Page 13 - ux-design-for-startups-marcin-treder

Like many of my contemporary UX Design peers, I

started my career as a so-called usability specialist.

Fascinated by ergonomics and cognitive science, I was

working to make sure users were able to actually use

interfaces. Armed with user research, heuristics and a

little bit of prototyping, I was trying to find my place

in the ‘developer-oriented’ world. This wasn’t easy.

For dev teams, an interface was considered to be an

addition to great technology, and usability was even

less important than that – a kind of nice-to-have

option.

It was a time when binary logic ruled. Actually having

a product that worked was important in contrast to not

having a product at all. Delivering anything functional

was seen as a success. Whether users could easily use it

was often outside the picture.

Business people didn’t get it either. The term ‘usability’

was on everyone’s lips thanks to the work of Jakob

Nielsen and Steve Krug (their popularity was

skyrocketing!), but executives believed it was more

The age of user experience design 13