Thanks all great points and I think I was trying to match the tone of the parent comment, sorry if it comes off sounding arrogant or gate-keepy that was never my intention.
The elitism you sensed was just me struggling to articulate my frustration of going through the rigorous academic route, yet in this industry there is a plague of graphic/10-week UX bootcamp designers who are polishing portfolios and getting hired above junior levels and thus dragging down the field of UX design when they make deleterious design decisions in a user interface and are either uninterested in or too inexperienced to run proper usability testing or UX research methods to evaluate unintended/harmful designs.
“The market seems to want generalists, because they seem cost effective, and because most operations are too small to support a team of specialists,” says Steve Krug, a veteran usability specialist and author of the influential book Don’t Make Me Think. “But I think it’s pretty hard to be really good at more than one of the many subspecialties. It’s a conundrum.”
The skillset to understanding user mental models and behavior is a key component of being a great UX designer and allows you to illuminate where harms exist in design and that can be mitigated when design matches user mental models on a user population representative level. Having this skillset and design practice would have easily caught the issue presented in the OP regarding confusing button schemes in the Tesla V11 UI update.
The fact that it was pushed out to Tesla drivers without nuanced user testing by UX professionals (UX researchers if we break it down into specialization), says a lot about the design team at Tesla, or lack thereof. All this has nothing to do with the developers who are simply taking these designs and implementing them, who are typically overworked and focused on delivering features driven by success of measured KPIs.
> The elitism you sensed was just me struggling to articulate my frustration of going through the rigorous academic route, yet in this industry there is a plague of graphic/10-week UX bootcamp designers who are polishing portfolios and getting hired above junior levels and thus dragging down the field of UX design when they make deleterious design decisions in a user interface and are either uninterested in or too inexperienced to run proper usability testing or UX research methods to evaluate unintended/harmful designs.
You know, i can fully understand why someone would be frustrated with these things! Yet, at the same time, getting a degree didn't prepare me for the realities of working in the industry either - that took further years of work. Perhaps it's a bit like someone expecting to learn C++ in 2 months whereas in reality getting to really know it might take anywhere from 2 years to 2 decades (depending on what you actually want to do, be it write your own compiler, write a physics/game engine, or some low level piece of software that should be bulletproof, vs just a package or two for your own needs).
The first step at getting good at something is to be bad at it - personally, i really appreciated being able to work with microservices in an academical setting and learning about the many ways it can go wrong, but even now, in my day job i am still learning a lot, albeit it takes a lot of care to limit the fallout of mistakes. In this industry, new technologies and methods just never seem to run out, so it's a constant process of learning and churn, sometimes without good reason.
I do agree that figuring out someone's seniority and what they should be entrusted with is difficult and oftentimes nebulous, but perhaps that's just because of the rapid pace of this industry and how much of a "Wild West" it is at the moment.
> “The market seems to want generalists, because they seem cost effective, and because most operations are too small to support a team of specialists,” says Steve Krug, a veteran usability specialist and author of the influential book Don’t Make Me Think. “But I think it’s pretty hard to be really good at more than one of the many subspecialties. It’s a conundrum.”
With this, i might have to concede. I still think that having inter-disciplinary engineers who are competent at everything even if not brilliant at any one particular thing is probably a good idea, but there can definitely be a good argument to make about having specialists. Yet, the financial realities of our world will often force our hand in one particular direction or another.
> The fact that it was pushed out to Tesla drivers without nuanced user testing by UX professionals (UX researchers if we break it down into specialization), says a lot about the design team at Tesla, or lack thereof. All this has nothing to do with the developers who are simply taking these designs and implementing them, who are typically overworked and focused on delivering features driven by success of measured KPIs.
Partially agreed! There are usually "known unknowns" (e.g. "we don't know how this piece of code will interact with that other piece, we should probably set up automated tests to catch them diverging over time") and "unknown unknowns" (e.g. "we probably should have been aware of the UX impact of these changes, which totally escaped our consideration"). Maybe people knew about the UX impact, but didn't want to speak up or be contrarian in that particular environment. Maybe they knew, but just didn't care much, since no one would go to jail for shipping bad UX (at least in the automotive industry in the current year, it would be a different situation in aerospace industry). Or maybe no one even considered it for a variety of factors.
I guess we'll never know, but i agree that it's probably telling of what the priorities were, perhaps being a reflection of the greater trends in our industry. I am yet to see the likes of ADA (https://www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/chap5toolkit.htm) compliance ever be mentioned as a concern in any of the commercial projects that i've worked on, lest it be explicitly demanded in the design spec. But talking about which front end framework or component library to use? Endless bike shedding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
Great discussion! I think we can both agree that in the end, when we are dealing with people's lives at stake, there should be more scrutiny of both design and code across the board. Hopefully in the future there is a consortium of experts from each respective Government body meeting with tech industry e.g. Department of Transportation meeting with tech industry experts from the likes of ACM Special Interest Groups[1], to create a regulatory framework for releasing safe and responsible tech innovations into transportation and other emerging spaces.
The elitism you sensed was just me struggling to articulate my frustration of going through the rigorous academic route, yet in this industry there is a plague of graphic/10-week UX bootcamp designers who are polishing portfolios and getting hired above junior levels and thus dragging down the field of UX design when they make deleterious design decisions in a user interface and are either uninterested in or too inexperienced to run proper usability testing or UX research methods to evaluate unintended/harmful designs.
“The market seems to want generalists, because they seem cost effective, and because most operations are too small to support a team of specialists,” says Steve Krug, a veteran usability specialist and author of the influential book Don’t Make Me Think. “But I think it’s pretty hard to be really good at more than one of the many subspecialties. It’s a conundrum.”
The skillset to understanding user mental models and behavior is a key component of being a great UX designer and allows you to illuminate where harms exist in design and that can be mitigated when design matches user mental models on a user population representative level. Having this skillset and design practice would have easily caught the issue presented in the OP regarding confusing button schemes in the Tesla V11 UI update.
The fact that it was pushed out to Tesla drivers without nuanced user testing by UX professionals (UX researchers if we break it down into specialization), says a lot about the design team at Tesla, or lack thereof. All this has nothing to do with the developers who are simply taking these designs and implementing them, who are typically overworked and focused on delivering features driven by success of measured KPIs.