What's "mine" ? and how much?

Recently, I was asked to showcase my portfolio of work to someone.
As long as I was full-time 'graphic designer', this was an easy task to do.
It was doable once I became a 'web designer' too - my work was still largely related to visual design.

As an interaction designer, I could still do this. Fortunately most of my early interaction design projects were with real products and I had a 'before and after' that I could showcase. Also, I was solely responsible for all the interaction design aspects of these products.

The last 5 years of my career has been rather different. I am a designer - part of a very large globally distributed user experience team. While I am officially designated as a designer, my tasks are not restricted to this. I've accomplished many things, however, I face a challenge to create a 'physical portfolio' that showcases these things.

In all my projects, I have strived to and have driven the attempt to get a 'holistic' understanding of the topic on hand. To do so, I have often engaged with with a huge number to stakeholders - developers; solution managers; field services; marketing and sales consultants; other designers to finally arrive at a democratic decision on things. Sometimes, we are lucky if this decision and its execution reaches the 'end-users' as intended.

However, often, the decisions get re-visited due to limitations that get discovered later on during execution. The final solution that reaches the hands of the end-users often only faintly resembles what we had all agreed on.
So, is my 'contribution' still valid?
(I believe, only that which an end user can touch and feel and use matters. The design of the solution will be judged by it's users on what they can see, touch and feel. They are not aware of all the wonderful designs I have in my drawer. Unfortunately, what they judge may have nothing to do with what I had designed.)
It is not at all gratifying to put some such work in my portfolio, when my work actually never reached the hands of an end user.
Besides, given this mode of working - what is it that I can call "mine?" (MY contribution)? Ideas came from every contributor and it was a joint /team effort. So how do I filter out 'my' contribution out of it?

A lot of sub-conscious things happen while we are working on such projects:

• key personal relationships are built (to be tapped on later)
• learn about competencies of one another (to be leveraged appropriately later)
• mindsets have been changed
• newer communication channels have been established
• market/ customer insights have been gained
• new geographic locations visited/ worked with colleagues from a different culture
• impressions made about individuals

All of these I believe are 'significant' aspects of working in a project and could be 'contributions' of an individual. My approach of 'holistic' thinking is extrement 'multi-directional' and creating a 'portfolio' that showcases just 'my' contributions is too 'uni-directional'.

Aren't tasks and words like 'breaking organizational silos;' 'holistic approach' self-explanatory enough of their inherent challenges and the resulting accomplishments?

How does one 'showcase' such things in a portfolio (other than 'words') when I rarely restrict my work to sketching a piece of UI?

Forward thinking

A larger part of the world is just not 'forward thinking.' (strong statement - i know)
Most of us are more comfortable being 'reactive' than 'pro-active.'

All this 'green' and 'sustainability' initiatives around me are targetted at 'large companiesto 'correct' their ways and become more sustainable. Fair enough.

But, on the other hand, a new product, targetted at small and medium enterprise is not on the radar for such 'sustainable' initiatives. Why not? "well, cos this space has many more, higher priority issues to deal with."

Looks like, it is an acceptable path to first do all the "important" things...spend money on making money...later...spend money to correct the means...and become more sustainable
The entire process is so very sustainable!!!! (wink! wink!)

For an idealist like me, this market space would be best to tap into and get aggressive on sustainable practices as it would be so much easier - given their size and scale of operations when they are in this segment than when they grow larger / get taken over by some giant.


Now comes my 'why not...' stream of questions.

• Why not encourage smaller/medium enterprises to work on 'sustainable' practices early on?
• Why not engage in inculcating the culture of thinking upstream in 'younger' corporates?
• Why not engage in governmental agencies to set in some relevant regulations before granting permissions and licenses for companies?  

Another one of my 'quest for utopia' topics but gets features in this blog because it is related to the work I do.

‘Dogmatism’ and User Centered Design

The ‘intention’ of every ‘process/methodology’ is to ‘enable’ something/some people to ‘achieve’ a bigger/higher goal.


However, becoming ‘dogmatic’ about any ‘process/methodology’ has the reverse effect.

Having listened to; engaged in intense discussions with practitioners of ‘User Centered Design’ particularly in ‘software’ industry, I get the feeling that the User Experience community has become too dogmatic about its processes and methodologies.

At first we in this community were struggling to make our presence felt, and now that there is a general recognition of this field, we are going overboard and preaching that User Centered Design is the ONLY way forward – to innovation; to increase customer satisfaction…answer to all our problems. Other professionals within the ‘eco-system’ of a typical software company perceive this message as telling them, “the way you do things is wrong, we will teach you how to do things right.”

With such a ‘message,’ one cannot expect the desired ‘co-operation’ and ‘collaboration’ that we seek.

Secondly, we have failed to adapt and/or evolve to changes around us. Business goals are becoming more aggressive – ‘more for less,’ but we stick to our methods and practices. “Sure, we can get end user feedback; however, it takes 4 weeks.”

As things become more and more ‘agile’ – this is simply not acceptable. We have to reflect on our methods and practices and be innovative to meet new demands.

We must remember, in most software companies, ‘UX’ has only been ‘recognized’ as a competency to have. We have not yet reached the stage where we can dictate terms (hope we don’t) and be dogmatic about our methods. It will only turn people off and reassure them that this aspect of product development is not feasible. We have to step down from our ivory towers and engage with the entire community in order to ‘change mindsets’ in an ‘organic’ and ‘sustainable’ manner.

(I have firsthand experience and reason enough to believe this slow but organic approach works)

Thirdly, we have to understand the fact that a product has various dimensions to it. These keep growing – sustainability being the latest one. Perspectives from the ‘end users’ are just ONE such dimension and is by no means the MOST IMPORTANT one. Being philanthropic about ‘end user’ needs alone will not find a place in the world of ‘business.’

Just as we in the community become activists to demand ‘respect’ for our competencies from others, we need to walk the talk too. We need to respect the perspectives and priorities from others too.

They are all equally important. We need to respect the fact that other competencies have equally valuable inputs to provide to the cycle of product development.

Collaboration, synthesis and shared understanding of the goal among multi-disciplinary team members are the KEY to successful product definition.

Fourthly, I have often heard the debate about ‘need to improve designer: developer ratio’ in order to improve the ‘user experience’ of products effectively. Sadly, ‘more people’ does not necessarily result in ‘better.’ The population within UX communities are growing progressively, however, in the field of software, there are not too many game changing products out there from a user experience perspective. One might say, “Oh because we are so few people, we have not had the chance to do so.”

In my opinion, we just have not pushed the boundaries enough.

We have not bothered to learn from our peers – product designers/ fashion designers / game designers /automobile designers … are we too egoistic to do so?

In most of the above mentioned areas of design, the ‘designer: engineer’ ration is much more imbalanced than the utopia we are striving for in software companies.

The key is, in these other areas of design, the ‘designer’ is one AMONG other disciplines and people talk to each other a lot more than we do.


We need to ‘earn’ a seat by the table and not ‘demand’ it.
It’s time we evolved.