The Growing Role of UX at Obtiva
[P]eople are recognizing that UX work is important, but I don’t think they realize quite how important yet.
Michael Feathers in Thoughts on the Future of the Boutique Software Shop
In his post about “boutique software shops”, Michael pondered the future of companies like 8th Light, Obtiva, Hashrocket and Edge Case. I can’t speak for those other shops, so I’m going to focus exclusively on Obtiva in the post. Except for this: these 4 shops, along with others like Atomic Object and Relevance, are slowly but surely starting to connect with each other and form a loose network of businesses that I predict will create some interesting opportunities for themselves and for our industry in the years ahead. But that’s a different story.
Michael’s point about the importance of UX for “the high-end restaurants of software development” was bang on in my experience at Obtiva. We started as a developer shop, and we’re still more focused on development than other activities like coaching, training, or user experience. That said, the role of UX has significantly increased for us over the years, particularly since we started our Software Studio in 2007.
In the past, when Obtiva has used a design firm for a customer’s user experience needs, we have sometimes had our customer engage directly with the design firm. To stick with Michael’s restaurant metaphor, this is like asking a restaurant customer to interact with two different servers who are collaborating to serve a single meal. Not surprisingly, this situation was annoying for our customer. Even if we acted effectively as a single team, the customer still had to negotiate with two different companies. Lesson learned: now we act as a subcontractor to design firms, or vice versa, so customers have a more coherent experience.
Michael goes on to say…
[I]n a high-end restaurant it is completely about the user experience. Everything is subordinate to that. I don’t mean subordinate in the sense that if a customer wants a quick and dirty burger rather than what is on the menu he’s going to get it, but rather that he’s going to get something special which reflects someone’s deep knowledge of the art of cooking, something which they can’t get any place else. Now, here’s the trick. That thing which constitutes that specialness in software probably isn’t clean internal structure. It’s more likely wonderful experience as a customer both in the engagement and in their experience of the application. To put it more boldly: it’s not that development teams need UX people, it’s more like UX teams need developers.
Michael’s bold statement overstates it a bit, but the spirit of the statement is true. In the past we may have needed a little design work here and there, but these days we find ourselves partnering with firms like Webitects (who presented at Agile2009) on projects in order to give our customers the sort of exceptional experiences they expect. To be clear, Webitects employs some of their own developers. And Obtiva employs a few of our own designers. But when either firm is faced with a project that requires deeper knowledge of a discipline that the other firm possesses, we partner.
Michael’s next point is near and dear to my heart…
What do you need to be a world class Chef? You need an incredible work ethic, talent, and taste. It’s hard to find all of that bundled in a single person, but typically the people who have it rise through the industry. Steve Freeman was telling me a story the other day about a master Chef who got so angry at his crew that [he] threw them all out of the kitchen and did the entire service himself. He was a master because he could do it all.
Two weeks ago, Jeff Patton and David Hussman gathered 12 agile developers and UX practitioners at Obtiva’s office to discuss what the two communities could learn from each other. Most of the people there were community leaders, people like Brian Marick, Ward Cunningham, Alan Cooper and Hugh Beyer, so they were often looking at things from a macro level. Being the inexperienced one in the room, I was looking at things from a micro level. It is (currently) less interesting to me to figure out how to get two communities to come together than it is to encourage developers to learn the fields of User Experience Design. I see this as similar to how Extreme Programming encouraged many developers to learn about testing 10 years ago. At the end of the workshop I was excited about learning UX because I see it as a crucial step toward mastering the craft of software development. I aspire to be a strong enough software developer that I can take on any aspect of a project, and when necessary, every aspect of a project. Ultimately, I want to work with a team of multi-disciplinary developers, rather than a multi-disciplinary development team. Which one sounds more like a kitchen to you?
If you’re interested in what each of the participants took away from the workshop that day, Ward Cunningham recorded our thoughts and posted them on his Youtube channel.
