Why you do not need a usability specialist?
“Firefighters are looking for, police are looking for, personnel agencies of our capital are looking for ...” Looking for SKB Kontur and Pulse Price, Business Lines and Dog Pavlova, Tinkoff and Sberbank, Defa and AIC, Yandex, permanently looking for even Lebedev himself. Moreover, many people are literally searching for years in the literal sense of the word, regularly renewing 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 tests are given: “How many football fields in England, how to fold the word“ eternity ”from three matches, why it rains, how to weave a gold-sewn carpet or draw an analogue of Yandex.Metrica, only shtop "- it is with such creative test tasks that every new applicant is tested.
')
When you see such confusion and throwing, for years not giving sane results, then you begin to understand what they are looking for, or not, or not. Of course, it would be ridiculous to doubt the professional suitability of all hiring specialists, which means that they are looking for something right, but that's not at all those who would be needed.
And who do you need? To understand this question and this article is intended.
Interestingly, some desperate companies have already frankly stated that they have long been disappointed in this process and make an unequivocal conclusion that there is simply no one true UX specialist on the market today.
Let me, but how is that? There is not one, and this is despite the fact that every second student who installed his Sketch on a laptop is officially considered to be the world’s UX guru and gets the right to teach on his own courses?
So why don't you need such a usability? By “you” here is meant precisely the target audience of the Megamind portal, that is, web studios, Internet agencies, startups and simply private developers who oppose themselves to the customer as a certain business owner and budget.
Beyond the article we will leave all large companies of the level of Gazprom, Russian Railways, Aeroflot, etc. - that just the same, UX experts are desperately needed in the state, but they are not looking for them, they will never read this article and for a long time do 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 public.
Type 1: Self-Ability
This is always the former mediocre illustrator, who literally yesterday realized that if one often inserts revolutions like “user orientation” or “end-user needs” into his speech, one can safely take three times more money for the same work.
The only problem is that the illustrator does not have a real research laboratory at hand, no team of subordinated sociologists, psychologists and marketing specialists, as well as the time to close Photoshop once and go out to find out about the problems, needs and expectations of living people. Actually, therefore, he takes all the ideas and usability concepts exactly from the same place, from where he used to come from his own head. "In my opinion", "it seems to me", "I think" - long ago they firmly occupied the very place that was originally planned for the research of those users, for finding the optimal solution, for the endless evolution of more and more effective approaches to a given the problem.
And here a completely sensible question arises for this know-all artist: “If you are so sure that you have thoroughly understood the needs and problems of people, all the trends and brands, and you can guaranteed to predict their response, so what are you doing on salary? Why are you hiring for us, because you should have created your own project for a long time, which simply rips apart all competitors precisely because of your deep and expert knowledge about people. Hell, you just have to earn billions and hire me already! Why does such a bright head and unsurpassed knowledge disappear in vain for 300 bucks of salary? ”And now not a single illustrator and self-ability expert has found the answer to this test question.
Type 2: Wedding General
To more accurately convey the image of such an expert, just give an example of the most typical summary:
I was there, I saw it, I looked in there, I 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 person who has earned at least one penny with his own work, who knows how much sweat and blood is worth every real result achieved - here you would definitely ask yourself: “How much money is 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 you and I are not talking about workaholic businessmen, but about human-personnel girls who graduated from university just yesterday, sat down on a warm salary and all this: real business, money, labor, life - they don’t know nothing. Therefore, they, who themselves have just served a fixed period of time at the desk, regularly lead you to the company of the same "villagers" from usability. Do you need them, all those who yesterday successfully ruined one project, and today happily grab yours?
There will have to make a remark that some conditionally called "company of hackers" such a specialist, of course, will have to court. They just needed only a wedding general, “a giant of thought, the father of Russian usability and a person close to the emperor,” so that people would be more active in contributing.
It is only needed in order to powder customers' brains, to tear up the price tag tenfold, to fill in fog and pathos, and instead of selling a real result to sell many many beautiful words and promises.
But you are not so? I am sure that all readers of this text are honest and hardworking people, ready to pay salaries, first of all, for the final result, and not for past services, ranks and epaulets, isn’t it?
Type 3: Evangelist
This is truly the perfect name for this type, which is also called “talking head” in common people. It must be a person who himself is not able to do absolutely nothing: he does not walk on water, does not heal, does not come to life on the cross and does not drive the merchants around the temple with his whip - but he has seen it all, heard or read , or simply passed by - and now on this basis is the author of a unique technique and teaches the lives of everyone else.
He speaks beautifully, writes even better, brilliantly draws slides and falls in love with women in the personnel department, he is aware of all the trends, he is a futurologist, a marketer, an analyst, and just the soul of the company.
I will say right away that I myself succumb to the charm of such evangelists, and therefore I assert that of course it is worthwhile to hire such a person, but only as a coach, master of ceremonies, internal Teacher and Preacher of the overall design culture in the company.
But just where is the convenience of the end user, quarterly earnings, hours-long evaluations of split tests, sleepless nights at Webvisor, or communication in the profile closed forum with the target audience sought. The evangelist will simply have no time to think about both your money and other people's needs, because he has a presentation tomorrow, the day after tomorrow a symposium, then a lecture in the British, then a speech at the City Day.
So, it is hard to trade your face, promote your advanced studio and preach a bright future of design thinking - is it hard enough in itself, why load your evangelist with the problems of optimizing customer business processes or researching user scenarios? - Fear God.
Type 4: Consultant Practitioner
This type of specialists, as a rule, has real cases and deep knowledge in one or two areas, in which he happened to make a successful and deep dive, having learned a thousand trifles and details, in which, as usual, all the reasons for it of success.
But you are a broad-based web studio, such a specialist is contraindicated simply because you will need to pull a dozen different projects at once: the portal of autonews, an online store for hamsters, a mobile startup, a corporate workstation for assessing the KPI of its employees - and all that tonight.
Yes, you need to earn, pay rent, salary to employees, etc. - that is, time factors are of paramount importance for you, which means that you should hire thoughtful practitioners who will then require a one-month business trip to the plant, then analytics results from your staff sociologist, and finally the secret development strategy of the customer’s company until 2020 years - you absolutely contraindicated.
You simply don’t have time for all of this, you’ll simply have no time to immerse each employee for 2-3 months into a problem, as they do in 1C, because you just need to take the decision of competitors, rearrange a couple of buttons and come up with a killer feature, which reality no one will ever use, but which will take up to 90% of the total budget and time to create.
Rather, more likely, just not at a loss to themselves, and the customer then let himself rake up everything that he had managed to pay in a hurry, before he had run the system in test operation for a couple of months. Here, any long-term immersion in details and user expertise guarantees your outsourcing company a beat from the rhythm and the loss of its leading position in the market.
Here we have to make another remark: it is clear that not all developers of the IT cluster are such multi-machine users, and there are still quite a few narrowly specialized teams that have been sawing the same project for years, gradually bringing it to mind. But here, too, they least need an expert from another field, who yesterday made a website for pumps, and the day before yesterday - for wheels.
I know from personal 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 things are really arranged than all previous months-long hypotheses and attempts.
I will even highlight this: For several months, a team of five experts absorbed coffee, smoothies, falafel, and regular salaries — resulting in a result that was objectively worse than anything that a real expert with many years of experience in this field advised in two hours . Alas, this is always the case.
So what to do if you need deep and practical knowledge in a certain narrow area? It is necessary and take this 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 period of time, only for the period of the project, and pay him exactly the same amount as you would have paid to an unknowing illustrator you liked for the portfolio at Dribble - the same 200-300-500 rubles thousand monthly.
I agree, at first glance it sounds crazy, they say, for what can you give thousands of euros to a simple storekeeper, for her advice and stories about life? Why, she had never heard of Bauhaus and kerning, how was that? Yes, and teach her the very drawing of squares in Axure, so she independently visualized all her experience and knowledge?
But for that, for the same. For these thousands of euros you buy dozens of years of unique real-life experience, millions of mistakes made and mistakes made before you. Decades of immersion in details, in nuances, in the smallest trifles - cost such money, believe me.
Just look at it easier: so, suppose tomorrow you would have an order to create a mobile application for all the prisoners in the country. Professional ethics would require you to sit down yourself for at least 10 years for the deepest knowledge from within the whole system of concepts, hierarchies, unspoken rules and laws of society that exists today (and not during Solzhenitsyn’s time), but you can pay for it by not paying too much money in order to get all the same information in just a few months of developing and launching a project.
Now we understand that if you hire here instead of an experienced convict-recidivist - another fashionable-bearded young man with slides - this will guarantee your project a complete failure. But why only in this case? Is there a fewer subtleties and pitfalls in the interface of a train station manager, a school timetable compiler, or a fighter pilot who a person who has a British certificate and 3 pictures in a freelancing portfolio just cannot know?
We summarize
So, having asked just for a moment the question “Why do I really need a usability specialist?” With the help of this article it is very easy to decide which way you need to go further.
A “wedding general” for brainwashing new customers, or an evangelist toast master for daily sermons on how “spaceships plow the Bolshoi Theater”, or a self-ability illustrator who will promote only his own vision everywhere and be afraid of any tests and practical checks on professional suitability.
Well, or ordinary cloakroom lady Baba, who spent 30 years in her wardrobe for pennies, but at the same time knows by sight everyone and everything that happens in this segment. And from which you will buy 30 years of her past experience in the form of a two-three-month extract, which you urgently need only at the time of developing a narrowly focused wardrobe management information system.
Or simply you will understand that you no longer need a usability expert, but there will be quite enough quality technical specifications for development, thought out in advance and competently compiled by the customer.
And what wonderful questions and tests are given: “How many football fields in England, how to fold the word“ eternity ”from three matches, why it rains, how to weave a gold-sewn carpet or draw an analogue of Yandex.Metrica, only shtop "- it is with such creative test tasks that every new applicant is tested.
')
When you see such confusion and throwing, for years not giving sane results, then you begin to understand what they are looking for, or not, or not. Of course, it would be ridiculous to doubt the professional suitability of all hiring specialists, which means that they are looking for something right, but that's not at all those who would be needed.
And who do you need? To understand this question and this article is intended.
Interestingly, some desperate companies have already frankly stated that they have long been disappointed in this process and make an unequivocal conclusion that there is simply no one true UX specialist on the market today.
Let me, but how is that? There is not one, and this is despite the fact that every second student who installed his Sketch on a laptop is officially considered to be the world’s UX guru and gets the right to teach on his own courses?
So why don't you need such a usability? By “you” here is meant precisely the target audience of the Megamind portal, that is, web studios, Internet agencies, startups and simply private developers who oppose themselves to the customer as a certain business owner and budget.
Beyond the article we will leave all large companies of the level of Gazprom, Russian Railways, Aeroflot, etc. - that just the same, UX experts are desperately needed in the state, but they are not looking for them, they will never read this article and for a long time do 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 public.
Type 1: Self-Ability
This is always the former mediocre illustrator, who literally yesterday realized that if one often inserts revolutions like “user orientation” or “end-user needs” into his speech, one can safely take three times more money for the same work.
The only problem is that the illustrator does not have a real research laboratory at hand, no team of subordinated sociologists, psychologists and marketing specialists, as well as the time to close Photoshop once and go out to find out about the problems, needs and expectations of living people. Actually, therefore, he takes all the ideas and usability concepts exactly from the same place, from where he used to come from his own head. "In my opinion", "it seems to me", "I think" - long ago they firmly occupied the very place that was originally planned for the research of those users, for finding the optimal solution, for the endless evolution of more and more effective approaches to a given the problem.
And here a completely sensible question arises for this know-all artist: “If you are so sure that you have thoroughly understood the needs and problems of people, all the trends and brands, and you can guaranteed to predict their response, so what are you doing on salary? Why are you hiring for us, because you should have created your own project for a long time, which simply rips apart all competitors precisely because of your deep and expert knowledge about people. Hell, you just have to earn billions and hire me already! Why does such a bright head and unsurpassed knowledge disappear in vain for 300 bucks of salary? ”And now not a single illustrator and self-ability expert has found the answer to this test question.
Type 2: Wedding General
To more accurately convey the image of such an expert, just give an example of the most typical summary:
I was there, I saw it, I looked in there, I 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 person who has earned at least one penny with his own work, who knows how much sweat and blood is worth every real result achieved - here you would definitely ask yourself: “How much money is 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 you and I are not talking about workaholic businessmen, but about human-personnel girls who graduated from university just yesterday, sat down on a warm salary and all this: real business, money, labor, life - they don’t know nothing. Therefore, they, who themselves have just served a fixed period of time at the desk, regularly lead you to the company of the same "villagers" from usability. Do you need them, all those who yesterday successfully ruined one project, and today happily grab yours?
There will have to make a remark that some conditionally called "company of hackers" such a specialist, of course, will have to court. They just needed only a wedding general, “a giant of thought, the father of Russian usability and a person close to the emperor,” so that people would be more active in contributing.
It is only needed in order to powder customers' brains, to tear up the price tag tenfold, to fill in fog and pathos, and instead of selling a real result to sell many many beautiful words and promises.
But you are not so? I am sure that all readers of this text are honest and hardworking people, ready to pay salaries, first of all, for the final result, and not for past services, ranks and epaulets, isn’t it?
Type 3: Evangelist
This is truly the perfect name for this type, which is also called “talking head” in common people. It must be a person who himself is not able to do absolutely nothing: he does not walk on water, does not heal, does not come to life on the cross and does not drive the merchants around the temple with his whip - but he has seen it all, heard or read , or simply passed by - and now on this basis is the author of a unique technique and teaches the lives of everyone else.
He speaks beautifully, writes even better, brilliantly draws slides and falls in love with women in the personnel department, he is aware of all the trends, he is a futurologist, a marketer, an analyst, and just the soul of the company.
I will say right away that I myself succumb to the charm of such evangelists, and therefore I assert that of course it is worthwhile to hire such a person, but only as a coach, master of ceremonies, internal Teacher and Preacher of the overall design culture in the company.
But just where is the convenience of the end user, quarterly earnings, hours-long evaluations of split tests, sleepless nights at Webvisor, or communication in the profile closed forum with the target audience sought. The evangelist will simply have no time to think about both your money and other people's needs, because he has a presentation tomorrow, the day after tomorrow a symposium, then a lecture in the British, then a speech at the City Day.
So, it is hard to trade your face, promote your advanced studio and preach a bright future of design thinking - is it hard enough in itself, why load your evangelist with the problems of optimizing customer business processes or researching user scenarios? - Fear God.
Type 4: Consultant Practitioner
This type of specialists, as a rule, has real cases and deep knowledge in one or two areas, in which he happened to make a successful and deep dive, having learned a thousand trifles and details, in which, as usual, all the reasons for it of success.
But you are a broad-based web studio, such a specialist is contraindicated simply because you will need to pull a dozen different projects at once: the portal of autonews, an online store for hamsters, a mobile startup, a corporate workstation for assessing the KPI of its employees - and all that tonight.
Yes, you need to earn, pay rent, salary to employees, etc. - that is, time factors are of paramount importance for you, which means that you should hire thoughtful practitioners who will then require a one-month business trip to the plant, then analytics results from your staff sociologist, and finally the secret development strategy of the customer’s company until 2020 years - you absolutely contraindicated.
You simply don’t have time for all of this, you’ll simply have no time to immerse each employee for 2-3 months into a problem, as they do in 1C, because you just need to take the decision of competitors, rearrange a couple of buttons and come up with a killer feature, which reality no one will ever use, but which will take up to 90% of the total budget and time to create.
Rather, more likely, just not at a loss to themselves, and the customer then let himself rake up everything that he had managed to pay in a hurry, before he had run the system in test operation for a couple of months. Here, any long-term immersion in details and user expertise guarantees your outsourcing company a beat from the rhythm and the loss of its leading position in the market.
Here we have to make another remark: it is clear that not all developers of the IT cluster are such multi-machine users, and there are still quite a few narrowly specialized teams that have been sawing the same project for years, gradually bringing it to mind. But here, too, they least need an expert from another field, who yesterday made a website for pumps, and the day before yesterday - for wheels.
I know from personal 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 things are really arranged than all previous months-long hypotheses and attempts.
I will even highlight this: For several months, a team of five experts absorbed coffee, smoothies, falafel, and regular salaries — resulting in a result that was objectively worse than anything that a real expert with many years of experience in this field advised in two hours . Alas, this is always the case.
So what to do if you need deep and practical knowledge in a certain narrow area? It is necessary and take this 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 period of time, only for the period of the project, and pay him exactly the same amount as you would have paid to an unknowing illustrator you liked for the portfolio at Dribble - the same 200-300-500 rubles thousand monthly.
I agree, at first glance it sounds crazy, they say, for what can you give thousands of euros to a simple storekeeper, for her advice and stories about life? Why, she had never heard of Bauhaus and kerning, how was that? Yes, and teach her the very drawing of squares in Axure, so she independently visualized all her experience and knowledge?
But for that, for the same. For these thousands of euros you buy dozens of years of unique real-life experience, millions of mistakes made and mistakes made before you. Decades of immersion in details, in nuances, in the smallest trifles - cost such money, believe me.
Just look at it easier: so, suppose tomorrow you would have an order to create a mobile application for all the prisoners in the country. Professional ethics would require you to sit down yourself for at least 10 years for the deepest knowledge from within the whole system of concepts, hierarchies, unspoken rules and laws of society that exists today (and not during Solzhenitsyn’s time), but you can pay for it by not paying too much money in order to get all the same information in just a few months of developing and launching a project.
Now we understand that if you hire here instead of an experienced convict-recidivist - another fashionable-bearded young man with slides - this will guarantee your project a complete failure. But why only in this case? Is there a fewer subtleties and pitfalls in the interface of a train station manager, a school timetable compiler, or a fighter pilot who a person who has a British certificate and 3 pictures in a freelancing portfolio just cannot know?
We summarize
So, having asked just for a moment the question “Why do I really need a usability specialist?” With the help of this article it is very easy to decide which way you need to go further.
A “wedding general” for brainwashing new customers, or an evangelist toast master for daily sermons on how “spaceships plow the Bolshoi Theater”, or a self-ability illustrator who will promote only his own vision everywhere and be afraid of any tests and practical checks on professional suitability.
Well, or ordinary cloakroom lady Baba, who spent 30 years in her wardrobe for pennies, but at the same time knows by sight everyone and everything that happens in this segment. And from which you will buy 30 years of her past experience in the form of a two-three-month extract, which you urgently need only at the time of developing a narrowly focused wardrobe management information system.
Or simply you will understand that you no longer need a usability expert, but there will be quite enough quality technical specifications for development, thought out in advance and competently compiled by the customer.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/299978/
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