UXPA Boston 2018: The Fracturing of the Experience Movement (Bill Gribbons)

Presented by Bill Gribbons, Bentley University

• 30 years of consulting work, 30 years of running graduate/professional programs
• Curious about how design works in the public arena
• “Very disturbed by how I was taught design”: observe practices, replicated, without understanding ideas behind
  • Graduate work, then, was in psychology
  • Pulling together what we call “UX” today
  • “At the right place at the right time”
• No matter what we’ve called it, we’re “all about people”
• What keeps you awake at night? Missing something significant in the marketplace
  • A lot of changes over the years, timing is everything in graduate programs
• Was very excited to discover there was a behavior-driven approach to design in Norman’s Psychology of Everyday Things and Jonassen’s The Technology of Text

Our journey

• 1980: “Design of everything”
• Slow thirty-year focus on narrow confines of “product design”
• 2018: Gradual reemergence of “design of everything”
  • “Once you’ve done the bathroom experience, you’ve done it all.”

We’ve arrived

• We have the respect of business leaders, developers
• We apply our principles widely
• Number of practitioners explodes

Success is not unnoticed

• Others want a piece of the action
• In some cases, want complete control of the experience

“Fracturing”

• Customer experience
• Experience of place/community
• Patient experience
• Retail experience
• Service design
• Play/game design
• Design thinking

A matter of “when”

• Momentum growing stronger over time
• Grad programs emerging… still a small number of programs
  • Leapfrogging over UX so they can place graduates more broadly
• Applicants already thinking about sub-specialization
• Consulting practices selling “experiences” (even though not using UX name)
• Human resources/hiring managers are asking about whether “UX” grad can fill a “Customer Experience” role

Reject complacency

• 1990: Society for Technological Communication… sitting on top of the world… had respect…
  • Someone then was saying: “Here comes ‘usability’… 70% of the documentation we write isn’t going to be necessary.”
• UPA was smart to move to UXPA

Lose the “User” from UX?

• Names define/shape how others view us and what we do
• Does “user” limit us from greater opportunities?
• Consider “design thinking”: would it be as successful if “user thinking”
• What about shift to “experience design”?
  • If we don’t, will someone else?
  • Seeing this in graduate programs, at consulting practices

If it’s not broke?

• Disrupt, or be disrupted!

Changing face of product design

• Interface is going away… nature of work is changing
• Product strategy, innovation is growing in importance

Are we the only ones who’ll suffer?

• Consider politics of product management
• Competition creates struggle for resources, power, control
• Will user/customer suffer?