ISO-9241-210 defines User Experience (UX) as “A person's perceptions and responses resulting from the use and/or anticipated used of a product, system, or service,” but alas, the time has finally come for me to make a change in labelling what I do…
It’s not that I don’t still passionately believe in that concept, but after years of basically trying to fight back against UX being relegated to just digital products, I’m moving onto acceptance. I’ve given innumerable talks from water cooler conversations to local meetups (and hundreds of tweets along the way haha) attempting to show anyone who’ll listen how broad we can and should see UX as the study and practice of designing for any people, internal or external, and any thing, digital or physical.
And yet, the perceptions of what the UX industry role and responsibility is these days is just too large for me to keep pushing back, so last night I finally made the mental acceptance and domain switch to labelling my work and interests at the higher level of Human-Centred Design (HCD).
ISO-9241-210:2019(E) - Human-Centred Design is an approach to interactive systems development that aims to make systems usable and useful by focusing on the users, their needs and requirements, and by applying human factors/ergonomics, and usability knowledge and techniques. This approach enhances effectiveness and efficiency, improves human well-being, user satisfaction, accessibility and sustainability; and counteracts possible adverse effects of use on human health, safety and performance.
For me, this broad HCD self-branding change is quite a big deal as I’ve touted myself as a jack-of-all-trades UX strategist, researcher, and/or designer (this last one to a very limited degree as the industry would call it) - flexing my focus onto whatever root cause problem needed identifying and solving, absent of any limitations. However, I’ve been disheartened to see UX seemingly becoming 1:1 linked to UI design with user research or business thinking barely requested as a skill or a mandatory part of the job. I got tired of having to explain to every new recruiter or hiring manager that my interests lie further than digital interfaces and interactions.
I haven’t explicitly worked on any digital product or service project in the past year and a half now, so it was high time for me to make a change to hopefully better represent on the surface the nearly limitless bounds of what and who I like to study. Digital solutions are but one way to potentially solve someone’s problem.
And so I’m first faced with the decision of re-branding as Customer Experience (CX); I mean, that is in my current job title after all - “CX Manager”. However, I didn't want to be pigeon-holed into CX either; not in what my professional network would think I do nor even what my current workplace will assume I do - only focusing on the paying customer's end-to-end journeys when I equally care about all internal people who through their work enable the channels and touchpoints along a customer journeys to be useful in solving someone’s problems.
I also love to talk and influence business strategy from the top down - whispering into whoever’s ear is needed to ensure that we as a company are at least focused equally on satisfying our customers’ needs, not just our own business objectives. For example, I recently pushed for putting the company-wide metric strategy in place to gauge our business success not only by what the shareholders care about like customer growth, but also the tactical, task-level usability of any digital or non-digital product or service, internal or external, as improving the latter is but one of many ways to help the former increase.
ISO-9241-11: Usability is the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use.
And so there's then Service Design which, true, could be for any digital or non-digital service, but if I branded my interests with that tagline, would I then be excluded from future work opportunities in helping to guide company’s website design again? Would I be forced to then spend all of my time in workshops more solely mapping the backstage interactions and needs than spending time with customers? I want the freedom to work in any space, any domain, without a branding label holding me back.
Overall, I want the freedom to be interviewing a customer at a retail branch one day, doing a heuristic usability review with our digital team the next, and then observing how our call centre works the following day - helping any team and any type of business identify pain points, user goals, and the opportunities available to us to do something different; something that’ll get us ahead as a business through helping others live an easier, more comfortable life.
For the record, I also still have no honest idea what Product Design exactly is either as it seems like a blurry almagamation of digital design and software development? Maybe someone can finally clue me in haha.
And so with all of the above considerations, I come back to the value system that is HCD. A core belief I hold that we need to not only look at all sides of a problem, but to also see the pandemic-like impact our decisions have on the world. To explain, you might have heard of cafe or Macca’s patrons “paying-it-forward” before by offering to pay for the next person in line’s order, hopefully inciting a trend of that person getting up to the counter next, finding out that someone else already paid for them, and maybe this person will also pay for the next person’s order and so on - spreading wholesome care for all humanity. Or, in a simpler analogy, it’s very similar to holding the door open for someone and hoping the good feeling that the person walking through got that they’ll pass that good vibe onto by them helping the next person they encounter.
Well, I see our design decisions the same way, except that with each little digital, physical, or service thing we create, the resulting experience someone has with that will unintentionally begin to impact others - hopefully for the better, but just as often for worse.
If a webform leaves a customer feeling even a little bit frustrated, they’ll take that underlying frustration onto their next interaction with anything, be it having less patience with the office coffee machine now or maybe looking a little stand-offish to someone they pass on the street, and that person on the street might think how rude it was to be cutoff and they now have a below-the-line negative feeling they pass onto to someone or something else in the world. I think about these things because I want to help others avoid these chain reactions where it makes equal parts human and business sense to do so. I feel an obligation to look beyond the market or usability success of our own products and services and see what downstream impacts one little design decision might snowball into, from inadvertently affecting non-users moods to generating wasted tech that gets buried in the ground.
And thus, after much more writing than I intended, this is why I’m rebranding myself under an all-encapsulating Human-Centred Design. I’ve still got a lot of low quality icons (haha I told you I’m not a ‘designer’ as many see it) and such to switch over, but as for my website and social channels, I’m at least underway.
And I hope this kind of eye-opening thinking will continue to help you firm up your own beliefs and interests too…