Despite having their roots in Silicon Valley, UX designers are a rare breed inside traditional tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter. In some cases they are so rare that other designers claim UX design doesn’t even exist. As a result I thought it would be interesting to explore where this attitude has come from, to see if it can hint at where our industry is heading.
Divergent/convergent thinking is a fundamental part of the design process, and something most experienced practitioners are familiar with. Essentially the design process is broken down into two phases; a phase where you open up the problem space and explore as many different directions as possible; and a phase where you start analysing all the possible solutions you’ve come up with, in order to settle on the perfect answer.
The England of my youth was a desert for good food. The difference between a "good" restaurant and an average one lay mostly in the surroundings; that and the use of slightly more expensive ingredients. But white cotton table cloths and snooty service weren't enough to hide the mediocre food that lay therein. That’s why I used to relish my regular trips overseas, to eat at restaurants where the owners actually cared about what they were producing.
The organising principles of agile are based around the needs of developers. So processes and systems are broken down into units of functionality and fed to development teams along a pipeline of delivery.
If I lived and worked in San Fransisco, the current "death of the agency" debate may have slightly more poignancy than it does in the UK. San Francisco and the wider Bay Area is undoubtedly living through a huge tech bubble, and has been for some time. The slew of new tech businesses quickly hoovered up the local talent, before starting to ship them in from around the country and the rest of the world. This includes dozens of Brits I know who have left these shores for a better life in California.
Every few weeks I see a discussion emerge that tries to dismiss the need for specialists in our industry, or refute their existence entirely. It usually goes along the lines of "I'm a [insert discipline] and I do my own [insert activity] so [insert specialism] is unnecessary or doesn't exist".