On training wheels

"Empathy maps", "affinity maps", and the rest of the UX paraphernalia are not stupid. But they are like the training wheels for UX students. They have no place in a serious team facing a real-world problem.

It's like going to your Series A pitch with a business model canvas. It's not cute. It's borderline disrespectful.

If your designers show you Empathy maps → They are either amateurs, charlatans, or morons.

This is our industry's attempt to make sensible tools like a SWAT analysis or Five Forces analysis. Unfortunately, they don't work because problems that can be modeled with these primitive tools are total no-brainers and should not be discussed in meetings of paid professionals.

"But Ayadi, this helps me show information in a standard format".

→ If the information you want to show fits in this format, you're wasting people's time.

"But Ayadi, it's a summary, an overview, an intro, a jumping-off point".

→ It's busy work that nobody needs. You can keep it for cosmetic reasons but don't do it on the company's dime.

Productive meetings must be about problems that can't be captured with standardized, basic frameworks. They are the "depends", the "Mostly", the "Sometimes", the "ifs", the quirks, and the things that are tough to explain.

I know many teams do this dance. That's a nice flag for the next round of layoffs 🙂

And you wonder why nobody takes designers seriously. It's because of this cr4p. These design bootcamps really need to start telling people to take off the training wheels. It's embarrassing.