It’s often said that one should not “go meta” because things just get too abstract and unwieldy, trying to make sense of it all in your mind. But perhaps it’s exactly the right time for designers to go meta, at least as a useful respite from the daily grind of that which is becoming automated and instrumented ad nauseam — and maybe more dramatically, for our professional survival, with a reframing of authentic, substantive design value.

Algorithms, automation, instrumentation: Designing is becoming increasingly routine, predictable, and systematic for the sake of efficiency and reliability, to safely ensure high-velocity outputs. The…

While applying for a UX manager position recently, I was asked to send in my portfolio along with the usual résumé/CV. It’s a rather perfunctory request, but that’s exactly it. It’s like some bodily reflex by the hiring staff, performed dozens of time daily, without thought. I was about to conform to this request, but I paused midway in my equally perfunctory response (“Of course, I’ll send over the link…”). This time, the rebel in me awoke, questioning: “Is a portfolio truly the best way to showcase my qualifications as a design leader?” Especially for one who is experienced and…

For a designer guided by human-centered methods toward improving our finicky relationship with technology, what does it mean to have impact? What are the primary means of enabling an impact with lasting value for your team or company, as well as your customers? These are truly existential questions. Who I am and what value I provide as a human-centered designer are concepts shaped by the actions I take and their consequences. It matters to me as a professional, in terms of pride and integrity, and to my cross-functional colleagues to justify my service to them toward collective, shared goals. …

Human-computer interaction, as implied in the phrasing, involves approaches for exploring, enabling, or optimizing the relationship between people & computational systems. There is a negotiation of intent between users and systems via discrete combinations of controls with fairly constrained yet recognizable behaviors: buttons, tabs, switches, dials, text fields, icons, and so forth — both pixel- and atom-based. Such elements make up the interface, helping users accomplish some task that may occur across a range of forms or screens. Sure, it all seems quite complex, yet it’s fairly direct and tangible. To put it bluntly, there is something there to interact…

We are living in an “age of automation”, where computational intelligence guided by algorithms is woven into our daily lives. What does this mean for the human aspect of experiencing literally artificial intelligence? The challenge before us is the act of humanization itself — shaping tech interactions with humanistic qualities, like emotion, conversation, and relationship, that impart values for humane living, like trust, respect, and dignity. Doing that well requires uncovering mental models, identifying emotional drivers, and unpacking our expectations of how a smart device or predictive service should behave — and how to interact with it to achieve our…

How many of you have heard or lived this: The product manager of the app for which you’re serving as the UX lead types out a 10-page requirements doc. You read through it and realize there are some critical dependencies that correlate to the presumed user’s “day in the life” usage patterns. You wonder, Is there a way to expose them and get clarity among the team? So you excitedly suggest mapping out the user’s activities, using a team work session to get everybody to discuss it in real time. But the PM balks, saying (a bit huffily) that it’s…

Thrown into the swirling currents of digital product development — either at an agile startup or a corporation “going lean” — designers must work with a variety of commercialized concepts that typify current design practice. Yet these concepts raise doubt, if not outright suspicion, about truly cultivating design depth and forethought in that practice. Validation, metrics, sprints and spikes, filing project tickets — all with an enthusiastic “bias to action” to “move fast and break things.” Woo!

For new practitioners emerging from a steady diet of HCI theories and behavioral frameworks debated amid college discussion groups, this all may be…

It has become rather routine to present a multi-device graphic on a company’s website, complete with laptop, tablet, and phone as a unified happy family, when selling a branded product or service. This imagery ostensibly promotes cross-device flexibility, if not uniformity. Today, that’s simply a baseline expectation, given that many people use multiple screen-based (mobile) devices over the course of a day, or across many days. And yet, underneath this benign ubiquity there’s the ominous specter of interminable, inescapable notifications/alerts/messages (i.e., “attention-disrupting entities”) distracting you anywhere, anytime. …