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[vhscorp]

Un couple ne peut être heureux que si les deux partenaires s’y sentent en permanence investis, soutenus, valorisés et libres…

V. H. SCORP

[yahnyinlondon]

Why don't I write about user experience?

This weekend I am staying in a rather large and quite beautiful house located in Martin Mill, along the coast of England. I'm staying here with a number of others from the UK user experience community, in order to write about (surprisingly) user experience. Organised by Cennydd Bowles, the hope was that we would come away with some finished articles to share with the wider community and raise the profile of the UK user experience people. For me this is quite a challenge, as I don't normally write about user experience. 

It's not that I don't write at all. I post to this blog at a reasonable frequency. I originally began writing as a way of sharing with family and friends back in Australia what I'd been up to, so it's just natural that I have an inclination towards talking about travel, food, art and other things I've been up to. I do occasionally share notes and sketchnotes from user experience conferences but that's really as far as it goes. 

I came into user experience by way of a graphic design and multimedia course studied at a technical college. It was one of only two courses at further education level in Western Australia at the time. I worked at an ISP and a web agency in Perth before upping sticks to London looking for a bigger challenge. I freelanced at a number of places before landing a permanent gig at a corporate communications agency called Investis. After a couple of years there, I joined what was then the European User Experience team at Yahoo!. It was certainly during my time at Yahoo! that I came of age as a user experience designer. For the first two years, I was surrounded by an amazing group of people, working on a number of projects, although I was mostly focused on Yahoo! Answers. During the latter half of my time at Yahoo! I was the lead user experience designer on Yahoo! Answers. For large stretches of that period, I was also a UX team of one. 

In an early interview with a company recently, I was asked to draw an illustration of my experience. The four facets were information architecture (IA), interaction design (IxD), research and strategy. Starting at the IA section I hesitated and then shaded a very small area as I don't have a degree in library or information science. I then moved along to IxD and as I don't have a degree in human computer interaction, I shaded a small area there too. As for Research, I have no related degree there either. I do conduct a fair bit of ad-hoc research but generally we use our internal researchers for formal testing and research so I shaded a rather small area there. Finally I came to strategy, again, I've definitely been involved in this but it's certainly not an area of strength, although certainly one of interest. I ended up with a very modest diagram despite considering myself to be relatively experienced practitioner.

Looking at the reasons why I downgraded myself, the most obvious solution would be to return to university and gain a tertiary qualification in one of the relevant areas, however I don't really consider that an option for me. It's not that I wouldn't relish learning in an environment free from some of the frustrating constraints that exist in the real world, it's just that I'm not prepared to take the risk financially when I have no issue in finding employment. So whilst I am confident of my job prospects, I don't feel confident to write a book or even a significant blog post about user experience. Given I'm not a great public speaker to begin with, submitting a proposal to a conference is definitely out of the question. 

It almost seems ironic that I'm happy to be paid by companies and have their customers and clients evaluate what I do but I'm not willing to allow my peers similar levels of scrutiny. It's not just the fear of whether I measure up but also a desire to share something meaningful, rather than just noise. I thought that once I had something meaningful to say I would say it but it's now become an excuse to hide behind. I'll readily admit to not having some of the academic nous that others possess but the experience I've had over my career is certainly a unique one and there must be valuable lessons that others can learn from, even if I haven't quite worked out the best way to say it yet.