Handful of Nothing

Things go wrong. It’s funny to see how a company can evolve, and gradually give more and more importance to one area and while they believe the philosophy is the best option, they end up losing identity and entering a hall of those “hey, we care for the user, so much that we decided to have no sauce at all”.

I keep looking at Globo.com for the past 5 years, and I need to say: the improved, but also it looks that they are always trying to reinvent themselves (what’s good) they gave importance for IA and usability before the others (what’s also quite good) but then they committed the mistake: no sauce. No professional visual design or not that much but less and less value for professional visual design.

So you end up with something you have to day, that someone could call “clean” design but I call food with no sauce. You just need to visit Globo.com and realize that. It just misses something. Clearly, because it’s visual, and it’s more and more looking like a web2.0 site for web geeks, than a content site for the masses in Brazil.

Ok, I’m using globo as a scape goat, mainly because I was there when this kind of “thought” was growing and it’s the best example to show what happens when things go over priced inside a company. A lot of people will say “I like it”, that’s predictable but the point here is more inside the organization and how you should be careful when giving power to specific skills, when you should give power to the bigger one, the one that really makes great products : the interaction design or the newest one in terms of fame: user experience. So, if you go back to my post with the circles, you going to realize what it is all about.

All of this babbling is to say one thing: nothing should have more important than they are supposed to have or they were meant to have. I get really pissed when people tries to sell more than they are really doing, and to minimize other’s work. In a creative team everything is important and everyone should think about the project not promoting their area more than the others. When attending UX week I could see it pretty well, a lot of people trying to give more importance to skills / subjects instead of focusing on do really great stuff. Some of the worst presentations where from IA people not talking about IA and trying to make it sound like it was IA. What a pity. Even more when you think that some of the talkers were pretty famous “professionals”.

So, if you are part of a team, and of course have the power to influencing it, please do in a way that great products are the goal not promoting or advocating individual skills. Everyone on in a UX team should be able to jump from task to task and understand the whole as a beautiful thing that’s is above an acronym, a skill set, a professional group and of course the individual ego.

enough of this =)

Update some IA AI typos fixed. Thanks Marco. =)
Not a surprise that my self taught English sucks hard.