As the summer winds down, Amanda and Michael reunite to get cracking on the Fall schedule of all things Team LibUX - but first they just need to catch up. Really! It's been awhile. We chat about carousels, summer redesigns, copyright, and more. 

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042 - Answer to the Ultimate Question

"The user experience is a metric." Brief high-level practical design strategy by Michael Schofield. Metric was ranked by DScout as one of the best podcasts for leveling-up. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/metric/support

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Episode 60 Rebroadcast. Tim Broadwater has a UX Master Certificate from Nielsen Norman Group, and he and I talk about whether it was worth it.  We talk about the diversification of UX roles, leadership, and management. A transcript of our talk, fully cleaned-up and made readable, can be found at schoeyfield.com. 

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Is UX Certification worth it?

I want to share a few totally unrelated pieces of thinking that caught my eye. This will be a shorty but I think you’ll find it interesting.  1 I am taken with this concept of exnovation, which is the counterbalance of innovation. To constantly make something new, you have to dismantle the old; to organize your team around iterating and innovating you need to systematize the dismantling. This is from a post on Medium by the Politics for Tomorrow, who - in the same spirit of championing failure with slogans like “fail cheaply” or “move fast and break things” - demonstrate the necessity of embracing the phasing-out of stuff by showing it as part of a larger system of innovation.  They discovered that stabilizing the new is not  enough to achieve systemic change. In order to embed innovation in an  existing “regime” or status quo, non-sustainable technologies and the  related systems, infrastructures and livelihoods around these  technologies had to be phased out in a deliberate and socially  responsible way.   Super cool. 2 Subject matter expertise in product design is over-valued. In his advice in hiring a head of product, Rich Mironov describes some of the biases subject-matter experts have in design decision making - usually having to do with lack of respect for the need for constant discovery. “I know about advertising, so I know ….” etc.  This should probably resonate with you all who value the process and rituals of user experience design, where good design is the result of disciplined practice. This then emphasizes the value of solid practitioners, an de-emphasizes the value of experts. 3 Perhaps the best way to sum-up my gripes with personas is that personas are easier to get wrong than right, and wrong personas are more likely to inspire resistance rather than empathy. This insight originated with a post from Christin Roman. In their conclusion they suggest alternatives - but honestly in my conclusion the value of any kind of user archetype is a red herring. 4 The near future of remote work is going to be very, very messy. It starts with the illusion that a remote worker moving somewhere with a cheaper cost of living will get to keep their salary, and then it will be encumbered by a struggle for privacy. I mostly just want to share this snippet from an article by the Economist (paywall): Already the gig economy has shown that it is out of date. Now new  prickly questions about workers’ rights and responsibilities loom: can  firms monitor remote workers to assess their productivity? Who is liable  if employees injure themselves at home? Any sense that white-collar  workers are getting perks will create simmering resentment in the rest  of the workforce.   5 What underlies patterns in user behavior? Structure. Specific touchpoints in an existing process, organizational pressures, policies and rules of thumb, or even rituals. I don’t know how best to credit this post without an author, but the folks at Eco Challenge (?) added levels of thinking to the familiar Iceberg model. This is interesting to me because I suppose I never really said aloud what this makes obvious: patterns are supported by the things we, or our predecessors, made. That means we can improve or unmake them. This is a powerful observation.  End Consider liking (❤) this issue of Metric if this made you think.  Metric is a podcast, too. Subscribe to Metric on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, and all the usual places.  I write about design and philosophy in another newsletter called Stoic Designer. Read “Letter 76: Shirking Routine,” then subscribe. 

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Exnovation, the Iceberg Model, and Expertise is Over-valued

When the market’s taken a spill, when your earned revenue is down — people aren’t leaving their homes, folks have lost work, uncertainty leads to spending scarcity - then the easiest line-items to cut are those that involve external consultants. You need to preserve your budget to take care of your colleagues, your business, your livelihoods.  But constraint, especially when that constraint is sudden, unpredictable, and symptomatic of problems widely outside of your control (or even the control of your industry, or your country) - constraint causes strategic tunnel vision focused entirely on stemming the blood flow. All the constellations in your worldview blur while you focus on a small point in the sky. This is sane. But one of the things you’re not doing now - or doing less of - is aggressively trying to understand how the service landscape has changed. This is the landscape where the service you provide, and your products, dot grainy plains that stretch far to the horizon. It is the landscape of your users’ journeys - all of them.  Your organization or business exists because the services you provide intercept these journeys. They do not exist for any other reason. That landscape has changed. It has changed dramatically. What once was - let’s say - a pastoral, sprawling lawn, is now an archipelago. The journeys have been existentially upset and are newly adapting for if not survival then a new reality, like neurons branching. If you yourself or your colleagues aren’t surveying your service landscape, then while you focus to triage the wound, you aren’t questioning - or, if you are, you can’t answer - whether your services will still be in demand. Do your users’ journeys still follow the same path? It is not just that design is reconnaissance: design is intelligence. How differently, then, do you value the role of service design? How differently do you prioritize your colleague, or your consultant, or the time you all allocate as a team to shift your attention to the window? Remember: the user experience is a metric. A heads-up about frequency of these emails and podcasts: I am going to begin publishing three times per week, starting this week 

The Value of Design in Hard Times

Let’s be clear, many folks have thrown-in. This question has loads of answers, and this writeup will likely not make it to the top of the search engines. So, what more is there to say? This: it’s not the answer that matters so much as is the philosophy that shapes it.  The answer — and, sure, let me be so bold as to say the right answer — is this: the difference between user experience and customer experience is scope. The customer is a category of user defined by the transaction. Not all users are customers; all customers are users.* So, how as Metricians do we understand this question? If we start with the core practical principle that the user experience is a metric, and if we agree to agree that our metric is some fuzzy holistic math — good or bad — we work to push up and to the right, then what’s the real function of using “user” as the adjective here?  What we’re describing is the experience of a given role. Our users are people who, well, use our service. It’s an exercise in seeing just how vague we can be, but most of the time “user” works. When we’re working to understand our place in a larger ecosystem of services, imagined as a journey from a bird’s-eye view where a person moves from one service to another service to our service to another even further on in pursuit of some greater motivation, that they use our service is all we can really say for certain.  It’s only in the performance of designing for that user experience that, flying closer, we perceive the path isn’t solid but an obstacle course with touchpoints haphazardly spaced. The journey is an act not just of traversing from one to the other but the choice of how to traverse. These angles of approach — hopping, skipping, crawling, swinging — are variables in the fuzzy math that determine whether the user experience is positive or poor. A variety of roles emerge on closer inspection, like looking at light through a prism. A single “user” early in their engagement with our service begins — let’s say — as a “subscriber,” for which we must consider the subscriber experience; they then pay to place an ad in some content, after which they become an “advertiser.” The advertiser experience includes a storefront and transaction, during which they too become a “customer.” A poor customer experience has detrimental impact on the user’s confidence in our service, part of which is defined by the quality of their experience as an advertiser. At no time, by the way, does this person stop being a subscriber.  What does it mean for the overall business when the customer experience is poor, the subscriber experience is alright, and the advertiser experience is good? This downside-up rabbithole reality defines the UX problems inherent in news, where I presently spend the majority of my time. Ultimately, it is the “user” experience, that higher level fuzzy cumulative, that correlates with business success - but designing to keep that UX in the black is a strategic mess. But this is true for you, too, wherever your niche. The awareness of this problem of scope is a mark of experience.  It is easy to conflate these roles I describe with personas, but they are not the same. A role in this way is defined by a job to be done that is contained within the motivating job to be done that set the user on this journey in the first place. The work is to first understand why folks use your service, then scope-in to identify the jobs within jobs: it’s how we design for those that ensure when users leave our realm for the next service on their journey that they don’t stumble on their way. So, next time, when someone asks you the difference between UX and CX - you can now give them the choice to see how deep this rabbithole really goes. * Some of you thinky service-design folk might write in that the one who pays for a service is not always the user of the service. I get where you’re going, but let me stop you right there. I think you’re wrong, but let me save the why for another writing. Liking (❤) this issue of Metric helps signal to the great algorithms in the sky that this writeup is worth your time. Please take the time. If you haven’t already, please subscribe for free. Help produce this work for $5 per month — which, I swear, is the lowest Substack lets me go monthly — or $30 per year.  Metric is a podcast, too, which includes audio versions of these writeups and other   chats. Subscribe to Metric on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, and all the usual places.  Remember that the user experience is a metric. Your pal,Michael 

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What is the difference between UX and CX?

Gutenberg isn’t a breakthrough innovation that made WordPress better.  It’s a disruptive innovation making WordPress more affordable and  accessible. — Mark Uraine, “Disrupting WordPress” A couple weeks ago I read Mark Uraine’s writeup about the disruptive role Gutenberg — the new block-based editor (and system of editor-extensibility) — performs for WordPress, the open-source juggernaut powering a third of the web. It nails why the WordPress community has been so hyped (and it’s in a language I speak): Why would anyone want to change this? The short answer is expressed best in the quote, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” Software must evolve or it becomes archaic and dies. This bring us to the concept of disruptive innovation,  originally conceived by Clayton Christensen. Disruptive innovation  describes the process when a more simplified product or service begins  to take root in an industry and advances up the market because of its  ease of use and/or less expensive entry point.  … The great companies plan for this. In fact they make efforts to self-disrupt, or innovate in ways that cause their own service or product to be disrupted. … WordPress has reached this intersection. — and for many folks, Gutenberg represents that self-disruption. It is a shot of espresso. A spurt of vitality intended to make the sluggish, successful ol’ man spry. It’s a little bit of good magic that wards off the heebie jeebies. I think Mark’s is the best argument for Gutenberg there is.  I’m also not convinced. I want to use “Disrupting WordPress” as an opportunity to demonstrate how to think about innovation, so I am going to start by putting the kibosh on the idea that Gutenberg is the saving grace the community around it thinks. Is Gutenberg disruptive? No - at least not like that. Product is a window Clay Christensen’s disruptive innovation is key to the point I want to make, and that is that we should be skeptical about the consensus assumption that what has to change about WordPress is the way content is created.  I phrase it like this because Gutenberg really is more than a UI: it represents a fairly different content model beyond just how pieces of content are chunked together by end-users, but how that content is treated in the database, and how developers interface with all that new tissue. Moreover, the ad hoc governance that has organized around Gutenberg to help ensure its inclusivity and accessibility is functionally of greater importance than the Gutenberg codebase altogether.  It makes sense that because there are plenty of usability studies betraying WordPress’s ease-of-use as a myth, that we-the-community target these usability problems with our innova-sers. Ease-of-use is a killer differentiator when you choose one product over another - but usability is flavor, not sustenance. Disruption requires identifying a misalignment between a person’s core job-to-be-done and the service they’re provided.  The secret to winning the innovation game lies in understanding what causes   customers to make choices that help them achieve progress on something they are   struggling with in their lives. To get to the right answers, Christensen says,   executives should be asking: What job would consumers want to hire a product to do? — Interview by Dina Gerdeman with Clay Christensen The product — and the features of the product — don’t fundamentally matter unless the user needs something that you can provide them.  Is the WordPress user’s core job to be done to have a usable content-creation experience? No. It’s not even to create content in the first place. Rather, the core job of the WordPress user is to — for example — provide candle-junkies like me with candles, and make a living from it. “WordPress” isn’t really part of that function. It just happens to be the means to an end. The interface, the content, even WordPress itself are ephemeral. While easing the work involved in creating content improves a holistic user experience, it’s not enough.  The reason Squarespace (et al.) has room to succeed in an internet dominated by WordPress is not because it has a better page-builder, it’s because for some users it is easier to envision their end goal met on the far-side of the Squarespace gauntlet. By looking at Squarespace, they can “see” their next candle-funded beach vacation. Product is a window. Broad applicability is a marketing challenge Listen closely to the ubiquitous Squarespace ads on any podast. Right (!), they mention ease of page-building - but they underscore the reason why such ease is valuable: so you can be done with that page-building s**t and continue on with your remarkable life. The job-to-be-done is “to have a successful business.” Squarespace provides the service of getting you there faster with an easy page-builder. The page-builder is the how, and the ease is the differentiator - the cherry on top. People don’t choose the cherry, though. The Squarespace business model depends on how well they can match the job people have to the service they provide. WordPress has been successful precisely because its service aligns well with gajillions of jobs. This I think compounds the difficulty the WordPress community has in communicating meaningfully granular services that are afforded to alternatives. Specificity helps evangelism. Rather than 1 job to address (“you need to become a dope ass participant in the blogosphere?”) there are 30 million — the difficulty of communicating that job/service alignment at scale is a real obstacle. It is easy to imagine and vouch for WordPress’s wide servicability, but it’s hard to communicate to the individual who is choosing between it and Squarespace.  Product is a window, and users’ vision through the WordPress window is a little obscured. This is, in part, why the ecosystem of professional WordPress development companies thrives: these companies, like Ninja Forms, identify a niche of jobs-to-be-done and serve them specifically. Tangent: seeing Ninja Forms in terms of job/service alignment To go on a brief tangent, the job Ninja Forms serves isn’t really the demonstrable need to manage web forms. They are facilitating people’s need to control how their users connect with them. Forms, and — specifically — forms through WordPress are choices about how and to what niche to provide that service. Consider then how WordPress isn’t spiritually part of the job/service alignment between the job-to-be-done of the Ninja Form user and the service provided by that team. They’re not really married to that platform, they just have a good working relationship. WordPress is an important technical constraint, but it’s a means to an end. It’s ephemeral. The WordPress community’s research problem By increasing WordPress’s extensibility through new APIs, even by adding new hot-right-now features into Gutenberg, the WP core team are addressing the jobs-to-be-done of those professional WordPress developers more directly than any WordPress end user - who I’m arguing doesn’t really care about the ease of use of the editor (they care insofar that the editor doesn’t get in their way). And why is that? Well, I think it’s because developers are WordPress’s strongest feedback loop.  Mark Uraine even made a comment about how usability studies revealed pain points in WordPress’s editor, but I haven’t been convinced otherwise that the WordPress core decision makers have anything other than usability studies about existing features. Problem. Usability studies reveal touchpoints in a user journey that need to be addressed. A tree needs to be moved off the sidewalk, or a pothole needs to be filled. But usability studies don’t question whether the user should be on this path in the first place. Disruption, after all, is born from Insight. Insight is the byproduct of strong research, particularly around users’ jobs-to-be-done, and I just don’t think the WordPress community has any of that.  If they did, I frankly think folks would be less hyped about Gutenberg. Gutenberg is fine. The work there is about addressing the need to reduce in WordPress the number of steps between the user and their published content. That’s the right move to support a status quo. It’s not disruptive. It disrupts nothing. It improves existing. This past year has seen remarkable and laudable collaboration around governance and accessibility in WordPress, which are the right foci that address real problems around the community, its users, and inclusivity. The next WordPress community movement should be around establishing a strong research program that can provide the research-derived Insight necessary for WordPress’s future. Without sufficient qualitative research, don’t expect WordPress to self-disrupt any time soon. Liking (❤) this issue of Metric helps signal to the   great algorithms in the sky that this writeup is worth your time.  Please take the time. If you haven’t already, please subscribe. Metric is a podcast, too, which includes audio versions of these writeups and other   chats. Subscribe to Metric on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, and all the usual places.   Remember that the user experience is a metric. — Michael (@schoeyfield) 

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042 - Answer to the Ultimate Question

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