It’s a funny thing — the more you share your opinions openly, the more people ask you for them. As the year is coming to a close, if you’re thinking about starting a blog next year or writing more frequently on the one you already have, don’t just make an empty resolution. STICK TO IT. I’ve been writing here for almost four years, and I am evidence of the fact that amazing things happen when you’re devoted to putting yourself out there.

Recently I was asked to contribute my thoughts to a few year-end articles, and have been quoted alongside many web practitioners who inspire me every day. You can read my excerpts here, but I encourage you to go to the full articles for a lot more wisdom:

A List Apart: What I Learned About the Web in 2011

CONTEXT IS KING
The most important thing that 2011 taught me about web design is that physical context of use can no longer be assumed by platform, only intentional context can. For the past couple of years, we have gotten into the habit of presuming that mobile means on-the-go, desktop denotes a desk, and tablet is on the toilet. But increasingly the lines are blurring on where devices are being used and how they’re being used in unison. This year I have learned to see devices as location agnostic and instead associate them with purpose—I want to check (mobile), I want to manage (desktop), I want to immerse (tablet). This shift away from objective context toward subjective context will reshape the way we design experiences across and between devices, to better support user goals and ultimately mimic analog tools woven into our physical spaces.

Webdesigner Depot: Web Design Predictions for 2012

The rallying cry of the web community in 2011 has seemed to be “make stuff.” My prediction for 2012 is that we’ll soon realize that that was rather shortsighted, and instead will encourage one another to “make stuff that matters.”

I have seen so much incredible talent squandered on designing products that only meet the needs of a small, homogenous, insular group of friends. While this can be fun and challenging for a side project, it is a fleeting satisfaction.

In 2012, mastery of the tools and a cool idea will no longer be enough to get attention. I predict that there will be a widespread movement to uncover and understand deep-seeded, life-damaging problems for sizable communities across the globe, and our efforts instead will be put towards improving their lives and work in ways that empower humanity. Productivity and entertainment tools have their place, but I suspect that we won’t continue to pat each other on the back so vigorously for continuing to crowd the market.

Design is the problem. The social, economic and political environments we will find ourselves in in 2012 will push us towards asking questions before devising solutions, equip us with a longer-term vision, and ultimately deepen our greater purpose.

The Next Web: The Future of Web Design

I hope we come to have a greater understanding of the various target audiences that our products have and that we deliver them content more intelligently. Right now, different content is appropriate on different platforms. But users tell us so much about themselves through their repeated use of our product and we haven’t done enough work to create customized content experiences for them as a result of all of that intel. Instead, we’ve only created custom, functional experiences but not custom, content experiences.

What did you learn about the web in 2011 and what do you predict we’ll see next year (or are just wishing will happen)? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

• Location Agnostic, Context Specific
• TweetDeck stream of consciousness
• Why I detest the term “Lean UX”
• boxee now in public alpha
• Onboarding: A Sidebar in “Designing Social Interfaces”

The blog post I wrote about six weeks ago titled, You’re not a user experience designer if…, got way more attention than I ever could have predicted — in fact, I think it got the most traffic of any post I’ve ever written.

Sure, it’s an antagonistic title and that always gets people riled up. But I spend so much time talking and writing about what user experience design IS, I felt it was about time I wrote about what it ISN’T. I’m confronted with so many misconceptions on a daily basis that make our work all the more difficult.

A few notable comments

A lot of people agree with me, a lot of people don’t. I enjoy hearing both perspectives.

A few notable posts

As a result of the post, several other folks published their own perspectives. I swell with pride that I was able to jump-start this conversation, as I believe that conversation and debate and analysis is what propels our industry forward and makes us all better practitioners.

Being a Designer by Uday Gajendar

Getting Into User Experience by Karl Smith

Un designer d’intérieur d’estomac by Benoît Meunier

Humble Design by Rian van der Merwe

You might be a user experience designer… by Jack Moffett

You’re not a software craftsman if… by David Adsit

Translations

Having my writing translated into another language is one of the most thrilling experiences, not only because it means someone found my thoughts valuable enough to take the time to painstakingly translate, but moreover because it then reaches a whole other audience I wouldn’t have been able to connect with on my own. Thank you so much!

Você não é um User Experience Designer by Fabricio Teixeira

Vous n’êtes pas un UX designer si… by Julien Hillion

Ongoing

If you have additional thoughts on my post, please feel free to comment there or here. If you’ve written a post of your own about this topic, please let us know about it in the comments.

I hope this is a conversation that can continue as long as it takes for us to reach clarity around our roles and evangelize the value of the user experience practice worldwide.

• 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design
• Catching Up on Pleasure and Pain
• You’re not a user experience designer if…
• Are you new here? My top 10 posts
• See For Yourself on Johnny Holland Magazine

I am incredibly honored to have won an award at last night’s User Experience Awards at the Parsons School of Design. I was awarded one of four Silver prizes for my work on the Boxee beta application, and was given the distinction of Best User Centered Design Process. Wow! Thank you so much to the jurors for your selection.

While I was unfortunately unable to attend the event in person, it was such a treat to see the tweets when the award was announced.

The first-annual User Experience Awards was coordinated by NYC-CHI, New York City’s largest and oldest user experience and usability organization, as part of NYC’s Internet Week 2011 in partnership with the NYC chapter of the Usability Professionals Association (NYC UPA), the NYC chapter of the Interaction Design Association (NYC IxDA), and the NYC Information Architecture Meetup.

The jurors for the awards:

• Chloe Gottlieb
• Bryan Hamilton
• Peter March
• Gloria Petron
• Whitney Quesenbery
• Nicole Rubin
• Kip Voytek
• Beverly May (Moderator)

My submission details:

Submission: The UX Design Process for the Boxee Beta http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2010/01/27/the-ux-design-process-for-the-boxee-beta/

Service: http://www.boxee.tv/make

Submission Description:
Boxee hired me as their user experience designer to help make the beta version of its media center application more mainstream-friendly. I reconceived its navigation, introduced search across content sources, and integrated social features in a less intrusive way.

Submission background and context:
In the five months that I worked with Boxee, I conducted user interviews and usability tests with several existing and prospective users, developed personas and scenarios based on my findings, created a prioritized feature set and long-term product roadmap, and drew flow diagrams and detailed wireframes of the new experience. The full process and outcomes can be found here: http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2010/01/27/the-ux-design-process-for-the-boxee-beta/

About the applicant:
Whitney Hess is an Independent UX Design Consultant in New York City. For more information: http://whitneyhess.com/blog/

About the applicant’s client: Boxee, http://boxee.tv

Project Industry: Publishing/Media

The UX team on this project: Whitney Hess

Completion date for the UX portion of the project: 10/10/2009

[Read about all of the 2011 winners]

Thank you again!

• boxee now in public alpha
• ReadWriteWeb on my Boxee beta UX process, and other thoughts
• More great press on the boxee NYC meetup
• More than 600 people attend boxee NYC meetup
• The boxee website redesign

On Monday, I had the honor and privilege of presenting a new talk at An Event Apart Boston 2011, titled Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX. This is my third year speaking at AEA and it never gets less exhilarating — and terrifying!

My presentation description:

The visual principles of harmony, unity, contrast, emphasis, variety, balance, proportion, pattern and direction (and others) are widely recognized and practiced, even when they aren’t formally articulated. But creating a good design doesn’t automatically mean creating a good experience.

In order for us to cultivate positive experiences for our users, we need to establish a set of guiding principles for experience design. Guiding principles are the broad philosophy or fundamental beliefs that steer an organization, team or individual’s decision making, irrespective of the project goals, constraints, or resources.

Whitney will share a universally-applicable set of experience design principles that we should all strive to follow, and will explore how you can create and use your own guiding principles to take your site or product to the next level.

Giving a new presentation for the first time is always nerve-wracking, and it’s particularly challenging when you have so much admiration for the conference organizers, fellow speakers and caliber of people in the audience. An Event Apart is a fantastic conference and a very special group of people. I still find it hard to believe I’m a part of it.

Huge thanks goes out to Jeremy Keith and Luke Wroblewski for their fantastic summaries of my talk, as well as to Virginia DeBolt who covered it over at BlogHer.

Last but certainly not least, thank you to the 30+ folks who attended my dry run of the presentation last Wednesday at New Work City, for all of their incredibly valuable feedback on how to make it a better, more impactful talk. And to Scott Reynolds and Adam Connor for their tireless attention to detail.

I got some great feedback on my presentation via Twitter that I’ll capture here for posterity:

I’ll be giving this talk again at several more conferences this year. Check my Speaking Engagements page for the latest.

• “Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX” featured on Core77
• I’ll be speaking at An Event Apart 2009
• My DIY UX talk is featured in InformationWeek
• See you at An Event Apart Chicago
• 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design — the presentation

The UX field is booming. It seems like the number of user experience practitioners has doubled in the last year — from newbies who’ve just entered the workforce, to mid-career changes, to folks who’ve been doing this all along but finally found out what to call themselves.

It’s incredibly reassuring to finally see a long overdue interest in user experience practice; after all, that’s what many of us have spent our careers fighting for. I started this blog to give greater insight into how we think, how we work, and how we benefit customers and companies alike. I consider myself lucky to be among many professionals who speak at conferences around the world in an effort to bring UX into the mainstream. And it’s working!

There’s just one problem: not everyone calling themselves a user experience designer is actually a user experience designer. Unfortunately the designation isn’t as clear cut as a doctor or a lawyer. Most professions are certified and regulated, so you don’t see impostor behavior often — and when you do, it’s typically in the form of a news article about someone going to jail for fraud. Perhaps more analogously, even those in non-regulated occupations like writers and programmers would have a hard time passing themselves off as such without actually writing or actually programming.

But how does a user experience designer demonstrate their user experience designing? I’m not talking about quality or level of expertise here; I’m merely referring to the veracity, the legitimacy of the title itself.

Regardless of what they choose to call themselves, how can you identify someone who isn’t actually practicing UX at all, who’s only hitching their wagon to a rising star?

You’re not a user experience designer if…

1. You don’t talk to users. If you design entirely based on intuition without ever gathering intel from a single human being who might at some point in their life come into contact with your business, I’m sorry, but you just aren’t a user experience designer.
2. You can’t identify your target audience. If asked who your site is intended for and you say anyone and everyone, you are wrong. If a product is designed for everyone, it works for no one. A user experience designer would know that and narrow the target.
3. You don’t define the problem before trying to solve it. If your boss tells you what to build and you don’t start the project by first determining why — the specific pain point that people are currently experiencing that your product aims to eliminate — you’re a lackey, not a user advocate. Nine times out of ten, understanding the problem changes the solution dramatically.
4. You can’t articulate your users’ goals. Maybe you kinda get the problem people are having, but unless you can communicate (in your own words) the objectives your target users are trying to accomplish both in their lives and their work, how can you craft a solution that will truly support their efforts?
5. You design in a vacuum. No user experience designer works alone, so if you are, you aren’t one. Even a UX team of one relies on stakeholders, visual designers, developers, marketers, the guy in the next cubicle , etc. for feedback. A user experience designer knows the product isn’t meant for them, and always tests its effectiveness with other people.
6. You make design decisions based on your personal preferences. If your coworker or client asks you, “Why did you choose to use checkboxes instead of radio buttons?” and your answer is, “Because I’ve always liked checkboxes better,” please dear God don’t call yourself a user experience designer.
7. You don’t consider the business objectives. Surprise! If all you want to do is protect the consumer, join the ACLU. A true user experience designer understands their company’s goals just as deeply as they understand their constituents. That allows you to determine which of the constituency’s needs should be addressed by the product, and make a case to the powers that be how doing so will positively impact the business in the long run.
8. You don’t use UX methods. User interviews, usability tests, personas, scenarios, card sorts, affinity diagrams, concept models, sketches, flow diagrams, sitemaps, wireframes, prototypes, web analytics, A/B tests, the list goes on and on. If you don’t have a systematic approach for articulating what you learn about your users to others on your team, or even a loose process to iterate on your ideas for what they’ll experience, you might be trying but you aren’t a user experience designer.
9. You don’t design for conditions and edge cases. If you map out best-case scenarios and how-we-want-it user flows, but don’t take the time to craft branches and escape hatches for alternative needs, user errors, system errors and general curiosity, you don’t understand people very well and you’re not a user experience designer.
10. You only think about the interface. If you’re focused exclusively on what the user sees and does on your website/mobile app/desktop app/kiosk/whatever, but never plan for how they’ll get there, what they’ll do when they leave, how they’ll come back, and most of all, how they’ll feel about it a week later, you’re a user interface designer, not a user experience designer. There’s a big difference.

I might sound like I’m contradicting myself

The above slide is from my presentation DIY UX: Give Your Users an Upgrade Without Calling in a Pro. So yes, I am partially to blame for this trend. But I didn’t really mean for people to start putting the title on their business cards and anointing themselves User Experience Designers without actually putting in the hard work.

The point of that slide in particular is to get people to realize that no matter what their role is, if they touch the outcome of the product in any way, shape, or form (as a designer, developer, copywriter, business analyst or marketer), they are ultimately affecting the user’s experience with the product, and as such, must take responsibility for doing right by them. This means learning who they are, listening to their needs, understanding their behaviors, and getting their feedback each step of the way. Otherwise you have no right to call yourself, or let your boss call you, what you’re not.

If you have the title of User Experience Designer and you want to do these things but aren’t being allowed to, don’t stand for it. Send the culprit this post if you’re feeling ballsy. Or let me know how I can help, either in the comments or via email. It’s one thing to claim to be something that you’re not just to be in vogue and make yourself more appealing to prospective employers; it’s another thing altogether to try doing the job and having roadblocks put in your way. What user experience designers do is honorable, compassionate, and valuable to businesses’ bottom line. When it’s actually practiced.

• Follow-up to “You’re not a user experience designer if…”
• UI13: Dana Chisnell’s “Usability Testing in the Wild”
• See you at An Event Apart Chicago
• A Hippocratic Oath for User Experience Designers
• Whit Hour – Week 16

This happened five months ago, and I was so stunned by the honor that I think I pushed it somewhere deep into my subconscious until now.

In Search Patterns: Design for Discovery by Peter Morville and Jeffrey Callender, there are these cute people icons that accompany various illustrations throughout the book. There was so much interest in these images that they decided to publish a collection of stencils for Omingraffle with both people and their Mr. Potato Head-like parts for use in personas and diagrams.

One of the sets Callender created is called UX Caricatures, and it contains some faces you might recognize.

Yep, that redhead is me! I’m kind of amazed at their attention to detail — I recognize that sweater, that necklace, those earrings. The dimples! Morville even held a contest to see who could name each person in the set, and gave away a copy of the book to those who guessed all correctly.

There have been more than 2,000 downloads of the UX Caricatures alone, and more than 15,000 downloads of all of Callender’s stencils combined.

I’ve been an admirer of Peter Morville since college, so you can imagine how it felt that he would think to include me with such an esteemed group of people. I cannot thank them both enough.

Now go put me in a wireframe or something!

• Sketching made easier by UI Stencils
• Hanging out at IxDA’s Interaction09
• I have joined the UXnet board of directors
• UX Bookshelf
• My BlackBerry Wishlist

The work I love is about helping companies who love their customers discover how to be better to them…not convincing them to care.

The work I love is about empowering customers to get the service they deserve…not trying to get them to buy into what they don’t really need.

The work I love is about understanding customers by listening to them…not implementing generic best practices based on my experiences with other companies.

The work I love is about identifying a company’s target audiences and optimizing the experience for them…not attempting to design a product meant for everyone that actually serves no one.

The work I love is about helping a company’s employees to thrive just as much as their customers…not improving the customer experience while ignoring organizational breakdowns.

The work I love is about conducting primary research and analyzing it to form a product strategy…not developing designs based on assumptions and predetermined business requirements.

The work I love is about equipping companies to do design thinking about produce great solutions over the long-term…not producing the work on my own for only short-term gain.

The work I love is about collaboration and iteration and shared learning…not documentation and deliverables for the appearance of formality.

The work I love is about having a process to give structure to a project when it’s needed and room for experimentation when it it’s needed…not just process for process sake.

The work I love is about the people I work with and the people we help…not the money I make for the company or the money I make for myself.

The work I love is about changing the world for the better…not trying to fit in, or appear glamorous, or taking down the competition just to win.

If this sounds like you or like the kind of person you want to work with, then I want to work with you. I’m always on the lookout for the right kind of projects. I only want to do the work I love.

Think you have something that would excite me? Please get in touch at whitney@whitneyhess.com.

“My heart is in the work.” — Andrew Carnegie

• Why I detest the term “Lean UX”
• Nationwide Insurance demonstrates user research with NationPam
• Loosecubes and the future of work
• Undercover Boss: Just How Badly is Your Company Screwing Itself
• The User Experience Relationship

Any user experience designer worth their salt takes the needs of the company they’re serving into account and adapts their approach accordingly — identifying the appropriate process, methods and tools to get the job done. This has been the case for as long as information architecture and interaction design have been in practice. Rigid methodology — doing the same exact thing every time despite the context — is, and has always been, bad practice.

Now that Eric Ries’s lean startup and Steve Blank’s customer development methodologies have gained significant traction within the startup and wider business communities, the value that user experience design practices can bring to an organization is finally being recognized.

While the techniques are being called different things (and aren’t they always?), VCs and founders are at long last starting to focus on the user as a means to make the best design decisions for their product and the best strategy decisions for their business. They aren’t spending weeks or months on in-depth, formal research because their prospective customers are easily accessible to them, and they aren’t wasting their time with heavily documented deliverables because their development team sits right next to them. But nevertheless they are still doing UX: spending focused time whiteboarding flows and key screens; prototyping solutions and testing them with users; and best of all, listening to their customers.

There’s nothing lean about it. The dictionary definition of “offering little reward, substance, or nourishment; meager” simply doesn’t hold. What they are doing — which ultimately comes down to design thinking — has tremendous reward and endless impact on the relevance of their products, the success of their companies, and the health of their egos.

“Lean UX” implies that less UX is being done. That couldn’t be further from the truth, nor is it something we should encourage. And anyway, UX shouldn’t be measured in time spent conducting activities or producing activities; it should be measured in its depth of integration in a company’s philosophy and culture.

Caring about your customers and working to make their lives better is the most honorable thing a company can do. Let’s teach these companies more and better UX methods, give them ways to adapt the methods to however they work best, and encourage them to keep the needs, attitudes, and motivations of their customers at the core of everything they do.

Some Lean UX links worth reading:

• LUXr: What is Lean UX?
• UX Booth’s Lean Startups and User Experience Design
• Cooper Design’s Lean UX, Product Stewardship, and Integrated Teams
• Jeff Gothelf’s Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business
• Josh Seiden’s Agile UX? Lean UX? Customer Development? A multiple discovery moment

• The Work I Love
• Ultra Light User Experience
• The User Experience Relationship
• Whit Hour – Week 18
• Your target market cannot be everyone

A big thanks goes out to Andrew Maier whose article “Designing for Startups: How to Deliver the Message Across” in Smashing Magazine included some thoughts from a blog post I wrote a few months ago titled “A Plan of Action.”

In it he features my three approaches to design: Reactive, Preactive, and Proactive — the latter of which I recommend as the best way for startups to design, test, and iterate.

“I believe that most UX designers would agree — dare I say, empathize — with Whitney’s prescribed preactive approach. Beginning with thinking — with research — is in a user-centered designer’s blood; it helps them understand their audience and voice their messages appropriately. Further still, “preactivity” appears to be the only real way for designers to gain empathy. But most start-up environments run counter to this approach. Acting and then thinking usually leaves little room for the voice of research.”

It’s a really great article for anyone who’s currently trying to figure out how to adapt their typical design and UX process to a company — startup or otherwise — that needs a more fluid, lightweight, fast-paced approach.

[Read the full article]

• “Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX” featured on Core77
• A Plan of Action
• “Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy” webinar with Indi Young
• When You Startup With UX
• Whit Hour – Week 19

Interaction-design.org is a Denmark-based foundation that explores research on all human-centered aspects of technology. In an effort to create world-class educational materials for free, they have just launched an open-access, peer-reviewed encyclopedia. The first seven chapters were released today, with many more to be published in the coming months.

I was invited by editor-in-chief Mads Soegaard to write a commentary on Marc Hassenzahl’s encyclopedia entry on User Experience and Experience Design. The other commentaries were written by Don Norman and Eric Reiss.

A dictionary attempts to define the words of a language. An encyclopedia contains informational articles that explore a variety of subjects. Interaction-design.org’s encyclopedia does not purport to define the terms our practice, but rather to examine its purpose.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on Marc’s article and the accompanying commentaries. Thank you.

• Follow-up to “You’re not a user experience designer if…”
• 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design
• I was asked to join the IAI Board of Advisors
• Introducing StartUXs
• Class Schedule for MFA in Interaction Design at SVA