This is the conundrum that Matt Simmons noticed during a period of being a frequent flier. His blog post details brilliantly just much airlines hammer it into your heads to not smoke … and then the confounding ashtray in the bathroom (with a no smoking sticker on it, no less!)

So why would they do such a thing? It turns out that having an ashtray in the bathroom an aviation requirement, based on human behaviour. After a 1973 flight crashed with 123 fatalities due to an improperly discarded cigarette, airline authorities realised the need to ensure that anyone wanting a cigarette would dispose of it safely. Even now. So if you do smoke in a plane, you’ll probably get booted off and fined, but at least you should be able to get rid of it without endangering the safety of the plane.

Simmons suggests that this is all about affordances (and if you don’t know much about this, you should check out Don Norman’s Design of Everyday things for more), and behaviour (he recommends reading Nudge if you haven’t already). This story reminds me of  the behaviour encouraged by the  infamous Schiphol airport fly urinals as well.

Read Simmons’ post for the full explanation. [EDIT: there's also an, uh, lively discussion about the topic over on Gizmodo.]

That said, there is one less place where you’ll see that sign. Notice how the one above your seat never goes off? Some modern planes now use that space to tell you when you can have your electronic devices on and off.

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Image NC-CC by roychung1993

In his recent post “Lean UX is Dead. Long Live Lean UX.” Greg Laugero noted, “Some tendencies within Lean UX treat deliverables and documentation as the equivalent of clerical work, or worse as “waste.” To me, systems with any strategic value to our organizations require you to think through complex user stories. This will require some thought experiments, many of which need to be written down and shared with others who are not part of the small, co-located team.” Let me be very clear: Lean UX is not “anti-deliverables.” It is a refocusing of UX efforts away from the documentation for which we’ve become known inside and outside organizations. It moves towards validating product hypotheses that relieve the organization of wasteful practices that include designing and building products and features customers don’t actually want. We achieve this by creating interactive experiences – the ultimate manifestation of our work – earlier and more quickly. Inevitably, as Laugero notes, we will have to create artifacts along the way. The focus should still be to design the best experience while minimizing the amount of time designing the wrong ones — not to design documentation that describes these design hypotheses.

We all face many challenges to successful team collaboration including working with distributed teams. Testing and communication to distributed teams requires different types of communication. However by facilitating these communications through regularly cadenced, cross-functional conversations, the depth and complexity of the documentation you’ll need to create will be diminished. Subsequently, any rework of that documentation will also be diminished. This is the waste that is being removed.

That lesson? Learn to be a teammate. The first step in learning to be a great teammate is to earn your teams’ mutual respect and acceptance. To do that you need to being willing to swallow your pride, be the bigger person, and admit when something is and is not your responsibility. Sure, you can have opinions about anything, but to be honest, the marketing numbers or the coding, or other non-UX design focused things are not your responsibility. Might you be a better marketing representative that the person on your team? Sure. But you aren’t the marketing person responsible for this project, you are the UX designer. Respect the other person’s role. Offer up suggestions to them in a kind way, in a way that you want people to offer up design suggestions to you, and then… leave it alone. You are not the saving grace of this company, you are a part of the company team. By recognizing and taking control of your responsibilities and by letting your other team members do them same, you are showing that you have faith in your teammates, the overall team and the team philosophy.

The outcomes of taking this first step towards being a great teammate are mutual respect and acceptance on both parts (yours and your team’s). Having these makes it a lot easier for people to trust you as an expert, as well as, to respect your thoughts and comments. This, of course, gives you a greater ability to sell UX and your UX ideas. By letting your guard down you are inviting your teammates to do the same. And once they do, they will start to see you as a valued part of the team and will then be a lot more likely to help you to curate the best solutions possible for your users.

Print and digital: even now, commonalities

My background is print. However, this still has a lot of use in terms of the web (for Western audiences, at least). For example, research on users of digital text draws parallels between reading in print and reading on digital devices. In the West, we read top-left to right, and then down the left-hand side of the page. In print, the most important items are put in the upper-left corner, and we in the West read web pages in the same way. We have also been culturally conditioned to look for captions under images, and to respond to color more than to black-and-white.

Other people I know who’ve come from this route

My friend Bill Dorman made the switch from print to digital. Bill and I founded a literary magazine that lasted a year before he moved cities and began to work for one of the first magazines to review web sites. After that magazine folded, he transitioned into writing on-line copy, then SEO copy, and finally IA, taxonomy, and hierarchy. Bill now works freelance in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

What Did I Do

I began my writing career at my college newspaper (The Alestle at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville). The editors there taught me to write. After that, I published freelance for a few years, even starting my own magazine for year. After that, I moved into the business side of print with sales, sales management, and market research. Later, I worked in digital publishing with a national call center. I updated content both for a customer care intranet and for the company’s first Internet Web site.

Why I Did It

I always wrote strong prose and began writing for the college newspaper. Moving into print was a natural progression. Later, I moved into the business side of print. After I taught public school for a time, I explored places that I could find a new niche and I think that UX is a high growth market that is currently underserved, at least by UX experts.

How I moved into UX

I spend some time teaching public school and when I explored ways to move back into the private sector, I realized that UX was a growth industry. Also, many in UX have technology backgrounds, even though the research was suggesting that users reacted to web pages in ways similar to print pages. I am currently working as a freelance UX consultant with small businesses and not-for-profits that do not have a large budget for full-fledged UX projects.

What I Bring to UX from It

With my marketing background, my first thought is the customer—called the user in UX. One thing that surprises me in the UX culture is that the focus on the user is still being sold as the most important thing. In fact, I recently read a forum post that said to move into UX, one has to shift perspective to the user. This suggests to me that the focus on the user is not completely ingrained in UX culture. No one in marketing would say that to move into marketing one has to begin to focus on the customer: that’s given. I bring to UX design teams a complete focus on the customer/user. (I have to admit, I prefer the word customer.)

Another thing that I bring is a first-step approach to content over design. Much of the current writing on UX focuses on shifting the UX design first to the concept of the content and lastly to design of the look. Print publishing always begins with concept and then content first. The design is always focused on making the content more accessible. Good design surrounds the content, not the other way around.

What I’ve had to Work On

UX if filled with jargon that I’ve had to learn. There is also a large amount of technical aspects, mostly programs that are great tools for UX teams. Also, though many in the UX world say that UX is not design, many UX professionals have design or other technical backgrounds, and most UX job postings require technical backgrounds. My experience is in writing and marketing, not coding. I do have some HTML skills but not enough to sell my skills as an HTML expert. Given all of this, I have had to go back and learn some technical skills so that I can at least interact with designers and others on the backend of UX design.

Tips for Those Making the Move

A quick survey of UX job posting suggests that employers are still looking for designers. For a marketer, especially a print marketer, you’ll have to show that you bring concepts and processes to the table that others simply don’t have. Also, you will have to bone up on the technical aspects, especially the tools that are most related to marketing (A/B testing, eye tracking, mouse tracking, etc.) Don’t try to compete with designers unless you already have lots of design experience.

 For a marketer, especially a print marketer, you’ll have to show that you bring concepts and processes to the table that others simply don’t have.

What I’ve Found about Moving into UX

Most UX is outsourced unless it’s a very large company  (and even then maybe not). Even in the outsourced industry, many UX consulting companies outsource those projects to freelancers. So, a corporation may hire UX consultants for a site redesign, and then UX Consultants may contract with a wireframe expert, a testing expert, and so on. Be prepared to hustle for work.

Also, UX is a generic term for anyone who works on design. I’ve found that a number of designers will claim UX as a proficiency, even though a short conversation shows that he or she relies solely on individual judgment. The market right now equates page design with UX. So when you begin talking about thinking through ideas, testing, taking time, and so on, many in the UX field and many UX customers may not understand or even think that a marketing-based process is important.

Image NC-CC by martinaphotography

What caught my attention was how the writer reflected upon the social impact and relevance Sassoon had made through design:

Instead of styles that took an hour to blow dry, women [and] men could have stylish functional, yet beautifully designed haircuts that didn’t require half your morning to style. He did this by putting the emphasis on the process and technique of cutting hair, clean sectioning, precise geometric shapes, fastidious attention to detail and an awareness of shape, texture, tone and form that was unheard of before then.

This also came at the time of the “sexual revolution” of the mid 60′s when women started to aspire to something more that cooking and cleaning, they wanted the same freedoms that men had enjoyed, careers, independence and their own lives, laborious and bloated hairstyles had no room here.

In some ways, it didn’t matter what “specific” technique or process Sassoon used to create the look. It was the idea behind the work that made the difference. Or to put it in an analogy closer to home, it doesn’t matter if one device has a touch screen or not – it’s what one chose to do with it to change people’s lives.

It also points out how society has a way of proclaiming their latent needs and desires of the time (in this case, women wanting greater autonomy), and how observing and understanding society as a whole has a direct relationship with design. We would do well to look beyond just the digital world.

Your organization invents something no one else does (as well, yet). The rest of the process goes like this: I have this tail. I put it on the donkey. I spend money testing and fixing the tail to get it closer to what the donkey wants it to do. I also spend money on marketing and sales people to convince the donkey I have what it needs.

Why do we waste money like this? It’s very easy to get caught up in the excitement of innovation. Most of us hear about something that can be done and adore taking it one step farther. Example: technology is able to discern between voices speaking? Why not make a mobile app that can measure the give-and-take in a conversation? Never mind the fact that the app would be an awkward contribution to any conversation, even if used covertly. The initial perception to seeing the results probably be “Hey, cool gadget!” or “Do you think I talk too much!?!?” Ironically, it would be a great application to use for ourselves as we practice running these deep conversations with possible customers using as few words as possible. But who were the designers empathizing with when they designed the talk-o-meter?

Often we receive a command from someone like, “figure out a cool way to mash up these two huge databases about London that’s visually interesting.” I encourage you to push back on the command a little and perfect it into something involving your empathy for people. “Figure out a visually interesting way for people who are moving to London to explore which neighborhood to live in.” This empathic perspective might require more than just the original mega-databases specified in the original request. In addition to housing prices and commute times, you will want to allow folks to choose crime history, traffic flow, noise and air pollution sources, special tax zones, income levels, school scores, restaurant reviews and ages, tree counts, architectural types, or frequency of art galleries or non-franchise cafés— whatever is important to them. All this information does exist as data. Now each person can identify their own unique considerations when exploring neighborhoods in a city. Now you are designing with a person as your primary concern, rather than letting data or technology limit your thinking.

In old school philosophical style, I will begin with my proximate enemy. My proximate enemy is the concept of “feedback loops.” Patina’d with a touch of the de riguer, “feedback loops” are often referenced as an accounting of social media’s virality. These loops describe the mechanism of social media participation. Feedback loops exist, in other domains, it is true. And feedback loops are a common feature of systems. But social media, and social tools in particular, are social systems, not mechanical, biological, climactic, or other operational systems. Social systems are reproduced not by system processes, but by meaningful exchanges among participants: in short, people.

Feedback loops

Feedback is an amplifying recycling of a source, say, a Fender Stratocaster in the hands of one Mr. Hendrix. It owes to the distance between two elements: a pickup, and a speaker. Close the distance between the two, and the signal tone amplifies itself, resulting in distorted feedback. Love it, but not an explanation of social media use, because it is acoustic.

Feedback loops fail as an explanation of social media engagement because they are a reproduction or amplification of the same: a single source. Social systems are reproduced on the basis of communication. And communication is dialogical. That is, it involves two or more participants in meaningful exchange. The common “feedback” features of social — likes, retweets, follows, comments, and so on — depend on the actions of individual users. The secret sauce, then, is in facilitating and amplifying not a single signal, but the coupling of signal. For one signal, a response. The response of an other (user).

Social action is awareness

Social engagement is built on social action. Social action is action of users aware that there are others. Not all social action solicits direct responses and replies, but all social action has in it the appeal to a response. In face to face situations, a look of acknowledgement suffices much of the time. But in mediated social contexts, there is no unilateral means of securing acknowledgment. Social media are built on separation, absence, and deferral. So the intrinsic appeal of social action — a feature, if you will, so fundamental to human social interaction that it must be accepted as a given — always remains. It is residue, ambiguous and unresolved, and it is the first key ingredient of our special sauce.

Social action is dead unless taken up by somebody. All of culture, all of language, and all of speech is “designed,” if you will, to make the improbable more probable. That is, to make communication more probable. Familiarity of meanings, use of a structured form of expression, norms and etiquette and innumerable practices all conspire to make it more likely that we are able to communicate with each other. So then, the challenge for any social tool is to make communication more probable.

Given that in mediated social systems, users sit at small backlit boxes reaching through the wire to share their thoughts and activities, the “design” of the application through which they engage necessarily structures and organizes their experience. But all of our socio technical systems harken back to original forms. Social tools are still part telephone. Part telegraph. Part radio. Part television.

You wait for a reply. The phone rings. It calls you — you are being called to answer. You place a phone call. The phone rings — a voice calls out: “It’s for you.” This is the system coupling of social action: action – response. And it is what becomes more challenging in social tool design, for unlike the phone, social tools are designed for asynchronous use.

Asynchronicity is distance. Distance not in space, but in time. Nearness, closeness, and immediacy are the human experience equivalents of space. This distance is inserted into social action and comes to separate action from response. The appeal — our first ingredient — is now at work. For it takes the form of waiting: urgent, distracted, compulsive, patient, or forgetful waiting.

Communication is a type of action system that by its nature is open-ended and ongoing. As it is how we maintain our relationships, it serves the purpose of allowing us to always resume interaction. And provides means by which to handle the gaps in between. Social tools, then, are built on action systems that are open-ended. They have no ending or conclusion, and are literally never finished. (Which is why it’s not really stories, but narration, which best describes social sharing activity.)

Communication wants to be probable

Given that communication wants to be probable, and given that mediation makes communication improbable, social tools use features and action designs that increase probabilities of communication. The Like, the retweet, the vote, and even the follow are system elements that serve as proxy communication. They are indirect symbolic expressions and actions. Same for all, but meaning something unique to each user each and every time they are used. These symbolic social actions in other words enable communication by other means: technical means, symbolic means, and within a social system that has ways of presenting these social actions to others.

Because these social systems are networked, any action taken that is captured and represented by technical form (like button click > “username liked this”) is displayed to others (a user’s friends), according to context (feed, page, etc). This leaves us with something very unique. A form or medium of communication quite different from the directly coupled ancestor of the phone, or the broadcast ancestor of radio and television. This unique property is distribution: propagation of a social action throughout the medium, if you will, according to “sharing,” display, privacy, and other design rules baked into the social system’s logic (just think Facebook timeline).

We saw earlier that the residual feature of social action is the appeal; the unspoken, if you will, of all that is said. Now this is complexified. For mediated symbolic action has a functional dualism: it appeals, and it propagates (distribution). Here we have the fundamental amplification of social media: a social action taken is visible (heard) in many “places.” It is a kind of action dislocated from space and place, and instead reproduced by system logic and rules in “contexts” “elsewhere.”

Social action is split

Now given that all social action seeks acknowledgement (directly or indirectly), mediated social action is split in two. The appeal is split from the action itself. For each additional context in which a social action is represented (say, a Like that appears in many friends’ feeds, on pages, in notifications, on phones, etc), its author’s intent is lost. For it’s a given that the author has not intended to “like” in front of each of his or her friends, to be seen in their feeds, or notified on their phones. A new form of communication is thus born — and all users must develop skills and competencies with which to interpret and handle what their friends mean, as well as what’s going on.

The dual function of the symbolic social action, an appeal split from propagation of the action’s represented form, complicates communication further. For there is but one possibility for communication as a kind of social action, and it is the response. But responses no longer mean what they did, when communication is unmediated and direct (as between people talking face to face). Furthermore, any response is itself a new social action, itself now with an appeal, and itself now propagated to contexts elsewhere.

Distribution

And so we have the second ingredient of our secret sauce: distribution. We are far from the feedback loop. For we have neither the closure nor the recycling that make up feedback. Rather, we have a much less efficient system of communication. What might be considered noise. And not just the noise “generated” by the propagation of social actions, but the meta noise, if you will, of all the lost intentional signals.

Which is where design comes in. Design of social must answer to the needs and interests of social action, not just the needs and interests of individual users. But social architecture has a growing portfolio of plans and blueprints at its disposal. And accompanied with an understanding of the dynamics of social activities, a sense for how to lay out social designs for increasing complexity over time.

Closure, still, is the first order of business in social interaction design. Closure makes communication more probable. In so doing, it decreases noise (noise being a form of redundancy). And so the social interaction designer asks not “what feedback loops do we build into this?” but “how do we facilitate social closure through other users?”

Closure is closeness

We mentioned earlier that distance in human experience is closeness. Closure is closeness. Jimi’s guitar feedback was closeness — proximity to the amp. But as speed of feedback. And in mediated systems, because they are technologies, closeness is a factor of speed (or time, as duration). The notification increases speed. The realtime feed increases speed. Speed reduces waiting time, and accelerates the process of communication.

Temporality

And so we have our third ingredient: temporality. All human affairs take time. Time not measured in minutes or hours, but felt and experienced: as tedious, dragging, plodding, or urgent, impatient, distracted time. Time has stretches, and spans; it has rhythms, cycles, and repetitions. It becomes habit, and pastime. And is lost in distraction, ephemera, and its own passage. Time, as we know it, has past and future. As past, it is recollection; as future, it is anticipation and expectation. No time, in human terms, is entirely unorganized, and all time, as we experience it, has meaning.

So the real real time revolution is not the revolution of speed alone. It is the revolution of im-mediacy. Approximation, by proxy of proximity, of immediacy in mediation. Design of socio-technical systems making increasingly running claims upon our awareness and attention. In short, getting ever closer to the presence in absence of that open state of talk which is the normal condition of everyday life.

Now many social systems designers have gone at the abstraction of social into design forms and rules. Gamification is one example of something interesting gone badly wrong at the hands of abstraction. Game mechanics, too, are oft but a shell of something compelling dislocated from the eventfulness of games and reified into codified sets of rules and recommendations. Design like this gets nowhere close to the grist because it takes its abstractions as real. Soon the map precedes the territory.

Designing for social makes use of much simpler factors. All social action appeals to others. All social action communicates. All communication is coupling. People understand the appeal of social action as acknowledgment. People understand the action of communication as response. People engage in communication through reciprocity and reciprocal action. All occurs over time, in order, and the more synchronous the experience the more present it feels.

To design social tools you need only to understand the distance at which you operate from the realities of human experience.

Last month we featured images from our travels to Austin, New York City and Dublin. This month we are looking much closer to home and finding ponderous interactions and objects within a few miles (and sometimes feet) of our front doors.

Why we can’t have nice things

My local cafe offers a small selection of lovely creams and lotions on the back of the toilet tank. I react thusly: “Ewwwww.” It’s one thing to put this in your home bathroom, or maybe in your office, where there’s a known and finite set of users. But this is a cafe along the highway. You don’t know who else has been using it, touching it, or not-washing-their-hands-and-touching-it! Or worse, I’ve seen some of the people that come in there and I do know who’s been touching it. Suffice to say that I do not want to be sharing cosmeceuticals with them! It’s the tragedy of the commons in the coffeeshop toilet.

Hooked on a feeling

The fitting rooms in Old Navy have labelled hooks to assist you in categorizing your prospective purchases. It’s what we do when trying on clothes anyway, and while it’s not a complete solution (e.g., where’s the place to put the clothes you are already wearing?), there’s something charming about how it acknowledges your process. Also, those arrows bring a real dynamic energy to a static aspect of the task. Small details, but fun.

Why use a wall?

There is not a lot of graffiti in the tiny town of Pacifica, CA where Portigal Consulting calls home. I passed this while walking from the office to the ocean one day and felt annoyed, but not because of the graffiti itself. I like to think I am an enlightened urbanite who appreciates the aesthetic enhancement, self-expression, and community color that street art affords. In this case, however, I was pissed off by the placement. See that ugly grey brick wall RIGHT BEHIND the fence? Yes, that’s the one; the unadorned, badly-in-need-of-anything-to-bring-it-to-life one. I can’t for the life of me figure out why the artist tagged the pretty white picket fence instead of the menacingly misfortunate wall.

Where’s my soul mate?

I spotted this sad scene on the sidewalk in front of our office. First I thought of the little girl who lost her shoe and would be upset, perhaps even scolded by her mom. And then I thought about the mother, recalling my own mothering moments of frustration realizing that my son or I had lost something of his along the way. And then I thought of the six word story penned by Hemingway, “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.” And then I waxed anthropomorphically about the shoe and her point of view. Yes, that little shoe looks like a lonely lady; one who has lost her sole mate.

In the field of UX it seems that mentors are lacking more than ever, and that we may never get the help we seek. What then happens if we never get the mentors that we are looking for? Do we just sit down and sulk. No, indeed we do not. What we do instead is turn towards a lesson learned from sports: Mentorship comes in many different forms, it’s up to us to recognize it.

Every sports team has a captain, right? Unfortunately, that person isn’t always the best person to lead the team to victory. This is the same in the field of UX. In fact sometimes, in UX, this person doesn’t exist at all. Thus we have two choices in order to solve this lack of mentorship. We could sit down and grumble or we could make like an established athlete and recognize our other options.

When I found myself on sports teams that did not have the mentorship I wanted, I went out and looked for it elsewhere. I observed other team members who I wanted to play like, and whenever they had a free moment, I asked them to show me a new move, or explain to me their line of thinking. I would also play sports outside of my ‘official’ teams, and there I would find mentors as well. The important thing to note is that by exposing myself to different experiences, and not rooting myself in my anger at not having a mentor, I was able to see beyond my situation and grow as a athlete. You see, mentorship is a two way street. Sports taught me this.

By applying this same methodology to my UX career, I was able to find mentors without waiting for someone to assign them. I could then extract the type of information and insight I needed to grow into the UX professional that I wanted to be. Mentorship is something I’ve learned both how to do, as well as to extract from others. By doing so, I have become the master of my own destiny, and you can too. Thus, the best UX mentor for you is out there, just maybe not all in one place. It’s up to you to find them.

It turned out that despite my brand-new degree in human-computer interaction, I wasn’t the well-rounded practitioner that I needed to be. I was far from a UX craftsman.

Luckily, I landed a job by the seat of my pants, and even more luckily, I scored a fantastic mentor. She was whip-smart, patient and supportive, and she shaped me into a bona fide strategist and user experience architect. This story ends happily for me, but I was lucky, and that’s frightening. It shouldn’t be a matter of luck whether a hardworking user experience professional can learn how to produce quality work; it should be standard and expected.

As Lane Halley puts it, “There’s often a mismatch between academic programs and the demands of employment.” We need to address this mismatch. We should comprehensively train those new to the field so we can be confident that everyone calling themselves a user experience practitioner is capable of actually doing the job.

We can do this by taking the practice of user experience seriously as a craft, and training new practitioners as craftsmen. What do other crafts value? How do other crafts grow their talent? The German Bakers’ Guild makes for an excellent case study, full of inspiring examples that we can mine and apply to our own field.

Guilds care about building foundational skills

Germans demand over 300 varieties of fresh, high-quality bread, and about 70% of master bakeries in Germany belong to their local guild. German bakers take very seriously the task of growing new talent, and incoming bakers take very seriously the task of becoming a baker. It takes quite a lot of work to become a master baker; one doesn’t decide to do it overnight. It starts with about two years as an apprentice, attending school half time and getting their hands dirty in the bakery half time. Apprentices can then become journeymen, and with another couple years of night classes, they can qualify to be a master baker. (The privilege of taking on new apprentices requires additional certifications.) All in all, this amounts to six to eight years of training.

Why do they go to all this effort to train their bakers? Isn’t bread kind of a simple thing? Nope. Baking is a craft, and master bakers care deeply about maintaining a high standard of quality for their products. This system allows guilds to determine what foundational skills are necessary, and then lay out a path for acquiring those skills. Apprentices don’t just learn how to follow bread recipes, but instead acquire a holistic, sensory understanding of math and chemistry and ratios, one so rich that they’ll know by touch whether the bread is done and by taste whether the yeast is fully fermented.

Similarly, the user experience profession has foundational skills that are essential in producing quality work, and user experience problems can’t be solved following a simple recipe. All the pretty wireframes in the world doesn’t do any good if you haven’t nailed down essentials like active listening, storytelling and problem-solving. These are some of the skills that make user experience valuable, and they should be taught and practiced at that foundational level.

What ideas can we steal from guilds today?

How can we bring these principles to UX? We could overhaul UX and institute a guild system, or more immediately, we could look for little things we can do on an individual level, as mentors and bosses, as people with something to teach.

1. Hire for potential

Someone who wants to be a baker in Germany really wants it; it’s their calling and their passion. This is a quality we should look for in UX as well. We should be picky and take on those who have the greatest potential over those who know the greatest number of software tools. We should hire someone who is curious, someone with humility, someone who genuinely wants to learn.

2. Set expectations

In a guild, everyone knows what their role is: the master, the apprentice, the guild organization itself. Similarly, user experience as a field needs to set expectations for these relationships. Mentors understand that in bringing on someone green, they’ve committed to shaping him or her into an accomplished craftsman. They understand their obligation to provide this person with learning opportunities, not just crap work.

Similarly, a good apprentice understands that they are to develop foundational skills and they won’t be rock stars right out the door. These skills (storytelling, problem-solving, listening) are not sexy skills to the untrained eye, but they are really damn important. Someone whose expectations are set accordingly will be absolutely thrilled for the opportunity to develop these skills.

3. Provide mentors

It’s essential that new craftsmen see how accomplished masters handle tricky situations, and receive personal guidance and feedback from those masters when they themselves take on challenges. While it’s not always possible in tough business environments to create a true one-to-one apprentice:mentor model, there are many ways to satisfy the core need to expose practitioners to brilliant problem-solvers and the creative solutions they employ. For example, while pairing juniors and seniors together on projects is actually fairly common, it isn’t always done well. Sometimes the pair opts to divide and conquer rather than doing things together. Alas, it’s not helpful to stick the junior in a back room to churn out wireframes while the master goes to an important strategy meeting.

It’s essential for the junior to see the senior, the master, in action. Equally important is the opportunity for dialogue about and critique of the junior’s work, so that the junior can learn and grow and improve.

4. Build a network

A guild is a network of professionals. If you’re part of a guild, you know all the other bakers in town. User experience professionals also build vast networks of personal connections, and in fact, that’s how a lot of us got our jobs. We should pay it forward and help new people get their own networks started. Don’t be the only designer this person knows, because that’ll just suck for both of you. Introduce them to people, take them out to happy hours, and be creative about helping them grow their networks so that when they leave your tutelage, they have a network to build on.

It’s worth the work

We may not be able to institute guilds overnight, but perhaps we don’t need to. There are things we can do tomorrow as individuals, and every little bit counts. Even if you don’t have much experience yourself, there’s always someone, a student perhaps, who can benefit from your knowledge and experience.

Growing people who are capable of doing all that UX requires is no trivial task, but it’s important. The good name of our profession rests on it, and our ability to work with brilliant, inspiring colleagues rests on it. If we take it upon ourselves to grow our professionals, we wind up with smart, competent people who make functional and delightful things, who are a delight to work with. That’s worth working for.

Midwest UX 2012

Want to know more about this topic? Leanna Gingras will be one of the speakers at the Midwest UX Conference in Columbus, Ohio (US).