Crossroads

"If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be" - Epictetus

Legend has it that under a full Delta moon Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads just outside of Rosedale, Mississippi. The devil tells Johnson that he will play guitar like no one before him; he will be the King of the Delta Blues and his music will possess the souls of all who hear it, but there will be consequences for which he must be prepared. Did it happen? Hard to tell, no one was there to witness it but one thing is for certain, his music changed the world.

I am not a guitar player, I'm a designer. I'm certainly not as good a designer as Johnson was a Blues man, but I am pretty good at seeing the patterns in things. One of those patterns is that everywhere I go it seems that everyone is staring into the shiny glass brick that seems to be surgically implanted to their hand. It's not just that I have someone occasionally veer out of their lane while texting and nearly smoke me on the beltway - that I am used to at this point - but last night while out to dinner with my 9 year old and one of her friends it occurred to me that I was sitting in a diner with probably 50 other people, and the majority of the conversation I heard was at our table and the servers speaking to other customers. Looking around I observed that nearly every table was engaged with their device instead of the people they went to dinner with. It occured to me that conversation may be an endangered species. Of course, I'm exaggerating but not as much as I would like to be. I asked myself as I looked around if we haven't accidentally weaponized UX, and if there might be consequences for which we should be prepared.

Back in 1997 I was at a different kind of crossroads. I had moved to Austin to take my first job out of school as a software engineer. I was working at a startup (employee 18 thank you very much) and had rolled the dice and moved 1800 miles to have a very small part in the creation of what would become the digital economy. In the pre-Google/Facebook/eBay/LinkedIn world UX was still being called "Human Factors" and had more to do with industrial design than digital. I was offered the chance to step out of my engineer role and take on the User Experience function our company wanted to create. I did, and that was the day I realized I no longer had a career, I had a calling. Like Robert, that crossroads changed my life. I had never been that good at anything, and it came pretty much all at once. I found a deep and intense passion for making things that would be used by people to improve their lives - and to make this internet thing that I was in love with reachable and relatable to as many people as possible.

Robert only got to play guitar for another few years after the crossroads, but when he died at 27 he had changed the face of music and since then he's inspired millions of people. I've spent the last 21 years locking arms with other members of this UX tribe to find a way to establish, measure, and communicate the power of user-centered design. We were told 20 years ago that UX didn't matter, 15 years ago it was a nice to have but a dearth of practitioners prevented mass adoption. 10 years ago industries began hiring but the programs would be the first thing to be cut when funding choices had to be made because it just hadn't gotten there yet. 5 years ago it was clear that this, like the blues, was here to stay.

Today UX is like Starbucks, you cannot swing a cat without bumping into a UX professional, service designer, or design thinker. Like at Starbucks where for years people fought against thinking about a large coffee as a "venti" suddenly "venti double soy americano no foam extra whip with a shot" rolls off the tongue like the lyrics to Sweet Home Chicago (Written by Johnson, perfected by The Blues Brothers) . Now that it has gone mainstream the power of the discipline is spreading faster and farther than ever before. Information reaches places it had never gone and in ways that make it consumable as well as actionable - information IS power, but it's also profitable.

So what's the point? Like the music business, digital is driven by dollars. There is money to be made when we allow advertisers to monetize us over and over again. This gets to a place where social networks are becoming shopping malls - sure you can see your friends there but you can also buy that pair of shoes that person you think is cooler than you has on. Add to this the crowdsourced affirmation provided by all of your friends and connections and now we have a path to addictive behavior - you see cool people buying cool stuff or doing cool things. You want to play too. Oh look, a convenient link that lets you get that thing you didn't know existed 5 minutes ago and still don't need overnight(!) - TAKE MY MONEY!

I work in this field and have come up with many of the folks who are much more talented than me who pioneered this space. We all love UX because we love people. We want them to be helped, happy and connected. I urge vigilance not because I think UX is bad nor do I think design practitioners want anything but to make things easier for as many as possible, but because the big money is here now, and like the tobacco, alcohol, and drug trade digital carries the possibility of addiction - fueled by experiences that are becoming learned well enough to become unconscious behaviors through virtual affirmations and disembodied conversations that show the angle we look best from on only our best hair days. How can we live up to that? By retreating behind carefully curated profiles exposing only what we want to have seen, leading to tables of families and friends in a diner interacting only with their ideal selves - in danger of losing sight of who they are by living vicariously through only who and what they want to be. For consenting adults this is one thing, it's quite another to raise children to believe that they will find themselves on Facebook or Instagram instead of face-to-face.

I'm not sure that I have explained this the way I set out to, but I believe this is an important dialog and so I'm going to publish it despite my fear that this message will not be perfect and it might provoke an uncomfortable conversation. I don't have all the answers, I don't even have all the questions - but I know who to ask. You. All of you. How do we use our skills, influence and access to balance all of this? Making things easily useful and universally accessible can only help widen the circle and enrich the conversation. Good design is not just good, it's great - but it is not something we can simply describe, it's my hypothesis that like the Delta Blues, it is not enough to try to define it, we have to feel it, we have to live it. After all, if the blues is music like a Cadillac is a car there's simply more to it than that.