In a world of great uncertainty, why is not the evolution of our own thinking and the ideation of how we share ideas the highest of priorities? And by this I don’t mean evolving technologies but rather to question with conviction the diamond like resistance to change within organizations.

I believe we need to move the discussions beyond the myopic scope of the iPhone screen to a much broader perspective. I believe the capacity to create is unlimited, and only by evolving ideas based on those for whom we design will we gain the creative insights we all aspire too.

Conviction is rooted in belief and belief is founded from passionate experiences in life. As Taylor Mali declares:

I implore you. I entreat you. And I challenge you to speak with conviction! To say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks the determination with which you believe it. Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker it is not enough these days to simply “question” authority… you gotta to speak with it, too.

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

Harvard Business Review – September 2012

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

In the Bubble – Designing in a Complex World by John Thackara

Boxes and Arrows Podcast

Radio Johnny Podcast

Information Architecture Institute Mentorship Program

In my professional experience, including those I’ve interviewed and mentored around the world, this approach to landing design opportunities is unfortunately, still a common practice.

As they suggest – and as I have done throughout my career – try attempting the following when looking to build your own design portfolio:

• Design for a local charity
• Design for a friend’s new business
• Spend time coming up with creative design solutions

Titles come and go in the design world. Today it is more important than ever to build strong relationships offline and start demonstrating our creative solutions to the business community.

Fast-forward some years later. Those attitudes weren’t much different in the workplace.

My experience, as it relates to the digital realm, was quite enlightening. With the proliferation of sites and their information, products, and services mushrooming all over the Web, I thought that the Age of Technology was solidly accepted by everyone with access to a computer and the Internet. If you missed the chance to buy the paper on any given day, no worries. Simply access it online from your laptop or Smartphone. You’re taking your teenager to school. She is reading and suddenly wants to know the meaning of “schizanthus.” At the stop-light, you Google it, and learn something new yourself. But then, after dropping off your now-smarter teen, you remember that you didn’t pay the cable bill. But you are the man, because you have already accessed your bank account on your Smartphone, and are just moments away from seeing the verification that the bill has been paid.

Yet, with all this wonder at our fingertips, I observed digital media being regarded with either apathy, or treated with little esteem, almost like a “new kid on the block” trying to be accepted by a particular clique. My perception was that these attitudes were lacking in a wholehearted cooperation with, and embracing of, the relevance of a digital presence. Consequently, my experience awakened in me a desire and commitment to fulfill the second aspect of my own personal mantra – Learn. Share. Grow – by becoming a medium myself of knowledge.

“Knowledge is embodied in people gathered in communities and networks. The road to knowledge is via people, conversations, connections and relationships. Knowledge surfaces through dialog, all knowledge is socially mediated and access to knowledge is by connecting to people that know or know who to contact.” 

– Denham Grey, Knowledge Management consultant with a passion for virtual teams and knowledge ecology.

How am I doing that now? In increments, and simply, too, through personal interactions, my blog, and via social media. I’m keen on learning new things every day, applying them to my life, and then sharing them, and seeing that light-bulb moment in someone’s eyes, or listening to someone as s/he shares how his/her life was changed. When I think of that transitioning from an individual to a global level like fired synapses, I feel as if I have been plugged into the matrix and am on the path to fulfilling my purpose.

Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes.” – Peter Senge, American scientist and director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

We humans are the original and most intricate “computers” ever designed. We are prime media for sharing knowledge that will lead to change on every level. With the unity of the human and digital elements, we have already set in motion a momentum of transformation that will break over rigid attitudes and resistance to change like colossal waves, leaving fear and darkened thinking from ignorance behind like driftwood in their wake.

Recess is over. School is out. Hello world.

If I wanted to retain any credibility as a digital strategist, I would have to find a way to break through the glaze-effect.

It didn’t take me long to identify the main culprit… Me!

Damon Stapleton (former colleague and Executive Creative Director at TBWA\ South Africa) supplied me with a few glazed-eye moments during the early parts of my career at TBWA\. I was working with him on a new business pitch that defined an approach that has stood me well in times of “glaze” ever since.

The business we were pitching for fell into the travel & tourism category. The creative Damon’s team worked and relied heavily on used images of the South African landscape, which we hoped would entice our target audience to visit our beautiful country.

Whilst working on the digital part of the pitch I identified an opportunity to use mobile phone technology with one of the proposed billboard executions.

We had the mobile strategy in place and wanted to extend the experience a little. By tapping into the phone’s GPS and camera API, we could use augmented reality to recognise the billboard in order to overlay additional content. We also figured out a way to connect a live image-feed, which would allow the user to look through the billboard, using their phone, as if it was a window into South Africa.

I was excited to get Damon’s approval. Nervous, as one gets when working with a highly-strung team, but eager to avoid the glaze-effect and win the approval of our boss, this is what we did…

As Damon walked into my office, we grabbed his attention with:

“What if we could take you there for 15 seconds?”

We had his fragile attention and closed the deal by visualising the experience with a simple paper prototype we stuck together before the meeting.

The words “Augmented Reality”‚ “GPS”, “API” and “Live-feed” never passed my lips. Success. Our mobile application and augmented reality contribution made it to the final pitch-presentation.

Technology and methodologies are not experiences but rather ways to define and enable them.

The words ‘What if’ have helped me avoid the techno speak. It’s a way to grab attention, kick off a story and reveal the experience you’re aiming to create.

Here is the final version of our concept in a video prototype.

This is part of a series of posts on the 7 barriers to better user experience. For context, you might want to start with the introductory post, 7 Organizational Barriers to Designing Better Experiences.

Two true stories:

For three years in a row, the executive team of a smart software as a service company identified user experience as one of the organization’s top three strategic goals. When the CEO gave company-wide presentations, he showed the slide with that year’s top three strategic goals, and user experience was right there at number three. The company even used its NPS score as the top-level metric to measure year-over-year progress. Even though improving UX was one of the company’s top-three goals, it always lost the focus game. The company didn’t bump user experience for items lower on the strategic totem pole, but the strategic priorities in slots one and two ate all of the focus and resources, leaving nothing for the user experience.

Across the country, a national telecommunications company was developing a new consumer service. The product and executive teams relied on user experience to drive consumer conversion and retention. Even though key aspects of the experience interfered with conversion and retention, UX never made it into the bi-weekly sprints. The user experience was never as important as that week’s sexy, new features. The user experience stories were always at the top of the backlog, the very next thing to work on, but they never made it into an actual sprint.

Both of these companies have conquered that first barrier. They understand the value and importance of user experience, but they can’t keep focused. Other activities keep pushing user experience aside. Now that your organization understands how design can be integrated into the product development process, you start to compete with other project activities. Once UX has a seat at the table, it has to compete with everyone else to be heard.

There are three strategies for making sure you can keep your eye on the UX ball:

1. Conquer the world

In theory, if you can better communicate the value of user experience, it will compete more fairly against other priorities. And if user experience is important, you’ll always end up at the top of the pile. Of course, that means you have to find ways to compare user experience and totally different activities side-by-side. How do you weight user experience versus software development? Or user experience versus marketing?

2. Protect your milkshake

If your organization understands user experience is important, but can’t spare the necessary attention, then you won’t have the resources you need. You have a milkshake, but other people keep drinking it. But what if no one can take your milkshake? If you can schedule inviolable blocks of time or gain total control of someone’s tasks, then you won’t have to worry about that time or resource being used on anything other than the user experience. No one else will drink your milkshake because their straw can’t reach it.

(And to continue the theme of extended metaphors…)

3. Lay your eggs in someone else’s nest

Cow birds lay their eggs in other birds’ nests. The nest owner returns and cares for the cow bird’s eggs as if they were their own. Whose nest can you lay eggs in? If you can merge or sneak user experience activities into other work streams, then you won’t have to worry about always being the next thing on the list. This means pushing user surveys into marketing, usability testing into QA, and scenarios and wireframing into your development teams. If you can get more important birds to hatch your eggs, you leverage their clout to protect the activities.

Where there’s a will…

Understanding user experience and pursuing it are two pre-requisites to improving the experiences your organization can produce. Once your organization has the mustered the will to create better experiences, then—and only then—can you begin to examine and improve the way you design. We’ll examine barrier to your organization’s design process in our next post.

My heart felt thanks to the organizers and volunteers for your efforts in putting together a fantastic conference and for the honour of being your closing keynote.

The lines humanity has drawn in the dirt that we call borders are vanishing! The need to learn about and respect the differences in all cultures is central to our professional development and acceptance of deliverables.

We are no longer designing for our boss or the corporation. Our focus should be on creating experiences that demonstrate the values others hold dear – especially those that may differ from our own fundamental beliefs.

This very much includes what we frame as being “good” design in the eyes of our collective global audience. A daunting challenge perhaps, but one that reveals benefits that exceed traditional measures allowing for the creation of ubiquitous designs for people – not machines.

Note: Slides have been modified slightly (quotes and images added) to provide greater context. Videos of this and all other presentations will be provided in the coming weeks on the conference website.

• the explosion of new technology, that could be expected to result in major new industries emerging and older ones disappearing.
• the change which he saw taking place from an “international” economy to a “world” economy.
• the need which he saw for organizations of all kinds to learn new responses to the rising pressures imposed on them by society as a whole, and by individuals – whether those inside them or those outside them.
• the emerging “knowledge society” and “knowledge economy” and their implications on all of us.

How right he was! And how ill-prepared most of us were …and most businesses and governments still are to this day.

As I look back over the last 2 decades, the pace and scope of change is breath-taking. Businesses and governments today face a dramatically new and different environment.

• Low rates of growth in demand and in income, at home and overseas
• Under-employment of resources
• Major fluctuations in the value of our dollar, and of other currencies against each other, bringing radical shifts in competitive advantage.
• Old markets, old customers, and old suppliers changing and often disappearing
• New technology to master, in every job.
• New knowledge to acquire, in every job.
• New public and social demands.
• New and changing expectations from within organizations as new values, new faces and new skills replace old

As Clifford Stoll, author of High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian, Silicon Snake Oil, and The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage has noted:

Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not understanding. Understanding is not wisdom.

To address these new realities we must take the time to stop and think. We need to question for clarity with our peers and especially with those for whom we are designing. We need to take the time to learn from a variety of cultures, values, and ideals the world over.

There is no top 10 list that will resolve an organizations’ fundamental issue with staff or clients. There is no application that you can download or purchase that will make you millions of dollars.

I believe the essence of the UX discipline has the potential to push beyond the usual conversations of the tools and methodologies we hear about everyday. This is possible if we take the time to think about the variety of values, ideals, and insights of others whose culture and experiences differ greatly from our own.

The average person cares little about technology so long as it works and becomes a ubiquitous part of their everyday lives.

I believe that collectively there is nothing we cannot accomplish so long as we don’t make such findings about any one individual, process, or company. Our problems are global. Our solutions must take these realities into account for the benefit of all.

If only we stop to think.

If only we take the time to question the experts and to consistently look to others outside our discipline for inspiration and new ideas.

Technology is a big destroyer of emotion and truth. it doesn’t do anything for creativity. Sure it can get you home sooner but it doesn’t make you a more creative person…that’s the disease that you have to fight in any creative field…ease of use.

And that is the distinction that I believe needs to be made clear – getting from complex to simple is rooted in creativity. We design to make things easy for others to use and interact with. Getting to ease of use should not be about focusing on specific processes or technology – nor should it be easy.

When was the last time you found inspiration following step-by-step instructions? The inspiration to create is not derived from replication. Creativity is born when we intentionally engage in new experiences and ideas that contradict our own long held beliefs.

It’s emotionally draining. It’s frustrating. But to see order in chaos we need to acknowledge the beauty and potential in being creative. The Edge qualifies this ideal, succinctly:

When you go past a managed forest you see a mass of tree trunks. Then at a certain point when you look again you see they’re all in perfect rows. Clarity. Clarity of vision. What you’ve been looking at from the wrong angle and not seeing at all. You labor. You sweat to see what you couldn’t have seen from that other perspective.

Editors Note: This post (edited) was published on my blog late last year. Based on recent conversations with designers the world over, I thought it appropriate to start this conversation again with the global design community.

Recently I had a chance to watch the video of a talk given by Jonathan Berger, given at the recently concluded Agile UX NYC 2012 Conference. In his talk, Jonathan made reference to a designer who boldly claimed: “We don’t hire designers who can’t code.” This statement got me thinking about my own personal experience as a designer within the Jamaican market who’s been forced to learn to code because no one would hire me as a web designer if I couldn’t also develop the user interfaces of these websites using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

I always thought that being forced to learn to code was a bad thing within our local web design industry, because I quite frequently prefered the thrill of design rather than spending all day looking at a screen filled with boring text. This coupled with the fact that many of my fellow web designers in other regions of the world were not forced to code – they’d constantly speak of designing comps and handing them over to developers who would handle the coding aspect of things. I’d constantly be perturbed at the fact that I had to be wearing so many hats in order to produce a digital product, while others overseas had fun all day doing what they loved – making things useful, usable and delightful through the process of design. I thought forcing a designer to learn to code was actually a weakness of Jamaica’s web design industry, because I thought it would take away from the time, energy and love that we could put into creating wonderful UI’s, but boy was I wrong!

It turns out that Jamaica’s web design industry may have had it right for all these years, because in recent times there have been articles popping up all over the web with persons advocating the benefits of designers who can also code as well as the need for designers to learn to code. Some even go as far as calling them ‘super designers.’ Interestingly enough, I also read an article that suggested that companies like Quora and Facebook follow a policy where their designers are also coders, and we’ve all seen the great user experience results yielded from the products produced by such companies.

After all these years of being forced to develop my coding abilities along with my talent for design, I’ve grown to appreciate being able to code, in fact sometimes I actually prefer coding than designing! However, design is my first love so please don’t tell anyone I said that! ;)

Among the many benefits of  being able to code is the fact that it enables me to bring my design vision to life in the exact way that I envisioned it; It allows me to work more closely with teams of developers and to understand their language when communicating throughout the product development cycle, and best of all, it enables me to have a better understanding of the medium in which I’m designing – how it works, and what’s possible, so that I won’t end up wasting valuable time designing ideas that cannot be implemented.

In his talk on Code Literacy at Agile UX NYC 2012, Jonathan Berger gives several benefits of a designer being able to code, and he also shares some bits about his personal journey of being a designer who has learnt to embrace coding. Please watch it and see if you can identify with any of his experiences:

What are your views? Do you think designers should learn to code? Is it reasonable for employers to demand that their designers know how to code?