[IxDA Discuss] Semantics of The Elements of UX

[Katie Albers]

>[Please voluntarily trim replies to include only relevant quoted material.]
>
>>  You make some great points. I think that if you (not specifically
>>  you) are on this list you are amongst the choir. But I do think half
>>  the battle for good design is a sober look at our own myopic and ego
>>  centric vision. Maybe this is not an issue for you, but for most of
>>  the designers I have worked with, that have worked for me, and
>  > particularly those coming out of school this is a challenge.

<snip>
>Thanks for the sympathy. :) But you know, I keep telling my boss when he
>thinks I'm getting overloaded that "I haven't done anything hard yet."

To paraphrase something Stephen J Gould used to say in his talks 
"When you find something to do that everyone else thinks is hard and 
you can't imagine why, because it's second nature to you, you've 
found your calling." For Robert, it seems his calling is UX (clearly 
not programming); that may be true of most of the people on this 
list. I have known many people to whom programming is the easiest 
thing on earth. Still others can do high level math in their heads. I 
knew one chemist who was known for the fact that if you brought him 
your research plan and hypothesis, he would tell you right away 
whether it was even worth pursuing  and he was invariably right -- he 
couldn't tell if something was true immediately, but if he said it 
was false, it was (of course, he had a Nobel prize in Chemistry, 
so....).

I don't think disciplines are, of themselves, hard or easy. The 
practitioner either suits or doesn't suit the needs of the discipline 
(and vice versa). The apptitude for some disciplines is less common 
than the apptitude for others.

This is not to say that there is no learning, experience, trial and 
error, apprenticeship or other start-up needed for a practitioner of 
*any* discipline. Just that the acquisition of that background and 
knowledge seems "natural" when you're in pursuit of your calling.

I don't think anyone is well served by the notion that because it is 
easy for the practitioner, the discipline itself is intrinsically 
simple, and it makes life harder for those who come after you. The 
question is not "Is it easy?", the question is "Is my work enhancing 
the value of the project I'm working on?"

Katie