Episode 78 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week Kevin Yank (@sentience) chats with Matt Magain (@mattymcg) and James Mansfield (@jmans), User Experience Designers at SitePoint and 99designs, respectively. They discuss recent comments by ThinkVitamin founder Ryan Carson claiming that ‘UX Professional’ isn’t a real job.
SitePoint Podcast的 第78集现已发布! 本周,Kevin Yank( @sentience )与SitePoint和99designs的用户体验设计师Matt Magain( @mattymcg )和James Mansfield( @jmans )聊天。 他们讨论了ThinkVitamin创始人Ryan Carson的最新评论,声称“ UX Professional”不是一项真正的工作。
You can also download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:
您也可以将本集下载为独立的MP3文件。 这是链接:
SitePoint Podcast #78: UX Bullsh*t with Matt Magain and James Mansfield (MP3, 41:44, 38.3MB)
SitePoint播客#78:Matt Magain和James Mansfield的UX Bullsh * t (MP3,41:44,38.3MB)
Kevin: September 10th, 2010. UX professionals respond to an attack on their job title. I’m Kevin Yank and this is the SitePoint Podcast #78: UX BS with Matt Magain and James Mansfield.
凯文: 2010年9月10日。UX专业人士对他们的职称遭到攻击做出回应。 我是Kevin Yank,这是与Matt Mattaain和James Mansfield共同制作的SitePoint播客#78:UX BS。
And welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. I’m Kevin Yank, as always, and for this interview show I wanted to get some voices around SitePoint HQ. We’ve been doing a lot of interview episodes lately with people outside the company, and I thought you know what, we’ve got a perfectly good room here at SitePoint HQ, and so I’ve cornered Matt Magain and James Mansfield to have a chat with us today about user experience design. Matt Magain works within the SitePoint team, he’s a UX designer these days, and James Mansfield does pretty much the same job over at 99designs. Hi guys, how’s it going?
欢迎收看SitePoint播客的另一集。 我一如既往是凯文·扬克(Kevin Yank),对于本次访谈节目,我想在SitePoint HQ上发表一些声音。 最近,我们一直在与公司外部人员进行很多采访,我想你知道吗,我们在SitePoint总部拥有一个非常好的房间,所以我逼迫Matt Magain和James Mansfield今天与我们聊天有关用户体验设计。 Matt Magain在SitePoint团队中工作,如今他是用户体验设计师,而James Mansfield在99designs上也做几乎相同的工作。 大家好,最近怎么样?
Matt: Hi Kev.
马特:嗨,凯夫。
James: Hi Kev, how you doing?
詹姆斯:凯夫,你好吗?
Kevin: So we’re here to talk about a blog post that was over at Think Vitamin by Ryan Carson, and he had a few choice words for UX designers and their chosen job title, but before we get to that I’d like to hear from you guys just exactly what it is you do, here it from the horse’s mouth; what is UX and what is a UX designer for you guys?
凯文:所以我们在这里谈论的是Ryan Carson在Think Vitamin上发表的一篇博客文章,他为UX设计师及其选择的职务提供了一些选择词,但在此之前,我想先听到你们的确切信息,是从马口中听到的。 什么是UX?什么是UX设计人员?
Matt: So for me UX design is an umbrella term; it encompasses a bunch of stuff that happens in the research and discovery and design phases of a project, and visual design is just one aspect of that, you know, there’s people that are specialized in information architecture, information design, copyrighting, interaction design, marketing, user research, editing and curation, these are just a sample of things that I believe come under the term ‘user experience’.
Matt:所以对我来说,UX设计是一个概括性的术语。 它包含了项目研究,发现和设计阶段中发生的许多事情,而视觉设计只是其中的一个方面,您知道,有些人专门从事信息架构,信息设计,版权,交互设计,市场营销,用户研究,编辑和管理,这些只是我认为属于“用户体验”一词的一部分。
Kevin: Alright, and James?
凯文:好吧,詹姆斯?
James: Thanks Kevin, yeah, I’d agree with what Matt’s saying, I think user experience is a very broad term, I think that’s partly where I guess where Ryan’s coming from with the term, and it doesn’t really mean a lot to other people perhaps. And user experience for me encompasses things around user research, anything from understanding a user’s motivations or behavior through to visual design at the end of it, or graphic design at the end of it, and I think there’s a broad range of things in there, particularly I think for me user experience encompasses more of the research and user research things, going out into the field and understanding how people are interacting with pieces of software. So I’m talking about medical devices, things like that, not always web specific. So user experience is covering a broader range of things than just web and also a broader range of skills than what I consider are things closer to the coal face like the graphic design and the development of that into a working interface.
詹姆斯:谢谢凯文,是的,我同意马特所说的话,我认为用户体验是一个非常宽泛的术语,我认为这部分是我猜测瑞安这个术语从何而来,但这并不意味着很多对其他人来说。 对我而言,用户体验涵盖了围绕用户研究的一切,从了解用户的动机或行为一直到最终的视觉设计,甚至最终的图形设计,我认为其中都有很多东西,特别是对于我来说,用户体验涵盖了更多的研究和用户研究内容,涉及领域并了解人们如何与软件交互。 所以我说的是医疗设备之类的东西,并不总是特定于网络的。 因此,用户体验所涉及的内容不仅限于Web,还涉及的技能也比我认为的更广泛,比我认为的更贴近煤面的事物,例如图形设计和将其开发成工作界面。
Kevin: Alright, so you guys clearly have a passion for UX design but you have chosen to apply that mostly if not exclusively to the Web. How does a UX designer working within web design, how does that intersect with the term web design for you guys? I know a lot of these terms are nebulous in our field, but is UX design within a web team a subset of the web design or is it a separate job, what is it to you guys?
凯文:好的,所以你们显然对用户体验设计充满热情,但是您选择了将其主要应用到Web上。 UX设计师如何在网页设计中工作,这与你们的网页设计一词如何相交? 我知道其中很多术语在我们领域中都是模糊的,但是Web团队中的UX设计是Web设计的子集还是它是一项单独的工作,对您来说是什么?
James: To me web design is a subset of user experience; user experience is a broader aspect of it, I see user experience as like I was saying encompassing the research parts of it and the user testing parts of it, where web design for me is the activity of, or creating the actual what it is going to be, so it’s a facet of a broader design process. I think, I don’t know, web design, design is an activity, not really an outcome too, so I’m not really sure what I’m saying with that, but web is the medium and design is an activity.
詹姆斯:对我来说,网页设计是用户体验的一个子集。 用户体验是它的一个更广泛的方面,我认为用户体验就像我所说的那样,涵盖了它的研究部分和用户测试的部分,其中对我来说网页设计是活动的一部分,或者是它实际正在发生的事情因此,这是更广泛的设计过程的一个方面。 我认为,我不知道,网页设计,设计是一项活动,也不是真正的结果,因此,我不确定我要说的是什么,但网络是媒介,设计是一项活动。
Kevin: So we have web design, the thing you do, and you have web designers, the people who do it. Is a UX designer a type of web designer or is that too simplistic?
凯文:所以我们有网页设计,您要做的事,还有网页设计师,即从事这项工作的人。 UX设计器是Web设计器的一种,还是过于简单?
Matt: Well, the thing about user experience design is that there are a number of aspects to it and just one of them is visual design. I think when people think about web designers they automatically think about guys or girls that are in Photoshop creating beautiful user interface mockups, and then depending on how much of a generalist you are, possibly then going and marking them up with HTML and CSS and maybe even writing some JavaScript. I think about the end product, but user experience design takes a step back and looks at how we got to that step, like James said, the stuff like the research, creating wireframes and prototypes, all of these activities that happen before you open Photoshop come under the umbrella of user experience design in my opinion. And also user testing is a huge part of that, the usability of an app and validating a market, these are all areas that kind of rub shoulders with product marketing and market research, and they’re all valuable input that go into creating that end product.
Matt:关于用户体验设计的事情是,它涉及很多方面,其中只有一个是视觉设计。 我认为,当人们想到网页设计师时,他们会自动考虑在Photoshop中创建漂亮的用户界面模型的男孩或女孩,然后取决于您的通才程度,然后可能会使用HTML和CSS进行标记,甚至甚至编写一些JavaScript。 我考虑的是最终产品,但是用户体验设计会退后一步,看看我们是如何做到这一点的,就像詹姆斯所说的那样,诸如研究,创建线框和原型之类的东西,所有这些活动都是在打开Photoshop之前发生的在我看来,它属于用户体验设计的范畴。 此外,用户测试也是其中的重要部分,包括应用程序的可用性和市场验证,这些都是产品营销和市场研究的重要领域,它们都是实现这一目标的宝贵输入产品。
James: Yep, I again agree completely with what Matt’s saying. I was at UX Australia which is a fantastic conference here in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago, which SitePoint also sponsored and Matt was at as well, and that was a sellout event, we had 100 people there, so the field of UX is a pretty well known field, or certainly a pretty healthy field. And I think the thing for me is that if I asked, I feel if I asked the people that were at that conference whether they were a web designer I think a lot of them would be uncomfortable with calling themselves a web designer; most of the people at that conference for me were in the research phase. I think if you can have two areas within the term ‘user experience’ I think there’s the research part and then there’s the design part, and I think most of those people who were there at that conference would put themselves in the research category, and that research is researching before design as well as researching something that’s in existence, how does it work, how good is it, how usable is it.
詹姆斯:是的 ,我再次完全同意马特所说的话。 几周前,我在澳大利亚澳大利亚UX大会上,这是一次很棒的会议,SitePoint也赞助了该会议,Matt也参加了会议,那是一场抢购活动,我们在那里有100人,所以UX领域是相当知名的领域,或者肯定是非常健康的领域。 我觉得对我来说,如果我问,我觉得是否问过那些参加会议的人他们是否是网页设计师,所以我认为他们中的许多人都不称呼自己为网页设计师。 对我来说,参加那个会议的大多数人都处于研究阶段。 我认为,如果您可以在“用户体验”一词中包含两个领域,我认为是研究部分,然后是设计部分,并且我认为参加该会议的大多数人员都将自己归入研究类别,并且研究工作是在设计之前进行的,同时还要研究存在的事物,其工作原理,性能如何,可用性如何。
Kevin: So a UX researcher, their business is getting inside the head of the users of whatever website or web application is going to be eventually built or is built and isn’t working for them.
凯文(Kevin): UX研究人员,他们的业务正在进入最终将要构建或正在构建但不适用于他们的网站或Web应用程序的用户的头脑中。
James: Yeah, absolutely. And even broader than that looking at the context in which it’s going to be used, like if you think about machines in a medical, in a hospital or something, how are they going to be used in dim light, what noises, what alerts, those things that pop up, so research into I guess user experiences also encompasses some physical things as well, some physical environment aspects.
詹姆斯:是的,绝对。 甚至比查看使用环境更广泛,例如,如果您考虑在医疗,医院或其他地方使用机器,那么如何在昏暗的灯光下使用它们,发出什么噪音,发出什么警报,这些东西突然出现了,所以我认为对用户体验的研究也涵盖了一些物理上的东西,某些物理环境方面。
Kevin: So what brought us together today is this tweet by Ryan Carson, who runs thinkvitamin.com, he also is the man behind Carsonified which runs several web-related conferences. And he tweeted the other day that “‘UX Professional’ is a BS job title. It’s just a way to overcharge naïve clients, all web designers should be UX pros.” And he has a longer form sort of defense of his position there, but that’s — he’s been accused of link baiting, but I feel like he actually does seem to believe what he’s saying, and there’s no doubt that this is a controversial stance, but I guess maybe start off with your initial reaction when you see this.
凯文(Kevin):今天让我们聚在一起的是运行thinkvitamin.com的瑞安·卡森(Ryan Carson)的这则推文,他还是卡森化(Carsonified)背后的人,后者主持了几次与网络相关的会议。 他在前几天发推文说“'UX Professional'是BS职位。 这只是给天真的客户加价的一种方法,所有的Web设计人员都应该是UX专业人士。” 而且他对自己的位置有较长的防守 ,但这就是-他被指控诱捕链接,但我觉得他实际上似乎确实相信他在说什么,而且毫无疑问,这是一个有争议的立场,但是我想也许是从您最初的React开始的。
Matt: My initial reaction is that Ryan’s obviously shooting from the hip; he’s writing something on Twitter, the timing was probably a bit unfortunate—
Matt:我最初的React是Ryan明显从臀部射出; 他在Twitter上写东西,时机可能有点不幸,
Kevin: Tell us about the timing.
凯文:告诉我们时间安排。
Matt: Well, he tweeted while he was at the dConstruct Conference which the Clearleft guys run in Brighton in the UK, and Andy Budd and his team were trying to hire a UX designer at the time that Ryan tweeted this, so it was probably a bit of a kick in the ribs for the guys that are running the conference, and maybe that was intentional; maybe it wasn’t. I think Ryan definitely likes to be controversial and so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a form of link baiting.
Matt:嗯,他在dConstruct大会上发了推文,当时Clearleft团队在英国布莱顿举办了dConstruct大会,而Andy Budd和他的团队在Ryan发推文时正试图聘请UX设计师,所以可能是对于正在运行会议的人员来说,有些肋骨,这也许是故意的; 也许不是。 我认为Ryan绝对喜欢引起争议,因此,如果它是一种链接诱饵的形式,我不会感到惊讶。
Kevin: I mean we would, you know, pot calling the kettle black, we’ve been guilty now and then at SitePoint of picking the most sensational, most controversial wording of a particular blog post title now and then; obviously this is a standard tactic for attracting traffic to your site. And the title of his blog post is “‘UX Professional’ Isn’t a Real Job,” well I’m sitting next to two UX Professionals right now, so what do you guys do? It seems like is it a real job?
凯文(Kevin):我的意思是,我们会以壶将水壶叫黑,我们时不时地在SitePoint上感到内of,因为他时不时地为某个博客帖子标题选择最轰动,最有争议的措辞; 显然,这是吸引网站访问量的标准策略。 他的博客文章的标题是“'UX Professional'不是一个真正的工作”,那么我现在正坐在两位UX Professional的旁边,那么你们做什么? 看来这是一项真正的工作?
James: First I’d just like to go back, Kevin, and to back up what Matt’s saying, I think this is a clear link bait, I think he’s looking to create some controversy and some traffic and some discussion, but saying all that I think it’s healthy to have some of these discussions. I think the term ‘user experience’ is a fairly recent term in the industry and something that not a lot of people out there are comfortable using or not a lot of people outside of user experience understand what it means. I was at a father’s day function at a kindergarten this morning and when people ask me what I do I certainly find it easier to say I’m a web designer than I am to say I’m a user experience designer. So I think there’s something in that, in that if people don’t understand what a user— if the general market doesn’t understand what a user experience designer is or does then, yeah, the term web designer is something easier to describe.
詹姆斯:首先,我想回去,凯文(Kevin),并支持马特(Matt)所说的,我认为这是一个明确的链接诱饵,我认为他希望引起一些争议,一些流量和一些讨论,但是我要说的是全部我认为进行一些讨论是健康的。 我认为“用户体验”一词在行业中是一个相当新的名词,没有多少人愿意使用它,或者不是用户体验之外的很多人都明白这意味着什么。 今天早上我在幼儿园的父亲节活动中,当人们问我该怎么做时,我肯定会觉得说我是一名网页设计师要比说我是用户体验设计师要容易得多。 因此,我认为其中存在一些问题,即如果人们不了解用户的意思-如果整个市场不了解用户体验设计师是什么或做什么,那么,是的,网站设计师一词更容易描述。
Matt: I suppose the two main issues I have with Ryan’s stance on this is number one that I don’t agree with his definition of what user experience is.
Matt:我想我对Ryan的立场有两个主要问题是第一,我不同意他对用户体验的定义。
Kevin: Right, he goes on to define what it is and it’s kind of a list of technologies; HTML, CSS, yada, yada.
凯文:对,他继续定义它是什么,这是一系列技术。 HTML,CSS,yada,yada。
Matt: Exactly. So Ryan I think believes that user experience is a subset of design and that includes some of the hands-on stuff. Like I mentioned before, James and I were at this UX Australia Conference a couple of weeks ago and there were people there who wouldn’t ever write any HTML or CSS or JavaScript, and yet they were specialists in their field of whether it be information architecture or user research or whatever, like is Ryan’s saying that these people don’t add any value? I mean that’s basically what his description says.
马特:是的 。 因此,Ryan我认为用户体验是设计的一个子集,其中包括一些动手操作。 就像我之前提到的,James和我在几周前参加了UX Australia会议上,那里的人们永远不会编写任何HTML,CSS或JavaScript,但是他们还是信息技术领域的专家架构或用户研究,或诸如此类,例如Ryan所说的这些人没有增加任何价值吗? 我的意思是,基本上他的描述就是这样。
Kevin: Well, reading a quote from Ryan’s blog post, he says, “You cannot be a ‘UX Professional’”, quote/unquote, “if you are not an experienced web designer and involved in the day to day process of designing, building, testing, marketing, and updating a web project.” This is something similar that we talked about a couple months ago on the Podcast that people were arguing that every web designer if they want to call themselves a web designer need to at least have a passing familiarity with HTML and CSS and how you mechanically go about building a website. Is that necessary for a UX designer working in the Web, can we give him that?
凯文:恩,读完瑞安(Ryan)博客文章的引文,他说:“你不能成为'UX专业人士'”,引述/取消引述,“如果您不是经验丰富的网页设计师,并且参与日常的设计过程,构建,测试,营销和更新Web项目。” 这与几个月前我们在Podcast上谈论的类似,人们一直在争论每个Web设计师是否想称自己为Web设计师,至少需要对HTML和CSS以及如何进行机械操作有一定的了解。建立一个网站。 对于在Web上工作的UX设计人员来说这是否必要,我们可以给他吗?
James: No. I’ve worked with plenty of talented user experience designers, people that I respect a lot, and they don’t know how to create HTML and CSS. I think Ryan’s context is maybe quite small or his scope of what he’s talking about is quite small. He mentioned that he’s worked for three design agencies before, and I’ve worked in, for a similar period of time as Ryan, in small agencies as well as big organizations and big corporates, and worked for financial institutions. Now, those financial institutions have marketing teams; there’s specialist companies who specialize in user testing and user research, so I think to say that a web designer should be able to do all of those things is a bit shortsighted, yeah, I think it comes back to he’s link baiting and looking for something.
詹姆斯:否。我已经与许多有才华的用户体验设计师合作,我非常尊重他们,他们不知道如何创建HTML和CSS。 我认为Ryan的背景可能很小,或者他所谈论的范围很小。 他提到他之前曾在三个设计机构工作过,而我和Ryan在类似的时间里曾在小型机构,大型组织和大公司中工作,并在金融机构工作过。 现在,这些金融机构都有营销团队; 有专门从事用户测试和用户研究的专业公司,所以我想说一个网页设计师应该能够做所有这些事情是有点短视的,是的,我认为这可以归结为他的链接诱饵并寻找一些东西。
Matt: But also like you mention, James, you know user experience designers have skills that are portable to other mediums, so if there’s a user experience designer who is working on iPad apps or desktop software or Windows Phone 7 stuff, you know, they’re not necessarily writing HTML or CSS and it may not be relevant for them to do because they’re experts at creating wireframes or doing user testing or doing ethnographic research or whatever else they’ve specialized in.
马特:就像您提到的詹姆斯一样,您知道用户体验设计师具有可移植到其他媒介的技能,因此,如果有一个用户体验设计师正在处理iPad应用程序或台式机软件或Windows Phone 7,那么他们“不一定要编写HTML或CSS,因为他们是创建线框,进行用户测试或进行人种学研究或他们专门研究的其他方面的专家,所以它们可能无关紧要。
James: I think one thing that’s common for me with user experience, or one thing that I associate strongly with the term user experience, is the actual interaction design. I think everybody who terms themselves a user experience designer will be doing the usability and interaction design specifically, they may not go on to do the visual design or the graphic design, and they may not go on to do the building, but I think interaction design is the key thing that I think user experience for me encompasses and is probably the one skill set that all user experience designers will have.
James:我认为与用户体验相同的一件事,或者与术语用户体验密切相关的一件事,是实际的交互设计。 我认为每个自称用户体验设计师的人都将专门进行可用性和交互设计,他们可能不会继续进行视觉设计或图形设计,也可能不会继续进行建筑,但是我认为互动设计是我认为用户体验包含的关键内容,并且可能是所有用户体验设计师都将拥有的一项技能。
Kevin: I suspect there’s a lot of people listening to this who have never worked with someone who had UX in their job title, they’re used to working in small web teams where it’s a designer and a developer, and this is the sort of team that Ryan seems to be talking about a lot in his blog post. And I’m wondering, you know, I may be asking the wrong people but can a good website be built without someone whose job is specifically UX?
凯文(Kevin):我怀疑有很多人听过这些话,但他们从来没有与拥有UX的人一起工作过,他们习惯于在小型Web团队中工作,而在Web团队中,设计师和开发人员都是这样, Ryan似乎在他的博客文章中谈论了很多话题。 我想知道,我可能问的是错误的人,但是如果没有专门从事UX的人可以建立一个好的网站?
Matt: I think there are always talented individuals; Ryan mentioned Shaun Inman in his blog post as an example of a generalist who has amazing talent in both the fields of design and development, and by all accounts looking at some of Shaun’s work—I’m a fan—he has a good understanding of user experience, principles as well. But, I mean, you know if Ryan obviously believes that UX is important and believes that web designers should have that as a par for the course; if someone specializes in that area why shouldn’t that be reflected in their job title?
马特:我认为总有人才。 瑞安(Ryan)在他的博客文章中提到了肖恩·英曼(Shaun Inman),他是一个通才的例子,他在设计和开发领域都拥有出色的才华,而且从各个方面来看,肖恩的工作是我的忠实粉丝。用户体验以及原则。 但是,我的意思是,您知道Ryan是否显然认为UX很重要,并且认为Web设计师应该将UX作为课程的标准。 如果有人专门研究该领域,为什么不应该在职称中体现出来呢?
Kevin: So if someone is listening to this and they consider themselves a front-end designer, they know jQuery inside and out; if someone delivers to them a Photoshop mockup with a description of how this needs to change in response to the way the user is interacting with them, but they do not feel confident to make those kinds of decisions themselves, they’re all about making it happen, someone tell me what amazing incredible thing has to happen in this page and I will take care of making that happen. It sounds to me like Ryan is saying that person is not a professional web designer.
凯文:所以,如果有人在听这个,并且认为自己是前端设计师,他们就会从内到外都了解jQuery。 如果有人向他们提供了一个Photoshop样机,并描述了如何根据用户与他们进行交互的方式进行更改,但是他们对自己自己做出此类决定没有信心,那么他们就是在做出决定发生,有人告诉我在此页面中发生了什么了不起的不可思议的事情,我会尽力做到这一点。 在我看来,Ryan在说这个人不是专业的网页设计师。
Matt: If there’s a person who is a jQuery specialist and there’s that much work for them that all they do is write jQuery code then I absolutely agree that they should call themselves a jQuery Specialist and not a web designer, not doing more general skills. I seem to get the sense that Ryan doesn’t believe in specialization, and if you take parallels, for example in the medical world, once upon a time there was only ever surgeons, there were never heart surgeons or brain surgeons or neurosurgeons. Is Ryan saying that surgeons should be able to do it all and they shouldn’t specialize? It may be a stretch for that parallel, but the field of user experience is maturing, web design the profession is maturing, and as a result specializations are evolving, and I’m not quite sure that calling them BS really achieves anything.
Matt:如果有人是jQuery专家,并且有很多工作要做,他们所做的就是编写jQuery代码,那么我绝对同意他们应该称自己为jQuery专家而不是网页设计师,而不是更多的常规技能。 我似乎感觉到Ryan不相信专业知识,如果您在医学界等相对比拟的话,曾几何时,只有外科医师,从来没有心脏外科医师,脑外科医师或神经外科医师。 瑞安(Ryan)是否说外科医生应该能够做到这一切,而他们不应该专攻? 并行处理可能会很麻烦,但是用户体验领域已经日趋成熟,Web设计专业也在日趋成熟,结果专业化也在不断发展,我不确定将其称为BS确实能取得任何成就。
James: Yeah, absolutely, I think I agree that the field is maturing and I think people are specializing a lot more. I see the industry around designing interfaces and interactions and experiences as maturing a lot and fragmenting a lot as well; I think there’s certainly I’ve seen in the last few years a lot of people coming out and calling themselves front-end developers, they specialize in HTML and CSS. That’s a growing and emerging field and I think rightfully so as well; there’s lots of libraries out there, and there’s lots of techniques and methodologies to keep up with and keep on top of, and I certainly can’t keep on top of them. I’d like to, and I’d like to be able to, but I’m finding myself drawn into more user research things as I mature, so I think the market is definitely fragmenting and I think we need to accept that. I think the term user experience is a broad term to describe a series of skill sets that a person may have, but I think it’s important to know that the market’s fragmenting.
詹姆斯:是的,绝对,我想我同意这个领域正在成熟,并且我认为人们的专业更多。 我看到围绕界面,交互和体验设计的行业已经日趋成熟,也越来越分散。 我认为,过去几年中肯定有很多人出来称自己为前端开发人员,他们专门研究HTML和CSS。 这是一个不断发展的新兴领域,我也认为是正确的。 这里有很多图书馆,还有很多技术和方法可以跟上并保持在最前面,我当然不能跟上它们。 我希望并且也希望能够这样做,但是随着年龄的增长,我发现自己被更多的用户研究所吸引,所以我认为市场肯定是分散的,我认为我们需要接受。 我认为“用户体验”一词是一个广泛的术语,用来描述一个人可能拥有的一系列技能,但是我认为了解市场的碎片化很重要。
Kevin: I’d like to move beyond Ryan’s specific blog post because I do think a lot of people are disagreeing with him, but a lot of the conversation that comes out of it and the different things that people disagree with is the most valuable thing that’s going on here at the moment. But I think on the surface I think I agree with you, Matt, that he is arguing against specialization; he’s saying “At its core a website should be the product of a web designer and a developer, obviously on larger projects you will need to add various people because the workload would be much too much for just two people. However, these people are added for logistical reasons not strategic.” So yeah, it’s like everyone is a web designer or a web developer, and that itself is a specialization, you know, those two roles used to be one person at the birth of the Web. So yeah, some of the conversation that’s going on is several user experience blogs, one of them Cennydd Bowles; he seems to be talking about why is it that people are able to question the value of user experience design? Why are there people out there who cannot see the intrinsic value of this thing? Obviously you know you’ve got a finished product that had a user experience designer involved, you’ve got another finished product that didn’t have a user experience designer involved; if this is a valuable contribution the difference between those two products should be obvious. You should be able to point at it and say that we never would have had without a user experience designer. What is the source of the confusion here? Why can anyone even question the value that such a person can bring to a team?
凯文(Kevin):我想超越Ryan的特定博客文章,因为我确实认为很多人都不同意他,但是其中产生的很多对话以及人们不同意的事情是最有价值的事情此刻此刻正在发生。 但是从表面上看,我想我同意你,马特,他在反对专业化。 他说:“网站的核心应该是网页设计师和开发人员的产品,显然,在大型项目中,您需要添加各种人员,因为对于两个人来说,工作量会太多。 但是,这些人是出于后勤原因而不是战略原因而添加的。” 是的,就像每个人都是Web设计师还是Web开发人员一样,这本身就是一种专业,您知道,这两个角色在Web诞生时曾经是一个人。 是的,正在进行的一些对话是几个用户体验博客, 其中之一是Cennydd Bowles ; 他似乎在谈论人们为什么能够质疑用户体验设计的价值? 为什么有些人看不见这东西的内在价值? 显然,您知道您有一个涉及用户体验设计师的成品,而您有另一个没有用户体验设计师参与的成品; 如果这是有价值的贡献,那么这两种产品之间的区别应该显而易见。 你应该能够在其指向和说,我们永远都不会在没有用户体验设计师了。 造成这种混乱的原因是什么? 为什么有人甚至质疑这种人可以带给团队的价值?
Matt: So my opinion on that is that some people are rock stars and they can nail their design first time round, and sure they might be able to incorporate some user experience into it, or maybe they just kind of nail it first pop, but for the rest of us who don’t have that genius—and I’m happy to put my hand up as saying that my design skills come from iterating and evolving and testing and validating until I achieve something that I’ve proven works rather than just having a gut feel.
马特:关于这一点,我的看法是,有些人是摇滚明星,他们可以在第一时间确定自己的设计,并确定他们可能能够将一些用户体验纳入其中,或者也许只是他们首先确定了它。对于我们中其他没有这个天才的人,我很高兴举起手来,说我的设计技能来自迭代,不断发展,测试和验证,直到获得我证明有效的东西,而不是只是有一种直觉。
Kevin: I think the testing and validating is especially important because even if you are one of these gifted geniuses who can produce something that everyone stands back and agrees is a marvelous thing, how can you prove that it is a marvelous thing, that there isn’t a lot more room for it to be better without some discipline, some rigorous UX design practices?
凯文:我认为测试和验证尤为重要,因为即使您是这些天才的天才之一,他们都能制造出每个人都退缩并同意的东西,这是一件了不起的事情,但是您如何证明这是一件了不起的事情,没有一些纪律和严格的UX设计实践,没有更多的空间让它变得更好吗?
James: There are certainly some rock stars out there who can create great user experiences in a very small team or within their own practice. Where I think the term user experience is more appropriate is when we’re talking about bigger organizations again or bigger markets of users. A good trait of a user experience designer is empathy, having empathy for the end user of that product, and the way you get that empathy is to have a constant dialogue with them and to test your product or to test that experience with them to understand what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, what they’re not finding, what they are finding at a very basic level. So I think if we talk about a context of a bigger organization or a bank, a user experience designer helps bring to that organization empathy for the end user, and I think anyone who’s worked in one of those organizations knows that empathy is not a quality that many people have and a lot of people have quite strong ideas and strong concepts within those organizations who don’t necessarily see that they’re bad ideas or not thought through very well. So I think user experience designer for me is somebody who more brings together a team and shows them and communicates to them what the end user is thinking and feeling and how they’re reacting to something as well so they can go on to help design that end product, but I think they need to, yeah, that term user experience I see applying in a more broader organization sense than in a small team. I think in a small team you want a web designer who has that empathy, can do the design, and then build it for you; if you’ve got a small team that’s exactly what you need, but in a big organization, a lot more people to communicate with and a lot more people to get on board behind an idea to get it over the line you need somebody who can — you need a user experience designer to help build up that awareness of what the user’s reaction is going to be to help champion their cause.
詹姆斯:当然有一些摇滚明星可以在一个非常小的团队中或在自己的实践中创造出色的用户体验。 我认为“用户体验”一词更合适的地方是当我们再次谈论更大的组织或更大的用户市场时。 用户体验设计师的一个很好的特征是同理心,对产品的最终用户有同情心,而获得同情心的方法是与他们保持不断的对话,并测试您的产品或与他们一起测试这种体验以了解他们在想什么,他们在感受什么,他们没有找到什么,他们从最基本的层面上发现了什么。 因此,我认为,如果我们谈论的是大型组织或银行的情况,那么用户体验设计师将帮助最终用户带来对该组织的同情,并且我认为在其中一个组织中工作过的人都知道同情不是一种品质这些组织中有很多人拥有的想法很多,但很多人却有很强的想法和强烈的想法,他们不一定会认为自己是坏主意或没有很好地考虑。 因此,我认为用户体验设计师对我来说是一个可以召集更多团队,向他们展示并与他们交流最终用户的想法和感受以及他们对某事的React方式的人,以便他们可以继续帮助设计最终产品,但我认为他们需要的是,我认为术语“用户体验”在组织上要比在小型团队中更广泛地应用。 我认为在一个小团队中,您需要一个具有同理心的网页设计师,可以进行设计,然后为您构建它。 如果您拥有的正是您所需要的小团队,但是在一个大型组织中,有更多的人可以与其进行交流,并且有更多的人可以参与其中,从而将其付诸实践,那么您需要一个可以—您需要一个用户体验设计师来帮助您建立对用户React的认识,以帮助支持他们的事业。
Matt: And to be fair to Ryan he’s not suggesting that user experience design is not valuable, you know, he’s acknowledging that it’s important, in fact, he’s saying that everyone should be able to do it if you’re a web designer. But the point is that process, like getting better at it, there’s room for specialization and there are people that are specializing and there’s an entire conference dedicated to it that James and I attended. Is Ryan suggesting that UX Australia is a BS conference title?
Matt:公平地说,他并不是在暗示用户体验设计没有价值,您知道,他承认这一点很重要,事实上,他是说如果您是Web设计师,那么每个人都应该能够做到。 但是关键是,这个过程就像变得更好一样,存在着专业化的空间,并且有人在专业化,而且我和詹姆斯都参加了一个专门针对这一过程的整个会议。 Ryan是否暗示UX Australia是BS会议的头衔?
Kevin: So, something that occurred to me, this is something that comes out of my personal life, in my spare time one of the things I do is I perform with an improv theatre company, and the thing about improv is the better you do it the more invisible it becomes. If you do a perfect job of improvising what you get at the end of the night is not an audience who’s impressed with your improv skills, you get an audience who doesn’t believe you were improvising; they think, oh, there were no mistakes in that, they did such a good job, clearly they weren’t making it up, it must’ve been scripted in advance. I’m wondering if this applies to a certain extent to UX that the better a job that you’ve done at the UX design of a given site the more natural it feels; what you see is the problems, the mistakes, and if there are no mistakes the job that you did becomes transparent.
凯文:所以,发生在我身上的事情,是我个人生活中产生的事情,在业余时间,我要做的一件事情就是与一家即兴戏剧公司合作演出,而即兴表演是你做得更好的事情它变得越不可见。 如果您完美地完成即兴表演,而不是让听众对自己的即兴表演印象深刻,那么您将获得不相信自己即兴表演的听众; 他们认为,哦,这没有错误,他们做得很好,很明显他们没有编造出来,必须事先编写脚本。 我想知道这是否在某种程度上适用于UX,您在给定站点的UX设计中完成的工作越好,感觉就越自然; 您所看到的是问题,错误,如果没有错误,您所做的工作将变得透明。
James: Yeah, Jared Spool I think summed this up really nicely at a UX Conference in that, yeah, good design is unseen, you don’t talk about it and you don’t notice it, and I think Google Search is a good example of that, you don’t know what happened or how it worked or you don’t really talk about the interface, it’s not a very appealing interface; it works, you get results, the results that you want, relevant results quickly, and everybody raves about it so it’s a good experience. I think, yeah, definitely I think good user experience is certainly invisible. I want to digress a little bit to go back on Matt’s point about I think there’s something in what Ryan’s saying, I would’ve termed myself a web designer probably five years ago.
詹姆斯:是的,贾里德·斯普尔(Jared Spool)我认为在UX大会上可以很好地总结一下,是的,好的设计是看不见的,您不会谈论它,也不会注意到它,我认为Google搜索是一个很好的选择例如,您不知道发生了什么事情或它是如何工作的,或者您并没有真正谈论该界面,它不是一个非常吸引人的界面; 它有效,您会得到结果,想要的结果,相关的结果很快,并且每个人都对此赞不绝口,因此这是一个很好的体验。 我认为,是的,我当然认为良好的用户体验肯定是看不见的。 我想稍微谈一下Matt的观点,我认为Ryan所说的有些话,我可能自称自己是五年前的Web设计师。
Kevin: And at parties you sometimes use that term still.
凯文:在聚会上,您有时仍会使用该术语。
James: Yeah, I do, because again I think people understand it; it’s a lot clearer for people to understand. But I’ve been calling myself a user experience designer for a few years now and that’s because my interests have been more in conducting user sessions and doing user research and those things that are a bit more early on in the process. I’ve moved away from — I do code, I have coded, but I’m moving away from it, I struggle to keep up with the trends and the technologies and the right approaches, and my interests are more earlier on in that design process, so I’m terming myself a user experience designer. I do visual design as well, so I think that that term user experience fits with the skills that I’ve got, I think it fits for doing the graphic design as well as doing the research and the testing and contextual inquiries and things like that where you’re going out into the field and talking to users.
詹姆斯:是的,是的,因为我再次认为人们可以理解。 人们更容易理解。 但是几年来,我一直称自己为用户体验设计师,这是因为我的兴趣更多地在于进行用户会话和进行用户研究,而这些事情还处于开发过程的早期。 我已经远离了—我编写了代码,已经进行了编码,但是我正在远离它,我努力跟上趋势,技术和正确的方法,而我的兴趣则早于该设计。过程,所以我自称为用户体验设计师。 我也进行视觉设计,因此我认为该术语“用户体验”与我所掌握的技能相称,我认为它适合进行图形设计以及研究,测试和上下文查询等工作。您要去野外与用户交谈的地方。
Kevin: Another issue I wanted to raise was if you have someone on a team whose job is the UX Professional, does that relieve everyone else from the responsibility of worrying about UX and can that be a problem itself? I’m again trying to think this is a point Ryan might be making by accident, but yeah, if you are the UX guy and no one else cares about the UX does that even work?
凯文:我想提出的另一个问题是,如果您的团队中有某人的工作是UX Professional,这是否使其他所有人都不必担心UX,这本身就是问题吗? 我再次试图认为这是Ryan偶然提出的观点,但是是的,如果您是UX方面的人,而且没有人关心UX是否可以正常工作?
James: I think everybody should care about the user experience and everybody on a project should have an opinion on that. I think we’re all designers, everybody inherently can design and we all like to come up with solutions for problems, so I think a good user experience designer is somebody who listens to everybody on a project and is open to their ideas and feedback; I certainly work quite closely with two developers who I have a lot of respect for their opinion on user experience, and I’ve certainly started off with one idea that they’ve changed my mind on as well. A good user experience designer needs to be able to think, okay, this is the audience I’m targeting and the idea doesn’t have to come from them, but a good user experience designer needs to be able to pick ideas that they know will fit that audience and be objective and say, hey, it’s not my idea but that is a much better idea and feed that into the process. So a healthy team everybody should have a view on user experience and everybody should be voicing their views on that experience, but I think for me the user experience designer needs to be the person who’s making that call at the end of the day because they’re the ones that are on the coal face talking to the end users of the products ideally, and they’re the ones that have a deep understanding of what they’re looking for in that experience.
詹姆斯:我认为每个人都应该关心用户体验,项目中的每个人都应该对此有意见。 我认为我们都是设计师,每个人都固有地可以设计,并且我们都喜欢提出问题的解决方案,因此,我认为优秀的用户体验设计师是一个在项目上倾听每个人并乐于接受他们的想法和反馈的人。 我当然与两个开发人员密切合作,我非常尊重他们对用户体验的看法,并且我当然从一个想法开始,即他们也改变了我的想法。 好的用户体验设计师需要能够思考,好吧,这就是我要针对的受众,想法不一定来自他们,但是好的用户体验设计师需要能够选择他们知道的想法会适合目标受众并保持客观,然后说,嘿,这不是我的主意,但这是一个更好的主意,并将其纳入流程。 因此,一个健康的团队,每个人都应该对用户体验有所了解,每个人都应该就这种体验发表自己的看法,但是对于我来说,我认为用户体验设计师必须是在一天结束时发出要求的人,因为他们理想的情况是,与那些面对产品的最终用户交流的人,他们对这种体验中的需求有深刻的了解。
Matt: And they’re also the ones who understand the process, right, so they’re going to be the person in the team who is making sure that the user in ‘user experience’ is what is focused on and that the decisions are made based on what the user’s needs are and not a clash of opinions.
Matt:他们也是理解流程的人,对,因此,他们将成为团队中的人,以确保“用户体验”中的用户专注于目标并且决策是根据用户的需求而制定,而不是意见冲突。
Kevin: I’d like to get into that a little more. We’ve got a little bit more time here, so I was wondering because at the start we talked about what UX was, what it achieves, could you talk about a bit in practicality some of the things that you do as a UX designer in a team here at SitePoint that other members of the team would not be doing; some of the practical processes and exercises and design steps that to be honest we never used to do here at SitePoint before we had people who had job titles like you guys.
凯文:我想多谈一点。 我们在这里还有更多时间,所以我想知道,因为一开始我们讨论的是UX,它实现了什么,您能否谈谈您在UX设计中所做的一些实际操作? SitePoint上的一个团队,该团队的其他成员不会这样做; 老实说,一些实际的过程,练习和设计步骤是我们以前从未在SitePoint上做过的,而在我们拥有像您这样的职位之前,这些人就没有了。
James: I might talk about a project that I worked on before I came into 99designs specifically because I think it’s a good example of the skill set that I think a user experience designer should have. So, I was a government organization, their intranet, they knew it wasn’t functioning very well, and they didn’t really know why, so I was engaged to help do some user research for them to understand what did this diverse, what did the diverse range of people within that organization want to achieve from their intranet, what did they want to know, what were they turning there for. Also what things did they think was good and bad about it currently, so I went and interviewed and sat with a range of people from personal assistants to scientists to management and got an understanding of a range of different perspectives on what they would like it to be able to do, what it was doing well at the moment and what it wasn’t, so that gave the organization and myself as a designer a really good grounding to understand what are the key things that we should be designing and what we should be trying to achieve from any redesign project that we undertook. We then came up with some concepts and these were prototypes, rough wireframes, and again we sat down with users from that organization, again, people in different levels of the organization with different roles and tested out that interface on them with certain tasks, and that helped inform the design further and we made changes and tweaks to it from there and then we went on to do the visual design to communicate and we worked with their marketing department to make sure it communicated the brand and the brand values of that organization and then we proceeded to hand it over to a company to then develop it from there. So I think that gives a good overview of how I see a user experience designer’s role is to understand and start from the beginning before doing any wire framing and then getting into that from there.
詹姆斯:我可能会谈论我进入99designs之前从事的项目,因为我认为这是我认为用户体验设计师应该具备的技能的一个很好的例子。 因此,我是一个政府组织,他们的内部网,他们知道它的运行状况不是很好,并且他们真的不知道为什么,所以我参与了帮助他们进行一些用户研究的工作,以了解这些功能是什么,该组织内的各种人员想要从他们的Intranet实现什么,他们想知道什么,他们为什么而努力。 另外,他们目前认为这是好是坏的事情,所以我去了一次访谈,并与从个人助理到科学家再到管理人员的各种各样的人坐在一起,对他们想要的东西有了不同的看法。能够做的事情,目前做得如何,哪些方面做不到,这为组织和作为设计师的我自己提供了一个很好的基础,可以理解我们应该设计哪些关键事物以及我们应该做什么尝试从我们进行的任何重新设计项目中实现。 然后,我们提出了一些概念,这些概念是原型,粗略的线框,并且我们再次与该组织的用户坐下来,再次与组织中不同级别的人员扮演了不同的角色,并通过某些任务测试了他们的界面,这有助于进一步告知设计,我们从那里进行了更改和调整,然后继续进行视觉设计以进行交流,我们与他们的营销部门合作以确保它传达了该组织的品牌和品牌价值,然后我们将其移交给一家公司,然后从那里进行开发。 因此,我认为这很好地概述了我如何看待用户体验设计师的作用,即在进行任何线框图构建之前先了解并从头开始,然后再从那里开始。
Matt: From my perspective there are a couple of other tools that form part of that process that I think are invaluable; one of them is surveys. We’ve been surveying customers at SitePoint about our courses recently, and the data that we’ve gleaned from responses to those surveys— Obviously they need to be taken with a pinch of salt because only a certain type of person will respond to a survey, but certainly if you’re after some quantitative data then surveys are a great way to achieve that, and the other thing is using personas and scenarios; personas are user profiles that represent typical users in your customer base, and scenarios are tasks that these users might be undergoing on your site. And I think when James referred earlier to the user experience designer having the obligation of communicating user experience to the entire team, personas and scenarios are a great way to achieve that. Generally you give these personas a real photo, you might just pinch an image of someone from a stock image site, give them a back-story, make it a bit of fun, you know, give them a dog and a house and some personal problems, and people have empathy and identify with these user profiles, they come to know and love them like they’re real people, and then the task of user experience permeating throughout the team has begun because people even subconsciously if they’re making a development decision, if they’ve got Larry and Henry and Joseph and Elaine on their mind they might think, well, how does that affect Elaine, I know that she’s got this particular requirement so I make sure that I take that into account, and if that’s happening then your job as user experience designer is successful.
马特:从我的角度来看,还有其他一些工具构成了该过程的一部分,我认为它们是无价的。 调查就是其中之一。 我们最近在SitePoint上对客户进行了调查,调查了我们的课程,以及从对这些调查的答复中收集到的数据-显然,需要采取一些措施,因为只有特定类型的人才能对调查做出答复,但是当然,如果您需要一些定量数据,那么调查是实现此目标的一种好方法,而另一件事是使用角色和场景。 角色是代表您的客户群中典型用户的用户配置文件,方案是这些用户可能在您的网站上正在执行的任务。 而且我认为,当James早些时候提到用户体验设计师有责任将用户体验传达给整个团队时,角色和场景是实现这一目标的好方法。 通常,您给这些角色做一张真实的照片,您可能只是捏捏某个股票图像站点中某人的图像,给他们做一个背景故事,使其变得有趣,请给他们一条狗,一只房子和一些私人物品。问题,人们会同情并认同这些用户个人资料,他们就像真正的人一样认识并喜欢他们,然后渗透到整个团队的用户体验就已经开始,因为人们甚至在潜意识里发展决定,如果他们想到了拉里(Larry)和亨利(Harry)以及约瑟夫(Joseph)和伊莱恩(Elaine),他们可能会想,这会对伊莱恩产生什么影响,我知道她有这个特殊要求,因此我确保我将其考虑在内,并且如果发生这种情况,那么您作为用户体验设计师的工作就是成功的。
James: Yeah, absolutely. I think surveys are really important, and personas and scenarios are really important, Matt. One other thing I’d like to quickly add is just analytics as well, and traffic stats, we often as user experience designers delve into that to understand what’s going on, what are the general paths that users are taking through a website and where are they dropping off to help identify ways in which we can fine tune things. An example of that is on 99designs, we’ve learned from web traffic stats that a lot of people are going through to browse existing contests on that site before going on to commit to starting a contest, so we’re doing all we can to help bring the really active, engaged contests to the fore and make them easier for our users to find those and see what’s going on within those contests so they have a deeper and a faster understanding of what is involved in those projects, so yeah, I think analytics is also another really important research tool for a designer.
詹姆斯:是的,绝对。 我认为调查非常重要,角色和情景非常重要,Matt。 我想快速添加的另一件事就是分析,以及流量统计,我们经常作为用户体验设计师来研究,以了解发生了什么,用户通过网站的一般路径是什么,在哪里他们下车帮助确定我们微调事物的方式。 An example of that is on 99designs, we've learned from web traffic stats that a lot of people are going through to browse existing contests on that site before going on to commit to starting a contest, so we're doing all we can to help bring the really active, engaged contests to the fore and make them easier for our users to find those and see what's going on within those contests so they have a deeper and a faster understanding of what is involved in those projects, so yeah, I think analytics is also another really important research tool for a designer.
Matt: And just lastly, user testing is one thing that can’t be ignored. Certainly I’ve learned from James since he’s come on board the value between just recording a user testing session compared to making sure that stakeholders actually watch the session. Generally a big shout out to the Clearleft guys who write Silverback, that’s the guerilla user testing app that we use here at SitePoint. If you record a user testing session the chances of convincing your boss to actually watch that entire recording are pretty slim, so if you can find a way to have them actually monitor the session live while it’s happening that live element is appealing and you’ll find that people get hooked, and then your job of permeating user experience throughout the organization is achieved.
Matt: And just lastly, user testing is one thing that can't be ignored. Certainly I've learned from James since he's come on board the value between just recording a user testing session compared to making sure that stakeholders actually watch the session. Generally a big shout out to the Clearleft guys who write Silverback, that's the guerilla user testing app that we use here at SitePoint. If you record a user testing session the chances of convincing your boss to actually watch that entire recording are pretty slim, so if you can find a way to have them actually monitor the session live while it's happening that live element is appealing and you'll find that people get hooked, and then your job of permeating user experience throughout the organization is achieved.
James: Yeah, I see it like a game of basketball or a game of football, I think watching a recording of a game that was played last weekend is highly unlikely and you get a much different experience than when you are watching the game live. So I think with user testing it’s really important to try and get the stakeholders there, get them to be more empathetic for their users is the key, get them to really know their users better and understand their users’ perspective because I think it’s very easy for that to get lost within any size organization and it’s important, really important, to go back and keep talking to their users. Jared Spool said one of the three key things about successful organizations who are focused on UCD [User Centered Design –KY] is the amount of time that organization spent looking and talking and observing the way users interact with their business, and I think that’s really, really important.
James: Yeah, I see it like a game of basketball or a game of football, I think watching a recording of a game that was played last weekend is highly unlikely and you get a much different experience than when you are watching the game live. So I think with user testing it's really important to try and get the stakeholders there, get them to be more empathetic for their users is the key, get them to really know their users better and understand their users' perspective because I think it's very easy for that to get lost within any size organization and it's important, really important, to go back and keep talking to their users. Jared Spool said one of the three key things about successful organizations who are focused on UCD [User Centered Design –KY] is the amount of time that organization spent looking and talking and observing the way users interact with their business, and I think that's really, really important.
Kevin: And if you can’t get people to watch the session live then maybe you need a good highlights reel tool or something like that.
Kevin: And if you can't get people to watch the session live then maybe you need a good highlights reel tool or something like that.
The one last issue I want to bring up, and it’s kind of a tricky one, it’s something that Andy Budd raised in his rebuttal blog post to Ryan Carson, I guess you could call it, and it’s the issue of people calling themselves UX designers when that’s not really, maybe they don’t have the qualifications or the focus that would be required; I guess people who really do have that focus are taking exception to that. The quote that stood out for me is Andy Budd says, “…there are increasing number of people out there who are calling themselves UX designers because they sketched out some wireframes and sat in on a couple of usability tests.” And realistically if you’re in a small team and you’re a designer who has raised your hand to be I’m going to do what I can for user experience, I’m the one who’s most passionate about it, maybe that is all the experience you have with UX design, and when someone comes up and asks you what you want on your business card that’s what you might pick. Is this a big problem for your discipline specifically guys?
The one last issue I want to bring up, and it's kind of a tricky one, it's something that Andy Budd raised in his rebuttal blog post to Ryan Carson, I guess you could call it, and it's the issue of people calling themselves UX designers when that's not really, maybe they don't have the qualifications or the focus that would be required; I guess people who really do have that focus are taking exception to that. The quote that stood out for me is Andy Budd says, “…there are increasing number of people out there who are calling themselves UX designers because they sketched out some wireframes and sat in on a couple of usability tests.” And realistically if you're in a small team and you're a designer who has raised your hand to be I'm going to do what I can for user experience, I'm the one who's most passionate about it, maybe that is all the experience you have with UX design, and when someone comes up and asks you what you want on your business card that's what you might pick. Is this a big problem for your discipline specifically guys?
James: Yes, I think it’s something that’s for all disciplines. I’m sure there’s plenty of people out there that call themselves web designers because they can cut and build a website. I’m sure an uncle’s brother would call himself a web designer, there’s plenty of people out there, that’s something that’s a problem for every industry. I think because it’s a relatively new term and a new field and an emerging field there’s not a lot of courses out there or degrees or qualifications you need to become before you can use the term ‘user experience designer’ so I think that adds to it; it’s an ambiguous term, I think that’s one thing that we can all agree on, it’s ambiguous for a lot of people. And, yeah, I think as it matures and progresses I think it will settle down; people will have a clearer understanding of what’s involved and what skills a user experience designer should have, and I think it will mature.
James: Yes, I think it's something that's for all disciplines. I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that call themselves web designers because they can cut and build a website. I'm sure an uncle's brother would call himself a web designer, there's plenty of people out there, that's something that's a problem for every industry. I think because it's a relatively new term and a new field and an emerging field there's not a lot of courses out there or degrees or qualifications you need to become before you can use the term 'user experience designer' so I think that adds to it; it's an ambiguous term, I think that's one thing that we can all agree on, it's ambiguous for a lot of people. And, yeah, I think as it matures and progresses I think it will settle down; people will have a clearer understanding of what's involved and what skills a user experience designer should have, and I think it will mature.
Matt: I’d just like to add to that, that yes, some people use UX as a buzzword and the fact is if you do a search on a job listing board for web designer the positions will list salaries that are lower than if you do a search for positions of UX designer. And perhaps one positive upshot of that is that if someone decides to call themselves a UX designer and realistically they haven’t had a lot of experience following any user experience processes eventually they’ll probably start doing some research on their own and finding out how they can validate that process, and maybe that’s how people move into the field; that’s the optimist in me anyway.
Matt: I'd just like to add to that, that yes, some people use UX as a buzzword and the fact is if you do a search on a job listing board for web designer the positions will list salaries that are lower than if you do a search for positions of UX designer. And perhaps one positive upshot of that is that if someone decides to call themselves a UX designer and realistically they haven't had a lot of experience following any user experience processes eventually they'll probably start doing some research on their own and finding out how they can validate that process, and maybe that's how people move into the field; that's the optimist in me anyway.
Kevin: So just because you like to call yourself that doesn’t mean you’re going to bag one of those jobs is what you’re saying.
Kevin: So just because you like to call yourself that doesn't mean you're going to bag one of those jobs is what you're saying.
Matt: Well, you’re going to have to demonstrate experience and talk about processes that you’ve followed, and if you can’t talk the talk then it’s going to be difficult to be able to walk the walk.
Matt: Well, you're going to have to demonstrate experience and talk about processes that you've followed, and if you can't talk the talk then it's going to be difficult to be able to walk the walk.
James: I certainly use the term user experience designer as a way to judge the maturity of the organization who’s advertising for a position. If they’re advertising for a web designer I don’t want to necessarily work with them when I don’t think they show maturity in what they’re looking for and their approaches into the way they value design, so I guess the flipside is, yeah, I actually look for and just look for jobs advertised for user experience designer because I think that organization wants to have a deeper understanding of their users and wants to use user centered processes in the way that they reach their designs. So, yeah, the flipside is that I actually specifically look for organizations advertising those positions and respect those organizations more than others.
James: I certainly use the term user experience designer as a way to judge the maturity of the organization who's advertising for a position. If they're advertising for a web designer I don't want to necessarily work with them when I don't think they show maturity in what they're looking for and their approaches into the way they value design, so I guess the flipside is, yeah, I actually look for and just look for jobs advertised for user experience designer because I think that organization wants to have a deeper understanding of their users and wants to use user centered processes in the way that they reach their designs. So, yeah, the flipside is that I actually specifically look for organizations advertising those positions and respect those organizations more than others.
Kevin: So let me put it to you listeners. I’m going to give the last word here to Ryan Carson, the man himself; after all he wrote a blog post that gave us a podcast so I think we owe it to him. This is the last word from his update, so after seeing all of the response that his blog post generated this was his considered reevaluation of his opinion. He says, “I still strongly believe that if the lead web designer on a project needs someone who specializes in UX because they don’t have a good understanding of solid UX principles then they shouldn’t call themselves a web designer. Web design and UX are not two separate disciplines and UX is not something you add to a project because you have a large budget.”
Kevin: So let me put it to you listeners. I'm going to give the last word here to Ryan Carson, the man himself; after all he wrote a blog post that gave us a podcast so I think we owe it to him. This is the last word from his update, so after seeing all of the response that his blog post generated this was his considered reevaluation of his opinion. He says, “I still strongly believe that if the lead web designer on a project needs someone who specializes in UX because they don't have a good understanding of solid UX principles then they shouldn't call themselves a web designer. Web design and UX are not two separate disciplines and UX is not something you add to a project because you have a large budget.”
So, agree or disagree, please head over to sitepoint.com/podcast and comment on this post. Do you work with someone who has UX on their business card or do you do the best you can with the skills you have as a web designer? What do you call yourself and what do you think that means to people who read that on your business card? I’d love to hear your thoughts, and we’ll be reading, and hopefully James and Matt will chime in on the comments feed as well. So, thanks for listening!
So, agree or disagree, please head over to sitepoint.com/podcast and comment on this post. Do you work with someone who has UX on their business card or do you do the best you can with the skills you have as a web designer? What do you call yourself and what do you think that means to people who read that on your business card? I'd love to hear your thoughts, and we'll be reading, and hopefully James and Matt will chime in on the comments feed as well. So, thanks for listening!
Once again, Matt Magain is a user experience designer working at SitePoint in the SitePoint courses team at the moment. You can see plenty of his writings over at sitepoint.com/blogs where he has written many a post over the years. James Mansfield is a UX designer working in 99designs. You can visit 99designs at 99designs.com and post a contest if you need a logo or other design job done. You can follow me on Twitter @sentience and SitePoint @sitepointdotcom. Visit the SitePoint Podcast at sitepoint.com/podcast to subscribe and receive every show automatically.
Once again, Matt Magain is a user experience designer working at SitePoint in the SitePoint courses team at the moment. You can see plenty of his writings over at sitepoint.com/blogs where he has written many a post over the years. James Mansfield is a UX designer working in 99designs . You can visit 99designs at 99designs.com and post a contest if you need a logo or other design job done. You can follow me on Twitter @sentience and SitePoint @sitepointdotcom . Visit the SitePoint Podcast at sitepoint.com/podcast to subscribe and receive every show automatically.
The SitePoint podcast is produced by Karn Broad this week, and I’m Kevin Yank. Thanks for listening, bye.
The SitePoint podcast is produced by Karn Broad this week, and I'm Kevin Yank. Thanks for listening, bye.
Theme music by Mike Mella.
Mike Mella的主题音乐。
Thanks for listening! Feel free to let us know how we’re doing, or to continue the discussion, using the comments field below.
谢谢收听! 欢迎使用下面的评论字段让我们知道我们的状况,或者继续讨论。
翻译自: https://www.sitepoint.com/podcast-78-ux-bullsht-with-matt-magain-and-james-mansfield/