Are You a Born Consultant?

Being a Chameleon

One of the best compliments I have ever received as a UX consultant was from a new hire who was shadowing me. He spent all day with me, from the airport to a late-night customer dinner. Even before arriving at the customer site, he saw me interact with airport security staff, customs agents, taxi drivers, and hotel staff. Once we got to the customer site, we sat with hourly call-center employees to hear what they liked and disliked about our product and how they used it. We then met with various levels of IT and business people, until we finally had dinner with the organization’s CIO and various VP-level business people. At the end of the day, I asked our new hire how he enjoyed himself. While he did not have a consulting background, he did have very deep UX expertise, and I suspected that he just had it when it came to consulting.

He turned to me and said that he had not realized the level to which a UX consultant has to recognize and care about all the various levels of people he interacts with. He said, as a UX professional, all he wants to do is design and create better user experiences. He then proceeded to tell me that he felt I was like a chameleon, who could change the way he is depending on his environment. I responded that, although chameleons change their colors depending on their environment, underneath it all they are still chameleons. You cannot be a great UX consultant and create stellar experiences if you don’t love interacting with and learning about people and what makes them tick. Don’t change yourself and your beliefs, but allow yourself to blend with others to create positive change.

As UX consultants, we are not just helping people to solve problems, we are designing solutions that affect organizations and structures that are far more complex than ourselves. UX designers who just design based on their own views will be limited in their greatness.

Smashing a Square Peg into a Round Hole

I believe that some of the struggles UX consultants experience come from having to do a job that oftentimes goes beyond what we are trained to do. UX consultants almost always have a strong creative side, yet we are also expected to work like IT and business people. We work in that very common medium of the user interface, or presentation layer, so we are often called upon to be mediators, bringing different groups of people into the same room—who would otherwise never meet together—to discuss important topics. While we may design user experiences for our client’s customers, they also expect us to craft experiences that disparate groups of internal customers can agree on and get behind. That’s tough work for any level of consultant.

Back to the Question

This column’s title asks whether UX consultants are born or made. I personally feel that I was born to this line of work. Many aspects of consulting come easy to me, and I truly enjoy it. Yet I’ve also found that great UX consultants can be made. That new hire I mentioned earlier? I turned out to be wrong about that person. He struggled greatly with a lot of the consulting aspects of the job. He had great UX skills, but was not always able to convey his ideas to clients. However, through mentoring and a great deal of hard work on his part, he turned himself into a world-class consultant. The ability to be a great consultant is about your mindset and will. Whether you are naturally acclimated to consulting or have to work hard to get there, it is these two personal attributes that will steer you in the right direction.