datacloud

Half full, half empty, and broken

A week or two back, Bruce Tognazinni, in an Ask Tog article argues (correctly, I think) that people who work in the current disparate areas that might be collected under "interaction architect" lack a strong professional focus, status, and -- most importantly -- the ability to drive key decisions about how software, hardware, and users (including their contexts) all interact. Often, crucial decisions about the design of software and hardware are left up to programmers, managers, database designers, and others who, despite their clear expertise in their chosen fields, do not have knowledge about how computers actually get used (or misused).

We've been complaining bitterly, these last 25 years, that we get no respect, that we are thought of as nothing more than decorators, if we are thought of at all. Guess what? We have no one to blame but ourselves. We have sat on the sidelines, perpetually powerless, whining, instead of changing up the game so we can win.

Mark Hurst, in a post at GoodExperience, argues the exact opposite:

Somehow "user experience practitioner" doesn't roll off the tongue so easily. Hence the inevitable effort for UX-types to name what it is they do: at conferences and in newsletters, for years, I've seen the endless discussions. Should it be "usability professional"? "Information designer"? "Interaction architect"? Some other permutation?

Here's my proposal - easy to pronounce, easy to understand, just two easy words: "Who cares?"

The problem of visiblity and status in the professions is not a new one--every profession goes through a period of struggle for recognition and stability. I've written several articles on it over the last ten years -- it's still a pressing issue, though.

Some professions make it and some don't. Carolyn Marvin, some time ago, documented the ways that electrical engineering struggled for professional recognition, emerging during the rise of electrical development, innovation, and deployment. Tactics such as publicity campaigns, certification, professional journals and conferences were part of articulating numerous different strands until they came to represent "electrical engineer".

Those struggles are not always successful. Phrenologists, for example, or alchemists. And legions more whose titles and activities were not preserved.

So what's the big deal with "interaction architect" (the title Tog recommends)? Not much from one perspective. Hurst argues that to be truly effective, interface/interaction/usability people should be invisible. Hurst misses some key points though, in his effort to be witty and provocative. First, when this group argues for increased status, they're not simply being self-serving. In order to do their jobs, interaction architects (or whatever we call them) absolutely have to be visible in corporate contexts. If Hurst is in an organization where he can quietly do his job and money just rolls in, I want to work there too. In order to "facilitiate" users, interaction architects need to have an extremely high profile in the company: without that profile, key decisions end up being made by the people in marketing, in programming, in management -- groups that actually know very little about how users think, live, and communicatio. (Marketing might be close, but in the long run, marketing's main focus is on the sale. Period. Take a look at the most recent version of an MS Office app to see what marketing can do for interface design. There are some key usable innovations there, but the amount of irresponsible garbage is overwhelming.)

Or perhaps Hurst meant (but didn't actually say) that interaction architects should never be seen by users, like wizards behind curtains. Even if this were the case, that invisiblity wouldn't prevent interaction designers from having high corporate presence.

But it's not the case: There's no reason that the profession of interaction architect should be a veiled mystery to users. Indeed, think of all the other professions that we might call "facilitative": Architect (Tog's choice), physician, coach, teacher.

And it's not even the case that software and the interface should be transparent to users. There are times when the interface should disappear, but there are also lots of times when effective use requires difficulty. It'd be great if website design were so simple that all we had to do was push a button in order to create innovative, unique, attractive, and useful websites? It's a myth, at least for anything but trivial websites. Websites often need to challenge us to think about ourselves, about others. They often need to push us to learn new ways of working and living. They often need to argue with us, entering into public debate.

Becoming invisible isn't the first step toward facilitation, it's the first step toward death.

[Thanks to Bill Hart-Davidson for pointing out the Hurst article after I posted some comments and a link to Tog's piece on the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing discussion list.]

Posted by johndan at August 9, 2003 06:06 PM | TrackBack