First off let me apologise for the laboured metaphor I’m about to inflict on you, but I thought it could be entertaining to try and describe the web design industry using a medium I’m sure you’re all familiar with—Dungeons & Dragons. However I should point out that I’m no D&D expert, having played it last when I was 13. So please don’t leave comments to the line of “you got that all wrong as those character classes were changed in AD&D 2nd Edition, Unearthed Arcana.” or I’ll pull out my +2 broadsword and go Berserker on your ass.

In the world of Dungeons & Dragons, characters could have a variety of professions such as Fighter, Thief or Magic-User. These professions were loosely related to a characters natural abilities. So if you were intelligent you’d be well suited to becoming a magic-user, whereas if you were dexterous, becoming a thief was a good option.

In the real world, your natural interests and abilities will also dictate the career path you follow to some extent. It’s doubtful that you’ll have a natural ability in a particular discipline, but your innate attributes will make it easier for you to pursue certain careers than others. So if your a logical thinker, development is a natural avenue, while if you’re empathetic, people management is a good career. If you have both, you get to choose one or the other or maybe even combine those skills and become a scrum master.

In the world of Dungeons & Dragons, Fighters were the bedrock of any quest. For a new party, you wouldn’t get very far without a fighter or two to guard your back, while a group of fighters could easily operate on their own, without the assistance of other classes. The same is true on the web. Programmers are the fighters of the web. It’s entirely possible to start an online business with a couple of programmers and you”d be successful for a while at least.

Thieves are sharp, agile and good with technology. The hackers of the fantasy world. In a modern campaign you’d want at least one thief along to pick locks, disable traps and run interference. With their penchant to form guilds (The Guild of Accessible Web Designers anyone), Thieves were front end developers of the D&D multiverse.

Thieves and Fighters could make pretty good headway on their own, but throw an illusionist into the mix and you’ve got a powerful combination. Illusionists are learned in the arcane sigils (typography to you and me) and had the power to dazzle people with their magical incantations. Relatively useless straight out of college, they only came into their own at higher experience levels, where they become formidable allies. Illusionists benefit from being around higher-level magic users as they can swap spells and learn faster. Similarly design is typically a learned profession but novice designers struggle on their own. So they need lots of support from senior practitioners. However when designers start to become seniors themselves, they are amazingly powerful, and a good creative director is worth their weight in sharpies (£5,500 if you assume the average weight of a man is 62kg).

Clerics are the wise healers of the pack. Their job is to look after the spiritual and physical well being of the team. A little like a good project manager when you think about it.

Lastly you have the Rangers. Rangers require higher than average attribute scores across a range of different areas, so tend to be less common. Like Wizards and Thieves they are also a learned class, having to study things like tracking and animal lore. In fact, higher level Rangers even have the ability to cast certain spells or defuse traps. As such they are a bit of a hybrid. Rangers are great in open country and typically work alone. However they’re not much use in towns. So Rangers aren’t needed on every quest and are a bit of a specialism. To me, Rangers are the UX Designers of the D&D world. Highly trained specialists, of use in a subset of specific projects.

Characters in Dungeons & Dragons progress by gaining experience points which relate to the complexity of the quests they undertake and the level of the foes they defeat. If they do something themselves all that learning goes to them. However if they are part of a team the experience is typically distributed amongst everybody. So the more quests you undertake, and the bigger those quests are, the more you’ll progress in your careers. If you play infrequently and only accept easy challenges it can take you ages to move forward, while if you work with a small but experienced team on tricky adventures you’ll grow much faster.

The same is true with the web. Learning comes through experience and the more projects you undertake the better you’ll get. If you accept simple projects with little risk you’ll have an easy life but you won’t push yourself. It’s only by taking risks and working on projects that are slightly outside your comfort zone will you learn new skills and push your career forward apace.

With some character classes, new skills become available at higher levels. You could argue the same is true on the web. There are certain skills you would typically only pick up at higher experience levels and are unlikely to be present in junior practitioners. As such, your level of experience really does impact what you can and cant contribute to a project.

Now here’s where things start to get interesting. In D&D it’s possible for characters to follow multiple classes. However if you do this you have to split your experience across the different classes making progress much slower. In new of mid level teams, this isn’t so much of a problem. So a 2nd level Thief-Ilusionist can hold their own with a 4th level fighter. But a 6th level Theif-Illusionist would probably be outclassed by a 12th level Ranger.

This is also true in the real world. It’s totally possible to do both design and development, and in the early stages one will actually aid the other. But as you undertake one project after another you’ll find that it’ll take you longer to become an expert in either. So it’s great if you’re an all rounder in a team of all rounders, but becomes difficult to carve out a meaningful niche amongst a group of experts.

There is one caveat here and that’s that Bard character. Bards were a really weird class and therefore not something many people played. They had to have really high ability scores across a range of attributes. They also had to start out as a Fighter, then duel class as a Fighter-Thief and then finally duel class as a druid. It’s only after going through this long and laborious process that they could become a 1st level Druid and start all over again.

I think this is the position a lot of UX practitioners have found themselves in. Rather than going through the higher education track, they have worked their way thought the design and development professions, never settling on either. Instead they will get to a medium level of mastery before getting bored or distracted by something else. As such, there is a subtle but important difference between a designer and developer who does a bit of UX (think multi-class character) and a self trained UX practitioner (think a multi class character who took a specific set of steps in order to change class to a Druid).

And that’s it. My slightly laboured, incredibly nerdy description of the web design industry, as explained through the medium of D&D.

You have the initiative. What’s your next move going to be?

I was really disappointed to see a recent post from somebody I admire and respect defend the validity of the new UX Developer job title that has been cropping up of late. As well as being misleading, the title, UX Developer has implications that are damaging to the field of User Experience and will hasten the current devaluation of the term.

Despite what many newcomers to the industry may think, User Experience Design is a well-defined specialism as distinct from visual or interface design. The practice of user experience design is a specific field of study with its own books, conferences, membership organisations and college courses. User experience designers therefore have a distinct set of skills and practices that form the core of their profession.

That being said, user experience designers don’t own these practices any more than developers own the ability to code up wireframes. So it’s right that designers and developers look to understand more about user experience as it is for UX designers to want to understand more about the technology that drives their products or the designs that bring them to life. This is one of the aspects of being a professional; the desire to develop your core skills while understanding where your domain overlaps with others.

When I look at new job titles my first question is to ask what new or specific activities form the core of that discipline and make it distinct from other fields. Is this indeed a brand new field of practice or simply a catchy name for a set of composite skills? So when I first heard the term UX Developer I was intrigued. What new skills or techniques are these practitioners using that are specific to the technological side of the equation, and is there anything here I can use?

With eager anticipation I grilled every self styled UX Developer I met to find out what new skills or techniques they had developed. However the more people I asked the more disillusioned I became. Rather than being a new discipline, it became clear that UX Developers were simply developers interested in UX. So developers who wanted to get involved with the initial research, attend (or even set up) usability tests, build HTML/CSS prototypes, consider user needs when coding up pages and put pressure on designers and managers when these needs fail to be address.

I’ve been working with people like this for years. They’re called “good developers.”
There seems as little need for the title UX Developer as there is for the term UX Product Manager, UX Programmer or UX Database Engineer. Similarly, if you’re happy for Developers that do some UX activities to invent a new title, what should a UX person who does a bit of front end or back end development call himself or herself? How about front end UX designer, or creative UX technologist? That has a nice ring about it and isn’t confusing at all.

The sad truth is that UX has stopped referring to the quality attribute of a product or a set of specific skills and activities, and has become a value judgement. For some reason people think that the term UX means “better”, “more valuable” or “more important”. So by adding UX to your business or job title it somehow sets you apart as a better designer, a better developer or a better agency. That, or at least one that can charge more money. This is obviously nonsense and disrespectful to all the talented designers and developers out there. So when I see people adding the term UX to an otherwise perfectly descriptive job title, it makes me view them with a healthy dose of scepticism.

[Andy Budd spent 5 years as a designer and front end developer before transitioning to a dedicated UX designer; a role that he has had for over 8 years. During this transition period he would never have dreamed of calling himself a UX Developer. He hopes other developers feel the same way.]

I first came across the term Minimum Viable Product when I dropped into a talk by Eric Reis at the Web 2.0 Expo in New Year a few year’s back. As a company that has always worked on variable scope projects, defining a MVP seemed like a great way of managing client expectations. Rather than clients worrying whether your team would deliver something useful, you’d work together to define the smallest thing you could release and it still be a success. You would then guarantee that the client would meet their core business needs, and everything else you manage to deliver in that time was a bonus.

MVP also appeared to be a great way to manage the inevitable project scope creep. When new requests appeared you could discuss whether they were part of the minimum viable product. If they were, you would update your planing and budget accordingly. If they weren’t, you would add them to a suitable point in your backlog and see whether you got round to implementing them or not.

In the continuous world of the start-up, this approach works well. Your MVP is just the starting point, and once that’s deployed you’ll continue to add new features and iterate as needed. MVP is about breaking something down to a manageable size and getting it to market quickly.

In the more periodic world of traditional businesses, this typically isn’t the case. Rather than working on a product continuously, things get broken down into bursts of activity known as “projects”. With numerous different products, it’s not uncommon for there to be long gaps of time between work on a single product, sometimes several years. As such, in a traditional business setting it’s all too common for the MVP to become the P. At least for a significant length of time.

So in the traditional business setting, when a feature gets pushed out of the MVP and into large backlog or future release, we’re actually witnessing a slight of hand. We’re saying that we realise the importance of this feature to the project and commit to implementing it at some stage in the future, while at the same time secretly knowing that it’ll probably never get built. Sometimes this process isn’t a conscious thing, but all too often it is. All too often I see the backlogs, MVPs and future iterations used as a deliberate attempt to ditch functionality that the design or development team don’t like, don’t want or feel is going to take too much of their time. It’s a way of saying no without actually having to say no.

In the start-up environment, it’s not as important to get the M and the V part of MVP right, as you’ll probably start adding new features as soon as it’s deployed. However in a world where MVP=P, getting the M and the V wrong can be disastrous.

As user experience designers we talk to users, talk to the business stakeholders, review competitors and build up models of behaviour in order to determine what a system needs to do to be a success. However it’s really difficult to pin down exactly why some people will use one product and not another. For new products it often comes down to functionality. However in more mature markets, quality and user experience are key. As such, it’s really difficult to put your finger on what minimum viable means, but it’s typically not something than can be easily expressed on a story card or as part of an acceptance test.

In the rush to deliver a minimum viable set of features (the threshold elements in the Kano model) we often ignore the elements that make the product really great (the exciters and delighters in the Kano model). As quality gets stripped back in preference for functionality, we slowly see our products become ever more minimal and ever less viable. It’s very rarely one thing that does it. Instead MVP often turns into death by a thousand paper cuts.

It takes a dedicated team with a strong vision to avoid this. Sadly in agency land, it’s all to common for the business interests of the agency or the personal interests of the team to come before the shared interests of the product.

I’m not necessarily proposing a better way. Just that we need to be conscious of the subtle effects our chosen methodology and business environment can have on a product.

Have you every been in the situation where the client keeps requesting tweaks to the design or changes in functionality? As you sit moving boxes around the page, the budget is slowly draining away and you’re no longer sure whether the project can be completed on target? In these situations what do you do? Some designers will push back on the client, claiming that these changes were never in the agreed brief and that they had only budgeted for 2 or 3 rounds of design. Others will simply swallow the cost in the hope that the changes are almost finished and in the knowledge that they’ll never find themselves in this situation again. Well not until the next time.

If this is a familiar situation to you, it’s because you’re a designer. This isn’t an unusual experience. Instead it happens to almost everybody to some degree. It’s just the nature of the game; and it’s completely your fault.

Clients come to us with little idea how much a website should cost. Often this is the first website they have ever commissioned, or at least the first in several years. So they assemble a list of agencies, put out a loose brief, and wait for the estimates to come in. If the client has done their homework and selected designers of similar quality and experience, the variation in prices isn’t that great. However most shortlists are assembled in a more scatter gun approach and the resulting estimates can range from the high thousands to the low hundreds of thousands. With little knowledge to base their decisions on, how do they choose?

As humans we don’t carry around a constant notion of value in our heads. Especially not for something we’re inexperienced at purchasing. Instead we take input from our surroundings and make a decision from the range of options availible. So if you’re an inexperienced wine drinker, you walk into the shop, take a look at the different shelves and map your purchasing decisions on to the range of prices available, some perceived notion of quality (often the design of the bottle) and the occasion you’re purchasing for (do I want a cheap wine to take to a party, a mid priced wine a a gift for a friend or an expensive one for a special occasion).

Market prices are dictated by the availability of suitable alternatives. So when an average client is faced with a group of undifferentiated agencies, they will inevitably decide based on price. I’m sorry to say that this is your fault as a designer. You’ve failed to differentiation yourself from the other suppliers and demonstrate why you are worth a price premium. You’ve failed to show that you have a stronger focus on quality, that you have a better team or that your process will help ensure that they’ll get the solution they want. When this happens you’re faced with two alternatives. You can choose to compete on price, or you can walk away.

Sadly far too many designers choose to compete on price. We enjoy what we do so much, we’ll do it for free in our spare time. So when somebody says they are willing to pay us—even if it’s less than what we wanted—we feel flattered and eagerly accept the challenge. The desire to create is so strong in most of us, it clouds our judgement.

Budget conscious clients have a knack of sensing this desperation and a skill at holding designers to ransom. I’ve met far too many designers who have taken projects at or below cost and signed all their rights away just to have a big name brand in their portfolio. Music clients are especially adept at this, but they’re not the only ones. These clients see designers as a mere commodity—there will always be hungrier and more desperate designer around the corner for them to use.

The problem is, when a professional relationship begins with a compromise, it’s very difficult to gain your power back. And to create good design solutions you really need to be in the driving seat, with the client acting as navigator. One compromise on price leads to another compromise on quality and very soon you find yourself a supplier rather than a partner, having to acquiesce to every demand.

We think that budget conscious clients are the norm, but they’re really not. Most clients want to balance between cost and value, while the best ones are willing to pay a price premium for quality. However if you’re unable to differentiate yourself from the competition, price becomes the only deciding factor.

As designers we think that it’s the prospective client that holds the cards. After all, they are the ones with the money and therefore the ability to choose who to work with. This is exacerbated by the pitch, where clients surround themselves by 5 or 6 agencies all competing against each other for the favour of the client. But here’s the dirty little secret in our industry. It’s not the client that has the power, it’s you, the designer.

Clients have the money, but they don’t have the expertise. Design is becoming one of the only business differentiators left, which is why they are coming to you. You, the designer, have something special, something rare and something in demand. The truth is, there are plenty of prospective clients out there, but few good designers to satisfy them. So it’s up to you to drive the engagement, to set your prices and to chose who you work with.

If a client’s budget is too small for you to do a good job, don’t compromise on quality and drop your prices. If you do that you’ll always be stuck in a self imposed price ghetto. Instead, explain to the client why their budget isn’t sufficient and encourage them to reconsider. If you focus on quality while everybody else in the pitch is focussing on price, you’ve successfully differentiated yourself. You may not be able to do this in one leap, but if you push every client to be a little braver, each project you do will be that much better than the last.

If your prospective client isn’t willing to budge on price, it’s a good indication that they won’t be flexible in other areas. In this situation it’s best to walk away. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself working on a project where client expectations exceed what’s possible and everybody loses. These projects become toxic. They sap your energy and eat into your profitability, while delivering little value to the client. Leave these projects for some other poor sap to take on. You’re better than this.

It’s hard leaving money on the table, especially if you don’t know where your next project is coming from. It takes character to turn down a big project from a respected brand, even when you know it’s the right thing to do. However it’s usually worth it. The number of times I’ve seen agencies take on a mediocre project only to have to turn down their perfect client a week later because they are already committed is astonishing. Turning down a project which is under budget closes one door, but you’ve no idea how many other doors this will open in the future.

Some times you have to take what’s offered in order to pay the bills. I just believe that this should be done as a last resort rather than your opening gambit. So let’s stop holding ourselves, our clients and our industry back because we’re so desperate to win work that we’ll drop our prices and compromise on quality. Instead, let’s endeavour to make each successive project we take on better than the last, and in doing so raise the professional standing of our industry and the quality of the web as a whole.

It’s amazing how good industrial design can turn something mundane into a highly desirable product. I wonder what other dull, household objects would benefit from similar treatment?

I first came across the concept of the Lean Start-up® three years ago while speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in New York. I’d finished my duties and there was little else of interest on the schedule so I dropped into a panel discussion about start-ups.

One of the panellists—a chap called Eric Reis—explained how he’d been involved in two start-ups. One had been a catastrophic failure while the other a moderate success. As Eric began to recount his story I found myself nodding along with recognition and agreement.

His previous start-up had taken too long to build and by the time it was ready they’d almost run out of money. Furthermore, once they launched, the shear volume of features obscured the products true value and made it almost impossible to use.

Eric then talked about his new start-up and the realisation that he needed to understand his users and validate the product early on. Eric discussed fast iterations and his concept of a Minimum Viable Product—the smallest thing you could create to prove the business had legs. This reminded me of 37 Signals’ call to “create half a product, not a half assed product”. It also reminded me of what my friends as Doppler had done by tying together existing services to prove their social network for regular travellers could work.

As I sat listening to Eric I thought to myself, “here’s a guy who really gets user experience design” and thought it was great to see somebody from the start-up world echo what we’ve been saying in the design world for years.

Jump forward 18 months and Eric Reis has become the poster boy for the Lean Start-up® movement, lauded by business magazines like Fast Company and the Harvard Business Review. While I was grateful that these ideas were gaining wider circulation, something started bugging me. Wasn’t the Lean Start-up® simply a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes? A combination of User Experience Design and Agile development rebranded and repackaged for a new market.

Also, what the hell was that ® about?

As somebody who believes in the free sharing of information, the idea of claiming ownership of a concept like Lean Start-up® seems really weird; like Jeffrey Zeldman registering “Web Standards” or Ethan Marcotte registering “Responsive Design”. The only reason for doing this, I surmised, was a desire to own the concept and thereby profit from it. That’s absolutely fine, I thought to myself, but I didn’t want to promote something that claimed to be a movement but was clearly one person’s brand. So I decided to keep a respectful distance from the Lean Start-up® community and carry on about my business. That is until the term Lean UX started to appear on my RADAR.

If Lean Start-up® felt like the Emperors New Clothes, then Lean UX felt doubly so.

Proponents of Lean UX talked about guerrilla research, low-fidelity sketching and rapid prototyping like they were new concepts. They discussed the need for close integration with developers and the idea of “design as facilitation” like the agile movement never happened. It was as if something was being excavated and held aloft as new; something scholars had known about for years. It also felt to me like a cynical attempt by a few people to jump on a bandwagon, stake a claim to a new brand name and make money by peddling the latest hip religion. And it annoyed me.

I attempted to ignore the Lean UX “brand” in the hope that it would fizzle out, but sadly it didn’t. Instead it seemed to grow stronger. In fact it got to the point where I started to question my own opinions and see whether I’d somehow missed some vital piece of the jigsaw. Truth be told, I think I had. I just wasn’t the piece of the jigsaw I was looking for.

You see, I think I developed an immediate dislike of the Lean UX brand because it’s something I felt the UX industry was already doing. However the more I looked at traditional UX agencies the more I realised that this wasn’t the case. Instead of doing quick bursts of user research they were running month long engagements; rather than doing café testing on half a dozen people they were lab testing a hundred, and rather then sketching interfaces out on paper and prototyping them in HTML/CSS, they were generating reams and reams of formal documentation.

Over the last few weeks a grim realisation has started to dawn on me and it’s something I’m not especially happy about. I think the reason I hate the Lean UX label so much is because Clearleft is a Lean UX company. That’s why Lean UX has always felt superfluous to me; because it doesn’t describe anything new, interesting or novel; just business as usual.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be comfortable using the term Lean UX. Especially as it implies all other forms of UX are bloated and full of fat. Also, by its nature Lean UX isn’t a different flavour of UX, just a subset. As such, some projects are fine with a guerrilla approach while others require more formality. So flexibility is key.

Anyway, if feels good to get that off my chest. I guess like so many things in life the first step to recovery is realising you have a problem. So here goes…

Hello, my name is Andy and I run a company that does Lean UX.