Collaboration
There is a heroism about being a User Experience Designer which, while initially fun, has become a problem.
The essence of User Experience is a feedback loop of finding out what people want, and doing it, and the virtues of that are that it works, and the results are obvious. The vice of that is when User Experience comes onto a project which is floundering, we get to be Superman, saving the day with a well-timed focus group and an updated design pattern.
So it goes on some projects.
On other projects, projects where there is a tension between Stakeholders, and our passion for following an ideal UX Process comes into conflict with the business ideas or guarantees made between people. We might be able to improve the project with a full review and reboot of the project, or think we can, but if the team we are in is not ready for that, or they have commitments which go against it. What do we do then?
This is what experience is in the field of User Experience. The ability to navigate working with people.
User Experience virtues are important to me, but there are other virtues that I prize. Virtues like collaboration, like consensus within a team, and like representing the thoughts of colleagues, sometimes at the expense of my own.
User Experience is a conversation with colleagues, not an assertion, and the work which comes out of User Experience should capture a team's solution, even when that solution goes against what I personally would favour.
A great collaboration means representing team member's solutions with fairness and honesty, and building trust that I in UX am an approachable collaborator who will take their ideas and build them into our solutions, not someone who thinks they are the Superman of web design, waiting to fly down and save the day.
