April 8, 2016 at 12:51Why don't you need a usability specialist?
“They are looking for firefighters, they are looking for police, they are looking for recruitment agencies in our capital ...” They are looking for SKB Kontur and Pulse Tsen, Business Lines and Pavlov’s Dog, Tinkoff and Sberbank, Defa and AIC, Yandex, even Lebedev himself is constantly searching. Moreover, many people have been searching for it in the literal sense of the word for years, regularly updating the vacancy once a month and changing the test task so that the applicants do not “write off” each other. In general, the demand for UX experts has already exceeded, it seems, all conceivable indicators.
And what wonderful questions and test tasks are given at the same time: “How many football fields are there in England, how to add the word“ eternity ”from three matches, why it rains, how to weave a gold-embroidered carpet or draw an analogue of Yandex.Metrica overnight, only darn even cooler »- it is with such creative test tasks that each new applicant is tested.
When you see such confusion and throwing, which for years have not yielded sane results, you begin to understand that they are looking for either wrong or wrong. Of course, it would be absurd to doubt the professional suitability of all hiring specialists, which means they are looking for something correctly, but only not at all those who would need it.
And who is needed? This article is intended to understand this issue.
Interestingly, some desperate companies have openly stated that they have long been disappointed in this process and make an unambiguous conclusion that today there is simply not a single real UX specialist on the market.
Excuse me, but how so? There is not a single one, and this despite the fact that every second student who installs Sketch on a laptop is officially considered the world UX guru and gets the right to teach in his own courses?
So why do not you need such a usability? By “you” here is meant precisely the target audience of the Megamind portal, that is, web studios, Internet agencies, start-ups and simply private developers who oppose themselves to the customer as some kind of business and budget owner.
Outside the scope of the article, we will leave all the large companies at the level of Gazprom, Russian Railways, Aeroflot, etc. - who just need UX experts to be desperate for the state, but they are not the ones who are looking for them, they will never read this article and for a long time they will not realize the true needs of the modern market. In the meantime, we will see that all Russian usabilityists are clearly divided into several categories, and at the same time we will see how representatives of each subgroup will be able to benefit your studio, agency or other organization that outsource the provision of IT services to the population.
Type No. 1: Self-abilitity
This is always a former mediocre illustrator who realized just yesterday that if you often insert turns into your speech like “user orientation” or “end-user needs”, you can safely take three times for the same work more money.
The only problem is that the illustrator does not have a real research laboratory at hand, there is no team of subordinate sociologists, psychologists, and marketing experts, as well as time to close Photoshop one day and go outside to really find out about the problems, needs and expectations of living people. Actually, therefore, he takes all the ideas and usability concepts from exactly the same place from where he used to - from his own head. “In my opinion”, “it seems to me”, “I think” - they have long and firmly occupied in his head the very place that was originally planned for the research of those very users, for the search for the optimal solution, for the endless evolution of increasingly effective approaches to the given problem.
And here a perfectly healthy question arises for this know-it-all artist: “If you are so sure that you thoroughly understood the needs and problems of people, all trends and brands, and you can predict their reaction with guarantee, so what are you doing on your salary? Why are you hiring us? After all, you had to create your own project for a long time, which would simply tear all competitors to shreds precisely due to your in-depth and expert knowledge about people. Hell, you simply have to earn billions and hire me yourself! Why does such a bright head and unsurpassed knowledge disappear in vain for 300 bucks? ”And now no illustrator and self-ability expert has yet managed to find the answer to this test question.
Type 2: Wedding General
In order to more accurately convey the image of such an expert, I’ll just give an example of the most typical resume:
I was there, I saw it, looked there, learned English and once flew in the same plane with Buzova - these are all the real achievements of such experts. It would seem that any real business man who has earned at least one penny by his own work, who knows how much sweat and blood is worth every real result achieved, would surely ask himself: “How much money has been earned? And what is the conversion, returns, recommendations, basket weight, etc.? What did you sell besides yourself? How many old women on the street thank you every day for making life easier, easier and more convenient? ”
But we are not talking about workaholic businessmen, but about HR girls who graduated from the university exactly yesterday, sat on a warm salary and about all this: real business, money, work, life — they don’t know at all nothing. Therefore, they themselves, having just served their due time at the desk, regularly bring the same “usmates” from usability to your company. Do you need them, all those who yesterday successfully ruined one project, and today joyfully clutch at yours?
Here it is necessary to make a remark that a certain conditionally called "company of hacks" such a specialist will certainly have to go to court. They just needed a wedding general, “a giant of thought, the father of Russian usability and a person close to the emperor,” so that people would more actively make contributions.
It is only necessary in order to flush customers' brains, to raise the price tag tenfold, to give off fog and pathos, and instead of the real result, to sell many many beautiful words and promises.
But you are not like that? I am sure that all readers of this text are honest and hardworking people who are willing to pay wages, first of all, for the final result, and not for past merits, ranks and epaulettes, is not it?
Type 3: Evangelist
This is truly the ideal name for this type, which in common people is also called the “talking head”. It must be a person who does not know how to do absolutely anything: doesn’t walk on water, does not heal, doesn’t come to life on the cross and doesn’t drive merchants around the temple with a whip - but all this once in his life he saw, heard, or read , or just passed by - and now on this basis he is the author of a unique technique and teaches the lives of everyone else.
He talks beautifully, writes even better, draws slides brilliantly and falls in love with women in the human resources department, he is aware of all the trends, he is a futurist, and a marketer, and an analyst, and just the soul of the company.
I’ll say right away that I myself am fascinated by such evangelists, and therefore I affirm that it’s certainly worth hiring such a staff, but only as a coach, toastmaster, internal Teacher and Preacher of a common design culture in the company.
But only where does the convenience of the end user, quarterly profit, hours-long split-test evaluations, sleepless nights behind the Webvisor or communication in a specialized closed forum with the desired target audience. The evangelist will simply have no time to think about both your money and other people's needs, because he will have a presentation tomorrow, the day after tomorrow a symposium, then a lecture in the British, then a speech at the City Day.
So, to actively trade in your face, to promote your advanced studio and to preach a bright future for design thinking is hard work in itself, so should your evangelist be burdened with problems of optimizing the customer’s business processes or researching user scenarios? - fear God.
Type No. 4: Practice Consultant
This type of specialists, as a rule, has real cases and deep knowledge in one or two areas in which he had a chance to make a successful and deep dive earlier, having learned a thousand little things and details in which, like usually, and all the reasons for his success were covered.
But you are a web-studio of a wide profile, such a specialist is contraindicated simply because you will need to immediately pull off a dozen diverse projects: an auto news portal, an online hamster feed store, a mobile startup, a corporate workstation for evaluating the KPI of your employees - and all this today in the evening.
Yes, you need to earn, pay rent, pay employees, etc. - that is, time factors are of paramount importance to you, which means that hiring a thoughtful practitioner who will require a business trip for a month to the factory, then the results of analytics from your full-time sociologist, and in the end a secret development strategy of the customer’s company until 2020 years - you are strictly contraindicated.
You just don’t have time for all this, you just don’t have time to immerse each employee for 2-3 months in the problems, as they do in 1C, you just need to take the decision of your competitors, rearrange a couple of buttons and come up with a killer feature that no one will ever use reality, but which will take up to 90% of the total budget and time to create.
Rather, even more likely, if only not at a loss to ourselves, but the customer then let himself scoop up everything that he had time to pay in a hurry before he ran the system in test operation for a couple of months. Here, any long-term immersion in details and the expertise of users guarantees your outsourcing company a breakdown in rhythm and loss of a leading position in the market.
Here we have to make one more remark: it is clear that not all IT cluster developers are just such multi-workers, and there are still quite a few highly specialized teams that have been sawing the same project for years, gradually bringing it to mind. But here, they least of all need an expert from another field who made a site on pumps yesterday and the day before on wheels.
I know from my own experience that a real expert from Rostelecom, specially invited for a couple of hours, once gave our project ten times more real knowledge about how everything is really arranged than all the previous many-month hypotheses and attempts.
I will even highlight it boldly:For several months, a team of five experts absorbed coffee, smoothies, falafel and regular salaries - giving in the end a result that was objectively worse than all that in two hours a real specialist with many years of experience in this field advised. Alas, this is always the case.
So what to do if you need deep and practical knowledge in a certain narrow area? It is also necessary to take a real specialist from this industry, who has devoted at least 10-15 years of his life to this task. Take him as an official consultant for a while, only for the period of the project, and pay him exactly the same amount as you would pay to an unaware illustrator who you liked for your portfolio on Dribble - the same 200-300-500 thousand rubles a month.
I agree, at first glance it sounds wild, they say, why can you give thousands of euros to a simple storekeeper, for her advice and stories about life? Why, she had not heard anything about the Bauhaus and kerning, how was that? And to teach her how to draw squares in Axure herself so that she independently visualizes all her experience and knowledge?
But for that, for the very same. For these thousands of euros, you buy dozens of years of unique real experience, millions of mistakes made and mistakes made before you. Decades of immersion in details, in nuances, in the smallest little things - cost such money, believe me.
Just look at it simpler: so, suppose you received an order tomorrow to create a mobile application for all prisoners in the country. Professional ethics would require you to sit down yourself for at least 10 years for a deeper understanding of the whole system of concepts, hierarchies, unspoken rules and laws of society that exists today (and not at the time of Solzhenitsyn), but you can pay off by not paying much money in order to get all the same information in just a few months of development and launch of the project.
Now we understand that instead of hiring an experienced convict recidivist here - another fashionable bearded young man with slides here - this will guarantee your project a complete failure. But why only in this case? Is there really less subtlety and pitfalls in the interface of the train station manager, school scheduler or fighter pilot that a person who simply has a British certificate and 3 pictures in a portfolio on freelance is simply not able to know?
We summarize
So, asking just for a moment the question “Why do I really need a usability specialist?” Using this article it is very easy to decide which way you need to move on.
A “wedding general” for dusting brains with new customers, or an evangelist toastmaster for daily sermons on how “spaceships plow the Bolshoi Theater”, or maybe an illustrator of self-ability, which will only promote its own vision everywhere and how to fear any tests and fire practical tests for aptitude.
Well, or the usual cloakroom woman Baba Manya, who spent 30 years in her wardrobe for pennies, but at the same time knows in the face of everyone and everything that happens in this segment. And from whom you will buy 30 years of her past experience in the form of a two-three-month extract, which is absolutely necessary for you only at the time of development of a narrowly targeted wardrobe management information system.
Or simply understand that you no longer need an usability expert, and there will be enough high-quality Terms of Reference for development, pre-thought out and competently compiled by the customer himself.
And what wonderful questions and test tasks are given at the same time: “How many football fields are there in England, how to add the word“ eternity ”from three matches, why it rains, how to weave a gold-embroidered carpet or draw an analogue of Yandex.Metrica overnight, only darn even cooler »- it is with such creative test tasks that each new applicant is tested.
When you see such confusion and throwing, which for years have not yielded sane results, you begin to understand that they are looking for either wrong or wrong. Of course, it would be absurd to doubt the professional suitability of all hiring specialists, which means they are looking for something correctly, but only not at all those who would need it.
And who is needed? This article is intended to understand this issue.
Interestingly, some desperate companies have openly stated that they have long been disappointed in this process and make an unambiguous conclusion that today there is simply not a single real UX specialist on the market.
Excuse me, but how so? There is not a single one, and this despite the fact that every second student who installs Sketch on a laptop is officially considered the world UX guru and gets the right to teach in his own courses?
So why do not you need such a usability? By “you” here is meant precisely the target audience of the Megamind portal, that is, web studios, Internet agencies, start-ups and simply private developers who oppose themselves to the customer as some kind of business and budget owner.
Outside the scope of the article, we will leave all the large companies at the level of Gazprom, Russian Railways, Aeroflot, etc. - who just need UX experts to be desperate for the state, but they are not the ones who are looking for them, they will never read this article and for a long time they will not realize the true needs of the modern market. In the meantime, we will see that all Russian usabilityists are clearly divided into several categories, and at the same time we will see how representatives of each subgroup will be able to benefit your studio, agency or other organization that outsource the provision of IT services to the population.
Type No. 1: Self-abilitity
This is always a former mediocre illustrator who realized just yesterday that if you often insert turns into your speech like “user orientation” or “end-user needs”, you can safely take three times for the same work more money.
The only problem is that the illustrator does not have a real research laboratory at hand, there is no team of subordinate sociologists, psychologists, and marketing experts, as well as time to close Photoshop one day and go outside to really find out about the problems, needs and expectations of living people. Actually, therefore, he takes all the ideas and usability concepts from exactly the same place from where he used to - from his own head. “In my opinion”, “it seems to me”, “I think” - they have long and firmly occupied in his head the very place that was originally planned for the research of those very users, for the search for the optimal solution, for the endless evolution of increasingly effective approaches to the given problem.
And here a perfectly healthy question arises for this know-it-all artist: “If you are so sure that you thoroughly understood the needs and problems of people, all trends and brands, and you can predict their reaction with guarantee, so what are you doing on your salary? Why are you hiring us? After all, you had to create your own project for a long time, which would simply tear all competitors to shreds precisely due to your in-depth and expert knowledge about people. Hell, you simply have to earn billions and hire me yourself! Why does such a bright head and unsurpassed knowledge disappear in vain for 300 bucks? ”And now no illustrator and self-ability expert has yet managed to find the answer to this test question.
Type 2: Wedding General
In order to more accurately convey the image of such an expert, I’ll just give an example of the most typical resume:
I was there, I saw it, looked there, learned English and once flew in the same plane with Buzova - these are all the real achievements of such experts. It would seem that any real business man who has earned at least one penny by his own work, who knows how much sweat and blood is worth every real result achieved, would surely ask himself: “How much money has been earned? And what is the conversion, returns, recommendations, basket weight, etc.? What did you sell besides yourself? How many old women on the street thank you every day for making life easier, easier and more convenient? ”
But we are not talking about workaholic businessmen, but about HR girls who graduated from the university exactly yesterday, sat on a warm salary and about all this: real business, money, work, life — they don’t know at all nothing. Therefore, they themselves, having just served their due time at the desk, regularly bring the same “usmates” from usability to your company. Do you need them, all those who yesterday successfully ruined one project, and today joyfully clutch at yours?
Here it is necessary to make a remark that a certain conditionally called "company of hacks" such a specialist will certainly have to go to court. They just needed a wedding general, “a giant of thought, the father of Russian usability and a person close to the emperor,” so that people would more actively make contributions.
It is only necessary in order to flush customers' brains, to raise the price tag tenfold, to give off fog and pathos, and instead of the real result, to sell many many beautiful words and promises.
But you are not like that? I am sure that all readers of this text are honest and hardworking people who are willing to pay wages, first of all, for the final result, and not for past merits, ranks and epaulettes, is not it?
Type 3: Evangelist
This is truly the ideal name for this type, which in common people is also called the “talking head”. It must be a person who does not know how to do absolutely anything: doesn’t walk on water, does not heal, doesn’t come to life on the cross and doesn’t drive merchants around the temple with a whip - but all this once in his life he saw, heard, or read , or just passed by - and now on this basis he is the author of a unique technique and teaches the lives of everyone else.
He talks beautifully, writes even better, draws slides brilliantly and falls in love with women in the human resources department, he is aware of all the trends, he is a futurist, and a marketer, and an analyst, and just the soul of the company.
I’ll say right away that I myself am fascinated by such evangelists, and therefore I affirm that it’s certainly worth hiring such a staff, but only as a coach, toastmaster, internal Teacher and Preacher of a common design culture in the company.
But only where does the convenience of the end user, quarterly profit, hours-long split-test evaluations, sleepless nights behind the Webvisor or communication in a specialized closed forum with the desired target audience. The evangelist will simply have no time to think about both your money and other people's needs, because he will have a presentation tomorrow, the day after tomorrow a symposium, then a lecture in the British, then a speech at the City Day.
So, to actively trade in your face, to promote your advanced studio and to preach a bright future for design thinking is hard work in itself, so should your evangelist be burdened with problems of optimizing the customer’s business processes or researching user scenarios? - fear God.
Type No. 4: Practice Consultant
This type of specialists, as a rule, has real cases and deep knowledge in one or two areas in which he had a chance to make a successful and deep dive earlier, having learned a thousand little things and details in which, like usually, and all the reasons for his success were covered.
But you are a web-studio of a wide profile, such a specialist is contraindicated simply because you will need to immediately pull off a dozen diverse projects: an auto news portal, an online hamster feed store, a mobile startup, a corporate workstation for evaluating the KPI of your employees - and all this today in the evening.
Yes, you need to earn, pay rent, pay employees, etc. - that is, time factors are of paramount importance to you, which means that hiring a thoughtful practitioner who will require a business trip for a month to the factory, then the results of analytics from your full-time sociologist, and in the end a secret development strategy of the customer’s company until 2020 years - you are strictly contraindicated.
You just don’t have time for all this, you just don’t have time to immerse each employee for 2-3 months in the problems, as they do in 1C, you just need to take the decision of your competitors, rearrange a couple of buttons and come up with a killer feature that no one will ever use reality, but which will take up to 90% of the total budget and time to create.
Rather, even more likely, if only not at a loss to ourselves, but the customer then let himself scoop up everything that he had time to pay in a hurry before he ran the system in test operation for a couple of months. Here, any long-term immersion in details and the expertise of users guarantees your outsourcing company a breakdown in rhythm and loss of a leading position in the market.
Here we have to make one more remark: it is clear that not all IT cluster developers are just such multi-workers, and there are still quite a few highly specialized teams that have been sawing the same project for years, gradually bringing it to mind. But here, they least of all need an expert from another field who made a site on pumps yesterday and the day before on wheels.
I know from my own experience that a real expert from Rostelecom, specially invited for a couple of hours, once gave our project ten times more real knowledge about how everything is really arranged than all the previous many-month hypotheses and attempts.
I will even highlight it boldly:For several months, a team of five experts absorbed coffee, smoothies, falafel and regular salaries - giving in the end a result that was objectively worse than all that in two hours a real specialist with many years of experience in this field advised. Alas, this is always the case.
So what to do if you need deep and practical knowledge in a certain narrow area? It is also necessary to take a real specialist from this industry, who has devoted at least 10-15 years of his life to this task. Take him as an official consultant for a while, only for the period of the project, and pay him exactly the same amount as you would pay to an unaware illustrator who you liked for your portfolio on Dribble - the same 200-300-500 thousand rubles a month.
I agree, at first glance it sounds wild, they say, why can you give thousands of euros to a simple storekeeper, for her advice and stories about life? Why, she had not heard anything about the Bauhaus and kerning, how was that? And to teach her how to draw squares in Axure herself so that she independently visualizes all her experience and knowledge?
But for that, for the very same. For these thousands of euros, you buy dozens of years of unique real experience, millions of mistakes made and mistakes made before you. Decades of immersion in details, in nuances, in the smallest little things - cost such money, believe me.
Just look at it simpler: so, suppose you received an order tomorrow to create a mobile application for all prisoners in the country. Professional ethics would require you to sit down yourself for at least 10 years for a deeper understanding of the whole system of concepts, hierarchies, unspoken rules and laws of society that exists today (and not at the time of Solzhenitsyn), but you can pay off by not paying much money in order to get all the same information in just a few months of development and launch of the project.
Now we understand that instead of hiring an experienced convict recidivist here - another fashionable bearded young man with slides here - this will guarantee your project a complete failure. But why only in this case? Is there really less subtlety and pitfalls in the interface of the train station manager, school scheduler or fighter pilot that a person who simply has a British certificate and 3 pictures in a portfolio on freelance is simply not able to know?
We summarize
So, asking just for a moment the question “Why do I really need a usability specialist?” Using this article it is very easy to decide which way you need to move on.
A “wedding general” for dusting brains with new customers, or an evangelist toastmaster for daily sermons on how “spaceships plow the Bolshoi Theater”, or maybe an illustrator of self-ability, which will only promote its own vision everywhere and how to fear any tests and fire practical tests for aptitude.
Well, or the usual cloakroom woman Baba Manya, who spent 30 years in her wardrobe for pennies, but at the same time knows in the face of everyone and everything that happens in this segment. And from whom you will buy 30 years of her past experience in the form of a two-three-month extract, which is absolutely necessary for you only at the time of development of a narrowly targeted wardrobe management information system.
Or simply understand that you no longer need an usability expert, and there will be enough high-quality Terms of Reference for development, pre-thought out and competently compiled by the customer himself.