ia play

So good friends in the UX community have expressed concerns about some of my slightly less than impressed references to “user experience”.  There was the whole penguin thing. And the using your clients language one. And the getting a bit snippy in an innocuous post about content management resources.  It is, admittedly, a bit of a bee in my bonnet (and no, I don’t own any bees before any of you ask).

But I can’t say “I’m an user experience designer”.  In much the same way that I couldn’t say “I’m a neo-conceptual artist” with a straight face.  I wasn’t raised that way.

I’m a bit embarassed to say “I’m an information architect”.  And as I said before I tend to avoid that at work.

(I’ve got a biological taxonomy metaphor I can use here but the whole Lakoff’s penguin thing went down so well…I think I better save that for the pub)

It would be a bit like me telling you my husband is a “craftsman”. It is completely accurate. It has grandeur and a philosophical sweep. It gives his career a wide scope and avoids him being boxed in by his job title.  But it doesn’t help anyone of you realise that he could make you a rather nice spoon, a lovely rustic fence or even some really good charcoal. And that he might not be the best person to ask for an earthenware pot or an Aran sweater.

What’s the IA equivalent of  “makes beautiful, useful things with wood”?

In the old days job titles were created by grabbing a bit of Latin/Greek and adding ‘er’ or ‘or’ to it. The suffix just means “one who does”.

Something of the bits of Latin /Greek are obvious, some not:

Carpenter=wagons, Cooper=vats, Plumber=lead, Lawyer=law, Miner=digging, Baker=roasting, Butcher=slaughtering goats, Doctor=teaching, Teacher=also teaching, Farmer=collecting tax/rent, Soldier=being paid, Tinker=jingles, Tailor=cuts, Dyer= dark/secrets

Vicar interestingly just means substitute or deputy.

And who slaughtered anything that wasn’t a goat? (I’m putting the etymological dictionary away now).

It seems for a modern job title that a single word is not enough. You need a combination of object and activity.

Possible objects in my professional sphere:

project/programme
product
business
content
user experience
customer experience
usability
interaction
systems
software
applications
development
technical
information
accessibility
search
web
digital
online
intranet
e-commerce
sharepoint

Posssible activities:

manager
analyst
architect
designer
producer
engineer

Some people seem to feel hemmed in by the activities bit and choose something vaguer. This usually implies they will only produce opinions not things e.g.

consultant
expert
specialist
professional

In the public and non-profit sector you also get ‘officer’ as in police officer but also projects officer or knowledge officer. This usually just means one who holds an office and seems to be a way of avoiding saying ‘man’. “Head of” is similar but usually at the opposite end of the hierarchy.

All combinations of object and activity are plausible and many are common. Although so far I only know one Usability and experience design oompa-loompa.

I’m probably going to get a new job title. And it won’t be UX-anything, so don’t worry that I’ve had a change of heart on that.

I don’t use my IA title much within the organisation. The web team get it but that’s four people.  I tend to introduce myself by what projects I’m working on. In project kick off meetings and meetings with stakeholders I’ll explain what I’ll be doing on the project but not my title.

A lot of the teams I work with are intimidated by IT projects. And for them the language of user experience design and information architecture is as alienating and terrifying as the language of server architecture and database design. It is all big words from people who get paid more than they do and seem to work in an alternate universe of conferences, social networks and blogging.

So mostly my introductions go something like…”I’m Karen, I’m part of the project team and I’ll be responsible for making sure users can find their way around the new site”. Or “the search actually works this time”. Or “putting your content into the system isn’t such a nightmare”.

So my boss and I are trying to come up with something that both more accurately conveys what I actually do and is also a user friendly one.

Anyone got any examples of doing user research into what their job title should be?

“Admit it. Ours can be an insular profession. As much as most of us think we communicate simply and effectively, we often don’t. Why? I think it’s because we’re sometimes overly concerned about how we’re coming across to our fellow UXers. You know what? Forget about them. Your real audience is the business stakeholder. When you’re planning a presentation or trying to figure out how to communicate your research or design solution, don’t let your inner Nielsen—or head-Nielsen for fans of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica TV series—prevent you from communicating in terms and concepts that your stakeholders can understand and groove on.

You know what this means, don’t you? You’re not allowed to use the term heuristic evaluation anymore. Banish it from your professional vocabulary! Now, wave goodbye to it, because, if you use it again, I will personally come to your house and punch you in the arm.”

via 8 Things You Should Be Doing in Your UX Practice, but Probably Aren’t :: UXmatters.

Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more. But it is ok to tell them you are user experience designer?

Some are respectable; appurtenances, sumptuary, peroration, bildungsroman etc.

But feckless, swine, banal and glut are a bit disappointing. Must try harder.

nytimeswords.pdf

Whilst thinking about AI, I went on a bit of a Wikipedia wander and discovered:

• android is technically masculine. You can also have gynoid.
• there’s a theory called “uncanny valley” that when robots look/act almost like actual humans, it causes revulsion in the human observers
• grey goo is an end of the world scenario in which out-of-control robots consume all matter while building more of themselves—a scenario known as ecophagy (“eating the environment”)

I’m sure that will all come in handy one day.

How many different ways of saying someone has an apt name are there? Wikipedia plumps for Nominative Determinism but goes on to say:

“Synonyms and/or related concepts include aptronym, apronym, aptonym, jobonymns, namephreaks, onomastic determinism, Perfect Fit Last Names (PFLNs), psychonymics, and classically nomen est omen or όνομα ορίζοντας. ND researchers are comiconomenclaturists.”

And that list isn’t particularly exhaustive, missing out on Tom Stoppard’s “cognomen syndrome”for one.

Sadly, this post has nothing to do with lego men. A hapax legomenon (or ‘a thing once said’) is a word occurring only once in the written body of a language. It’s kind of the classical scholars version of GoogleWhacking.

Reading about hapaxes has led me to the discovery that honorificabilitudinitatibus is the longest word in the English language featuring alternating consonants and vowels. Sure to come in useful one day.

Other discoveries:

nonce word – one made up for the occasion, possibily with no expectation of reuse

stunt word – created to artificially suggest importance, or coined merely to demonstrate how clever the coiner is.

Daniel Gilbert’s homepage is the fabulously named hedonic psychology laboratory within which there is a page called ‘playing’. The page has the tag line ‘frivolous linkageZ’ (he’s got a thing about Z).

Slightly outside most people’s expectations for the page is the section called deathZ -which includes the links to Find a Grave and Dying Words .

Control a Man in a Chicken Suit, Kwazy Rabbit and Walls with Things Written On Them are probably closer to mainstream definitions of playful.

Matt Jones also mention Gary Penn’s concept of ‘toyetics’, an interesting concept but one I can’t help feeling is destined for another list of hated words, just like this Lulu Blooker list.

I had ambivalent feelings about that Lulu list since one of the ‘winners’ folksonomy has dogged the last few years of my career, with far too many people, who should know better, getting confused about a useful idea and thinking it means we can get rid of all the BBC’s librarians.

But neologisms seem to be another way we entertain ourselves. Fun with words, even. The BBC’s newfangled broadcasting mechanism once upset C. P. Scott, the editor of my old employer the (Manchester) Guardian:

“Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it” – C. P. Scott

Just like metadata then, another common work topic.

And this week Information Architect as a job title was lampooned in Private Eye using, shock horror, a BBC job ad in their Birt-Speak feature.

I’m neologisms all over at the moment.