Business Keeping
Grades on Blackboard. Check there for individual feedback as well.
Key learning from this module
Persona = User as character in a story called “design process”
UX is iterative
I say I have been doing UX for about 8 years, but I’ve been a researcher far longer than that. UX simply gave me a name for the collection of interests I had: usability, communication, content strategy, etc. I had always been a researcher interested in messy, complex problems with no simple solution.
When I found UX, I simply found a community of people who were interested in similar problems. At its core, UX people are people who realize that shortcuts and simple solutions rarely provide maximum benefits to clients and users.
There is no right way to do UX, but there are many wrong ways
At the same time, there are a lot of UX hucksters out there selling pretty, but unusable designs to unsuspecting folks. As I mentioned in my other rant about these types of people, they usually come from graphic design or web design. They are used to there being a simple solution to problems, in other words: make something that looks a certain way.
This is not to bash graphic designers and web designers. We all need them. They are the people who make all the things we use on the Internet. They are also sometimes dead wrong about what the best thing for users is.
Because UX is tied to those pesky, non-sensical beings called “users” it will always partially be at odds with other professions. That’s your job as a UXer: to explain to other kinds of designers why the simplest solution is not always the best one. To explain to clients why throwing up a Wix site that has no classification scheme for information is not going to get them more business.
We are the muddiers of the design waters. And I can guarantee: every usable, brilliant design that users love and find useful has someone who gets UX behind it. Every. Single. One.