It has been quite a while since I took the time to write about work activities in my blog.
One of the reasons for my lack of writing is that I have been working as an independent consultant for some time now and I spend all of my time at client sites or trying to find new clients. Some people insist on calling me a freelancer instead of a consultant, which makes sense for some people where they fill a temporary role with a company that does not have resources to hire someone full time and needs help to quickly deliver functionality. I prefer to be called a consultant as I like to prove my worth by demonstrating how to implement correct processes to my teammates and to lead them as a mentor. My initial goal when starting at a new company is to find the biggest needs and help fill them myself or to encourage my team to work on them. My next goal is to become a domain expert as quick as possible as this knowledge and skill is always indispensable for any company. My personal goal is always to help improve the people around me and prove that every dollar spent on me can be tied directly to improvements in both processes and products.
After reading the article entitled "The End of Traditional Employment - The Other Gig Economy" I have come to learn about consulting on a whole new level. What would you do if you could depend on a large pool of super talented people? Part of the problem in finding contributors at the right time for the right rate is the right people just seem to never be available when you need them. Sure, in a perfect world it would all be planned way in advance, but as we all know we don't live in a perfect world. There are times when employees quit, and we need to immediately fill the void they leave. Next comes the thought to quickly find anyone to help instead of thinking long term in locating someone who can transform the company into something better.
An illustration comes to mind that illustrates this point. Suppose you need a prototype built which will be used to discuss with the end users in a customer visit in two weeks. Do you hire someone who just creates a couple of screens for you this visit, or do you bring in someone who has domain knowledge and can take over the design and prototyping for you from now on? It depends on several factors, but the latter person can be used for any future projects and is someone you can depend on when a time crunch exists as well as fill immediate needs. Now what happens if you need several of these people? Do you just give up in despair since it was difficult just to find a single User Experience person to help you? Often what is natural is to keep requesting the same resource when the need arises since they have always helped in the past. But what would happen if they were a resource bank of people just like the one UX person you love?
From a personal standpoint I really like the idea that I am not an island by myself and if a client needs more people like me or more specialized help, then I can easily refer to a large talent pool of like-minded people who I know can do the job for my client. I like to call myself a generalist who can perform any UX task, but sometimes a client requests an expert with a specific UX skill, like technical communication write or competitive analysis expert. A good example of different UX skills are listed in the following article "The 10 UX Deliverables Top Designers Use". This brings up a completely different set of problems.
What is the true role of UX? Are we just in the deliverables business or producing beautiful artifacts? With the advent of Agile, whether it be Scrum or Kanban we must be mindful to produce deliverables that result in an improved product. We need to have actionable items in every document we produce. If we have a heuristic evaluation, then the output needs to be a bulleted list of items that can be given to the development team to fix in priority order. If we run a usability study on a prototype, then it should be driving a refinement to our proposed design. Then comes the hardest part of our job, in working directly with developers so there is no misunderstanding between our concepts and final product that is shipped to customers to use. This can be done by inserting yourself in the development team to help all along the way to be available to answer questions as they arise. Also, as development tasks are completed, there is a QA task to ensure that the whole product meets the original UX design or improvements proposed along the way from monthly usability studies.
The goal of every UX designer should be a product that matches the mental model of the actual end users and helps improve their life.
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