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Without a doubt, the best work is done by people who are dedicated to their work.  The reason is pretty simple. It is hard to develop something amazing if you don’t care about it, when there’s no interest or passion.

If you talk to people who do great work, they will tell you that there is dedication based on the inner need to craft something wonderful. It isn’t money or external rewards that drive the best people, unless you’re talking about people who make money for a living such as sales people.

When it comes to usability, this focus and dedication is especially important. The reason is that usability is mostly tedious, nasty work unless you are truly in love with delivery of a great experience for other people.

(UX folks are an odd bunch but I love them!)

This is a profound state of affairs. You see, it takes special people doing special work to make usability a reality. If you’re doing UX work, you need to actually care about the work you’re doing, and the people that will feel the pain if the design isn’t right.

This is why focus is so important. First, you need the passion. Second, you need the skills. But third, you need to focus or nothing will be done that has any lasting impact for world. Put another way, UX work can be good but never great without focus.

Dedication is the key ingredient. But, it’s often neglected.

The good news is that humans have the ability to learn how to be focused. More precisely, humans are predisposed to be focused. This is achieved through flow as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

There’s another way to think about passion and focus and flow. Many people wonder how long it takes to become an expert and to kick ass. Well, most research indicates it takes about 10 years to reach “expert” status in a domain. That’s dedication. That’s focus.

So, there’s focus on a task and flow, and then there’s focus over a long period of time. Both are required to achieve greatness in most domains, but especially usability. The reason — again — is that UX work takes focus because it isn’t always fun.

Greatness is found in the details. It isn’t instant and it’s rarely easy.

So, if you want great usability please be prepared to focus. Put in the time and you’ll see rewards. Learn to get into the state of flow and be ready to spend years on the craft.

You can make a difference right now. You can do great now, and it will come easier and faster as time goes on. Get going and good luck. Focus!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.