Pat’s Point of View

As many of them do, this post by Seth Godin struck a chord with me, and made a lot of sense:

Is marketing an art or a science? It’s both, and that’s the problem. Some marketers are scientists. They test and measure. They do the math. They understand the impact of that spend in that market at that time with that message. They can understand the analytics and find the truth.

The other marketers are artists. They inspire and challenge and connect. These marketers are starting from scratch, creating movements, telling jokes and surprising people. Scientists aren’t good at that.

Sounds a lot like the field of user experience, doesn’t it?

You definitely have those practitioners who are more “data driven”, analytical, more “quant”. And then there are those that are at the other end of the spectrum, who use research, intuition and “qual” (by the way, I really like how Seth puts it: “inspire and challenge and connect”).

I’m tempted to say the “scientists” are bogged down in strict methodologies, rules, templates, and patterns. That they have lost sight of the forest for the methodological trees. And that the “artists” are more agile, free-thinkers who don’t follow rigid process that kills creativity and serendipity. But that’s just my bias showing, I’m not a strict process kinda guy. The truth is that you can be scientific but not suffocated by rigidity, and you can be an artist that is so fixed in the way they work they miss valuable insights.

Seth then elaborates, explaining that the problem is two-fold:

1. Outsiders are confused. Which are we? When we’re artists sometimes and scientists other times, we often seem like charlatans, because we’re associating scientific results with artistic endeavors.

2. We’re confused. If you don’t know if you’re doing a science project or an art project, you’ll probably emphasize the wrong elements.

Ok that’s two for two, from a UX point of view. I come up against the first issue on almost a daily basis, people we work with expect one approach and are confused when we turn around and propose the opposite approach—if they have any understanding of what we do at all.

For example, my colleagues are often a little amazed that I don’t turn to analytics straight away, if at all. And many of our stakeholders think UX is all about demographics and looking at which section of the website gets the most hits. When we say we’re going to “sit around and talk to people” it’s quite a shock, evidently. (On the subject of analytics, my reluctance has more to do with the ridiculous tools being used and the data being collected, rather than a philosophical opposition to the concept.)

Regarding the second point, all you have to do is monitor any relevant mailing list for a short time and you’ll run into this issue: who are we? what do we do? how do we do it? how do we “define the damn thing”?

I wrote an article a while back, attempting to give some definition to the many faces of information architecture and while the article served the intended purpose—to explain all the associated terms/titles to those who were familiar with only a few (or none) of them—it wasn’t conclusive other than concluding that the “faces” are overlapping and difficult to define. This issue of schizophrenia in our field is not going away any time soon.

Seth concludes by suggesting: “figure out what sort of marketing you’re going to do today and go do that”. Fair enough, but does it actually solve the dilemma, for marketers or UX folk? Try as we might to explain what “brand” of UX we do, it just doesn’t seem to work, does it?

Perhaps a better question is how do we balance the art and science? or how do we communicate that it is a balance of art and science?. Because it should be a balance of the two, I think. You can’t go down a wholly quantitative, scientific route and have a well rounded result, nor can you just go down the qualitative, artistic route. The scientist and artist within all of us should be grappling with each other to keep each on the level, to ensure we cover both aspects of the subject we are studying and designing for. And on a team level, we need people within the team that sit on both sides of this fence, to balance each other out.

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 10:22 am and is filed under User experience. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to leave a comment, find out more about me or follow @patrickkennedy on Twitter.

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