Read my story on Medium

UX is more than just executing an idea, it’s defining the problem to be solved and identifying the person for whom you are solving it. This means that you don’t always need to know exactly what you are setting out to design when you hire a UX designer, because we can use the research and design tools at our disposal to help figure that out with you.

But it’s rare that a client will commit to a truly UX-led design process. Why? Because that lack of certainty can be scary. It’s not always clear when you set out on a project exactly what you will learn or how it will shape the end product. (And by the way, this is not only true for clients, but for designers too. This uncertainty is probably the number one source of anxiety that my UX students face when they are just starting out.) You may find that your assumptions get challenged and your vision of the product changes. You may question whether your initial idea is even viable, or whether the audience you thought you would be designing for even needs the thing that you thought you would be designing. You may even have to kill your pet feature because it doesn’t actually solve the problem that needs solving, and that can be a hard pill to swallow.

That’s why I was not just fortunate, but downright lucky to have a client – Canopy – who was willing to go on this journey of uncertainty with me and the design team at Type/Code. I kept track of our activities week-by-week in a diary so I could shed some light on what this looks like, and wrote it up as a case study outlining our process which can be read on Medium

The long and the short of it is this – if you think you need a 2-year roadmap or a product requirements document all figured out on your own before you hire your design team, think again. And if you think design is just a deliverable and not a tool, then you may be missing out on some valuable insights that will inform a better product. Really great things can happen when we admit that we don’t have all the “right” answers from the get-go, and can take the time to find the information we need to deliver the best designs possible.

While we had a wide range of really great questions from the audience, I’ll just paraphrase what I said here on the topic, because the conversation hit on a lot of things that come up often when I’m talking with potential clients who are trying to understand the difference between UX, UI, visual design, and front-end development, and struggling to identify what it is that they need.

User experience design is simply informed design. The output can be whatever best helps you build and launch your product or service, be that recommendations, workflows and wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, clickable prototypes, or fully functioning front-end code. Your UX designer’s output will depend largely on their strengths and preferences, but also on what works best for your team. Dealing with a large organization where there are lots of stakeholders and departments who need to buy into the concept each step of the way? Then you probably want some sort of written documentation that you can pass around to get everyone’s sign-off on what you’re building and how it will work before you sink a bunch of time into building it. Working on a small, agile team with nothing but a back-end developer and no money to hire a front-end developer? Then you probably want someone who can deliver somewhat functioning front-end code on a rolling basis.

The point is that whatever your UX person is delivering, it hasn’t been designed in a vacuum, and it hasn’t been designed purely in service of some other objective such as “I like the way it looks” or “this was the easiest way to code it up” or even just “this makes sense to me.” This is why I prefer the term “user experience designer” to “interaction designer,” even though the two titles are basically interchangeable. And, this is why I’ve found that, while not essential to every team, it’s often preferable to have somebody who, at least for some dedicated period of time, is focused solely on designing the best possible experience for your users, without a lot of other distractions.

And this isn’t just because that’s the way that I prefer to work. In fact, the majority of my clients over the past two years have come to me with a story that goes something like this:

Well, we had an idea of how it should work, so we brought in a visual designer who said they ‘know a little UX.’

(Whatever that means.)

Our designer created mockups, but once the developer started building it we realized that there were all of these things that we hadn’t thought about. We did the best we could to fill in the holes, but mostly we just left it up to the developer to figure it out, and we went way over deadline and over budget. Now we have a few thousand users, and everyone loves how it looks, but they’re not doing what we want them to do.

So, not only do I not have a background in visual design, I actually think that, in most cases, it’s kind of an advantage that I don’t. What I do need is the ability to communicate effectively with whoever owns the visual design of a product – be that a graphic designer developing the branding for the first time or a front-end coder working from an existing styleguide. I need to understand their unique goals and challenges so that I can ensure we’re creating the best user experience, much in the same way that I work with developers or content creators.

At the end of the day, my success is determined by how what I design works and gets used, not by how it looks or what technology it was built with. Does it need to look good? Maybe. (Honestly, it depends on your brand, your product, and your audience.) More importantly, the way it looks needs to be in service of the how it works and what it does for the user, not the other way around.

The UX designers I know have come from all sorts of backgrounds. Some of them do visual design, some write code, some are product managers, most do some form of strategy, and a few just do research. If there’s anything they all share in common, it’s a healthy curiosity about technology, an ability to understand both the strategic vision and the intricate details of their products, a desire to build things that solve problems, and the ability to understand and empathize with the people for whom they’re building them.

Like so many things in life, work/life balance is a frame of mind. We tend to think about “achieving” a work/life balance, as though it’s this tangible goal, and we’ll feel great when we get there. We also tend to think about it as this state where we have the time and the energy to do everything that we want to do, as though that’s in any way realistic.

Two years ago, this was how I thought about work/life balance, and I took this way of thinking to the extreme. I can’t remember now if it was following a bout of guilt for spending too much time on my personal life, or a stressful spell of over-time on my work that prompted this, but I decided that the solution was to split up my day, in measurable increments of time, each allotted to some activity related to either my “work” or my “personal” life. I wish I still had the post-it note that I wrote this down on, but I think basically came out to something like this:

Work:

• Client projects – 4 hours
• Professional development – 2 hours
• Business development – 2 hours

Personal:

• Puttering/tidying up – 2 hours
• Gardening/cooking – 2 hours
• Chilling/seeing friends – 2 hours
• Personal projects – 2 hours

Convinced I had found the answer to achieving my perfect state of work/life balance, I stuck to this schedule rigorously. For about two days.

The problem with the schedule wasn’t that it didn’t address all of the things that I did, or needed to do, in a typical day. I don’t even think it’s that it was too rigorous, as surely I could’ve internalized it after a few days and then given myself some leeway in estimating the exact amount of time I spent on things.

What I realize now, is that problem was in the designations themselves. It was in the the division between my work and personal life at all. As though by working on client projects and doing professional development I’m not also improving my earnings and my career happiness, which in turn improves my personal life and my relationships with the people in my life. Or that, by spending time on things that I happen to enjoy or find personally fulfilling, whether that’s by reducing distracting clutter, eating well, or giving myself a creative or meditative outlet, I’m not also making it easier for myself to focus on my work. Or, as though my personal projects don’t also offer potential lessons or perspectives that I can take with me into my work.  Or, as though there is any way to distinguish between a business development call that leads straight to direct client work vs one that leads to a social connection. Etc. The lines are just so blurred, the thought that I could somehow even the two out mathematically, I realize now, was just ridiculous.

I once read a fashion advice column where the writer’s advice (paraphrased) was to “Go through your closet and separate your work clothes from your party clothes. Now throw all of your work clothes away. Now it’s a party all the time!” I loved this advice, so I took it, and I haven’t regretted it since. (There isn’t a single thing in my closet now that I look at and think “God, I really hate this shirt. But…it is a good work shirt…”)

As it happens, my new approach to work/life balance has turned out to be quite similar. The less that I differentiate between my “personal life” and my “work”, the less that I make the two compete with each other for my time and my energy, the less guilt I feel for spending too much time on one or the other, and the more “balanced”, well-adjusted, and happy I feel.

The first step to the mindset of work/life balance is to admit to yourself that your life is work. I don’t mean that to sound discouraging. Friendships are work, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a good time when you’re doing the work of nurturing the relationship. Having fun with your friends is doing the work.

I believe this way of thinking is very hard for Americans, and particularly, in my experience, for people who live in New York City. New Yorkers apologize for spending time on their personal lives as though it’s this terrible thing that they’re not supposed to do. This is a city where people would rather stay at the office all night than admit that they need to go home and cook dinner or do the laundry, as though they don’t require nutritional sustanance or clean clothes in order to make it into work each day.

I don’t make excuses anymore, and I don’t feel guilty. If I have to leave the office at 5:00 so that I can go to the grocery store and get dinner on the table by 8:00 then that’s what I do. I don’t let the fact that I happen to enjoy cooking obscure the fact that, in order to be healthy, feel good, have energy, and live my life the way I want to live it, it is also a chore that I need to do. It is both an unpaid job that I do for the good of my household, and a hobby and creative outlet. I know that there are certain things – having a clean and comfortable house, eating well, having friends who are smart and fun who I can talk to about both work-related and non-work related subjects, having clients who I can regard as friends, having creative outlets that don’t carry career-related consequences, having new experiences and gaining new perspective by traveling, just to name a few – that I need in my life, and that without them my “work” will suffer.

So here is what work/life balance means to me. Your work and your life are not separate. Your life IS work. Your work affects your life. Life does not always equal fun, and work does not always equal no-fun. You should not feel like a martyr for spending most of your time on “work”, and you should not feel guilty for spending most of your time on things that others may designate as “personal.” The designation is not the stuff that you have to do vs the stuff that you want to do. The real designation is the stuff that you do to improve your life and the stuff that you do to sustain your life. You both need to live and you need to enjoy the living. Is “balance” really the issue?

To me “web designer” and even “interactive designer” are both incredibly vague terms. Sure, I will use the term “web designer” if I’m describing to somebody’s 90-year old grandma what it is that I do for a living, but for a potential employer, these terms really do nothing to describe the kind of work that they’re expecting from me. It’s always been my assumption that when clients are looking for a “web designer,” it’s because they need someone who can do production, content creation, HTML/CSS, programming, information architecture, visual design, analytics, SEO… Basically, a little bit of everything. Now while most people in this industry worth their salt can do each of these things to some level of proficiency, anyone who values their career and charges a livable wage will only specialize in one or two. (Sure, someone could try to hire me to do web programming, but knowing my limitations, I probably couldn’t in good conscience charge them more than $30/hour.)

So when a client or recruiter uses this term to describe what they are looking for, what it says to me is that they want a low-level employee with little-to-no experience who they can pay a crappy wage. Hence the low salary averages for “web designers.”

Now maybe this isn’t always the case, but if it isn’t, then employers need to do some real research into what it is that they are actually looking for, stop casting the net so wide, and stop setting the bar so low. This has all been said already, but I think that using terms like “web designer” and “interactive designer” in your job descriptions are a dead giveaway that you either haven’t done your homework to figure out what it is that you’re really looking for, or that you know what you’re looking for but won’t come to grips with the reality that to get all of these things done (and presumably done well) you are going to need to hire more than one person (and you’re going to need to pay them well).

“Startup mythology demands that to create something great, you need superhuman sacrifices. You need to work for no pay, you need to put in 120 hours/week, you need to preferably sleep under the desk and live off pizza as a sole form of nutrient. As a result, you need to abandon your family and risk life without insurance.”

From It doesn’t have to be all or nothing with a startup

Before I get into my big, tangential gripe (something which I have no doubt many people will disagree with) let me grease the wheels a little bit by throwing out a similar example (something which, based on many conversations I’ve had, people are more likely to agree with).

You know those obnoxious job descriptions that use words like “guru” and “rockstar” to describe who their looking for? (If any recruiters are reading this, I’m looking at you.) Do they turn your stomach when you read them? Why? Is it because calling yourself a “ninja” sets up an unrealistic expectation of what you can or will do for your employer? Does “rocking out” belittle the fact that what you are doing is actually serious and sometimes difficult work? Do these words make your job sound so deceptively fun, that you wonder whether this employer even realizes that they’re still going to have to monetarily compensate you for your efforts?

In the same way that job descriptions using words like “guru” or “rockstar” turn most peoples’ stomachs, pleas from startups looking for “passionate” people really turn mine. While I’m sure the people who write these descriptions have the best intentions in mind – they want to weed out people who do their jobs without any sense of joy or accomplishment – to me it’s a dog whistle, where “passionate” means “young person who will work 80 hours a week for practically nothing.”

Passion as Exclusion

This is the kind of cultural mythos that David from 37Signals is talking about. It subtly excludes people who are middle-aged, have small children, are considering having children, or just have a healthy desire to live a meaningful life outside of their job. On a larger scale, it feeds into the idea that these people have no place in the startup world. It’s the kind of attitude that makes people who only want to work 40 hours a week (nevermind that that’s all they’re getting paid for) look like slackers.

So why is it not enough to be “interested” in your work? What happens if you are “passionate” about something outside of your job, like playing in a band, traveling to exotic places, or being a good parent? Does that mean that you are in the wrong industry? And who is this person giving you a 30-minute interview to say?

Before you start feeling sorry for me…

Now, because I can sense some super-passionate overly-zealous person out there starting to feel sorry for me, some context. In my field, it’s my job to find what’s most interesting about my clients and their companies – a problem they’re trying to solve, an opportunity that’s available, or just some compelling customer behavior that they need to support or discover – and use that to inform the design of their website, product or service. While I’d be lying if I said that I was “passionate” about every single niche that my clients have come from (they are so diverse, I fear I would have run out of passion by now anyway) I can say that as a freelancer I never take a project that I can’t find the challenge in. In other words, I don’t need to be passionate, my projects need to be interesting. (And no, a sexy brand or a cool vertical alone do not make for an interesting project.)

I also recognize that there are things in my life I’m passionate about, but that I would never want to do for a living. In fact, I tried that once before, in my former life as a classical musician. As a young adult I assumed that the thing in my life that I enjoyed doing the most was the thing that I needed to build my career around. Granted, I made my share of mistakes in that endeavor, but by 22 years old I was burnt out and desperately searching for something to do next.

These days, my music career is a distant memory. I love to cook, but I would never want to open a restaurant. I love animals but I would never want to open a pet salon. I’m passionate about having a clean, organized, comfortable, healthy home, but I don’t want to be a housewife. In case you haven’t heard, the word is out – even if you follow your passion and turn it into your work, it is still going to feel like work.

Now for Some Unsolicited Advice

So here’s my advice for young people who are looking for work. Yes, it’s good to be eager. Hell, it’s good to be passionate if that’s what you really feel you are. But working hours that you’re not being compensated for, working for less money than you are worth or can make a reasonable living on, doing the job of more than one person, and working to and beyond the point of exhaustion are not. Be passionate, but don’t be desperate. Even passionate people can burn out. You may not realize this right now, when there is so much importance on getting your career started, but eventually you are going to find yourself desperately clinging to the things outside of your job that make you feel like a happy, well-rounded person, whether that job started out as a passion or not.

And for startups who are looking to hire. If you want to employ people who enjoy their jobs, make sure that your company culture is healthy, friendly, creative, and supportive of your employees lives both inside and outside of the office. Don’t just hire young people who are passionate and naive, then use that as an excuse to work them to death. (I should probably add that it’s not just startups that are the problem, it’s agencies too. The only difference is that big agencies generally don’t go so far as to sugar coat their 80-hour-a-week culture under the guise of “passion,” they just pay their employees well enough, or do a good enough job of cultivating a super-competitive environment, that employees feel like they can’t complain.)

In other words, I agree with David, but I want to take it a step further: it shouldn’t be this way.

Follow Up

Although I wrote this a while ago as a reaction to a post by 37 Signals, now that I’m getting around to posting it I see they’ve got an even more recent one taking up the passion argument as well: Forget passion, focus on process

Also, in digging around for that NYTimes article again I stumbled on this.
Just, wow: Monetize Your Passion

This is also the case with startups who just can’t ever seem to imagine being their own customer. Arbitrary deadlines, technical and personnel constraints, or even technical and personnel strengths, can cloud a team’s judgement and lead to an ambiguous and un-impactful launch that never clearly communicates what the product is or who it’s for.

Fortunately though, things have started to change in this industry, and I’ve heard a lot of people lately talking about how much they “care about product.” But does “caring” mean that you know how to balance attaining business goals with creating user value? Or that you know how to work within technical and personnel constraints to achieve your desired outcomes? Does it help you know when some new and shiny technology or some brilliant new idea comes along whether it’s essential for launch or just another distraction? Is “caring about product” really enough, or does every startup really need a good product manager? And for that matter, what even makes a good product manager?

This last question is the one I recently posed to the Quora community:

I’ve worked with startups that have no product manager, CEOs who “play the role” of product manager, product advisors, and even one self-proclaimed “product guy.” As a UX designer, I’ve even had to fill in the role myself.

But, having never had the benefit of working with or as a dedicated product manager, I’d love to hear from others who have. What are the qualities that make a “good” product manager? How are they equipped to steer the company in a way that CEOs, advisors, or other team members are not? What value can a “good” product manager add that a whole team of people who “care about product?” can’t?

In my experience, “caring” is not enough. While the word is still out on exactly what makes a good product manager, I like to think that one person who can maintain vision and focus, make hard decisions, and achieve business goals while creating customer value can do more for a startup than whole team of people who simply “care.”

I mean, I know someone who is addicted to Groupon and Gilt Groupe and Daily Candy and the like, and to be honest, she is pretty much obsessed with shopping, deals, “hot items” and “hot spots”, and little else. Is it possible that Groupon just knows their audience really well? The kind of people who just want to buy stuff and will use any justification to do so?

And I realize that I’m drastically over-generalizing their audience based on one example (I’m sure there are lots of very nice people who use their service). But at its core it is, like any coupon or sales scheme, just designed to get people to jump at the prospect of saving a little money, ignore the fact that they’re actually just spending money that they may not have otherwise spent, and buy something that they probably don’t really need in the first place. I guess this has more to do with my personal philosophy on consumerism (perhaps more on that another time), but that’s just how I think about their company.

All of this is to say that I was in no way shocked or outraged by their Superbowl commercial. In fact, I may even go so far as to say that it was a total success. Shopaholism is a debilitating disease, people, and for whatever sick reason, it pays for some companies to present themselves as the cure. After watching this ad, sure, you may be offended – if you’re really a sensible person who honestly thinks that making a positive impact on the world is more important than stuff. But whether you’re that person or not (no judgement here), after watching this ad, you will remember two things: First, that Groupon is where you go to get deals, and second – on a more subconscious level – that nothing else matters.