Ethos
In the middle of the first decade of the century I was paid to spend a week in Second Life.
For those who do not recognise the name Second Life was an attempt to create a virtual world in which people, and businesses, would exist at first alongside and then instead of reality. I was paid to assess Second Life for the advertising potential. My report was not glowing, noting only niche interest, and no fulcrum shift in progress.
This story stands in for the multiple times in my career where I've encountered something new, something shiny, and after due diligence, something eventually forgotten.
VRML? ICQ? Google Glass? Quibi? Telescope? Data Is The New Oil? Perhaps we might add Metaverse and NFT to that list? None of these things are useless, or without merit, or not something we can incorporate into our models of user behaviour, but none of them have changed the World in the way World Wide Web did. As McLuhan said, the medium is the message.
Big Data is a part of research, but research is now as it always was and best done by talking to real people and asking what they want. New technology might change our ability to draft out more sophisticated wireframes, but the purpose is always to show real people what they will be getting, and see if it is what they want.
Which is my ethos. That UX is about real people, and understanding real people, and listening to them when they tell you what they want. Then it is about designing and building something which does that well and talking to them about if you've met their needs, and how you can improve on that.
While there are a lot of ways that that process has evolved over the years the heart of UX has not changed, and that is what I do.