feel all great designers do it.

Is UX an escapist’s career?

I almost feel as if UX is a bit like a “cop-out” job. I know it really isn’t, because there are tons of well-meaning UX people who are really passionate about solving the right problems, and they’re taking risks by challenging the status quo for the sake of the users themselves. But the more I think about it – UX designers almost never begin as UX people themselves – many of them were formerly designers, or software developers, or project managers, etc. who were desperate to be in a position to solve the right problems – and left their “old jobs”.

The good news is that UX places the designer directly in a strategic position to make design decisions on behalf of the product implementers, but the trade off is having less control over implementing the actual guts the product. So, while they’re actually doing the important work of navigating the ship, they don’t actually get to man the deck and run the engine (ok, that was a bad metaphor, but you get the idea).

A compromise?

Because we’re such a small community (compared to other professions), we tend to huddle together and give ourselves pats on the back and talk about all the amazing new things the industry is coming up with, even though there are so few major players in the market. I’d actually prefer it if we mingle with senior management and developers and visual designers and marketers and advertisers and… gasp, real users! I feel we’d make a much bigger impact that way.

There seems to be a growing gap between UX and other professions (which can be a good thing), but at some point we’ll need to establish a set of norms or cultures that communicate the way UX designers can integrate with other bodies of the team to produce successful products.

The sooner we begin this process, the better.

This says so much more than some overly-polished, high-profile, consultant friendly, overpriced user experience books I know.

Here’s a quote from the author, writer, and presenter himself, Stewart Brand. Simply amazing:

This six-part, three-hour, BBC TV series aired in 1997. I presented and co-wrote the series; it was directed by James Muncie, with music by Brian Eno. The series was based on my 1994 book, HOW BUILDINGS LEARN: What Happens After They’re Built. The book is still selling well and is used as a text in some college courses. Most of the 27 reviews on Amazon treat it as a book about system and software design, which tells me that architects are not as alert as computer people. But I knew that; that’s part of why I wrote the book. Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like. Please don’t bug me with requests for permission. Hack away. Do credit the BBC, who put considerable time and talent into the project. Historic note: this was one of the first television productions made entirely in digital— shot digital, edited digital. The project wound up with not enough money, so digital was the workaround. The camera was so small that we seldom had to ask permission to shoot; everybody thought we were tourists. No film or sound crew. Everything technical on site was done by editors, writers, directors. That’s why the sound is a little sketchy, but there’s also some direct perception in the filming that is unusual.

Part 1: Flow

Part 2: The Low Road

Part 3: Built for Change

Part 4: Unreal Estate

Part 5: The Romance of Maintenance

Part 6: Shearing Layers

Everyone seems to be really upbeat. Articles are constantly talking about the next best thing. And for some reason, no one seems to want to stop. It’s really scary – everyone seems to be really getting ahead in life, and I feel really out of step – like stepping on a dance partner’s feet or something.

It’s like I’m expecting someone to tell me – “it’s okay to stop living for awhile”, “leave the laptop in the bag”, “forget about how your friends are doing”, “go to bed”, “it’s not going to make any difference whether the Palm Pixi is going to be a hit or not”, “it’s okay to do the same boring thing over and over again”.

Because in some ways, that’s what I’m doing now. And I don’t feel like I can change my circumstances very much, such that I have exciting things I absolutely needed to share with the whole world. I just don’t have anything going on at the moment that’s very exciting. And I’m thinking that’s what a lot of people call, “a mediocre life” – when folks start settling down and getting into a routine of things.

I actually believe that most people live mediocre lives 90% of the time. That they have routines that don’t change very much. Or wishes and dreams that seldom get acted upon. And conversations that don’t change very often. And time seems to just seems to drift by. And for these people, that’s just the way life is.

I actually don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but the Internet is inherently a very explosive sort of environment – an explosion of activities. Emails. Blogs. Messages. Articles. Feeds. Comments. Streams. Votes. Tags. Notes. Clicks. If all this activity ever grinded to a halt, then the Internet would cease being the Internet.

It’s like – on the Internet – you can’t ever be someone mediocre. It’s almost like you needed to be someone with an opinion worth giving, or someone with a message worth sharing, or someone whose goals were so important that you needed to click on stuff or to read something or respond to something. You couldn’t just be “nobody” on the Internet, because everyone else is a nobody and it’s like you need to prove that you’re not because it already became so brain-numbingly easy. Just click. Or reply. Or comment. Or upload that photo. Something. Anything.

But, here I am with absolutely no motivation to check my twitter messages or read my newsfeeds and I’m telling myself it’s fine. It’s fine to be mediocre, and to just live the way some people live – without a care in the world.