I’ve never held a formal position as a usability professional. I’ve never been a UX Manager, Usability Specialist or Interaction Designer. All of my experience is just outside these formal roles.

I’ve done a bunch of usability consulting on my own. I’ve worked as a “hired gun” doing UX work for firms like MarketFace. And, I’ve written hundreds of usability articles, I’ve done dozens of presentations on UX topics and I’ve been running WebWord for more than 11 years now.

The interesting thing about my usability experience is that I see it mostly as an outsider. Despite my direct experience, most of my time is spent analyzing usability and purchasing UX as a software engineer or project manager.

In many ways, I’m the biggest public critic of usability as a profession. Many of my articles and blog entries poke holes in UX and usability specialists. Most of this is tough love. I’m just desperate to help UX’ers yet I end up being critical.

As a sidebar, I’m happy that Selling Usability is getting so much traction and that the reviews are 100% positive. I did everything I could to turn my constructive criticisms and complaining into a practical and useful book for usability and UX professionals. It worked!

I’m throwing all of these comments onto WebWord for a very important reason. Rather than complain or explain problems we should spend more time trying to make things right. It isn’t hard to turn a problem into an opportunity with a smart solution.

I could have complained about how hard it is to get other people to understand usability and UX. Many people have done this. In fact, in the past, I have done this a lot. It’s easy to complain. But I stopped and decided to focus on providing solutions.

There’s a related point here. When you’re running a usability study and you generate a report, spend some extra time providing potential solutions. Of course, you don’t want to literally dictate the new design but it’s your responsibility to give the team direction and positive energy. Don’t “dump and run” problems on the team. You can do better than that. You’ve got so much to give the team.