The other day I was sitting in church listening to our pastor (Miles McPherson of the Rock San Diego), and he was talking about how important it is to share with other’s what God gives us – he was speaking in the context of when God blesses us with hope or peace or comfort, that we need to be a conduit of that and not a cul-de-sac and then give that to others (no matter who they are).

Now, I truly believe this, but that it not only applies to me as a Christian, but as a User Experience Designer- that I need to be a conduit of good UX practices to others I work with, and not a cul-de-sac where we keep UX design as some sort of secret passed down from UX practitioner to UX practitioner, and that we belong to some secret usability society, where we meet once a month at some hall, wear funny hats and the leaders wear hooded robes, and we’re sworn to never tell a single soul what we know or how we do what we do. There is no Grand Poohbah of UX — that I know of.

I’ve known UX designers who think we need to keep it close to our chest, that what we do is some sort of unreachable knowledge that only we can possess.

And then there are those who think we should educate our co-workers on what good usability is, what makes good UX design, and hopefully that will cause them to become champions themselves of UX, and so we don’t have to be small single voices in a crowd, shouting out “UX! UX! UX!!”, but that maybe if they understand what we do, how we do it, and how we make decisions beyond putting boxes on a page (what we’re basing that on and why we’re doing that), and make UX design ACCESSIBLE to them, then THEY will become champions of using User Experience Design and of what we work so hard to deliver every day. What we are extremely passionate about.

Then we are not one small voice in a crowd, being drowned out by “well, we did it this way before and it’s not perfect but we got the project done!” But instead we now have developers, product owners, and executive team members wanting UX design, and allowing us to drive the project as far as usability, look, and feel from concept to completion.

Given, there will still be some who are against us, who feel they did fine without doing UX design before and during a project (as in an Agile environment), and think they really know what’s best…

But there will be those who will be for our cause and goal and our passion, and know we, as a team, have the user in our best interest and to delver the best experience we can possibly give.

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