Update: you can get this book on Peachpit at a 35% discount if you use the code “SKETCHNOTE”. Download a free PDF of chapter 4.

Fellow sketchnoter and UX friend Mike Rohde has just released a book on sketchnotes, which contains lots of tips and advice about the craft of visual notetaking, copious examples, including contributions from other sketchnoters, including one from yours truly.

I was super excited when Mike contacted me to contribute something to his book, and I can’t wait to see the book for real. Mike contacted 15 other sketchnoters like Paul Soupiset, Francis Rowland, Eva-Lotta Lamm,  and Jessica Esch to contribute to the book to show the range of work across a broad range of skills and backgrounds.

It was fun translating the work from initial concept (shown above) to final designs (see below). I’ve gained a lot of value since I started visual notetaking a few years ago, which began at a sketching workshop by Eva-Lotta Lamm. It’s a great memory and understanding tool, social artifact, conversation starter, and is a really fun way of getting deep into a topic or idea.

Needless to say, this book from Mike puts a lot of this stuff into an easy-to-read format, and I forsee myself using it for reference and learning over time.

You can now order the book from Peachpit press, as an ebook, printed book or both.

If you’re looking for a sketchnoter to capture thoughts, ideas and work during a live session, do get in touch with me. :)

It’s been three months since I published my thoughts and feelings about UX amateurism and my constant struggle to define my position and understanding of user experience. I have now found that it’s better to refer to user experience as a state of mind rather than “a thing you do”. I admit that I still fall in the trap of using the word “UX” to refer to certain design practices, but I have stopped calling myself a user experience designer altogether, which I think is a good thing.

Since my post, I’ve started identifying myself as an interaction designer (and sometimes an information architect) and find that specialising my craft around behaviour (rather than everything under the sun) has helped me produce better work. There are many things involved in the design of interactive systems, and rather than biting off more than I can chew (although that is my name), it’s better to focus on collaborating with other specialists (content, tech, business requirements, strategy, graphic design, etc.) to produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The mis-selling of UX

UX amateurism has resulted from an ugly mess of mismatched talent and demands, based on a poor understanding of effective modern design work and an overemphasis on marketing, branding, and “world-changing” experiences. There exists an extremely valuable pool of talent amongst us that contribute directly to UX but often don’t go by the term “UX designer”. Instead, they remain as visual designers, copywriters, content strategists, project managers, planners, front-end developers, producers, product managers, design researchers and so on – each of whom provide their own unique problem solving capabilities to the fore.

These roles are not new, but the emergence of digital ubiquity and disruptive innovation have caused many organisations to scramble for solutions, signing up for what is often packaged as user experience and cobbling together design teams without really understanding the drastic demands on its own operations and systems, not to mention its relationships with customers and end users. Meanwhile, “non-UX” practitioners have responded in their own way to push the boundaries of tools, processes, teamwork and technology.

Eventually, smart organisations and practitioners understand that it is not really about building better experiences per se, but better conversations. The primary struggle of industries today is not about delivering the ‘wow’, but about delivering relevance – because people are increasingly trading on trust rather than desire.

Transformation is everyone’s job, the future of UX

If user experience is a term that we use to trade our craft skills and services with, I feel that we owe it to UX buyers to match the “promise” of the term. And most of the time, these buyers will refer to UX as many things – a user-centred approach, a means to improve customer experiences, a product or service experience that is way better than the one before (the ‘wow’). Despite the single vision we can all see and agree on, the effort to achieve this is often gargantuan (you’re not really assuming UX = just an amazing app or website, right?). Hiring a team of “UX designers” isn’t going to solve anything unless the proper understanding, systems, culture, sponsorship and environment are in place. And if these things aren’t in place, it’s our job as practitioners to help build it up, if we all agree that’s where we need to go.

So yes, UX has taken over our hearts and minds, but we remain practitioners in our own domains. I feel that we’ve reached a point where the real transformative work still lies in front of us, if we really believe UX to be this truly amazing thing we can all achieve and celebrate. It’s time we look further afield and collaborate with others outside our specific domains.

And no, it’s not just about apps and websites.

I’ve decided to close this post because I’ve felt that things have moved on since. There are things in the future worth striving for and this needed to be left behind.

I recently passed the one-year mark at Sapient, and I’ve been wanting to write a blog post about it but have been procrastinating. Part of it was because I wasn’t sure if I had anything worth sharing to another UX practitioner that they didn’t already know.

The more I thought about it, the more depressed I got. Am I really learning anything or doing work that’s valuable? It was hard to put it into quantifiable terms. A hear people talking about the insights they’ve learnt from usability tests, designing a new reading experience for the iPad, writing books and inspiring articles, improving their UX process. I found it hard to say with conviction that I’ve learnt something new that someone other UX person hasn’t experienced so far or find valuable.

I began to ask myself why.

A lot of my work revolves around concepting, defining specifications and communicating UX strategy through wireframes, flows, user journeys and other deliverables I have no name for because sometimes I just cobble things together to make a point. But thinking in terms purely in terms of artifacts doesn’t answer the question of how effective one is in solving problems related to experience design.

So, I started thinking about the design process. Again, it was hard to put a finger on it. Some projects I work in run in a semi-agile format, with standups, sprint-like charts with weekly deliveries and design reviews fixed at specific times. Other projects I’ve worked on have been less structured. Again, I can’t say for sure what works best.

I also began comparing myself with the UX world beyond me. After my UX conference marathon which began in February 2011 with UX Hong Kong and ending in Interaction 2012 this year, my head was filled with all sorts of ideas about “The Future of UX”, “Lean Everything”, “Making Stuff”, and Unicorns. The more work I did, the more distant I felt from these ideas and lessons. Still, I soldiered on – believing that the inspiration had entered my unconscious and was working its way through my hands and tools.

I questioned the applicability of these ideas. How would a unicorn fit in a place like Sapient? How would Jeff Gothelf run a UX team here? Would any of our clients embrace The Future of UX? Would our clients really succeed if we convinced them decided to ship early and iterate through continuous testing and learning?

To an extent, I think my work has some evidence of that, but not entirely. Because a lot of these ideas have been put in specific frames, and those frames don’t exist in many places. It’s also very hard to flex organisations and practices around a new frame than it is to reshape the frame and change what’s inside it. Many of these frames are also owned and acted on by imaginary, ideal agents. In the real world, ownership and responsibility is far more subtle and complex.

Also, clients are very different than UX designers.

In fact, clients are very different from each other. And it makes for exciting as well as difficult projects. In some projects, I think a lot more about our clients’ business than I do about UX.

And then I start to wonder why UX people don’t talk about clients and their businesses.

That led me to realise that project success isn’t always measured by UX-related metrics – so a lot of my work (and thus, learning) is influenced by something other than UX. In fact, it’s measured more by Customer Experience (CX) metrics, which changes depending on which client you’re speaking to.

I had wrongly assumed user experience equals customer experience. It’s not. It’s like different set of cultures and beliefs, although they may share some anatomical similarities. This is probably why most business people don’t attend UX conferences.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that there’s a gap between UX and CX, like two brothers who refuse to talk to one another but are forced to live together somehow. And it’s like UX wants CX to be more more like UX, and vice versa.

So, then I asked myself if I’ve learned more about CX over the last year. I probably have, but it’s hard to say exactly what about CX I’ve learnt – partly because there seems to be no hard definition of CX as of yet. I could probably make one up and sound like I’m making sense.

I do know, however, that I’ve contributed to both my client’s understanding of UX and my understanding of the CX of their business. We’ve learnt to translate each other’s languages a little bit to hold a decent conversation.

So in summary, translating UX to CX (and back again) is what I’ve gotten better at doing in the last 14 months, and it’s something I’m thinking more about from now on. This makes sense to me, as I happen to work for an organisation that calls itself the world’s first customer experience company.

Related reading:

Customer experience vs. User Experience – Leisa Reichelt, disambiguity.com
What is an experience strategy – Steve Baty, Johnny Holland
Understanding customer experience – Harvard Business Review

A lot of people are harping around this story of expert violinist Joshua Bell who went barely unnoticed as a busker at a Washington DC metro station and how we’ve lost sight of the beauty of music, how we don’t stop to recognize talent, etc. The real lesson of this story isn’t so much about stopping for a moment or missing out of life’s pleasures or even recognizing talent. It’s really about how we fundamentally are as human beings, how we naturally perceive things one way and not the other.

In short, this story is about the nature of human beings, not about the future of who we can become. If you really want to learn from this, begin to turn the points around as normal behaviour:

• We ascribe greater value to things when they’re priced higher (i.e. Metro Station vs. Concert Hall, see http://bit.ly/PaPPx)
• We are naturally self-centred, and we perceive things based on our social context (see Tom Vanderbilt’s modal bias article on cyclists vs. cars http://bit.ly/dWW7ZI)
• We are also a social species, and there’s been a lot of studies done around crowd or group behaviour, and a crowded space like like a Metro station influence certain behavioural tendencies (http://bit.ly/r0svv)
• How we perceive each other as individuals also have a ‘framing’ effect (busker vs. talented musician), so the whole moral aspect to this this interplay of roles is really quite pointless (http://bit.ly/190z3w)

If you want to learn from this story, don’t focus on the morals themselves as they can come from *anywhere*. Focus on understanding our who we are as human beings, imperfections and all – our behaviours tend not to change, but changing environments and contexts (which is easier to do) can help shape and align those behaviours toward good.

Either that or I should stop clicking on lame stuff people post on Facebook.

Last year around this time, I was ‘attending’ Interaction 2011 from afar, cosily in my loft. But when IxDA announced this year’s conference in Dublin, I jumped the chance. I’m glad I did – conferences like Interaction have deep community roots, and help interaction designers come together to reflect, energize, and chart history for the near future.

Here’s an article I wrote for a corporate blog, which didn’t get published but highlights my reflections from the conference…

Last week I joined about 750 attendees in Dublin, Ireland for IxDA’s Interaction 2012 conference on Interaction Design. While last year’s conference had (loosely) answered the question “what have we achieved and how do we move forward?”, this year’s IxD12 has progressed towards answering “the future of human experience and relationships through interaction”. The main themes that emerged throughout the event were the emotional/social aspects of digital experiences and breaking through UX cliches and norms. It was also the first “global” Interaction conference, based in a non-US venue, which thankfully made it easier on us London-based folks.

One of the major takeaways of the conference was about modernising our tools, methods and approaches to address the explosive growth around mobile, social computing, and affective interaction. Several keynotes and talks emphasized the use of innovative thinking (Luke Williams’ “Disrupt”), progressive methods (Abby Covert’s “IA Heuristics”), and expanding beyond conventional interfaces (Jonas Löwgren’s sketching keynote). This critical reflection of the practice was very well received by attendees, myself included.

Even classic UX hallmarks such as usability testing, goals, and tasks were brought into question. In his talk, “Users don’t have goals”, Andrew Hinton argues that we’ve become too procedural, and that there are better ways to design against for organic, fuzzy, human behaviours. The MAO model, presented by Sebastian Deterding, is one such method – proposed as an alternative to BJ Fogg’s “Persuasive Architecture”. Even usability expert Dana Chisnell argued that testing against tasks is ill-suited to research the increasingly ubiquitous social web. Despite the challenging nature of these talks, it didn’t feel superficial or impractical, and certainly left me inspired about the future of our practice.

The evening events, such as the opening & closing parties and the IxDA Awards (an Interaction first), were packed and fed the whiskey-induced celebrations well through the nights. One of them, The Great IxDA Debate hosted by SapientNitro, pitched three controversial IxD topics against panelists Dave Malouf, Pete Trainor, Abby Covert, Jeff Gothelf, Kieron Leppard, and Giles Colborne. With Dan WIllis (@uxcrank) moderating, the debate turned out to be one of the best IxD12 events.

It’s hard to shake off the community spirit at an Interaction conference, and it certainly delivered that in spades this year. Next year’s theme (again, an Interaction first) has been aptly named “Social Impact”, and will be held in Toronto, Canada. Closing keynote speaker, Dr. Genevieve Bell, summed it up best – we’re moving away from thinking solely about interactions and more towards relationships.

I tried to cover as many talks I could with my sketchnotes, but I’ll briefly sum up the event with the following “themes” I observed:

Everything is anthropomorphic

From Interactions to Relationships

Upgrading our UX methods

It’s just the beginning – resources, articles, and even more sketchnotes

• My complete Ixd12 sketchnotes on Flickr
• More sketchnotes from Sam “Pub” Smith, Eva-Lotta Lamm, Krystal Higgins and Jason Alderman
• Coverage on all three days on Johnny Holland
• The great IxDA debate by SapientNitro on Storify

I attended Leancamp London 2 last weekend because Rob told me about this really excellent book he was reading, and that he was attending Leancamp to learn even more about it. This book is “The Lean Startup” book by Eric Ries, which has taken the world by storm. So I needed to find out for myself what it meant for me.

In that process, I realized that “Lean UX” is really a term targeted at a business audience, but it somehow got misinterpreted as a “new” way of doing UX. I don’t think it’s a new way to do UX. But I think it’s a more focused way to do UX. In short, Lean UX is a way to apply UX for Lean Startup practitioners.

What is Lean Startup?

Lean Startup is mostly a combination of Agile (mostly with a big A) and Steve Blank’s Customer Development, tightly integrated into one machine. Subjectively, it is a model for operating a business with an entrepreneurial mindset where the there are a lot of unknowns – so the successful execution of a lean startup is more art than science.

Lean UX is a disciplined effort to play by the Lean Startup rules. In that sense, I think it’s good because it’s a way to embed UX into a system. How successful it will be, I’m not sure we can tell yet. I think it’ll take awhile to see if it sticks.

Should we all do Lean UX now?

However, I’m still not sure about Lean UX as a way to “get out of the deliverables business“. I think we need UX designers who are able to play well in an Agile environment, but I also think we need UX designers that work in rocket-ship environments, where it may not be so practical to run an effective Agile shop. Maybe your teams are not co-located, or the effort to integrate silos are too costly, who knows.

Do agencies need a modified version of Lean UX? I think many already do – this is why this I think “Lean UX” is really a term for the Lean Startup community, and while those outside that can and should learn from this partnership, I don’t necessarily think we need to jump into the same boat. I think there’s a lot of room for all of us to grow and provide value.

Don’t stop until you succeed

Lean Startup also applies very well to environments where teams continue to work and iterate over a (somewhat) indefinite period of time, usually expiring at the time the business is mature and developed enough (i.e. it’s business model is validated to be profitable, repeatable, valuable).

Not all UX practitioners work in this kind of environment. Freelancers and agencies are hired for a period of time to solve thinking problems – e.g. planning, design, strategy. I think agencies want to move away from pure delivery work, but delivery work is here to stay and more, not less, UX will be needed in the future – for delivery work or otherwise.

Lean UX is an opportunity for us to learn

I think what’s exciting about Lean UX is the opportunity to bring focus to some of the following issues:

• what skills, knowledge and aptitudes does a practitioner need to have to succeed in highly collaborative teams?
• how work spaces, artifacts, information systems and the coordination of all those come into play
• how UX can integrate deeply with development and business
• in the spirit of Lean Startup, what can UX communities learn from other industries to be more successful? (Lean Startup borrowed elements from Toyota’s manufacturing system)
• how can we measure UX output and effort more effectively? How do we use these metrics to improve traction and value?

I see Lean UX as an area that’s contained and focused enough that we can observe and learn from, possibly even emulate, steal from or modify.

Note: I’ve uploaded my presentation on how to use Diary Studies for customer validation (part of the Customer Development framework). My sketchnotes for several leancamp sessions I sat in are also up now.

About three years ago, I embarked upon a silly idea to change my career away from engineering towards design, and 2011 was the first full year where I wasn’t paid to write any code. It’s been highly enjoyable and I feel there’s so much to learn, it’s overwhelming.

The first half of 2011 was filled with conferences, and it has really paid off. So much of what we do as designers is social. Being part of a community makes you more keenly aware of the little things in design, especially when you’ve already spent a lot of time in the literature. The field of UX is still evolving a lot, and so is the language. Being exposed to other people’s practices has helped me learn and validate my own work.

After I joined SapientNitro in March, I continued to absorb new things. I spent a lot of time thinking about interaction, experience, context and aesthetics. Working with concepts and ideas has been fun but challenging as well – communicating effectively is not easily taught. I also learned a lot about working collaboratively in a design team, with real commercial pressures.

If that was not enough, I volunteered to organize UXCampLondon 2011, which was a real challenge. One’s experience of organizing events can vary greatly depending on the team, venue, sponsors, weather, marketing, networks… the list goes on. While the event went okay, I wasn’t satisfied with the outcome. Still, I’ve grown more respect for people who put on events, and a better appreciation of the value of events as a whole.

I’m excited for 2012, because I’m looking forward to the challenges ahead. I want to devour that pile of UX books I’ve bought over the months, and concentrate on certain areas in my work – notably prototyping and adopting a more iterative and inclusive way of designing. Finally, I feel I should use 2012 to get a bit of rest after the hectic times in 2010 and 2011.

I recently passed my one year mark as a full-time user experience designer. While I have been applying user-centered design in my previous roles, this feels like a big change for me. I’m now in a job with a different title (information architect), with different responsibilities (design), working in a different industry (customer experience). In getting here, I immersed myself around books, events, practitioners, and finished a postgraduate degree. But now, it feels like I’ve shifted gears by putting it into serious practice.

The theory vs. practice gap

There’s been a bit of debate about whether you need a postgraduate education to qualify as a UX designer/information architect/interaction designer these days. Having done the MSc a few years ago, I don’t think it’s necessary in building a career, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to find good practitioners who have the passion to acquire knowledge apart from the day job.

One of the things I find lacking in commercial practice is the general awareness of solid HCI theory. Granted, it wasn’t HCI alone that gave birth to this industry, but I feel quite strongly that HCI covers enough of the essentials required for sound practice.

At the same time, HCI as a field is also changing, but we’ve been borrowing a lot from the older stuff – passing our knowledge on our colleagues like chinese whispers without keeping things in check. For example, Don Norman has been trying to get designers to stop misusing the term “affordance” when they actually mean “signifiers”. It’s not just HCI, but other fields too – see Mags Hanley’s “Fill in the IA gap” talk at London IA.

Multidiscplinary teams and processes

I love that I now work alongside strong visual designers, copywriters, project managers, developers and directors. It takes many hands to produce good experiences – UX designers should never work in isolation. However, this means we all need flexibility in adapting to multiple processes and practices, yet remaining fully competent in our own areas.

Flexible, focused teams place top priority on shared understanding, willingness to change work approaches, being sensitive to project execution, and effective communication of the overall design. Exceptional teams are very detail-oriented, but focus too much on the details while ignoring other issues leads to misunderstanding and communication breakdown (and occasionally screaming and crying). It’s one big balancing act.

Of course, my experience is heavily influenced by the design studio approach (which I feel is a better way of doing things), but my point is that learning UX on the job has given me that necessary exposure to complex design practices in its various forms.

Designing for more than just users

Another balancing act that is seldom discussed is how to effectively design for the client and even the design team’s agenda. We focus a lot on discussing users since they rarely ever get a say (until the design is launched) – but in reality we’re heavily influenced by client requirements and goals, even our own design preferences and styles. Plus, they’re all moving targets, making it even harder.

Designs are never finished, but they get pushed out into the wild one step at a time. I like the idea that our designs become mediators of conversations, relationships and behaviors. Sometimes it’s about enabling an experience we think our clients or their customers want. Or  changing the way people do things. Other times, it’s just a really good idea.

It isn’t always pretty though. Projects can sometimes be set up to fail, opinions can take a wrong turn, and new technologies can be really disruptive.

The need to reflect

Project pressures and uncertainties rob time away from learning things the way I did before (books, events, etc.). Sometimes I have to stop and think about what I’ve learnt over time, much of it is hard to put in words – but learning on the job has been invaluable. Forcing myself to write this post has been good way to keep things in perspective.

In October 2007, I launched a pet project called foodlah.com, a website that aggregated blog posts from Malaysian and Singaporean food blogs. The whole project was really an experiment in content curation. There was then a big rise in food blogging in Malaysia, and content was all over the place. My aim was to aggregate all that content to make it more convenient to read and find content. I also wanted to see if the project could sustain itself through means like online advertising and sponsorship. Today, I decided to shut the site down for several reasons. There were many lessons learnt from that project leading up to my decision to shut it down, and I felt it was worth sharing.

Good content – a basic necessity

The site started off as a simple wordpress site with a plugin to aggregate content via RSS into one place. This is a common model for many sites that farm and scrape content from multiple RSS feeds. Despite the fact that farming and scraping content is frowned upon by bloggers (there are some notable exceptions), I felt that aggregating good content in one place to make it more accessible was worth the experiment. Over the years, I carefully selected blogs that had good content, and I removed blogs that were neglected or showed a considerable drop in content quality.

Good content was crucial for two things: people searching for specific food reviews and people browsing the latest food reviews. Keeping the site fresh with good content alone made the site sustainable, averaging more than 2000 visits per day for more than 2 years. When I asked readers for feedback, they said they liked coming to one place to find everything. And that’s pretty much the only thing the site did.

Caring about content and the people who make them

It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. When I started, many bloggers got upset that I was ‘stealing’ their content and I apologized. Instead of publishing full articles, I published summaries instead and made the links back to their site more prominent. I learned to be more courteous with authors and to treat them with greater respect. Every subsequent site I wanted to aggregate was initiated with an email asking the author for permission. I also disabled commenting on foodlah, because my main goal was to drive people to the food blogs where the real conversations were taking place.

Later when the site grew bigger, I installed an “add my blog” submission form so bloggers could ask for their blog to be aggregated. When bloggers sent me a request, I evaluated each site for quality, consistency, and authenticity – then wrote back to every one of them. Not all of them responded back whenever I agreed to add their blog to the aggregator though. This made me sad but there are many food bloggers who blog for profit and profit alone. Not that I’m against making a profit – but sometimes the quality isn’t there to match.

Features can choke your content

Besides content aggregation, I experimented with many “web 2.0” features, thinking it would make the site more innovative. I tried things like automated tagging, manually adding location data, adding a gallery of thumbnails from images in the articles, and adding links to most viewed posts and related posts. The features made the site feel bloated and clinical, as the features came to overpower the content people were really after. I didn’t take long before I started kill the features, but I kept ones like “most viewed posts” and “related posts” which improved the browsing and searching experience.

Partly due to my inexperience, trying to make the features work to achieve a good user experience took up too much time. Good user experiences are almost never achievable out of the box, especially when ‘plugging in’ new features one after another. Enabling more plugins meant performance drawbacks, and many needed to be modified. It wasn’t worth the effort, especially when each new feature seemed to choke life out of the content, and ultimately out of the site.

Be wary of your ability to maintain your site’s overall experience

Running a good website takes a lot of effort. Good content requires effort to write. Good interactive experiences require effort to design and build. While tools and platforms make it easier to publish, design and distribute content, the real work remains a human endeavor. It’s too easy these days to enable plugins, add scripts, install themes, but none of these add any real value to websites and can hinder the overall experience.

That’s hard to swallow for many people who can’t control every part of the UX of their website, whether it is the content or the code. And even if they do, they still need to design it. But I think it’s important to scale things back when websites get so unmanageable that it hurts the quality of the experience. And sometimes, some websites just need to die.

Why foodlah.com had to die

Ultimately, I shut down the site because there weren’t anymore lessons worth learning from it.  The underlying code was rough and ready, and I wasn’t willing to re-write everything from scratch. There are now better ways to viewing aggregated content and I felt the site wasn’t doing anyone favors by “hanging around” – shutting it down was like pruning the dead leaves of trees that made the Internet. Part of me was never happy with the site even though it lasted so long. And while I was able to pay the server fees from the ad money, profit was never the main objective.

I do think it’s worth investing time in pet projects as they can provide valuable lessons outside of a traditional office, but it all depends on how much you want to invest and what you want to learn from it.