Beautiful city, beautiful mountain.

I’m thrilled to announce the next event we, at Neo, are putting on this fall. Lean Day: West will take place September 16-17, 2013 in the gorgeous city of Portland, OR.

Building off the momentum of Lean Day: UX, held back on March 1st, 2013 in NYC, this event is expanded to 2 days and will offer workshops and talks about practicing lean startup in the enterprise.

Day 1 of the event will provide workshops that will teach development, research, lean startup and design systems tactics to help large organizations become more agile in their practices. In addition, you’ll learn how to enable your entire product development team — engineering, product management and design — to work more effectively and efficiently together.

Day 2 will have a series of tactical talks on how our presenters evolved their teams and organizations into more nimble practitioners of lean startup.

Details are being released as we finalize them so click or tap on over to Lean Day: West to see what we’ve got locked down and to sign up to be the first to know more.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing you in Portland this fall.

[Jeff]

As the author of a book on collaboration – a book that touts the benefits of collocated teams – the reality of distributed teams is not lost on me. In fact one of the main questions I get asked each time I present on Lean UX is how to make it work with remote teams. While the benefits of in-person collaboration and communication are clear, it doesn’t mean they can’t be achieved with remote colleagues.

There’s been no shortage of coverage lately about the different strategies companies employ when it comes to their distributed work force. Certain companies, like Automattic – makers of WordPress, have an entirely remote workforce and swear it’s the only way to work. Other companies, like Yahoo!, have made headlines recently when CEO Marissa Mayer demanded all remote employees come back to the office. LivingSocial has promoted a distributed team environment under the leadership of now-departed SVP of Technology Chad Fowler. The poster children for distributed teams, 37 Signals, swear by this approach to the point that they’ve written a book on the topic. What has been missing from the conversation to date is context – the context of the work these companies are doing and the context of their current environments.

Let’s look a little deeper.

In Yahoo!’s case, Mayer asked roughly 500 people (out of a workforce of over 11,000 employees) to stop working from home. This is indicative of a subset of the workforce that has split from the hive and clearly wasn’t providing the same quality of work as their office-bound counterparts. What was happening here was what Jason Fried warns about – the creation of a “here” culture and a “there” culture. In an interview in Quartz magazine, Fried says:

“A big part of it in my opinion it comes down to culture. If you have one remote worker and 35 local workers, that’s a problem because there’s a real disconnect between people at the office and that one lone person. The culture splinters into the “here” culture and the “there” culture. It becomes almost like there are two companies, and that’s what you have to avoid.”

Yahoo!’s culture, as it currently stands, is clearly a “here” culture and needs to stay that way in order to right their lilting ship (according to their CEO).

In the case of companies like Automattic there has never been a “here” culture. From their inception they’ve built a “there” culture and assimilated new hires into that context. They do this through an initial trial onboarding project with a new employee and, if that works well, they transition into a full-time role. That is their normal context and clearly it’s been working for them.

What’s interesting, even the most ardent promoter of remote working – the aforementioned Mr. Fried – speaks to the demands of context when it comes to working face to face or not. When a new employee joins 37 Signals, they bring her into the office for a month to gain a sense of how this new person works, what their strengths and weaknesses are and, perhaps most importantly, to establish a familiar bond with the new hire. It’s this bond that translates into a more successful remote relationship, they’ve found.

In another context, there may be a project that requires an intensive dose of collaborative thinking. In these situations, the 37 Signals team gets together in person to generate this creative spark for a period of time (a few days or a week) before departing with the output of that session to their remote offices.

It seems that, as with most things design and UX, the answer to the question, “Does remote working work for software development teams?” is, it depends. Context and culture seem to be the determining factors but there’s another sub-element of culture that can’t be ignored: trust – specifically the trust between managers and their employees.

Fried continues, “”A big part of it comes down to trust—we’ve found that companies that work remotely trust their employees more. And what’s interesting about that is that when you’re trusted more as an employee, you work better.”

In February 2013 I ran a brief and informal (read: unscientific) online survey to gain a sense of how prevalent remote working was in my tech circles. 108 people responded. Here are some of the results of the survey:

43% of respondents were designers

32% of respondents were engineers

12% of respondents were product managers

The rest were distributed between C-level executives, other managers, coaches, QA, project managers and copywriters.

Amongst all the respondents there was an average tenure, in the tech industry, of about 11 years.

Here’s the interesting fact: 100% (yes, everyone) of respondents were currently working with or had recently worked with a distributed team. In other words, this is a reality for all of us today.

There were at least 5 remote team members for every respondent on average. This means that on an average, 2-pizza team (i.e., a team you can feed with two pizzas), at least half the team is split from the other.

The most fascinating insight for me was the distribution of respondents who said they’d be happy to continue working with distributed teams. Only 55% said they’d want to do it again. The other 45% said they’d much rather collaborate with their colleagues in person on a regular basis.

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest challenges the respondents listed for remote collaboration. Then we’ll dive into specific ways to solve some of these challenges.

1. Poor Communication – this was, by far, the biggest complaint for distributed teams. Colleagues felt like they were not included in decision-making activities and were unclear why those decisions were even being considered. They didn’t know their colleagues that well and felt awkward interrupting them during the day and providing critique on their work.
2. Slow progress – many respondents complained that their teams felt like they were moving slower. At the very least it was clear that the perception was one of slower progress.
3. No team-building or camaraderie – some team members never meet in real life. Without some level of shared experience outside the realm of “the project” there was a distinct lack of camaraderie amongst remote teammates. We spend the majority of our awake time working. For many folks, this is their only social outlet. When the office component is removed, all that’s left is the work. Jason Fried touts this as a benefit as it leaves nothing but the work to judge the merits of an employee’s contribution. However, for many folks this is starkly missing from their work experience.
4. Lack of collaboration – different time zones, languages, priorities and obligations leave many distributed teams working on their own. Productivity may soar in these situations but many survey respondents seem to miss collaborating with their colleagues.
5. Language and culture barriers with team members in other countries – while this can certainly fall into the poor communication bucket, the challenges with foreign colleagues are unique enough to warrant their own category. Building rapport with colleagues from your own country can be difficult enough. When you need to build that rapport with colleagues who speak a different language, follow different customs and have culturally-different approaches to work it becomes exponentially more difficult.

These are only five of the big issues teams have when working in distributed situations. It’s in no way a complete list but, from my survey, these are the biggest challenges.

So, what does work with remote teams? Here are some of the ways successful distributed teams have solved these challenges and thrived.

1. Skype, video conferencing, virtual presence and video portals

It probably goes without saying but teams need to see each other. Facial expressions and body language add nuance to conversations that can’t be captured in email, IM or voice-only calls. The natural tools for this typically include Skype and Google Hangouts.

However, there are some unique ways to use these tools to make them even more effective. One interesting idea is to have Skype on, full screen on a monitor for each remote person. In other words, you’ve got a talking head version of your colleague on screen, next to you at all times. It’s a virtual presence that allows you to be “next” to each other throughout the day without having to plan explicit conversations.

Similarly, for teams that are all remote from each other, leaving a Google Hangout on all day for everyone on the team allows them to drop in and out of the conversation and team dynamic as needed throughout the day. In this case, the name Hangout actually means exactly what the team is doing and how they’re using the product.

Some companies, like Foursquare, leave a permanent video portal open to their remote offices. It functions like a virtual conference room where members of teams, separated by continents, can pull up a chair and have a conversation or a daily stand-up meeting.

Foursquare team doing a stand-up with their colleagues on the opposite coast

Two other interesting companies are pushing the idea of virtual presence further. Double Robotics is offering remote controlled wheels for your iPad. Their (pretty amazing) product mounts an iPad on a stand with wheels that is remote-controlled by the remote worker allowing her to adjust position, height and move around the office as if they were there in person. The camera and screen function as a way to show the environment to the remote worker while displaying their face to the rest of the groups.

Double Robotics iPad mount

Anybots is also providing a similar virtual presence experience albeit slightly more retro designed and, well, dorkier.

2. Get together at the beginning of an initiative

Personal connections make the difference between failed and successful remote teams. One way to build strong bonds on a remote team is to kickoff the project in person, together. Bring all team members to the same place and have them get to know each other over a week of kickoff activities. Facilitate the week to encourage brainstorming, collaboration and group problem solving. Let the teams get to know each others’ strengths and communication styles.

Next have them go out and talk to customers together. This activity builds empathy for the customer and shared experiences team members can fall back on to make sure the long distance relationships endure.

Finally, make sure this time together has plenty of opportunities for socializing. Build in some dinners and even a party to give the team an opportunity to have fun together as well.

Combined, these bonds can create a remote team that feels very closely connected.

3. Hire the right people

Perhaps this one also seems obvious but it’s worth nothing that the characteristics you’re seeking in remote workers are different than those for the collocated team. Two specific traits to ensure in your remote team hires are responsibility and good communication.

Remote workers are given an implicit level of trust. Finding individuals for the team who can be responsible with that trust increases the likelihood of an efficient distributed team. Look for signs your candidate’s previous employer gave them high levels of responsibility.

The second trait you should look for in remote team candidates is the strong communication skills. Remote teams only have their communication to bind them together. Hence, teammates who don’t feel comfortable or find it necessary to over communicate with their colleagues won’t do well on distributed teams.

4. Use a good project tracking tool

The tool must be web-based and accessible to everyone – regardless of OS. The goal is to have a centralized system the whole team uses to keep track of the project status.

The most popular recommendations from our survey respondents were:

Pivotal Tracker – the granddaddy of web-based Agile project tracking tools, Tracker continues to be a popular choice for collocated as well as distributed teams.

Trello – a newcomer to this category it’s quickly gaining popularity with its ease of use and non-industry specific flexibility.

JIRA – Atlassian’s bug-tracking tool has become the go-to project management app for many teams. The fact that it’s easily accessible from anywhere makes it a popular choice with many more-technical teams.

Basecamp – the tool 37 Signals built for themselves has been a popular choice as well for years now.

5. Shared servers and folders

Provide your team with the tools they need to get files to/from each other as efficiently as possible. Many teams use shared servers internal to the company. Many others rely on cloud-based services like Dropbox (get the corporate account), Github for source control, and Google Docs for everything from spreadsheets to asset repositories.

6. Knowledge management systems

Centralized knowledge management systems allow new teammates to onboard quickly and provide a consistent place to go for decision-making history. Wikis fulfill this need rather well. Many of our respondents recommended Confluence by Atlassian as their main knowledge portal. I’ve worked with Confluence myself and, while it lacks a bit of UX polish, it has a tremendous feature set and flexibility to make it worthwhile.

Any version-tracking CMS with a commenting system will work well though. WordPress can do it thought the P2 theme – the one the WordPress team itself uses – has some clear benefits for team collaboration.

7. Instant Messaging

Whether it’s iMessage, AIM, HipChat, or Campfire your teammates need to coalesce around one instant messaging tool. Once there, this veteran communication method still proves highly valuable with today’s distributed teams.

Some teams have moved to Yammer to create a more real-time conversation thread.

8. Collaborative sketching software

Sketching together is an exercise in explanation and collaboration. It’s important to keep this tactic alive with a remote team. While there are multiple solutions to this problem including software and smart boards, I’ve found Google Drawing to be the easiest and most effective product to date.

You simply start a new drawing and invite your colleagues. Everyone has the ability to sketch on the virtual canvas and everyone can see what they’re doing. Combine this with a Skype call or event just a phone call and you’re running remote design studios with ease.

9. Virtual Happy Hours

At the end of the week you want to blow off some steam with your team. Unfortunately it’s hard to take your colleague from another continent to the pub. Instead, try a virtual happy hour. PJ Camp Malik recommends that teams set aside time to not only collaborate via video conference but to also drink together. These virtual happy hours bring the team a slightly closer sense of camaraderie.

10. Share videos of team activities

There will be times where some team members take part in an interesting activity or view a customer demo that the rest of the team can’t be a part of. If possible, take video footage of the event and then share that video with the team members who couldn’t attend. Give them a sense of what transpired and how you think it affects the project.

This simple technique reduces the knowledge gap between teams and still allows everyone on the project to feel involved.

11. Pinterest to share designs, inspirations

When it comes to design, nothing beats a wall of ideas, sketches and explorations. Unfortunately there is no wall for distributed teams – until now. Pinterest serves as a tremendously helpful “wall of ideas” to keep and share with your team. Teammates post and comment on elements as their posted providing the entire team a window into the inspiration for the design.

Pinterest – mood board

These are some ideas to help bridge the gap between long-distance colleagues. They seem to work for our survey respondents and I can certainly vouch for some of them as well.

What’s worked well for you? What has your remote team experience been like? Share in the comments.

[Jeff]

P.S. – I’ll be teaching a class on Lean UX on May 20-21 in Stockholm, Sweden. Details and registration here.

Lean UX – the book!

It is with great excitement that I announce the launch of the Lean UX book. We’ve talked about it for a long time (close to 18 months) and it’s finally a reality. Read this book! It will cover:

• how to frame design problems in terms of assumptions and hypotheses
• how to build and run collaborative, cross-functional teams
• how to make Agile and UX work together
• how to bring design to a broader portion of your organization
• how to make better, more successful products

And then, after you read it, please review the book on Amazon.

Huge thanks to my co-author Josh Seiden for taking on this project with me.

Let me know what you think.

Buy the book.

And here is a great review of the Lean UX book by Kevin Kauzlaric – The Best Business Books for Entrepreneurs.

[Jeff]

Making a list of all of these challenges can be a lengthy endeavor. To spare you that list and to focus this article on challenges with actual solutions I’ve picked three. Again, this is far from a complete list and I encourage you to add your experiences to the discussion in the comments.

Failure is not an option
For Lean UX and Lean Startup to take hold philosophically, your company culture must allow for some level of failure. Declaring hypotheses carries an implicit admission from the product development team that they don’t know if a problem statement is true and if their proposed solution will work. To find out they will need to experiment. Experiments will fail. Management needs to be comfortable with teams learning by failing. The failures will come regardless of process. By experimenting early, your team mitigates the costs sunk into a particular solution.

If you’re facing this challenge here’s what you can do:

1. Communicate with your manager regularly. Let her know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, what it will cost, how long it will take and what you expect to learn from your experiment. Explain how you will mitigate legal and brand risks. Invite her to participate in your testing sessions. Most important is to share your learnings as soon as you have them. By keeping your manager informed you reduce their anxiety. By regularly communicating progress you’re letting them know work is getting done.

2. Crunch the numbers. Show your manager the cost of fully executing the current, unproven plan. Then show the cost of validating those hypotheses. The drastically lower cost of early failure always helps build support for Lean UX.

Your company manages to outputs, not outcomes

Many companies build lists of features and then task teams with building those lists. When the features launch, the team is rewarded for completing their work. No reward is given for the feature actually solving a business problem – only for deployment.

Lean thinking pushes us to seek the business outcome we seek to create with our feature sets and then question whether these features will get us there.

To overcome output-focused management in your org realign conversations with your stakeholders around what metric you’re trying to move with the current feature roadmap. Discuss how confident the company is that these features will actually achieve that goal. If confidence is low, ask your stakeholders to challenge your team with moving that metric. Let the team figure out which features move that metric and use the communication tactics mentioned above to keep managers at bay.

IMPORTANT: the metric you task your team with must be an outcome they can move as opposed to global corporate impacts (think reduction in shopping cart abandons as opposed to “revenue”).

Silos

Lean UX thrives on cross-functional collaboration. Silos destroy this. Enterprise level organizations often have entrenched silos that lock disciplines and business units within their own walls. Crossing these boundaries often brings cries of “that’s not my job” or the opposite, “isn’t that their job?” The truth is that it’s everyone’s job to build great products. Many of the skills your teams possess go untapped because they reach beyond their job title and ultimately their silo.

To get past this you’ll need a bit of stealth maneuvering. This is a situation that requires asking for forgiveness as opposed to permission. If you can find a few like-minded colleagues from other disciplines, grab them and put together a small skunkworks effort to tackle an annoying problem the business has. It doesn’t have to be big – just enough to show what a motivated, cross-functional team can get done in a short amount of time.

Showcase your success to your managers. Tell them how you were able to get all of this done so quickly. Prove the power of silo-busting by showing it’s accomplishments.

These are not small problems and the tactics here will only get you started overcoming them. What challenges have you had? How have you tried (successfully or not) to get past them?

Share your feedback in the comments.

[Jeff]

P.S. – to learn how others in this position have implemented Lean UX in the enterprise consider attending Lean Day: UX – 9 amazing speakers will share their insight on this exact topic.

Example: the job boards (where I have a little bit of experience) will tell you that job hunting is much harder when you’re 40.

Another: marketers find you less “coveted” even though I have more “disposable” income (hate that phrase) now than at any other point in my life.

Maybe, for me, it’s because I got a late start in my current profession. I spent a good chunk of the 90′s trying to be a professional touring musician. I kept shitty day jobs to pay the bills until the steam ran out of both bands I was in. How much further would I be now, if at all, if I’d used those years at a “real” job? I ask myself that question a lot.

The truth is that I’d never trade those experiences for anything. They are some of my fondest memories and where I made my best friends – friends I’ve kept to this day. Nothing builds bonds quite like driving through middle America in the dead of winter, on the way to yet another show where (hopefully) 30 people would show up, in a 20 year old van with no heat, a constantly failing engine and a hole in the driver’s floorboard requiring the driver to wear an extra boot to keep his foot from getting frostbite. Glamorous.

Which brings me back to 2012. It was a year filled with amazing personal and professional achievements. I quit my job! Holy shit that was scary. I started my own company. Holy shit that was scary. I started teaching and training more than I’ve ever done in my life. Holy sh…well…you get the idea.

I wrote a book too. I can’t wait to actually see the physical product.

The irony of 2012 is that my dreams of world tours are now coming true – in the form of public speaking, book events and teaching. I never saw that coming. With gigs (as I still like to call them) spanning India, Asia, Europe and all over the US I’ve gotten to see the world in ways I only thought I would much later in life. Thanks for coming to see me “play.”

On the personal side 2012 has been a roller coaster of emotion with the continually growing beauty of our daughters etching permagrins into our cheeks coupled with the crushing tragic loss of my wife’s brother – something we’re still coming to grips with.

When I turned 30 I wrote a blog post assessing things up to that point. I’ll dig to find it (long lost blog) and post a link so I can assess my progress against 30 year old me. I think he’d be proud.

UPDATE: I found that blog post I wrote when I was 30. It cracked me up.

I’m excited for 2013. There’s a ton of potential on the horizon. Lots of folks have supported me in the last few years. Thank you for that. It means everything to me.

I hope you’ll continue to join me here, Twitter (assuming it continues to be relevant and in the real world as we build new products, companies and ideas together.

[Jeff]

The speakers we’ve lined up represent some of the biggest and most successful companies in the world and the case studies they’ll present will offer tactics, tips and tricks to introducing greater cross-functional collaboration in your organization. At next year’s conference we have the following folks speaking:

Andrew Crow from GE

Stacey Gutman from Amex

Farrah Bostic from The Difference Engine

Lionel Mohri from Intuit

Bill Scott from PayPal

David Panarelli from LivingSocial

Tom Illmensee from SnagAJob

In the afternoon we have Melissa Keene and Christina Goldschmidt from Annalect taking the entire conference through a Lean UX Hackathon workshop. The ideas, skills and methods the morning speakers will share will be put into use that afternoon. It’s shaping up to be a great day.

Lean UX is not just for startups. Lean Day: UX will teach you how to bring these ideas into your practice and start making the process and cultural shifts necessary for them to stick.

I hope you’ll join us in NYC on March 1, 2013 for this great conference. It will be the first of a series of Lean Day events with each one focusing on a different discipline.

The web site for the event is www.leandayux.com — click through to see the full descriptions of the talk, location and ticket purchasing options.

It’s worth noting that we’ve got a limited number of early bird tickets. When they sell out, the price will go up to the “regular bird” rate. Join us! It’s going to be a great day.

[Jeff]

As much as this feels like the end of a process, it’s actually just the beginning. I’m very excited about what the future holds for our new company.

[Jeff]

Make that connection...

“I don’t really use LinkedIn or Twitter.”

“I don’t go to meetups.”

“I don’t really have time to meet people.”

These are just a few of the phrases I hear all the time from people I come across — whether they’re in tech or otherwise. And it shocks me.

I have long lost count of how many business connections, opportunities, jobs, professional acquaintances, referrals and just plain friends I’ve made through both social and real-life networking. To this day, I maintain the philosophy of taking every meeting. Sometimes they’re in person and sometimes they’re over Skype. Sometimes they’re just email conversations. But the connection is made.

Even if we don’t talk again for a year or if we never talk again, we’ve both gained something. And you never know where that little connection may lead. So take that call. Return that email. Schedule that coffee and accept that invitation. You won’t regret it.

[Jeff]

Fear not, I’ve got a stable of great ideas that are just begging for a write-up and I hope to have another post up here in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, please check out my two latest articles over at Harvard Business Review and Johnny Holland.

And if you haven’t yet pre-ordered the Lean UX book you can do so here.

Also, if you have a great idea for a blog topic here please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Thanks!

[Jeff]

The almighty microphone at The Great IxDA Debate

Back in February I was lucky enough to attend Interaction 12, the IxDA’s annual conference, in Dublin, Ireland. It was an incredibly well-produced event with lots of thoughtful sessions, interesting people and fun activities. One of those activities was the inaugural Great IxDA Debate. I was lucky enough to be a part of that debate. The brainchild of SapientNitro’s Dan Willis (aka @uxcrank), the debate put a bunch of interaction designers, creative directors and information architects on stage, in a bar, debating some fundamental questions of the interaction design profession – as the Guinness flowed.

Dave Malouf debating with Abby Covert looking on

Joining me on stage was a formidable (some would say motley) crew of folks from a variety of backgrounds and countries. The debaters included Andrea Resmini, Dave Malouf, Boon Yew Chew, Jason Mesut (my team mate), Pete Trainor, 
Abby Covert, Giles Colborne and Kieron Leppard (arguably the best name ever). We were paired up into teams of two and each foursome took on a divisive argument about the merits and roles of interaction design. Dan did a fantastic job, not just picking questions that were sure to get a spirited discussion, but also MC’ing the event and keeping things rolling all the while involving the crowd in the discussion as well.

Me, at the podium, debating....

The statement Jason and I debated was, “Interaction design is not a well-respected design profession.” Our job was to argue for the statement. You can imagine what it felt like to get up in front of a room of half-in-the-bag interaction designers and tell them their profession was suffering from a lack of respect. :-/

The binary nature of the  statement made it a tough assignment to take on. There are many shades of gray between IxD being or not being a well-respected profession.

What follows is the opening speech I gave in the debate on this topic. Naturally there was a ton of back-and-forth after this initial argument but this will give you a sense of where the night began. It was a terrific event that I hope will be repeated in years to come. Thanks to Dan for driving it. After you have a chance to read my argument, I’d love to hear what you think.

Without further ado, my opening statement:

Aretha Franklin once said,

“I’m about to give you all of my money
And all I’m askin’ in return, honey
Is to give me my profits
When you get home.”

…and a little respect.

That’s exactly what our clients are asking of us – give us profits in exchange for our money. In return, I’ll give you and your profession some respect. Yet what does respect actually mean? When is something respected?

Arguably it’s when that something is understood along with the value it brings to an organization, discipline, product line and ultimately, profit.

Looking a layer deeper, Dictionary.com defines respect as, “to hold in esteem or honor.”

This means that if we seek this esteem and honor from our colleagues, teammates, employers, executives and, perhaps most importantly, our customers, they must clearly understand what interaction design is and what value it brings to their professional and personal lives.

For this conversation, I’d like to look a little bit closer to home instead of immediately expanding to our end users, let’s look within the interaction design community itself.

It was the Buddah who said, “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

Yet when we look within, at ourselves, into the thought leaders, champions and defenders of the interaction design faith, what do we find?

Let’s take a look:

Dag Svanaes, a professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and teacher/researcher in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) since the late 1980s said,

“While it is almost tautological that furniture designers design furniture, it is less obvious what the end product of interaction design is.”

This guy wrote a book on interaction design!!

Victor Lombardi, co-founder and former president of the Information Architecture Institute recently said in a conversation on the UX-Management list,

“When things are Really Fucking Important, like the design of an airplane cockpit, we don’t just review the designer’s portfolio. We hire someone who is certified, and in that case the certification is a PhD in Human Factors from an accredited educational institution. Every industry that’s Really Fucking Important, whether it’s law or medicine or home electricity went through a progression of screwing around->building knowledge->certification and I think we will too. I’m not sure when our work in general will become Really Fucking Important, but given the trend I imagine it’s this decade.”

Turning our attention even closer to home,

Dave Malouf, co-founder of the IxDA and interaction design caricature said in his Core 77 piece, State of Interaction Design, Diverging,

“Is there a core foundation, that ALL of these communities and practice types (if you will) share? What initially brought them together, or caused us to galvanize as a community of practice and what will keep these connections relevant for local and global communities who stick with the interaction design banner as one of their many representative identities?

And as I write this, I find myself sliding down that slippery slope of defining myself out of a discipline, yet again: “There is no IxD.”

If the founders of our representative organizations and thought leaders in our field cannot agree on what interaction design is comprised of, how it should be taught, if it makes a difference or if it even exists, how can our clients and potential employers begin to understand what value we bring?

I believe the value of IxD is becoming more and more evident as well-designed products, both physical and virtual, succeed in the mainstream, but it still has not reached the levels of maturity and respect that other disciplines (both design and non-design) have achieved. Industrial design has tangible output. Our stakeholders and employers can understand that. Graphic designers have long been around to get client messages and communications effectively out in the field. Employers get that as do the readers of those messages.

Most of our employers still see us as wireframe monkeys and pixel pushers. They see us as annotators and documenters – not as problem-solvers and product designers. They evaluate us based on our portfolios of decontextualized wireframes asking not how we solved the problem or what the outcome was but instead wondering what tool we used to create the straight lines in our wireframe decks.

The strategic benefits of interaction design are lost on many enterprise and mid-sized organizations evidenced by the near non-existence of C-level and other senior executive design positions at these companies. Most interaction designers rise to the ranks of director with no upward mobility available within the discipline itself. We must, essentially, change jobs to get further up the corporate ladder. Again, this is because the strategic, org-wide benefits of interaction design do not permeate into the boardrooms.

While this is also true in smaller organizations we do stand a better chance to make a greater impact and earn the respect of the entire organization because we are simply closer to the entire organization. Our work is seen and heard more in smaller companies. We must make ourselves seen and heard in the enterprise as well if we hope to attain the same levels of respect as software engineering, marketing, sales and even product management.

The fact that those within the profession struggle to unify around a name for our profession hurts our credibility. The fact that our leaders cannot identify in concise and consistent terminologies what it is that we do, hinders our progress into the mainstream of the corporate world. The fact that we, as practitioners, fail to consistently and convincingly describe what we do and the impact we have on our teams, products and companies, speaks volumes towards the progress we still have to make to get the respect we deserve and that is afforded to all these other professions.

[sock it to me indeed…]

[Jeff]