One thing that drives me bonkers about tech culture is teaching designers that the bureaucracy is more important than the output — journey maps, documentation, multiple iterations, user research etc etc. All of these are fine tools but the goal is a good product and you can spend months producing mountains of all these design artifacts and still end up with junk.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from fonts@sfba.social
@fonts Dealing with this right now, a designer unable to start out of fear of not getting it right, only after all these artefacts are in place can they be sure.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from aegir@toot.wales
@aegir I’ve seen that in junior designers coming from really bureaucratic orgs where they feel like they have to prepare enough testimony for a 6 month long trial in order to change an icon.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from fonts@sfba.social
@fonts This one is more experienced and more than capable but I think their organisational/country’s culture is the problem. Too much blame maybe?
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from aegir@toot.wales
@fonts @aegir Design can’t happen without input, ideally user research. When you don’t have anything validated to go from, you end up creating artifacts and getting the org to agree on the shared perspective. The artifacts are there to force the retrieval of information to do our jobs with some hope of success.
Sometimes we fail to twist the org’s arm to provide us with any insight and we end up designing wherever and hoping it sticks. Or designing wherever a Product Manager hopes work. But we generally need lemons to make lemonade.
Also, wireframes are artifacts too.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from laescude@mastodon.cr
@fonts are UX and design becoming, or did they become the same thing? Are they the same? Should they be?
Please assume I'm ignorant, not that I'm asking probing questions.
Part of the problem I feel is that everyone, because everyone interacts directly with the design, feels like they have a stake in it, have ideas about how it should be, has an opinion.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from sarajw@front-end.social
@sarajw @fonts Nobody really knows and everyone has opinions about it. ;)
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from stegrainer@mastodon.social
@sarajw @fonts in my mind, the production of these artifacts is a way for the designer to justify their result. Not necessarily a post-hoc rationalization (though I’ve seen it happen, designers skewing the research in order to justify their own preconceptions), but more a diffusion of responsibility. You’re right that design teams have a lot of pressure from every other team, every manager, etc. So everyone has an opinion but very few people have the knowledge and experience of design that designers have. It can be very frustrating for a designer to propose a solution only to have it shot down with spurious reasons and bad ideas.
So UX design kind of saved the day, with an industrialized way of reaching design decisions. Sometimes complicating things in order to appear serious and your decisions to appear grounded in an approach that business-types and technical-types. No more of this “creativity” and “sensitivity” nonsense.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from joachim@boitam.eu
@joachim @fonts yes you've eloquently put much of what I was thinking - everyone has an opinion and lots of people think they could just "do design" (they often can't, but they still have opinions when designs are placed in front of them) - but if the design choices are backed up by all this laborious process, they can't really argue any more.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from sarajw@front-end.social
@sarajw @fonts the processes only goal seems to be to justify itself 😅
I wonder if there’s also a sexist dimension to that evolution. Just like in the frontend world where JS bros reinvented the wheel using React and sidelined the html+css folks (where a big number of women developers had ended up because of the false idea that html & css weren’t worthwhile, manly languages). Wouldn’t it be possible that the separation of UX and UI as disciplines, and the piling up of new processes and tools, were used to displace women designers?
In my experience design was a rare place with more women workers. I don’t know where it’s at now.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from joachim@boitam.eu
@joachim @fonts there's an idea I've seen cropping up lately of "male flight" - which feels relevant to this - probably because kottke shared it recently: https://kottke.org/25/01/0045954-male-college-enrollment-c
Design maybe got too woman-y, the men flew out into UX. Then that has got too woman-y, and now people are starting to ring the death knells for that: https://trends.uxdesign.cc/
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from sarajw@front-end.social
@sarajw @fonts oh thanks, I didn’t know the term!
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from joachim@boitam.eu
@joachim @fonts "white flight" is more familiar, this is new... But feels like it rings true
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from sarajw@front-end.social
@fonts everything you listed is actually very valuable. The problem isn't with the artifacts, it's how they are used.
As a #UX designer I want to STRONGLY defend the journey maps and user research in particular. In no way are they 'bureaucratic'.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from scottjenson@social.coop
@scottjenson @fonts
Imho if you do user research and still end up with junk, you are doing something wrong 😅
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from earthling42@mastodon.social
@fonts Designers would benefit a lot from having the skills to work in the actual product. But that’s something that they really never want to hear…
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from alper@rls.social
@fonts Even more bonkers is the fact that all that glitzy research has to be “approved” by managers who have zero sense of design, usability or taste. Have seen too many times helpful designs discarded in favor of clumsy patchwork to fit in an overstretched roadmap because of “reasons”.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from naiyer@mastodon.social
@fonts as an educator I must admit I've got some responsibility for creating a culture where deliverables are assessed on arbitrary intrinsic features rather than their usefulness. I have seen way too many personas that were both extremely detailed and said almost nothing about the need for the product at hand.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from raph_v@mstdn.social
@fonts Certainly, designprocesses in tech have very much adapted to the corporate way to do things, incorporating the dynamics and operations of those companies. Products in this context are (99%?) not the goal, but means to increase revenue for investors and shareholders. Thus design has to follow “their mode” of operation.
Designgoal=working product is one common perspective – but it can and should also serve as a tool for better investigating relationships within complexity.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from kainiephaus@mastodon.social This content has been proxied by September (3851b).Proxy Information
text/gemini