Embedded Designers

This is the way I worked for years in the game industry — not by choice, but because nearly every game company is structured in such a way that, if they even had multiple UI designers, they chose to embed the designer in the project. Having frequently been the only UI designer at any company I worked, I was embedded within a particular project during a particular part of its lifespan and then moved to another project, sometimes with some overlapping.

Benefits

Being embedded within the team means that you’re always in the head space for that game, which is great for focus, concentration, and always feeling like you have your pulse on the current state of the game. If you’re working on it every day, you’re seeing progress and change in it every day, and that means never needing to spend time refreshing your knowledge about the current state of the game.

You’ll also develop a tighter relationship with your fellow team members. Because UI and UX are so intertwined with a game’s core design, an embedded UI/UX designer has the advantage of (hopefully) being more in tune with the project’s lead designer. You’ll be seen as a team member that works with the designers, rather than an external resource that may or may not be easy to reach.

Drawbacks

One of the drawbacks of being an embedded designer is Robinson Crusoe syndrome: a game project usually only needs one UI/UX designer, and that UI/UX designer can begin to feel very lonely professionally.

If you’re like me, you need — nay, crave — the feedback and interaction of other UI/UX designers. While you can certainly solicit feedback from other members of your team, if they’re not actual UI designers, or even designers with some kind of graphic design background, you’re not going to get the kind of feedback you need that only another UI/UX designer can give you — does the important interaction in this screen have the right visual weight? Am I being consistent in my visual language? Am I properly affording the right interactions?

UI is a subject that many people tend to think they know about, because they use interfaces in many aspects of their daily life. But as well-intentioned as feedback is from your non-UI designer teammates (and even the lead designer falls into this category), it won’t be the kind of feedback you actually need when designing UI. And again, if you’re like me, being Robinson Crusoe on UI/UX Designer Island can leave you second-guessing your decisions, with no one to help see when you might be heading into problems until it’s too late.

Centralized Teams

The external UI/UX team really only works if it’s exactly that: an actual team. Otherwise, you’re really just trying to spread one UI/UX designer very thinly across every project your company is working on, and your UI/UX designer will essentially function as a thinly-spread embedded designer for multiple teams, gaining none of the benefits of an actual embedded designer nor a centralized team, and all of their problems.

When you do have an actual team of more than one UI/UX designer, and they’re working together — literally working in the same physical location — there are some great benefits.

Benefits

First, the designers are able to feed off of each other for feedback and problem solving. Not only will a designer be able to get a second set of eyes (or third or fourth, depending on your team size) on their work, you hopefully won’t suffer from anyone reinventing the UI wheel. When UI designers are embedded on a project, they may all be working on solving very similar problems, but their lack of interaction with each other might mean that they’re missing out on sharing solutions that others may have already arrived at.

Secondly, from a management perspective, it means you may be able to be more agile about UI/UX development, using the natural ebb and flow of projects and tasks to keep UI and people running smoothly. When one project’s UI needs are light, a UI/UX designer can be working on a project that requires more time and then switch back when the current task is finished.

An additional gain from this process is that an external team, by virtue of working on all of the projects at a company, has an opportunity to enforce a standardized user experience across all of the company’s projects, if that’s an applicable goal.

Drawbacks

A centralized UI/UX team still suffers from its own unique problems. Unlike the embedded designer that sees the same project and work day in and day out, a “client services” designer may work on a project for only a brief period of time, and then switch to another, and then switck back again. They won’t be in the head space of a project for too long, and so it may take some time and effort on the part of the designer to refamiliarize herself with the current state of the game.

The gains in feedback and problem solving that come about from being a centralized team can mean that you lose that camaraderie and link with the team for the project you’re currently working on. You may not be seen as a team member that’s working in the trenches, and your communication pipeline will almost assuredly suffer without some extra work on your part. You may need to put in extra effort to maintain good lines of communication with all stakeholders on your current project.

So Which Is Better?

There’s no formula for knowing which solution is right for every company, and even within the game industry, project needs vary so widely that there’s no one answer. What style does your company use? I’d love to know how it’s working out for you, so drop me a line on Twitter or Google+.

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“I can have a cupcake whenever I want.”
“I should not have a cupcake whenever I want.”

These two statements are frequently on my mind now that I work right next door to a Cupcake Royale. I decided to indulge myself the other day and was pleased by the packaging of my singular red velvet cupcake. The label alone really compels me to want to buy and give someone a cupcake just for the sheer joy of it.

Good design: the Cupcake Royale packaging.

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UX in games: the UI Designer evolved

Ten years ago, the role of the UI designer hardly existed at most game companies. UI was something that everyone at a game company knew their game needed, but few gave much thought about until late in the project, when most of the game systems were thought to be in place. It was rarely seen as a specialized task with a full-time in-house employee working as a UI designer. And so the job usually went to an artist and engineer on the development team, who were commanded to go forth and make the game’s UI, usually under the direction of the game designer. And because UI was always the job that absolutely no one wanted to do — who would choose to do UI when there are flashier things like textures, environment art, and effects to make? — the unfortunate souls usually picked for this task were the most junior artist and the most junior engineer, who were in no position to complain.

As games became more complex, UI became more complex with it, and more effort was needed to create good UI. Game companies began employing UI artists, artists whose speciality was in creating UI. These artists usually had some kind of graphic design background, or at least had worked primarily on UI on past projects. The game designer was still the primary designer for the UI, but a dedicated UI artist could give a cohesive look to it.

It’s no coincidence that as the web evolved and required people specialized in creating usable, well-designed web sites, games also evolved and game developers began to see a similar need to make their game UI more usable. Something that was actually designed. Everything that everyone used so commonly in day to day activities by this point — the Internet, games, smart phones — was driven by user interfaces. Just as Web Designer was now a job description, UI Designer was becoming a common job posting in the game industry. Game developers were beginning to look for people specialized not just in making a UI that looked good, but who could actually create one that was well-designed.

Everything is an interface.

Then, a few years ago, the term UX design began to surface in the game industry. It was something that some people may have heard about when it came to the design of things they used every day — Apple’s User Experience Design department had certainly helped with that. The general public was beginning to grasp what good design was in the every day products they used. UX designers were already doing work outside of games, and they were doing jobs that didn’t always have to do with UI design — they were designing products like smartphones or cars, or designing experiences like theme parks or museum navigation.

But if you’d read any of the job postings that were turning up for UX Designers in the game industry, the job description was inextricably tied to UI. The role of the UI designer was now evolving into the role of the UI/UX designer: someone who not only designed the individual screens that made up a game’s user interface, but designed the entire navigational flow of the UI, and ensured consistency and usability within the UI’s interaction design, visual language, and more.

One problem, though, was that a lot of companies didn’t quite know what a UX designer actually was. They just knew they needed one. They had a vague idea that UX design might have something to do with UI design, but very often their knowledge didn’t go beyond that. I personally ran into several instances of companies approaching me and telling me that they needed my services as a UX designer, but upon talking to them it turned out that they were looking for a UI artist. (In one case, a company actually told me that the position I’d be interviewing for was “UX Artist”. This said everything about how little they really understood the concept of UX design.)

These days, some game companies get it, and they know mostly where the role of a UX designer fits into their organization. Some are still working this out.

“UX is not UI!”

Today, UX designers are working in many different industries; in some of those industries, they’re heavily responsible for the interaction and experience of a company’s customer-facing web presence. And in some other industries, they’re focused not on UI but on product design or experience design (as in theme parks or museums, mentioned earlier). In the game industry, they’re working on making the UI as easy to use and friendly as possible.

But UX is not UI, and UX designers outside of games are, right this very minute, passionately trying to convey this to the people that are looking to employ one. It’s a common misunderstanding across most industries that UX designers are glorified UI designers — that we just create wireframes of UI that get translated into final UI screens (whether that’s for a web site or a game UI).

Poster from UXIsNotUI.com.

But true UX design is far more than that, and in fact UX designer Erik Flowers has created a fantastic chart that shows exactly what UX is all about, contrasted with what people perceive it to be. The essence of the argument is that UX design has always been far more than the wireframes, the end product of UX design that most people actually see. It’s about user research, prototyping, and many other tasks that lay the foundation for the wireframes that people think make up UX design.

As a UI-designer-turned-UX-designer, this is fascinating to see and learn from, because in my industry, UX design is the legitimization of UI design. Where UX designers outside of games are saying, “UX is not UI!” UI designers in the game industry are saying, “Yes! You guys finally get that good UI is good UX!” UI design in games has, for so long, been swept under the rug as a last minute, non-important task, and the appearance of the position of UX Designer among game company job postings is a sign that game companies are finally understanding that game UI design has to be given more thought and planning than mere button art.

Game Design IS UX design. Except when it’s not.

When I’ve discussed the role I think UX design plays in the game industry, compared and contrasted with the role of UX design in other industries, I get a common reaction from my colleagues who are lead game designers on their projects: “We don’t need a UX designer, because that’s my job.”

And they’re right. Except in the cases where they’re not.

A game is different than a product like a car or a TV or a smartphone. The design of a game — its rules, its fun factor, its balance — is different than the design of the navigation into and throughout a game. UX design is User Experience design, and of course how the game itself plays is a part of the user experience; if it’s poorly balanced, for example, the player will generally have a poor user experience.

But this is different than getting a poor user experience because the UI was designed with inconsistent visual language in the interface, or with no adherence to common UI convention and affordances, or because the flow through a particular piece of UI was too complex and didn’t use good visual design and layout to help the player understand what to do and why. And there’s no reason why a game designer — someone who’s skilled at the numbers behind a game’s balance, who knows about how to make a game fun — should have any experience or skill at designing interface interactions, or have any background in graphic design that would allow them to create a well-designed interface visual language, or have a deep understanding of affordances and how they contribute to a positive user experience.

In the face of this argument, most people would say, “sure, but that’s why we hire a UI designer. Any UI designer worth their salt will be able to do this.” But you’d be surprised at how much of a unicorn a UI/UX designer, someone who has all of these skills, turns out to be. Someone who excels at the visuals of graphic design and can make beautiful user interfaces isn’t, by default, good at knowing how to do good interaction design. It’s a completely different skill set. And they’re also not necessarily skilled at distilling complex game mechanics into a complete navigational flow of many user interface screens that are easy to use, easy to understand, and feed out the right amount of information at the right pace. And then there’s prototyping and testing to ensure that the UI you think you designed well actually is designed well — it’s not a skill that’s generally taught in graphic design courses.

Conversely, someone who excels at prototyping, designing large-scale UI flows, interaction design and information architecture isn’t necessarily going to have killer visual design chops in Photoshop.

One of these is a mythical creature possessing multiple qualities that do not occur in a single animal. The other is a unicorn.

If you can find the person that’s top-notch in all of these areas, you’ve found a UX Unicorn, and you should probably insure them heavily and possibly start a captive breeding program. In fact, in researching this article, I found that the concept of a UX Unicorn is so prevalent that there’s a ton of stuff already out there about it:

- A Visual Designer with UX Chops
- UXUnicorn.com
- UXUnicorns.com
- Hiring a Designer

So we shouldn’t expect that our killer-Photoshop-visual-chops UI designer is also a top-notch UX designer, or that our UX designer is also capable of making incredible-looking interfaces that rival other games out there. And we shouldn’t expect that the game designer has an entire set of interaction design skills that are top notch, because their job is to make a great game. This is why having all three roles on a game project is a great thing.

Think of the role of the game designer and the UX designer as the characters in Top Gun. The game designer is Maverick, the hot-shot pilot that actually gets you there and shoots down the bad guys. The UX designer is Goose, the one that has the handle on the current battle situation and gives you the knowledge you need to get the primary job done. If Maverick had to do both, how would he have been able to get rid of those MiGs and win Kelly McGillis in the end? Sometimes you’ve got to rely on the expertise of people around you that are skilled in areas you aren’t in order to get the job done well.

“I feel the need…the need…for frictionless usability in my game interfaces.”

The intersection of game UX design and non-game UX design

We’re reaching a point in the game industry where the role of the UI designer is evolving into that of the UX designer, and some crossover is beginning to happen between UX designers in and out of games. But we UX designers in games still have a lot to learn from our non-game brethren: namely, user research and prototyping.

As someone who was always more of a UI designer than a UI artist, the bulk of my work always focused more on the foundation of the UI rather than the aesthetics. I planned, designed, and created the UI, but almost always worked with an actual artist to make it look good. In doing this, I was a hybrid, and became known as having a skill set that was hard to find in the game industry: I could do light coding and heavy scripting, and had enough art skills to create a UI that was often considered “plausibly shippable” — something that could likely be shown in previews and something that would be good enough to playtest and work with, but wasn’t something we planned on shipping the final product with.

Essentially, I was doing UX design without realizing it: I was designing and prototyping my UI, but sometimes working with someone who was more skilled than me who could make it actually look good. And in fact, for most of the second half of my career to date I was doing the job of both a UX and a UI designer, but having to split time between the two without being able to adequately focus on one or the other due to scheduling constraints, and the fact that the job is really that of two people.

What I also didn’t know was that I was doing prototyping at a stage that was later than it should have been, and I wasn’t doing enough pre-planning and research ahead of time. And in talking with other people in the game industry, both UI designers and non-UI designers, I was learning that few other game companies were doing extensive UI prototyping at any stage. And as I studied the field of user experience design that I was beginning to get exposed to, I learned more about prototyping and how to get the most benefit out of it.

I’ve since learned that one of the best things we game-UI-turned-UX-designers should be stealing from our non-game-industry comrades is the concept of early rough prototyping. My prototypes were often in-engine whiteboxes of UI that was extensively designed to the point of almost being fully baked, leaving little room for change without a whole lot of work.

Now that I’m focusing almost entirely on UX design, I’m discovering the value of early throw-away prototyping. Instead of building actual UI in-engine, I’m taking hand-drawn sketches or quick wireframes done in Illustrator, using apps like Field Test App or Prototype on Paper, and putting usable prototypes on my mobile device and handing them to people for testing. Some of these tests are formalized with outside testers, but much of my early testing is guerilla testing — it’s me taking my iPhone into the company kitchen and asking anyone who comes in that’s not on our project team, whether it’s the receptionist or the CEO, to do a quick one-minute usability test.

Paper Prototyping. From QuestionableMethods.com.

For some of these tasks, it’s useful to use other methods from traditional UX design, such as personas or scenarios, and user research. If I’m defining the user experience for the crafting interface of an RPG, I’ll develop two or three scenarios to guide me. These scenarios might define a player type (casual or hardcore) and a typical goal that this player type might want to accomplish in this area of the UI (the casual player might want to simply get a better weapon than the Rusty Axe they started the game with; the hardcore player might want to craft items with specific properties and resistances to fit their play style).

In other cases, I may decide to use user research to help me with a UX task. User research is another traditional UX method that seems rarely used in game UI development, but has proven to be useful in some cases. When designing the best place for a set of buttons to go that I know will need to be easily accessible on a mobile phone interface, I might do a survey with questions that will tell me how people typically hold their phone for the type of game I’m working on. Or, better yet, I might even just bring a group of people in and watch them to get even better data.

Neither scenarios and personas nor user research is something that game UI design has ever really embraced formally — if they were done, it seemed, it was usually in an ad hoc way. But they are methods that we can pull in and use now that we’re growing up as an industry and embracing the concept of UX design.

There and back again

It’s been interesting to see the field of User Experience design begin outside of games and make its way into my industry. But what’s even more interesting is seeing that influence multiply and then make its way back out. Case in point: a recruiter recently contacted me on behalf of a car company, and they explained that they were looking for a UI/UX designer, but one who had specifically worked in the game industry, to work on the Heads Up display for a new car. Fascinating! Where UX design in games will go next, I don’t know. But it’ll be fun to watch.

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This actually kind of hurt my hand to cut.

But there’s a difference between quilting and UI work…as if that wasn’t obvious. The stencil I need needs to be a little bit more precise. I drew out what I needed this weekend, got some report cover plastic that turns out to feel exactly like stencil plastic, and found my Exacto-blade. I got roughly what I wanted. And I literally mean “roughly.” I can’t quite get the cuts as straight and as narrow as I’d like.

My husband had a good idea, though, and he ordered some 1/16th size routing bits for his Dremel tool. He’s pretty sure that he can set a jig up for me that, combined with a more precise tool than my ruler and an Exacto-blade, can probably make something that’s pretty straight and exact.

When I’d described my idea for this stencil to one of my UI/UX coworkers, her eyes lit up. “Make two!” She exclaimed. She’s going to help me test out my prototype, and — just as in my UX work — I’ll make changes accordingly, and then see if this is something worth having manufactured in any decent quantity. I’m kind of excited.

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My Facebook friends list is very highly curated; although I sometimes feel bad about it, I have a fairly strict rule about only having people on my friends list that I actually know, in person, and are friends or close colleagues in some way — not just people I met at a game dev conference somewhere. The reason for this is that I use Facebook for more personal updates and targeted discussion.

My Twitter feed, on the other hand, is a much looser, less committed stream of stuff. Unlike Facebook, there’s no mutual requirement for following, so I’ll tend to follow anyone who seems remotely interesting until they prove themselves not to be, at which point I’ll remove them — because, unlike Facebook, I feel less obligation to follow someone on Twitter since it’s less personal.

The problem with both of these is that they’re at opposite ends of the stream control spectrum. Facebook has always had algorithms that are out of our control as users that dictate which posts from which friends you see, and has implemented even more controversial stream-throttling mechanisms recently with their promoted posts. You’re able to set up lists to offset this, but the effort to do so is high enough to be a bothersome user experience.

Facebook vs. Twitter: a study in stream control.

Twitter, on the other hand, has zero internal stream-throttling mechanisms. Again, like Facebook, you can set up lists to manage this, but it’s to achieve the opposite experience from Facebook — your feed can be so noisy that you need to set up lists so that you don’t miss anything.

I do some management of my Twitter feed in order to make it useful rather than too noisy. But even with some pruning and management, there are posters I enjoy following who are just really, really prolific. And while I might enjoy many of their posts, I often wish I could throttle their post stream just a little bit, depending on who the poster is.

The type of throttling that I’m envisioning already exists in Google News. Google News allows you to list your favorite news sources, but then set a slider value according to how much of that source you want to see in your news feed — “seldom” to “always”, with values like “rarely” and “occasionally” in between.

I would love to see this kind of slider implemented on the profile of people I follow, and setting it controls how many posts I see from them in a given time in my stream.

Adding a slider for post frequency to Twitter.

What would the algorithm be for determining how to throttle a user’s posts? Would it be time-based or content-based? I’m not immediately sure, but I imagine some basic UX research could be done with Twitter’s users to determine what value they get out of the posters they follow or how they “use” their stream to find the answer.

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But I’m tired of seeing people put up walls between two people who love each other and want to make the same legally-binding commitment that my husband and I made to each other. And Washington state, where I live, has a referendum on the upcoming ballot (R-74) regarding same-sex marriage.

These are all of the arguments I’ve heard against making same-sex marriage legal, and these are all of the reasons why they don’t hold any water.

“Marriage is defined as one man and one woman; homosexuals are trying to redefine marriage.”

Marriage has been getting regularly redefined since the concept of marriage has existed. And who’s been doing the redefining? Heterosexuals. In the past, marriage has been many different things. It has been used as a tool to cement the bond between two countries and help stave off war. At other times, it’s been a transaction that exchanges the child of one family for a rise in money and stature with another family. Many other times in Western culture, it was simply a way of ensuring the continuity of property, heritage, and lineage. And at other times, it’s been defined as one man and many wives.

It’s only been somewhat recently, and in Western culture specifically, that marriage has come to be understood as one man and one woman marrying because they love each other. And that last part — the part about loving each other — isn’t even part of the legal definition. People have been getting married for ages for reasons that only they care about — for love, for money, out of obligation to the family, and others (which is something else we’ll tackle further down when we address the concept of marriage becoming weaker).

The legal definition and the culturally established norm are not the same thing. We heterosexuals are the ones who’ve been “redefining” marriage throughout history, and heterosexuals are the ones seeking to redefine it again by putting a limit on it that was never there in the first place.

“Marriage is a sacred bond that mirrors the covenant with God.”

We have no laws in this country that forbid atheists, non-religious people, or non-Christians from getting married. So if you’re cool with atheists and Hindus getting married, you can’t use this reason to bar same-sex marriage. If you’re not cool with that, then you’re on another page entirely than pretty much the rest of the country.

“Marriage is for the creation and support of children and a family, and since gays can’t biologically have children, marriage doesn’t apply to them.”

The same argument applies: we have no laws in this country that prevent couples who don’t intend to have children from getting married. And we have no laws that prevent infertile couples from getting married. So unless you intend to add this restriction to any laws regarding who can and cannot get married, this argument has absolutely no validity.

And if you want to bring up the adoption of children at this juncture, that’s really just a separate debate; just as there are straight couples who are allowed to marry but don’t intend to have children, there are gay couples who’d like to marry who don’t intend to raise children.

“The concept of marriage will become weaker if we just let anyone do it.”

Some of this goes back to the argument that marriage is getting redefined. Again, we’ve been redefining marriage since marriage existed. And yet…marriage still exists. Sure, society seems to be crumbling down around us, but

(a) Every generation thinks that society as we know it is coming to an end;

(b) people have always blamed this destruction on the changing mores of society, which includes the state of marriage in our culture.

Oddly enough, people seem to like blaming all of society’s ills these days on the fact that not enough people are getting or staying married these days, and yet we’re legislating against people getting married who actively want to. Statistics show that divorce is at an all-time high, and that’s among people who are actually marrying — more and more couples these days are foregoing marriage entirely and choosing to raise families without marrying at all.

And, of course, there’s the fact that people always have to blame the crumbling of society on something, whether that’s the changing face of marriage, or television, or comic books, or video games, or…you get the picture.

But here’s really why this argument is weak: the real purpose of marriage, no matter what its culturally accepted parameters, has been stability. Marriage is the affirmation and cementing of a bond. It’s a concept that so-called “pro-family” groups really ought to be behind: the notion that two people have formed the ultimate human bond of love and companionship so strongly that they want to commit themselves to each other for eternity. It brings two people and their entire extended families into one communal group. Taking this step is a step in maturity, adulthood, and stability.

That doesn’t make marriage weaker, it makes it stronger. And it makes our society stronger when we allow two people willing and ready to take this step to take it.

“Same sex couples already have exactly the same rights regarding marriage that everyone else does; there’s no inequality.”

This is the one argument that really sticks in my craw, because it’s an intellectually dishonest statement adhering to rigid legal semantics, and that’s only if you don’t believe that being gay or transgendered is a choice. If you do believe it’s a choice, then you’re being willfully ignorant of all evidence to the contrary (scientific data, the fact that homosexuality occurs in non-human species, that no person would choose to be ostracized so much from society, that straight people can’t conceive of choosing to be gay, etc.).

But if you don’t believe it’s a choice, then you’re being dishonest. Those who use this argument say that same-sex couples have exactly the same right to marry that we heterosexual couples do…as long as that person is the opposite sex. What’s the problem?

The problem is that a straight person can no more conceive of falling in love or having sex with a person of the same sex than a gay person can conceive of falling in love or having sex with someone who is the opposite sex. We don’t choose who we fall in love with. But if you’re heterosexual, the law says you get to marry the person you love.

It’s the closest argument there is in this debate to being mean-spirited and bigoted, because it denies the humanity of those being legislated against. One of the greatest things we value in this society is the bond of love we can form with another person, one that’s so strong that we’re willing to state in front of everyone we know that we’ll spend the rest of our lives with this person, even if that might ostracize us from family and friends who don’t approve (something that I’m sure some straight couples can empathize with). And we all know, including the people using this argument, that marriage in our society is largely the celebration of that bond, even if some people marry for purely practical reasons. Telling someone who wants to marry the person they deeply love, who happens to be the same gender (because, again, they didn’t have a choice about who they fell in love with), to “just marry someone of the opposite sex,” is to tell them that you don’t care about them or empathize with them as a human.

“Washington already has a domestic partnership law.”

I propose the same argument here as I do above: it’s skirting the issue. There’s absolutely no reason to accept a side-by-side law that confers virtually everything that marriage does but without the legal document to say so if you’re not willing to allow that final legal document.

If it’s the same thing that you say it is, then why not just allow the marriage? If you can come up with another reason not to, then this argument is obviously not the one you’re actually resting your position on.

Let’s pass R-74.

As I said at the start, I have no horse in this race. I’m a straight woman, married to the man I love and chose to raise a family with. My life will not be negatively affected one bit if R-74, the same-sex marriage bill, doesn’t pass in Washington.

But it will be positively affected if it does pass, because I know that the wonderful qualities of marriage — the joy, the love, the foundation and stability, and the trials and tests that come with all of that — will be able to be enjoyed by everyone. We would be a society in which every member can fully take part in a defining ritual of humanity that adds strength, love and stability not just to the couple getting married, but to everyone around them. And who could possibly be against bringing more love and stability into this world?

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The results told me that the information I was conveying on these screens, in the way I was conveying it, was confusing. I was clearly going to have to go back to the drawing board on a few things. The design director, after admitting that our idea just wasn’t clicking, said, “well, I’m sorry you had to throw away all that work.”

Now, that was a very interesting response, because in any other line of work I would agree that it was an unfortunate turn of events. But I’ve come to realize that my job as a UX Designer is actually to deliberately throw away a lot of my work.

As the UX Designer, it’s my job to vet out ideas in quick, easy, low-tech ways before it ever gets into the hands of people who have to spend a lot of time baking things into systems that would become difficult or extremely time consuming to change later. By doing mock-ups and running through them with other designers, or constructing paper prototypes, or even on-device prototypes that are simply clickable images, I can test out ideas in a way that only depended on one person’s time (mine) and didn’t require any modifications to any systems or code to write. (Paper prototypes literally are sketched UI screens with little sticky-note UI elements that I move around depending on how my test subject interacts on the screen; if you’re interested in learning more about how awesome paper prototyping is, check out my shared Evernote notebook of UI and UX articles, where I’ve saved several links about paper prototyping.)

In order to for us to avoid wasting valuable engineering time, it’s almost vital that much of my work gets thrown away. It’s better to test out ideas and waste only a day of my time than it is to waste several days of several people’s time, only to discover the idea didn’t work.

So I’m not sad at all about having to throw away much of my work. In fact, I embrace it now, and if you’re a UX Designer, perhaps you do, too.

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Battlefield 3 as a card game.

I might try a card for ammo or medpack drops. I’ve also got some other ideas for other games, but would love to hear suggestions from people on what games and their mechanics to try and emulate in card form.

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You see, over the Christmas holidays, my Apple TV — which had been giving me constant trouble with failing to connect to my iTunes account, failing to connect to my PC, and other issues — completely bricked itself. It was the night that my whole week off was about to start, and we were going to settle into some movie watching. I applied the most recent update when Apple TV asked me to, and…nothing. I got the “plug this thing into a PC with a connector that you don’t own” screen, and there would be no TV watching, no music serving, no nothing for a whole week, because the next day was Christmas, and I couldn’t get anything replaced or looked at.

After the break, I took my Apple TV to the store. I just wanted a new one. Granted, I knew that it was about a month out of warranty. But I also knew several things. One, I’ve been a pretty good Apple customer, having bought an Apple TV, an iPod (two of them, actually, since I accidentally dropped one into a cup of coffee), an iPhone, an iPad, and did almost all of my movie, music, and TV show purchases through iTunes. And two, I knew that Apple had a reputation for being pretty reasonable about replacing broken stuff, especially since my Apple TV only broke after applying an update that clearly bricked it.

But the “genius” at the bar explained to me that it was out of warranty, and they would only replace it if I had paid for the extended warranty, which I hadn’t. Otherwise, I would have to pay $60 for them to repair it, and even then they couldn’t guarantee it would work. I explained to them that I had had many problems with this Apple TV, and that I wasn’t trying to scam anyone out of any money — I had paid $100 for it, and I simply wanted to exchange it for one that worked. He continued to repeat the policy at me. Not once did he actually tailor his response to my specific situation, or attempt to talk to me as a thinking person. He just quoted the policy at me. I explained that I could go out and spend $60 on a Roku box instead, and take the hundreds and hundreds of dollars of iTunes purchases with me that Apple would never see again. And again, he quoted the policy.

I ended up walking out of that store and calling Apple customer service. And again, I got the policy quoted at me, this time with an annoyed edge, as if the person really thought I was trying to scam them out of something. When I hung up empty-handed, I ended up writing a long letter to Tim Cook about my experience. I wasn’t angry that they didn’t give me an Apple TV. What I was angry about was that one of my favorite companies, known for its attention to detail and customer service, had failed to give me the user experience that I had come to expect from the company. And it had failed because it committed a crime I see happen so often now at businesses: it didn’t empower the employee to really look at the customer as a person and say, you know what? It’s not going to cost us that much to make this person happy, and that’s going to end up paying back in multiples. So why don’t I just go ahead and get her what she needs?

In the end, someone from Apple who called “on behalf of Tim Cook” (rather impressive) ended up calling me. They said they really liked my letter and really took it to heart, and they ended up making everything right regarding my experience and my Apple TV.

I saw this happening again at Babies R Us. I know the company isn’t known for a high level of customer service or satisfaction like Apple is. But it made me think of how much they would gain in those areas by improving on things like the interaction I witnessed.

A harried and stressed mother came into the store and had a baby monitor out of the box that she wanted to return. She said that from day one it never worked, and she just wanted a new one. The sales clerk — with a patter that belied how much she’d memorized this — explained the return policy to her: it was something like 45 days, and after that they could only do some kind of partial compensation. The customer explained that she didn’t live anywhere near a Babies R Us, and got it back in June.

The salesclerk repeated the exact spiel she just gave her. Without any change, or without addressing her situation. The customer looked at her blankly. I would have, too, because the customer gave her a situation and the clerk replied with something that didn’t do anything to address what she was asking about at all. So the customer, exasperated, looked at her and said, “so, am I out of luck?”

What did the sales clerk do? She again repeated the exact spiel. She never once answered her question. She never said, “I’m sorry, ma’am.” She simply repeated the same speech a third time.

Watching this, I felt horrible for the customer. She was asking the clerk if someone could help her, and the clerk wasn’t answering her question at all.

I really wanted to pipe up and say, “look, she’s asking you a question. She’s a customer, and she has a concern, and she’s asking if you’re going to help her. The answer is clearly ‘no’, but you refuse to own up to that answer. So you’re just repeating useless information at her like a robot, and clearly giving the term ‘customer service’ a bad name. It would cost your company almost nothing to simply walk over to the shelf and replace the product she just wanted to work, but instead you’re completely ignoring her right to her face, three times in a row. If you can’t or won’t help her, just say so.”

I didn’t say it, but I wish I had. In the end, the sales clerk cheerfully went off to find the manager when the customer asked for one, probably because she could finally walk away from this situation in which she wasn’t allowed to do anything but repeat the return policy when people asked. Because that is surely what’s happening, and it’s what angers me about the way companies have gone in customer service. If this had been a small store run by a family or small business person, it’s almost a guarantee that the person behind the counter would have happily helped the woman. Because when you have a direct connection to the business you run, you know that the cheap monitor will be paid back in dividends by solid customer service. No one at tiny, mom-and-pop hardware stores ever turns a customer away when a tool doesn’t work if they’re a little bit past the return policy date. It would be foolish.

But many companies don’t empower their employees anymore. In fact, it’s actively discouraged. Employees are frequently paid barely minimum wage and given rigid guidelines to do their job, so that they don’t need to hire anyone who can think or evaluate anything — anyone could do the job, so anyone fits the bill. But when companies hire people who are given some incentive to care about the company they work for and the customers they serve, the improved user experience of customer service would pay back in dividends.

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