Title: The hardest thing in UX design…
Context: It gets easier. Or so I’ve been told.
Synopsis: There are many difficult aspects to being a user experience designer: long hours, constant rework, uncertainty, but nothing is so hard, or dispiriting, as having the same conversation over and over agin: what value do you guys bring to the table? An eye twitches and hands clench into fists the first couple of hundred times you are forced to answer this question, but barely controlled rage eventually morphs into resigned melancholy once you hit quadruple digits. It doesn’t have to be this way however. Rather than a practiced elevator pitch extolling the many virtues of having an adequately staffed and suitably empowered UX team in your organization tell them a quick anecdote about the time you helped to turn a customer relationship around, or how you reduced a workflow from twenty screens to two, or even the old chestnut about discovering that that tried and true feature everyone thought was the single most important selling point of the product was actually the thing customers hated the absolute most about it. Stop trying to justify your existence through reasoned argument and start using the same method parents use to get their 4 year olds to finally for the love of god go to sleep: tell a compelling story.
Best Bit: “Hiring someone with an opinion isn’t the same as having a healthy design process.”
via medium.com
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