What happened to this blog? Ok, I will talk about my real life for a second here…

Sorry for the inactivity. What happened to this blog? I have the #1 excuse sitting here at my side: a lot of stuff has been happening in the real world, and this blog became low priority.

And what happened in the real world?

Well, some things changed at my work’s organization. Some new bosses came, new projects came, and we were all excited to see where this would carry us. Unfortunately, I do not share their views on what User Experience is. Long story short, I decided it was time for a turning point.

I am passionate about my job. I am passionate about building experiences for my customers. I do not believe one pays $10 a month just to be able to use some weird online service just because it looks good, or because the boxes in the homepage are perfectly aligned… I think one “buys” an experience, and to create a good experience you have to research users, understand them, draft your experience, test it and iterate. Creating a good user experience comes from research, test, practice-based wisdom… I do not believe in “experts” or magic recipes, I believe in hard work and learning from research, books, experience, testing, and errors.

I was stressed, with a lot of work to do, not much recognition from my top managers (but fortunately a lot of recognition from fellow designers, programmers, and project managers), and the feeling I was not doing what I really wanted to do, what would help me understand User Experience, customers, people… I wanted more research, more interviews, more conversations… focus on quality based on facts, less opinions… research-design-test-learn…

The part where I talk about the Wroblewski anecdote

In 2010 I was at UX Lisbon. Luke Wroblewski was there. I can’t recall the name of his lecture, but I remember that I found it very inspiring. When the time for questions came some folks asked him what to do if your company does not really believe in User Experience (although they may publicly say they do because it is a good selling point)… well, you know the drill…we guys that are working in an environment where UX is still thought of as a luxury (I would argue that creating an online service without understanding your users IS a real luxury) like to know if the top guys had to face our same problems, and how they did went through that.

Then, somebody stated an apocalyptic scenario: What to do if your company does not believe in UX at ALL? They would not let you conduct research, they would interfere in your work, take decisions by committee based on preconceptions… the guy threw all the problems one can face in a company at once to Luke… would he be able to walk out of that with a good answer?

Wroblewski took some seconds to think about that… it was a horrible scenario. How could someone fight all those problems? He candidly said “Well, life is too short…” and basically told that sometimes you have to go look for greener pastures. We all smiled.

Why this story?

After a lot of thinking I decided to quit my job. I learned a lot there, had good times and bad times too… but I think I have to go elsewhere to keep growing, somewhere that shares my views on User Experience and that values hard work and knowledge over titles and opinions. I want to keep growing, and I want to grow doing something I wholeheartedly believe in.

What I am doing now that keeps me so busy?

I am learning. I love learning. I always wanted to play with Adobe CS. I come from an engineering background and never knew my way with Adobe. Now I can do some nice shapes with Illustrator, apply some effects with Photoshop and finally create a mockup in Fireworks. Then, I went the HTML/CSS route. A long time passed since the last time I HTMLed a website, so I had to update myself. CSS is great! And HTML5 and CSS3 look very promising… also, I am learning JavaScript and jQuery, although I think this will take me a little longer… and my goal would be creating some mobile app by the end of summer by myself! Will I be able? Mmm, that’s the beauty of challenge.

Any future plans?

Now I am into learning, but when summer goes near the end I will look for a move to UK, which is the best UX market in Europe; I have some good memories of London, where I worked creating the Giffgaff IA a couple of years ago. But we will see…

 

 

P.S.: As a result of learning HTML/CSS and the like I plan to get a “real” WordPress site in the near future, someplace where I can play with plugins and styling, so I am not sure about this blog’s future… but I will keep you updated of future developments in that area!

P.S. II: After some feedback (hey, I am a UX guy, I love feedback!, particularly that which hints me on how to improve something) I decided to refine the post and shrink it a little, adding some structure here and there as well. There might be some folks out there that do not know the context of my post, and I would not like them to misunderstand me.