About dieUX
Pat's dieUX cartoons observe and comment on the day to day work of digital User Experience (UX) design teams.
“Although the dieUX characters don't represent anyone, they often do…”
Annual Appraisal
A female colleague slinks away. She looks unnerved and leaves our senior designer stood outside the Director's office alone and awaiting his turn. His eyes follow her retreat.
A sign saying, "Annual Appraisals" is taped to the UX Director's door. We cut to the overtly aggressive personality of the Director looking unphased. "Next", he calls with false patience…
Why dieUX?
dieUX is a superbly clever play on words. Bathe in Pat's design brilliance:
- Dieux
- Play on the French (Latin) word for god. UX designers are gods, no?
- Die
- From the act of dying—with laughter, of course. Nothing to do with that last two wireframes decomposing in the trash can—or the developer's last audible words about you?
- UX
- User Experience. Is it being killed by ableist design and poor coding? Or is it only too saturated by allied trades to be a separate profession?
- dieUX
- Is that pronounced, "die-U-X", "dieux", or "die-you"? Feck it. You're taking this too seriously.
About Pat Godfrey
Pat has spent twelve years observing his colleagues in the eLearning and platform design office. His chilling warning to team managers is based on fact:
“Never leave two designers together in a room with even a teaspoon between them…”
It's not that conflict is a bad thing. Indeed, Pat advocates that we enable conflict within our teams. It develops and tests ideas and strategies before they are even voiced.
Then again, every office has its passive and aggressive personalities too. Sometimes they are useful. We only need to watch out for their toxicity and channel their self-gratification and gift for mis-truths into positive outcomes.
Just who is the, "senior designer" in the dieUX strip? Maybe there's a little of Pat there? Maybe there's a little of all of us just trying to do the right thing?
This cartoon strip is awarded 4-stars of 5.
The Plan
The personal assistant finds our senior designer and says, "The Director wants your plan for the information architecture".
Our senior designer's expression remains a fixed grump. "I'll tell him you are at lunch", adds the personal assistant helpfully.
About the workflow
dieUX cartoon strips don't all follow the workflow to the letter. One or two fly straight into and out of Adobe Illustrator. It depends on the inspiration and speed to delivery.
The formal workflow would be something like this:
- Ideation starts when I am inspired by an event or situation.
- When it is a good idea, I progress it to Design.
- If it's a crap idea, it stays in ideation for more work.
- If improved with more work, I progress it to Design.
- If it is really crap. I bin it.
- Design work generally starts with pen sketching.
- First, I choose appropriate characters from the library to match the scene.
- Then I develop the script into the three frames. It's the hardest part.
- And then I develop the layout.
- Using Adobe Illustrator:
- The design is refined as necessary.
- The strip is finalized.
- When ready, I Publish the strip to whatever media it fits.
As for schedules? Around the normal work-life cycles and busy student activities punctuated by DIY and family, what room is there for schedules?
Schedules
The Program Manager (PM), Brian catches our senior designer in the corridoor. "About the scheduled schedule meeting?" He begins. We zoom in on our senior designers predictive face and read his thoughts; "And the punch line…".
The PM continues, "We need to reschedule it". "Bingo", mutters our senior designer.