A Stake(holder) to the Heart
They Might Be Giants sang "...as sure as you can't steer a train..." Welp, a corporate UX gig is like riding the rails — if you're lucky, you might lay down some new track, but there are no hard turns in your future.
The sweet nougat at the center of the UX candy bar is empathy. But the application of empathy via UX is a quantum-like, Catch 22 kind of challenge.
If you are at a small company where you are a design team of one, odds are you aren't working with any kind of product that is in the cultural mainstream. At a corporate behemoth, you’re a lone voice at the bottom of a garbage dump, gasping for air as the latest load of acronyms, vanity metrics, and synergy-laced slop gets gleefully bulldozed on top of you. The stench of "alignment" is strong.
Newton, in all of his wig-wearing glory, helped codify a basic force in the universe: inertia. And you’re going to learn a lot about inertia if you practice UX at a large enterprise.
The more passionate you are about a change to a workflow, UI element, or task, the harder you will have to work to get it implemented. It turns out this law is as iron-clad in the meeting room as it is in the Horsehead Nebula. (Yes, I know, inertia applies throughout all of space...I just like saying Horsehead Nebula. And looking at images of it, too. So beautiful, right?)
If you've ever caught yourself in the third ring of televisual Hell at 3am on a weekend and seen a World's Strongest Man competition, then you might have witnessed the point where some jacked, Nordic homunculus tries to lift a concrete ball the size of a Telly Tubby up onto column. He fails, but not before his head, neck, and arms become the color and texture of pepperoni. Everything hits the ground with the force of a building demolition, and he lurches away on wobbly newborn pony legs.
That'll be you, staggering out of a stakeholders meeting having failed to convince them to add a single new tab, nav item, or button — one that would have demonstrably saved users time, clicks, and cognitive load. (I often keep that wonky walk going straight to the nearest bar.)
Thomas Reid famously observed, "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link." (Hmm, another wig wearer. Why do I have so much wisdom in my thought locker uttered by dudes in fake hair?) We've bastardized that truism for sales, acting, gameshows, yadda yadda yadda. I'm adding UX to the list. Ahem.
A company is only as empathetic as its most cynical stakeholder.
(Spoiler: there ain't a lot of empathy in the C suite, Spanky.)
Just another reason for me to make like a Depression-Era hobo and jump off this beast while I still can.
Yours in stifled sympathy,
the letter S.
I may be bitter, but I'm not wrong. You don't have to take my word for the current state of UX affairs; check out this piece on Medium. Same tune, less snark.
