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화요일, 9월 28, 2010

SMALL CHANGE

At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.
“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.
“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.
The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.
By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.
By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.
The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”
These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests—as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.
Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later. On the first day, the store manager notified the police chief, who immediately sent two officers to the store. On the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter and stood ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously muttering epithets such as “burr-head nigger.” A local Ku Klux Klan leader made an appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be evacuated.
The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.
What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.
This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.
So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter—David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil—was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into the dorm and talk late into the night in Blair and McNeil’s room. They would all have remembered the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little Rock in 1957. It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at Woolworth’s. They’d discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There was a pause, and McCain said, in a way that works only with people who talk late into the night with one another, “Are you guys chicken or not?” Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of coffee because he was flanked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.
The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.
This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.
In a new book called “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.
But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.
The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.
The students who joined the sit-ins across the South during the winter of 1960 described the movement as a “fever.” But the civil-rights movement was more like a military campaign than like a contagion. In the late nineteen-fifties, there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fifteen of which were formally organized by civil-rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. andCORE. Possible locations for activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had been briefed on the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which had preëxisting “movement centers”—a core of dedicated and trained activists ready to turn the “fever” into action.
The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures. At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority. At the center of the movement was the black church, which had, as Aldon D. Morris points out in his superb 1984 study, “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” a carefully demarcated division of labor, with various standing committees and disciplined groups. “Each group was task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority structures,” Morris writes. “Individuals were held accountable for their assigned duties, and important conflicts were resolved by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation.”
This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.
This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.
There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?
The Palestine Liberation Organization originated as a network, and the international-relations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones argue in a recent essay in International Security that this is why it ran into such trouble as it grew: “Structural features typical of networks—the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms—made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation and internal strife.”
In Germany in the nineteen-seventies, they go on, “the far more unified and successful left-wing terrorists tended to organize hierarchically, with professional management and clear divisions of labor. They were concentrated geographically in universities, where they could establish central leadership, trust, and camaraderie through regular, face-to-face meetings.” They seldom betrayed their comrades in arms during police interrogations. Their counterparts on the right were organized as decentralized networks, and had no such discipline. These groups were regularly infiltrated, and members, once arrested, easily gave up their comrades. Similarly, Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective.
The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy. The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott’s organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with “military precision.” By the time King came to Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor, he had a budget of a million dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on the ground, divided into operational units. The operation itself was divided into steadily escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support was maintained through consecutive mass meetings rotating from church to church around the city.
Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised. Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.
The bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody.” Shirky, who teaches at New York University, sets out to demonstrate the organizing power of the Internet, and he begins with the story of Evan, who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after she left her smart phone, an expensive Sidekick, on the back seat of a New York City taxicab. The telephone company transferred the data on Ivanna’s lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan discovered that the Sidekick was now in the hands of a teen-ager from Queens, who was using it to take photographs of herself and her friends.
When Evan e-mailed the teen-ager, Sasha, asking for the phone back, she replied that his “white ass” didn’t deserve to have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page with her picture and a description of what had happened. He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded it to their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha’s boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video on the site. The story was picked up by the news filter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created a bulletin board for his readers to share their stories, but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the police, but the police filed the report under “lost,” rather than “stolen,” which essentially closed the case. “By this point millions of readers were watching,” Shirky writes, “and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered the story.” Bowing to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassified the item as “stolen.” Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his friend’s Sidekick back.
Shirky’s argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have happened in the pre-Internet age—and he’s right. Evan could never have tracked down Sasha. The story of the Sidekick would never have been publicized. An army of people could never have been assembled to wage this fight. The police wouldn’t have bowed to the pressure of a lone person who had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The story, to Shirky, illustrates “the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause” in the Internet age.
Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.
Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all#ixzz10mupWqp8

월요일, 9월 20, 2010

Can Experience be Designed?


Do experience designers shape how users feel or do they shape with respect to how users feel? A small but important nuance. Did you catch it? No? Then let me ask you this way: Do architects design houses or do they design “inhabitant experiences?” The bullshit answer is “They design inhabitant experiences.” The pragmatic answer is: “They design houses.” The cautious answer is: Architects design houses that lead to a spectrum of experiences, some foreseen, some not. But they do not design all possible experiences one can have in a house.
Can Experience be designed?
People’s perceptions of user interfaces are too different to be pre-cogitated by a single person. Yes, I designed this site. But no, I don’t know exactly how you experience it right now (but I do have sort of an idea).

Look at the Agenda

Con men: As in every other field there are con men that fool naive clients using experience design as a slogan. Some just make empty promises, some sell empty white papers, some use the slogan to pump up meaningless speeches, some just upsell naive clients with hot air.
Bullshitters: Bullshitting is not lying, it’s fooling people into assuming whatever suits your purpose. Bullshit in UX often comes in pretty funny colors: Unconventional meetings, esoteric brain storming and irrelevant chats at preposterous prices with arm thick bullshit documentations (documentation is important, but just because it’s printed and time consuming doesn’t mean that it’s worth thousands of dollars), some invite programmers and secretaries to design user interfaces, others push management executives to engage in childish games, and some make you do really really crazy stuff like eating soap in a handstand.
Wishy washy managers: Insecure managers like everything that can be tested because it allows them to avoid responsibility. The more insecure a manager is, the more he wants to ask other people. There is nothing wrong with serious user testing, but asking husband, wife, kids, secretary, cousin or yourself is not serious user testing testing. Usability tests and user research need to be done professionals. Not everybody can be as badass as Steve Jobs, but an exceptional product needs a clear vision, solid user research, an experienced designer and a management willing to take some risks.

The Rhetoric

Salesy Emptiness: User Experience Design as a tautology: The design of a product—voluntarily or involuntarily—defines the interaction between human and artefact. Interaction leads to experience. From this point of view, all design is experience design. Used like this, the term “user experience design” doesn’t mean anything.
Amateurish Exaggeration: User Experience Design as hyperbole: User experience design somehow suggests that a designer has direct control over how each and every user experiences his product. A massive exaggeration. The more experience you have in our field the more you are aware of how much the perception of a product varies from person to person. Design defines experience, it doesn’t control it. Used like this, “experience design” is a big promise that cannot be kept.
Technical language: User Experience Design as a synecdoche: The user experience of a product doesn’t start with the first hands on contact and it doesn’t end there either. It includes all contact points: business, technology and design. Skilled designers use the term user experience design instead of web design to express that the visual design is a representative part of a much more complex construct. Used like this, user experience design is a valid term.

The Substance

So yes, some, but not all that use the term “user experience design” are charlatans. So what do serious people try to say, when they use “user experience design” instead of just “web design”?
User Experience Design is not as easy as Dreamweaver: Everybody that publishes a website can call himself a web designer. Calling yourself a user experience designer suggests that you measure your designs with a substantial audience and deal with a wide scale of user opinions on a daily basis. If not, you are not a user experience designer.
User Experience Design proficiency makes you feel small, not big: Traditionally, design is a hierarchical notion where the designer is King and the consumer pays designer taxes to get a spark of his genius. In the field of user experience design, that notion of a glorified omniscient designer has been turned upside down. The experience designer tries to get in touch with as many different users as possible.
User Experience Design doesn’t win ADC prices, it wins percentages: User experience design is the part of a design that can be measured in clicks, time on site, return on investment, return visits and in verbal feedback. User experience design is design where every opinion counts. User experience design is engineering, it doesn’t try to find the perfect solution but the best compromise.

Everybody is a user, so is everybody a user experience designer?

Since everybody is a user, everybody has an opinion on how his experience should be. And many are very eager to utter their opinions really strongly. But that doesn’t mean that every user is a designer. Asking for salt doesn’t make you a cook. The user has his own opinion, the user experience designer deals with different opinions and tries to find the best compromise. Good compromises are not in the middle, they are higher than the initial options: good compromises are synthetic (If your options are cowardly or foolhardy, the synthesis is courageous).
You don’t need to be an engineer to find out that your car doesn’t start. But you need to be an engineer to fix it. As a user experience designer you need to know how things work. When it comes to use, all opinions are equal, but when it comes to engineering, they are not. The engineer collects the feedback and finds ways to deal with it. His opinions are not just based on personal experience. Like a scientist, he tests and validate his assumptions, he develops both theory and practice—not merely relying on his own perception, but by actually testing his products with his audience. And yes, designing interactive products for over ten years makes you more experienced about what works and what doesn’t. But it should never stop you from testing it in the field. By dealing with feedback you get proficient in “experience design.”
The more response you get the more you learn and the better you can do your job in the future. It is not so hard to find feedback. What’s hard is how you deal with it: Feedback always makes complicated things more complicated. And beware! If you do everything the user wants you end up with a mad carrousel.

Theory and Practice

You cannot claim to be an expert in interaction design without practical experience. Building things and dealing with user opinions is what makes a user experience designer.Being an active facebook or Twitter user, a talented speaker, a winning sales man or a collector of UXD articles doesn’t make you an expert on user experience design. What makes you an expert in designing interfaces is building interfaces and dealing with the (often very angry) feedback. Full blooded user experience designers find pleasure in weird things like:
  • Studying user behavior on a daily basis just for fun (Analytics, SE-logs)
  • Usability tests and interviews
  • Prototype testing and optimization
  • Fixing mistakes after the launch by closely watching and evaluating angry user reactions
  • Learning about new business processes
  • Studying new technology on a daily basis
The bigger the audience the more Stoicism is needed. Relaunching T-Online ten years ago, was a baptism of fire, the new design was ripped apart by the whole German tech community. Over time you get used to relaunch protest. Looking at the numbers, iA’s designs seem to improve (and for some reason the reactions are not all that angry anymore). But in every project, there are a lot of surprising feedback to digest and learn from.

Conclusion

Yes, a lot of agencies will abuse technical language to upsell, some more bluntly, some in a more entertaining way. But you can’t slam the bullshit hammer on an entire industry that employs some of the smartest and honest men and women in tech without looking like an amateur.
Amateurs don’t want to talk to and understand clients, they don’t want to discuss things with stupid users, they want to go right in and do it live, change it and improve it in the way they deem necessary. Their strategy is: “Let’s work until it works.” Amateurs are cheap at first but they often fail to complete the job. Because, simply put: without proper preparation and user research and user opinion you can’t make things work—for the user.
  1. User experience design is not a magic method that allows you to foresee how people will feel about your design, but a design approach that is based on user feedback in different phases of the project.
  2. The more experience you have with user testing, the better you know how to deal with the usually hard to handle feedback (feedback alone won’t make a good design), and only few are born Stoics.
  3. The more experience you have handling user feedback, the more likely it is that you are going to find a higher synthetic (and not a foul) compromise in your design development.
Okay, but… how can I discern the bullshitter from the user experience designer? Look at what they say and look at what they did. Then compare. Well that’s just… like… your opinion man… Sure. Tell us what you think ontwitter.com/iA

금요일, 9월 03, 2010

엄마 같은 아빠 '대미(Dammy)'가 뜬다

'모든 공과금은 내가 낸다, 물론 인터넷 뱅킹으로. 주1회로 정한 '가정의 날'엔 무조건 칼퇴근한다. 퇴근할 때 아내에게 전화해 먹고 싶은 걸 물어본다. 큰 아이 숙제와 일기쓰기는 항상 내가 봐준다. 아내의 사소한 질문에도 성심성의껏 답한다. 무슨 일 있어도 산부인과는 같이 간다.'

최근 트위터에서 화제가 된 '둘째 가진 마누라 남편으로서 할 일' 여섯 가지다. 전시기획업체 이플러스의 오준화(37) 온라인팀장은 이걸 올리고 나서 뭇 남편들의 '공공의 적'이 됐다. 오 팀장은 당당하게 자신을 엄마 같은 아빠, '대미(dammy, daddy+mommy)'라고 소개한다.

목욕시키고 밥 해주는 아빠

"웬만한 육아용품은 아내보다 훨씬 잘 알죠. 7살짜리 아들 목욕도 항상 제 몫이에요. 요즘은 아빠용 육아용품까지 나와 있어서 활용만 잘 하면 엄마 못지않은 아빠 되는 거, 어렵지 않아요."

첫 아들이 태어났을 땐 오 팀장도 여느 남편들처럼 서툰 아빠였다. 자그마한 아기를 목욕시키려니 행여 놓칠까 불안했고, 안을 때마다 아기띠를 두르려니 영 어색했다. 안 되겠다 싶어 재질이 말랑말랑해 아이를 떨어뜨려도 크게 다치지 않게 만든 욕조와 말안장처럼 생겨 아이를 옆으로 앉혀 안을 수 있게 한 사이드케리어를 일부러 사다 썼다. 점점 아이 돌보는 일이 손에 익었다.

"육아가 세심하고 부드러운 일이라고들 생각하는데, 의외로 힘이 많이 들어요. 목욕시키고 안아주는 것도 그렇죠. 힘쓰는 일을 제가 도맡아 해서 그런지 아내가 얼른 둘째 갖고 싶다 하던데요."

오 팀장의 아내는 건축설계사다. 육아보단 부동산이나 인테리어 쪽에 관심이 더 많다. 반면 오 팀장은 육아 전시회 기획업무를 하다 보니 자연히 정보를 많이 접한다. 그는 "최근 출산이나 육아 전시회에 평일 휴가까지 내고 참가하는 아빠가 눈에 띄게 늘었다"며 "아빠의 적극적인 육아 참여 없이는 출산율을 높일 수 없을 것"이라고 말했다.

영어회화 강사로 일하는 김지훈(35)씨네 세 아들은 점심때마다 아빠가 해준 밥을 먹는다.

"수업이 주로 아침과 저녁이거든요. 낮에 집에서 아내 혼자 아이들 돌보는 걸 보니 제가 안 나설 수가 없었죠. 원래 요리를 좋아하기도 했고요."

내 친 김에 김씨는 지난달 요리학원까지 다녔다. 양식은 유학시절 레스토랑에서 아르바이트를 하며 어깨 너머로 배운 실력이 있지만 한식은 경험이 부족했기 때문이다. 요리할 때 일부러 가루반죽이나 면을 여유 있게 준비해서 아이들에게 갖고 놀게도 한다. 최근엔 아기용품업체 아가방앤컴퍼니의 육아 웹사이트에서 웹작가 활동도 했다. 밥 해주는 아빠의 생생한 요리 노하우는 초보 엄마들의 열렬한 호응을 얻었다. 김씨는 "아빠의 육아는 능력이 아니라 의지의 문제"라고 말했다.

모르면 쑥스러워 말고 배워야

대미족, 거저 되는 거 아니다. 아이를 잘 돌보려면 그만큼 배워야 한다. 오 팀장은 첫 아들이 뱃속에 있을 때부터 육아강좌를 듣고, 다른 부모들의 육아 노하우도 빼놓지 않고 꼼꼼히 챙겼다.

"태아에게는 엄마의 고음보다 아빠의 저음이 더 잘 들린다는 걸 알게 됐어요. 아내 임신 중에 출장을 가야 했는데, 2시간짜리 테이프에 제 목소리를 녹음했죠. 제가 없는 동안 들려주려고요."

전 정욱(41) 매일유업 중앙연구소 식품분석연구팀장은 올 4월 온라인강좌 '행복한 아버지학교'를 수료한 뒤부터 다른 아빠가 됐다. 아침에 아이들 깨울 때 소리 지르지 않는다. 마사지하듯 팔다리를 주물러주고 온몸을 토닥토닥 지압해준다. 초등학생 아들딸은 아빠의 부드러운 손길에 짜증 대신 웃음 띤 얼굴로 잠에서 깬다.

"교육받기 전엔 아이들 독립심 키워준다고 각자 방 침대에서 재웠어요. 일부러 친구네 집에 가서 자라고도 했죠. 하지만 점점 대화가 줄었어요. 아버지학교를 통해 아이들에게 스킨십이 얼마나 중요한지를 깨닫고 난 뒤 지금은 온 가족이 한 방에서 같이 잡니다."

전 팀장은 아버지학교를 들을 때 직장동료는 물론 아내에게조차 알리지 않았다. 쑥스러워서였다. 하지만 이젠 주변 아빠들에게 대놓고 추천까지 한다.

"아이들 눈높이에 맞춰 소통할 수 있는 방법을 찾는 게 혼자선 쉽지 않아요. 모르면 배워야죠. 평생학습이란 말도 있잖아요. 돈 많이 벌어다 주는 게 좋은 아빠인 시대는 지났으니까요."

수퍼맨도 힘들다

가정과 직장을 병행하는 여성을 '수퍼우먼'이라 부른다. 아빠라고 다를 것 없다. 대미족 역시 '수퍼맨'이어야 한다. 남성 육아휴직도 있지만 현실은 언감생심. 회사서도 가정서도 능력을 인정받을 수 있는 현실적인 방법을 찾아야 한다.

사 내에서 열혈아빠로 소문이 자자한 박준호(39) 그랜드 인터컨티넨탈호텔 객실부 대리는 주말이면 초등학생 아들딸을 데리고 캠핑을 떠난다. 틀에 박힌 도시를 벗어나 넓은 세상을 보고 느낄 수 있게 해주고 싶어서다. 캠핑장비를 구입하고 손보고, 짐을 싸고 푸는 것 모두 박 대리 몫이다.

"逞宅?힘들죠. 요즘처럼 일 많을 땐 특히요. 하지만 지금 아이들과 시간을 보내지 않으면 평생 후회할 것 같아요. 아이들이 스스로 생각하고 결정하는 나이가 되면 챙겨주고 싶어도 쉽지 않을 테니까요."

그 역시 캠핑 다니기 전엔 여느 아빠들처럼 주말에 온종일 잠에 빠져 지냈다. 우연히 참여했던 캠핑에서 아이들이 좋아하는 모습을 보곤 정신이 번쩍 들었다. 아예 캠핑동호회에도 가입했다.

밥 해주는 아빠 김지훈씨 역시 밤 늦게나 새벽부터 강의하고 나면 당연히 피곤할 때 많다. 그래서 아이들을 위해 해줄 수 있는 일로 일부러 자신이 좋아하는 요리를 택했다. 김씨는 "육아는 의무만으로는 절대 못한다"며 "아이 돌보는 걸 두려워하거나 부담스러워하는 아빠들이 많은데, 자신에게 맞는 방법을 찾으면 얼마든지 달라질 수 있다"고 조언했다.

아이 엄마 이해가 기본

한 국인터넷진흥원에 다니는 이상민(가명·40) 연구원은 육아에 관심 많은 직원들이 모여 만든 사내 동호회 '맘마스 앤 파파스' 회원이다. 회원 25명 가운데 남성은 4명이다. 기본 목적은 네트워크 확보와 정보교환. 장난감을 서로 빌려주기도 하고 학교 들어갈 때 어떻게 준비하는지, 학원은 어디가 좋은지 경험담을 나누면 많은 도움이 된다. 단지 이 뿐만은 아니다.

"직장동료 엄마들의 생각이 궁금했어요. 육아에 대해 아내와도 물론 얘기하지만 동호회에서 더 다양한 이야기를 듣거든요. 육아 때문에 회사를 그만두는 엄마들의 고민도 생생하게 들었죠."

그 만큼 아내를 더 이해하게 됐다. 대미족 자격은 아내의 고충과 심정을 헤아리는 데서 출발한다. 김홍태(30) 남양유업 홍보전략팀 대리는 누나가 둘에 대학서도 여학생이 많은 국문학과를 다녔다. 그는 "여성들과 편하게 마음을 터놓았던 환경 덕에 육아에 대한 생각이 많이 변했다"고 말했다.

"주말엔 아내에게 외출을 권해요. 걱정 말고 친구들과 식사도 하고 영화도 보라고 말이죠. 그 동안 전 10개월 된 딸과 장도 보고 서점도 가요. 우유 먹이고 기저귀 가는 거요? 기본이죠."

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