Some years ago the Mercedes Benz advertising agency came out with these brilliant images.
I really like it, but I do not identify with just one side. Through my career I was jumping from side to side and it shaped my professional profile. This is what made – and still makes – me motivated to look for new things to learn every day, I feel challenged and most importantly, alive and love my job.
I do not care only about how beautiful and engaging an interface is, I also care about how it works, what could be improved, how people use it and how we can analyse all the data that we have collected from it.
In the past 15+ years I’ve worked with all kind of people and the most common thing that I’ve found is that is hard to get out of our comfort zone. We love to do what we know how to do (or at least we believe that we know) but when it comes to doing something different and new we all tend to avoid it because we are afraid of the unknown.
If I’m a designer, why should I care about how my interface is implemented? This is not my job.
Or
If I’m a programmer, why should I care about how beautiful and engaging this interface is? This is not my job.
Well, the fact is: The industry is demanding more and more professionals with a global vision, who knows how everything works outside of their specialities, who can think outside of the box and break this invisible barrier between what they do and what everyone else do. They don’t need to be specialist in everything – and that is probably not possible – but they do need to know how their work affects other stages in the production process.
By doing this they’ll be able to improve not only their own work process but for other areas too.
I know it takes time to learn this, but the sooner you get the idea , the sooner you will be working better / happier and improving all your work environment.
🙂
