Sometimes when I speak at events I write up a whole script, especially if I'm trying to cover a lot - or I need to make sure I stick to a time limit. This is the script I wrote up for the event in Swansea, where my talk was entitled 'UX in a Product Design world'. Some day I'll find the slides again.
Hi, I’m Alistair, an Interaction Designer at PDR, we’re part of Cardiff Met University but mainly a commercial design consultancy - I’m not going to give loads of background to that but you can ask me about it later if you want to know more.
I've met a few people around the room and there's a wide cross section including some back end developers, video producers, branding, product and web designers. I trained as a product designer, by which I mean physical 3D products - I’ve done some other bits and pieces, freelance graphics, basic web stuff and service design too, and have now settled in my current role.
At PDR I now find myself working at the intersection of physical products, digital products and services and I want to make the humble suggestion, that this is where you can truly design a user experience. Even sitting at this point on PDR, no project is perfect, but every now and then I get to work on something which includes the development of the three areas to an extent where I genuinely feel we’re designing a whole user experience. We’re working on a project like this at the moment, Im going to do the horrible thing and say I can’t tell you anything about it, but it is equally exciting and nervewracking. I think this is because we know it's not often that such a project comes along like it.
You might already gather that I’m starting to head outside the lines of UX as it's often talked about these days, but hopefully you’ll see where I’m coming from as I go on.
Also, to be clear, I’m not here to tell anyone what to call themselves, it's quite fashionable to question definitions of different job roles, we seem to be becoming obsessed whether I should be called a UX designer, an Interaction designer, of maybe a UI designer, or maybe a product designer. I'm not doing that but I’d would suggest though, that User Experience and Interaction are wider issues than they are frequently discussed. Instead of moaning about it, I want to hopefully open your eyes and excite you about the possibilities outside of our screens.
If you read or listen to people like Don Norman, Jon Kolko, or really anyone writing about these kinds of fields about 10 years ago, it was widely accepted that interaction with screens was only a portion of our interaction with products. These days, especially within the industry - by that I mean, ‘What I see on Twitter’ - this has shifted drastically.
I think that's quite interesting- this is sort of how I see it.
Originally, because products were primarily about the physical, you put time and effort into the physical - digital was such a small part of these products, if at all. Because of this the specialisms of Front end industrial design, design engineering, and Colour Material and Finish have developed. Different people pick up specific parts of the process.
We’ve moved to a time where digital has dramatically increased in importance, and so people invest significant money and time in developing digital design capability and the understanding how people interact with screens in great detail.
You could argue that we’ve reached a point where the emphasis is primarily on the digital. The speed of growth in digital certainly gives the appearance of outstripping the design of physical products. So, in the same way as there are specialisms in product, we’re seeing these arise in digital too. At the moment I think there is uncertainty about whether the industry should look to generalists or specialists, but as the field grows, if we look at other fields, specialism has come along with the growth on the industry. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that though.
I think there’s a few reasons digital is growing so fast:
Speed:
When it comes to digital, the speed with which we're able to translate design concepts into glossy, functional things is amazing. Especially when it comes to the web, It's possible to take a design from a sketchbook to the entire internet connected world within an hour. This might be anything from a web app at a hack event, or a tumblr of a fun hashtag on Twitter.
Cost:
The cost of developing physical products is huge, but this isn’t the case with digital - you don't need 10k of tooling to have a website - and the actual thing is centralised, it's not like everyone needs their own version of your website to carry around in their pocket. You host it in one location and everyone accesses it remotely.
Piggybacking on other people's hardware:
You might say that that these days less products need to be designed because we don’t use dedicated devices anymore - the obvious example is phones, I wonder what are all the designers of stills cameras, video cameras and music players doing these days? Now, If you’re designing an app, you don’t design the product it runs on, you use existing hardware, be it Apple, Samsung, HTC etc.
The combination of these things means that the industry is growing at an exponential rate, new people getting involved, which is great. As a newer industry it's easy to get carried away with the exciting future, without looking at potentially useful lessons from other industries, so here are my suggestions from my limited experience.