“Startup mythology demands that to create something great, you need superhuman sacrifices. You need to work for no pay, you need to put in 120 hours/week, you need to preferably sleep under the desk and live off pizza as a sole form of nutrient. As a result, you need to abandon your family and risk life without insurance.”

From It doesn’t have to be all or nothing with a startup

Before I get into my big, tangential gripe (something which I have no doubt many people will disagree with) let me grease the wheels a little bit by throwing out a similar example (something which, based on many conversations I’ve had, people are more likely to agree with).

You know those obnoxious job descriptions that use words like “guru” and “rockstar” to describe who their looking for? (If any recruiters are reading this, I’m looking at you.) Do they turn your stomach when you read them? Why? Is it because calling yourself a “ninja” sets up an unrealistic expectation of what you can or will do for your employer? Does “rocking out” belittle the fact that what you are doing is actually serious and sometimes difficult work? Do these words make your job sound so deceptively fun, that you wonder whether this employer even realizes that they’re still going to have to monetarily compensate you for your efforts?

In the same way that job descriptions using words like “guru” or “rockstar” turn most peoples’ stomachs, pleas from startups looking for “passionate” people really turn mine. While I’m sure the people who write these descriptions have the best intentions in mind – they want to weed out people who do their jobs without any sense of joy or accomplishment – to me it’s a dog whistle, where “passionate” means “young person who will work 80 hours a week for practically nothing.”

Passion as Exclusion

This is the kind of cultural mythos that David from 37Signals is talking about. It subtly excludes people who are middle-aged, have small children, are considering having children, or just have a healthy desire to live a meaningful life outside of their job. On a larger scale, it feeds into the idea that these people have no place in the startup world. It’s the kind of attitude that makes people who only want to work 40 hours a week (nevermind that that’s all they’re getting paid for) look like slackers.

So why is it not enough to be “interested” in your work? What happens if you are “passionate” about something outside of your job, like playing in a band, traveling to exotic places, or being a good parent? Does that mean that you are in the wrong industry? And who is this person giving you a 30-minute interview to say?

Before you start feeling sorry for me…

Now, because I can sense some super-passionate overly-zealous person out there starting to feel sorry for me, some context. In my field, it’s my job to find what’s most interesting about my clients and their companies – a problem they’re trying to solve, an opportunity that’s available, or just some compelling customer behavior that they need to support or discover – and use that to inform the design of their website, product or service. While I’d be lying if I said that I was “passionate” about every single niche that my clients have come from (they are so diverse, I fear I would have run out of passion by now anyway) I can say that as a freelancer I never take a project that I can’t find the challenge in. In other words, I don’t need to be passionate, my projects need to be interesting. (And no, a sexy brand or a cool vertical alone do not make for an interesting project.)

I also recognize that there are things in my life I’m passionate about, but that I would never want to do for a living. In fact, I tried that once before, in my former life as a classical musician. As a young adult I assumed that the thing in my life that I enjoyed doing the most was the thing that I needed to build my career around. Granted, I made my share of mistakes in that endeavor, but by 22 years old I was burnt out and desperately searching for something to do next.

These days, my music career is a distant memory. I love to cook, but I would never want to open a restaurant. I love animals but I would never want to open a pet salon. I’m passionate about having a clean, organized, comfortable, healthy home, but I don’t want to be a housewife. In case you haven’t heard, the word is out – even if you follow your passion and turn it into your work, it is still going to feel like work.

Now for Some Unsolicited Advice

So here’s my advice for young people who are looking for work. Yes, it’s good to be eager. Hell, it’s good to be passionate if that’s what you really feel you are. But working hours that you’re not being compensated for, working for less money than you are worth or can make a reasonable living on, doing the job of more than one person, and working to and beyond the point of exhaustion are not. Be passionate, but don’t be desperate. Even passionate people can burn out. You may not realize this right now, when there is so much importance on getting your career started, but eventually you are going to find yourself desperately clinging to the things outside of your job that make you feel like a happy, well-rounded person, whether that job started out as a passion or not.

And for startups who are looking to hire. If you want to employ people who enjoy their jobs, make sure that your company culture is healthy, friendly, creative, and supportive of your employees lives both inside and outside of the office. Don’t just hire young people who are passionate and naive, then use that as an excuse to work them to death. (I should probably add that it’s not just startups that are the problem, it’s agencies too. The only difference is that big agencies generally don’t go so far as to sugar coat their 80-hour-a-week culture under the guise of “passion,” they just pay their employees well enough, or do a good enough job of cultivating a super-competitive environment, that employees feel like they can’t complain.)

In other words, I agree with David, but I want to take it a step further: it shouldn’t be this way.

Follow Up

Although I wrote this a while ago as a reaction to a post by 37 Signals, now that I’m getting around to posting it I see they’ve got an even more recent one taking up the passion argument as well: Forget passion, focus on process

Also, in digging around for that NYTimes article again I stumbled on this.
Just, wow: Monetize Your Passion

This is also the case with startups who just can’t ever seem to imagine being their own customer. Arbitrary deadlines, technical and personnel constraints, or even technical and personnel strengths, can cloud a team’s judgement and lead to an ambiguous and un-impactful launch that never clearly communicates what the product is or who it’s for.

Fortunately though, things have started to change in this industry, and I’ve heard a lot of people lately talking about how much they “care about product.” But does “caring” mean that you know how to balance attaining business goals with creating user value? Or that you know how to work within technical and personnel constraints to achieve your desired outcomes? Does it help you know when some new and shiny technology or some brilliant new idea comes along whether it’s essential for launch or just another distraction? Is “caring about product” really enough, or does every startup really need a good product manager? And for that matter, what even makes a good product manager?

This last question is the one I recently posed to the Quora community:

I’ve worked with startups that have no product manager, CEOs who “play the role” of product manager, product advisors, and even one self-proclaimed “product guy.” As a UX designer, I’ve even had to fill in the role myself.

But, having never had the benefit of working with or as a dedicated product manager, I’d love to hear from others who have. What are the qualities that make a “good” product manager? How are they equipped to steer the company in a way that CEOs, advisors, or other team members are not? What value can a “good” product manager add that a whole team of people who “care about product?” can’t?

In my experience, “caring” is not enough. While the word is still out on exactly what makes a good product manager, I like to think that one person who can maintain vision and focus, make hard decisions, and achieve business goals while creating customer value can do more for a startup than whole team of people who simply “care.”

I mean, I know someone who is addicted to Groupon and Gilt Groupe and Daily Candy and the like, and to be honest, she is pretty much obsessed with shopping, deals, “hot items” and “hot spots”, and little else. Is it possible that Groupon just knows their audience really well? The kind of people who just want to buy stuff and will use any justification to do so?

And I realize that I’m drastically over-generalizing their audience based on one example (I’m sure there are lots of very nice people who use their service). But at its core it is, like any coupon or sales scheme, just designed to get people to jump at the prospect of saving a little money, ignore the fact that they’re actually just spending money that they may not have otherwise spent, and buy something that they probably don’t really need in the first place. I guess this has more to do with my personal philosophy on consumerism (perhaps more on that another time), but that’s just how I think about their company.

All of this is to say that I was in no way shocked or outraged by their Superbowl commercial. In fact, I may even go so far as to say that it was a total success. Shopaholism is a debilitating disease, people, and for whatever sick reason, it pays for some companies to present themselves as the cure. After watching this ad, sure, you may be offended – if you’re really a sensible person who honestly thinks that making a positive impact on the world is more important than stuff. But whether you’re that person or not (no judgement here), after watching this ad, you will remember two things: First, that Groupon is where you go to get deals, and second – on a more subconscious level – that nothing else matters.

But a few weeks just left to nothing but our word didn’t really mean that we were sticking to our diets. It was too easy to slip here and there, and then look back on the previous week thinking that we had done better than we actually had. I decided that we needed to hold ourselves, and each other, more accountable, and that the only way to do that was to keep a record of our offenses.

So I put together this chart and put it up on the refrigerator. For every offense – that is, each time we ate something we weren’t supposed to – we had to write it down on the chart. At the end of the week we tallied up the offenses and whoever had the most offenses “lost”. We got pretty competitive, even realizing after a couple of weeks that whenever one of us exercised and the other one didn’t that we were actually holding that over each other’s heads. So naturally, the next step (although it didn’t make its way into the design of the chart) was to mark an “amnesty point” each time that we exercised and deduct those from our weekly totals, which essentially allowed us to make up for a food slip-up by working out a bit, or to pull out ahead of the other person at the last minute and break a tie.

A lot has changed in the past couple years for me in the world of food and how I approach it. While my big picture food philosophy is probably best saved for another post, suffice it to say that these days I’m thinking more about what I should eat than what I shouldn’t. (I am a huge stickler for 3-5 fruits and veggies a day, for example, at least one of those veggies being a leafy green.) So what really spurred me to start to re-think this chart and this exercise again (aside from winter coming to a close) is the “Live and Let Diet” episode of Good Eats I caught while I was on a plane to Austin this week. While this chart served me well last year and definitely set me down a better path to making myself accountable for the “bad” foods that I ate, I’m wondering how a system that rewards eating healthy stuff could differ from one that punishes unhealthy stuff, and how the idea of Alton Brown’s “Four Lists” could be used in a similarly competitive diary setting to promote accountability and enable change. I hate to call it a “diet” exactly, but more of a way to keep track of all of the good things you eat without relying on your memory, which to me is the most difficult way to try to make changes in something you do every day. I’ll be thinking about this a lot more as we head into Spring and a new season of eating! In the meantime, you can download the original Food Chart here and let me know if it helps you make any changes.

Update: I’ve finally got the food chart up after some web host wrangling. Download it here.

For those of you who don’t know me or know why you’re here, my name is Christin Roman and I am a User Experience Designer in NYC. I started this blog 5 years ago as a place to document my research, thoughts, and projects, and to experiment with some web programming and blogging tools while I was a graduate student at ITP. In 2007, I graduated and have had a variety of gigs doing information architecture, interaction design, experience design, user testing, project management, planning, and strategy consulting for start-ups, non-profits, and other types of companies. For the past year I’ve been working at Blenderbox, a home-grown 20-person interactive agency started by husband-and-wife team Jason Jeffries and Sarah McLoughlin. I’ve designed ecommerce sites, interactive sites, media sharing sites, museum sites, educational sites…you name it. My passion is doing design research, and creating that fully-formed picture of the people who I’m designing for.

This blog was named for a quote I once heard Red Burns – the founder and still chair (over 25 years later) of ITP, and an incredible woman – say to my class when we were first-year students. (I should mention that she is in fact known for her bluntness and sometimes surprising off-the-cuff remarks.) She said “I hate robots”. With a 100 confused students looking back at her she continued. “I hate artificial intelligence. I don’t believe in artificial intelligence, I believe in artificial augmentation.” What she hates is the idea that technology should be used to replace people. So instead, she inspires her students to develop technology that will help people.

But Undercover Boss actually peaked my interest as soon as they started airing commercials for its series premier, and I went out of my way to make sure that I watched the first episode. Why? Because the show is essentially an exercise in user-centered design.

What these bosses are experiencing is the first step to user-centered design – empathy.

First, the show creates empathy. That’s the “break-through” that these bosses are experiencing, and it’s one of the first steps to a user-centered design methodology. It doesn’t necessarily have to be wrapped up in the emotional life story of a young woman struggling to provide for her family while doing the work of two job descriptions (that’s more for effect), but it does have to be tangible. Explaining how a person thinks or operates is one thing – and it will get you pretty far in creating empathy – but seeing people operate in real life, the way that ethnographers do, the observers have to be inhuman not to walk away feeling like they truly understand where that person is coming from.

Second, the employees in the show are stakeholders. Interviewing stakeholders is a great place to start when undertaking a UX project, in my case, one that’s meant to redesign a system that’s expected to achieve certain goals towards the mission or bottom line of a company. Most clients agree. But where I often find that C-level executives get confused is in the definition of who the stakeholders really are. (Maybe the word is just to similar to stockholder?) What they often get wrong is that a stakeholder isn’t just a person who is high-up in or understands the marketing-speak of the company – they are not the most influential or “important” people there – they can be anyone who’s life or job is affected by the system being designed, even if it is in the most mundane way like fielding customer service complaints or doing data-entry. The lowest-level employees are stakeholders, and often the most important ones.

Third, the problems the boss is observing are design problems. The mandates that come down the company latter don’t have to be at odds with the humanity of the work environment that they sometimes unintentionally create. In observing the problems the show put forth it’s obvious that many of them, whether through incremental change or a massive overhaul, can be solved now that they’ve been identified. What I hope that CEOs understand is that those solutions don’t have to hurt productivity, and can in fact have a very positive effect once your employees’ natural capabilities and limitations are taken into account. It’s a fact, women working typically male-dominated jobs are going to have some more extensive toiletry needs that need to be taken into account, and I’m sure that someone out there is already doing the work to make sure that they are. (Or, maybe not.)

This show is incredibly relevant, but not just to people who are interested in user-centered design. As a society we are constantly trying to reconcile our capitalist beliefs with our humanist natures, and the US often gets the worst rap when it comes to “willful” ignorance of exploitative practices. Whether through design or through blunder, seeing CEOs meet their day of reckoning in the public eye, and the extent to which they are held accountable for their company practices is becoming an integral part of the puzzle that is consumer behavior. It’s much more enjoyable to be a part of these epiphanies as they unfold than to just cringe at the aftermath. If ignorance is part of the problem, then let’s at least give these guys a chance to smarten up, then see whether that day of reckoning still comes.

Somebody very smart out there is watching every episode of this show, and calling each CEO and their marketing teams to offer their UX design services.

Automatic flushing toilets were either not designed with women in mind, or not tested extensively on women before they were deployed in millions of bathrooms across America.

Without getting into graphic detail, let’s just say that sometimes there are “other things” that women are trying to do when they are on the toilet besides simply relieving themselves, flushing, and going. Sometimes these “things” take a little bit of time and a little bit of agility. How that movement doesn’t get translated into a “she’s finished now, it’s time to flush” signal to the toilet is too technical for me, but that’s exactly what happens (sometimes multiple times in one “sitting”). The best result is a lot of wasted water, the worst is a toilet that splashes a little too high while it’s flushing and the toilet ceases to be a toilet but something more akin to a bedet.

Now if you’d asked me my opinion on the subject a few weeks ago, I would’ve stopped there. Until then I’d thought the automatic flowing faucet to be a relatively harmless invention, until, after getting off an 8:00AM flight on my way to DC to see a client, I dared to try to put on my makeup in front of a mirror that was hanging over one of these sinks. I guess just standing there (and leaning forward to get as close to the mirror as possible) was enough to keep turning the damn thing on and off, on and off…I tried to find a lone mirror (one that didn’t have a sink under it) but there wasn’t one. So instead I just had to stand there like a water-wasting asshole while I tried to rush through my makeup application as quickly as possible.

The summary here should be pretty obvious – we are not robots. (I can image that men have complaints about these mechanisms too.) Assuming that the interaction with an appliance like this will be a simple three-step process that’s the same every time seriously over simplifies its utility and ignores the larger space in which it exists. It’s as though the appliances were designed in a vaccuum, with no consideration as to how that space is used in a multitude of ways.

When it comes to technology, I often find myself trying to live in two camps at once. On the one hand I am interested in new technology and new interfaces, and I want to be one of the first to try something and make some conjecture about how that new thing is or isn’t going to affect peoples’ lives or the technological landscape or what have you. On the other hand, it’s my job to try to empathize with people and imagine the contexts in which they experience the applications I have a hand in designing, and let’s face it, the majority of people out there are still running IE6.

Now I’m not saying I’m going to remain willfully ignorant, but I do try to make sure I’ve at least got my sites broad enough to include slightly outdated hardware and software (a slow-running computer and too-small monitor may be annoying when I’m trying to work from home, but man do I see our sites differently there than I do on my huge, bright iMac at work). The truth is that some people will just refuse to upgrade unless you force them too. And as an aside I think that’s one area where Mac really excels – despite the complaints (and there is often reason to complain), when Apple wants to phase out a technology, they will simply cut it off, with little apology, rather than trying to accommodate everyone. It’s tough love, but it’s really effective in pushing new standards (although I think they’ll prove to have less sway than they’d like to admit in standardizing HTML 5). Microsoft, conversely, I believe is directly to blame for the number of people still running outdated web browsers, and their history of making caveats and disclaimers for what can/can’t run on new OS versions can give people feature-list fatigue when trying to decide whether to upgrade. Apple on the other hand, just reassures you that everything will work fine and practically forces you to upgrade.

So it’s a difficult line to tow. Fortunately I’ve got a new gadget junky of a boyfriend who’s always ready to make the switch or get the new thing, so I have the advantage of having access to that while enjoying the luxury of being a little bit slower to move on my own machinery than I would otherwise be. Maybe not a luddite, exactly, but a skeptic.

You see when I read “currency” I thought “exchange”, as in the trading of goods or services for some socially-accepted form of compensation, when what they actually mean was “money”, as in cold hard cash. In other words, while I thought they were being asked to design a system, it would appear they were just being asked to design an object.

Now don’t get me wrong, these objects are really beautiful – well researched, constructed with great materials, a really good design exercise (and probably part of the general ramp-up into a more specialized area of design that one might expect in their first semester at SVA), but I guess what I was missing here was the interaction in interaction design. While we’ve definitely found ourselves in a time where functionality and aesthetics are inextricably linked, designing systems is what interaction designers do. We think about inputs and outputs, motivators and compensation (not always the same thing), and above all social dynamics. We think 10 steps ahead, past how do people use currency to “how does this exchange shape our economy”;, and 10 steps behind, back to “why would people use this currency in the first place?”

How cool would it have been to see students think through other objects, services, or less tangible exchanges besides money that could be regarded as currency within a given neighborhood? The design exercise would have involved a mix of game mechanics, social intelligence, and a lot of research into the people that make up a neighborhood – their goals and their motivations, and the things they see as more important than “stuff”, or at least, could be convinced to use as an acceptable symbol for goods. I think we would have seen some interesting social commentary, and maybe even some speculation as to how economies based on a different type of currency would develop, survive, or fail. We might have seen rich Upper East Siders trading lunches and dinners, Midtown Executives accepting client leads, and downtown hipsters paying for coffees with Yelp reviews or some such nonsense. (Yelp reviews of course being merely an indicator of a company’s real net worth – the amount of internet traffic they get – great for a bubble but not sustainable.) And all of this documented, illustrated and described – a design exercise that may or may not necessarily end in a design “object”.

At least, it sure seemed cool for the three seconds I spent thinking about it while waiting for the page to load. When I saw how mistaken I was about the project I was nevertheless impressed by the work that was done, but I’m all the more curious to see how this program shapes up and what sort of projects they get into next. It’s worth bearing in mind how different my introduction to the world of Interaction Design probably was (all the more reason why I’m so interested in following this program) but more on that another time.