You're reading for free via Luis Berumen Castro's Friend Link. Become a member to access the best of Medium.
Member-only story
The unexpected gentrification of user experience
There is still a lot of room for more people in the neighbourhood.
Hey, welcome to the User Experience Design neighbourhood! You can call it UX; we love trendy abbreviations, like SoHo. We have so many acronyms of our own (UI, UXR, CX, HCI, etc.) it is hard to keep track of, and even if you ask any of the residents where one ends and the other starts, most likely everybody will give you a different answer. By the way, Google Maps does not work here, but the guys who work on it have a residence in this community.
Seeing this part of the tech town growing so fast has been a crazy ride. Many newcomers would not believe these pixel-perfect streets used to be a ghetto with jagged around corners. We used tables for laying out pages! Crazy, right?
It is so nice seeing many entrepreneurs, product owners, developers and people from almost every walk of life coming down here for inspiration. Many of our current residents started like tourists, and after a couple of visits, they made the bold choice to move here permanently. Hey, it is a safe neighbourhood; you will not get into trouble unless you hang around with the dark pattern gang, support scroll hick jacking or love hamburger menus.
It has been pretty cool seeing huge companies investing in the community during the years and taken so much stake in it. IBM and Google are now known for their design efforts, but they were hardcore engineering companies for many years. Other large organizations had followed other strategies to get their footing in design, like when Capital One acquired Adaptive Path or even IDEO’s open marriage with Steelcase and Kyu Collective.
This is not a perfect place, but considering its humble origins, many of its shortcomings have improved quite a lot very fast.
Every road leads to UX… if you wonder long enough
There are many ways to make it here. Some people will tell you to have a university degree, some would ask for five years of experience, and others claim that a six-month certificate can guarantee you a small studio apartment. Everybody loves gatekeeping.
I have seen groups asking for immigration (from other careers) reform with certifications and strict rules, even when most of us are first-generation immigrants in UX. Please ignore them.
Some natives are still around, like the IDEO tribe. They do not seem to be bothered by new people. On the contrary, as soon as you convert to the Design Thinking church, the tribe will welcome you with open arms. I am more a value proposition canvas kind of guy, but I do not discriminate if you believe in the loop, double diamond or the Stanford.
Just a heads up, the UX neighbourhood has a really high property tax. If you want to make this place your home, you need to personally have to spend many hours every week catching up with the latest trends, learning best practices and working on your skills. If you love this area and have an insatiable curiosity, it should not feel like a burden at all.
On my side, I do not mind where you are coming from or what you did before; all I would care for new residents is to respect your neighbours, build up the community and do your best to learn about its values.
The first settlers
Almost half a century ago, the first settlers of this area discovered an overlapping zone between Art and Engineering states and somehow got the financial backing to make their first explorations into that territory. We are talking about pioneers from Xerox Parc. They built the foundation of everything we know and love, even if their efforts at that time ended up in financial ruin. Some of that was reinterpreted by a guy called Steve Jobs; we will go back to him later.
I was a kid of the 80s (thank you for not doing the math); at that time, technology was expensive owned by parents lent to kids under adult supervision once in a while. Now technology is given to kids so parents can keep adult supervision to a minimum while Big Brother is watching us all 👀.
The screens I grew up with gave me tiny electric shocks when I touched them, and the voice inside my phone was not SIRI; it was a cranky lady normally referred to as “the operator.” Rotary phones were harder to break than Nokias.
Note: I guess I would need to explain what a Nokia was and why it is considered the Chuck Norris of cell phones for some of you. Damn, now I need to explain who is Chuck Norris. Keeping it short, rotary phones, Nokias and Chuck Norris were hard enough to crack your skull 💀.
When I moved into this neighbourhood (around 2003) from a weird town called Product Design, this barren land used to go by the name of Web Design. Nothing to do with spiders, but we had to think about crawlers and bugs all the time. Later on, it was renamed User Experience, thanks to the legendary Don Norman. Back in the mid-90s, he coined the term describing his title at Apple as User Experience Architect. Not exactly a sexy title, kind of a mouth full, to be honest, which explains why it really took a while to catch on.
Nearby, there was another community called Multimedia, which for a while, mostly meant you would be designing menus and extra features of DVDs movies. At that time, nerdy magazines used to add CDs in the back cover with cool videos, demos for games, and cheap utilities, which might give you an idea of this field's cultural impact.
Encarta CDs replaced encyclopedias, and sometimes you had to imagine the full experience since many computers did not include CD players 💿. In retrospect, the best thing we got out of Encarta is not having to worry about door-to-door encyclopedia salespeople bothering us mid dinner.
At some point, internet bandwidth got fast enough; these two communities connected and led to a golden age of “✨The Flash✨.”
The flash at the end of the progress bar
The Macromedia Flash era was the equivalent of “The roaring 20s”. Everything was a big party until one single event led us to a big depression.
Note: I think in a century from now, this year will be known as “The coughing 20s”.
In the age of flash, things were wild! Every page you visited had to be a visual spectacle. Imagine going to a restaurant, being stopped at the door by a bouncer for almost a minute. He will start telling you that the show is about to start at 15%, 55%, 99%… 88% … 100%. Click to start!
Then the restaurant became a full Broadway musical bursting in front of you. Lasers, smoke, and Circle-Du-Soleil-like characters dancing while throwing confetti all around you. Sometimes you were able to skip it, sometimes not. Once the spectacle was over, you were allowed to see the restaurant’s business hours finally. It happened to be closed 🤦.
Now multiply that for every site you can imagine. Drugstore website, you got a flash recital. Car dealership, a motion graphics extravaganza. Air conditioner repair shop, vector animated snowmen melting under the sun heading towards a certain death triggering in you the weirdest bystander effect ever ☀️⛄.
Flash was the cornerstone for an industry full of amazingly talented individuals, working really hard to elevate their art to absurd extremes… regardless of the user's needs. Tokyo Plastic’s Drum Machine was, in my opinion, the magnum opus of that era. Just check this beauty out!
It is a shame I could only find videos of it, not the original.SWF format. There must be a museum for all of that.
Oh, my! I spent most of the 2000s checking if I had the latest Flash Player version for my computer and updating Acrobat three times a day.
Then Adobe Flash (changed its first name after a forced marriage) had the equivalent of its black Thursday. Steve Jobs, the Prometheus that stole the hidden secrets from the mythical Xerox Parc temple to be later on punished by the Gods and expelled from his own company, had returned to Apple. And in an open letter exiled Flash from iOS, opening the seventh seal and bringing the apocalypse to that professional community.
All those countless hours learning Action Script, all those big fat O'Reilly books, infinite tutorials printed from the web and flash forums with the weirdest flexes had a sudden bonfire of the vanities. Many flash artists never recovered, just decided to sink with the ship.
Just recently, Adobe announced it would shoot Flash's zombie and take it out of its misery at the end of this year. And the rest of the world responded with a unanimous: “Was that still a thing?”
To the newcomers to UX, two serious warnings. Never invest your professional future in one design tool, and do not tattoo your girlfriend’s name on the arm. No matter how much you love both.
Meeting designers was different.
I have to say that the people in the neighbourhood had changed a lot and could not be happier.
In the past, during networking events, I had moments when a fellow UXer cut the conversation abruptly when they find out I was a UX designer too. This 500 people startup event was too small to provide for two designers at the same time out of a sudden.
I felt like I was in one of those spaghetti westerns. I needed to spill out something like: “This event can only have a UX sheriff, you have crossed my territory, we will have a prototyping standoff at dawn, the looser will smash his MacBook and leave town. Are you feeling lucky, punk?”.
Actually, that sounds pretty cool. I am not sure if the right term for people doing this should be UXslinger or GUIfighter, but I would totally watch competitive UXing Duels on ESPN.
All this silliness is easy to brush off as mind-narrowness, but everybody loses from acting that way. This designer who suddenly decided to stop talking to me may lose an ally, a partner or a future reference. I have often found myself overwhelmed by too many projects but not being able to count on somebody to give me a hand.
Things are much better now, with international communities of countless amazing individuals sharing their best and most precious advice for free. That is a freaking dream come true.
I still feel I need to kindly remind the new joiners that if you meet another designer in the wild, do not be territorial. The lone wolf mentality is a myth; real wolves create and nurture packs.
This design colony is expanding, and we still feel we need to eradicate the misconception that there are only X amounts of projects in X amount of companies. The world is still a badly designed place; we have endless opportunities to make it better.
Welcome stranger, be part of our UX neighbourhood and make yourself at home.
