Q: To what extent has sci-fi (TV, movies, books) influenced your UX work?

A: That’s a great question. I think you can look at science fiction as our collective fantasy about technology. If you want to understand not how people use their computers but how they want to use them, popular sci-fi is the first place you should look.

In the past few years I’ve really moved away from web app design or even traditional desktop app design, favoring touchscreen devices instead. The computers of the future don’t have mice (“Hello computer!”). Rarely do they even have keyboards. We crave ubiquity and personality in our interfaces; something always there, always responsive, controlled as directly and easily as any tangible system. Star Trek predicts all of this, and now more than ever you can see those predictions becoming reality.

Something that I think will be interesting to look for in coming years is the development of the human element in UI. Will we begin to realize our fantasies of the jovial robot butler, or the sweet voice of Majel Barrett-Roddenberry greeting us when we login? Only time will tell!

We all know where this is going.

Try your best to avoid being stuck in:

• A turbolift.
• A transporter pattern.
• A static warp bubble.
• The holodeck.
• An infinite loop.
• The 19th century.

Never be any of the following people:

• The good friend of a bridge officer, who no one has ever seen before, and who appears at the beginning of the episode.
• The love interest of: James T. Kirk, Julian Bashir, William T. Riker, or Lwaxana Troi.
• A spunky young ensign who is trying to prove him/herself.
• Any member of the crew of the original Enterprise appearing on a series other than their own.
• A member of any opposing force with redeeming characteristics or sympathetic qualities who opens up to a Starfleet officer.
• An enemy defector with heartfelt emotional allegiance to his/her race or government.
• Any android other than Data.
• The only member of the away team who is not a bridge officer.
• Tasha Yar.

Do you remember the popular kids? You know, the people who sat at the best lunch table, wore the most fashionable clothes, and went to awesome parties? Objectively, there was nothing particularly special about this clique, but everyone understood that they were “cool.” Coolness was in fact their salient characteristic.

What I find interesting about being cool is that it’s simply not a label you can give yourself. In this context, cool means that everyone else thinks you’re cool. Think about what that does to the locus of control when it comes to coolness. The popular kids didn’t make themselves cool – it was the rest of the school who did.

(Once in a while, someone can define a new understanding of coolness, but only if they are not trying to be cool. It is one of the great paradoxes of human interaction.)

The thing is, this phenomenon does not just apply to cool. It applies to just about any feature or characteristic you can think of to define a group of people as different from others. You can be an emo, a goth, a slut, a jock, a dork, a hipster, or whatever else, without passing some objective test that shows you have the right set of qualities to earn the label. Those are labels other people give you based on their understanding of you and the world.

This is normal and I suspect mostly understood. We all do it; it helps us formulate our big-picture worldview without spending too much processing time on individuals that aren’t immediately relevant to us. The problem is when the label starts to mean something to you as an identity.

Let’s talk about the word “nerd.” Let’s just deal with that word for a second and think about what it means. I assume that most of the people reading this article are like me and probably think of themselves as nerds. I’m also going to assume they are reasonably internet-literate and have read their share of the incredibly common treatises on what it means to be a nerd and why we’re better than everyone else (especially if you read Reddit). Perhaps the most well-known of these is Rands’ Nerd Handbook. It’s actually quite well-written, and I personally have a lot of respect for the author. But I find this particular article condescending and counterproductive. It reads like a laundry list of excuses written for people who don’t “get” nerds.

Listen. Being a nerd is just like being cool. It’s an arbitrary label originally assigned to you or people like you because you act a certain way or have certain interests. If you encounter someone who doesn’t seem to “get” you, it’s not because they need a five-page article about what you’re about. It’s because they are interested enough in you to try to get past the label and interact with you on a level that’s deeper than just “nerd” or “not nerd.” Shoving them back over the line with a huff and a mumbled “it’s a nerd thing, you wouldn’t understand” is escapist or elitist, depending on your mood that day. Take your pick — the stereotypical nerd is both.

The cool kids aren’t fundamentally different than any other clique, and neither are nerds. Yet it seems as though we keeping trying to believe that we are. It’s stupid and just as bad as telling yourself that it’s okay to act the way you do because you’re “cool.”

Embrace what you are, but don’t use a label as an excuse to stop growing. Be a good person, whatever that means to you. There are enough walls and boundaries in this world without us trying to build them higher.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this as I read Gladwell’s latest book Outliers. I won’t go into the details of what he says in the book, because it’s worth checking out on your own. But the basics of what he discovered when he studied exceptionalism can be summed up in two sentences. Experts practice a lot, and must have the opportunity to do so to become experts. And seemingly arbitrary factors such as when you were born or where you were raised can have a big impact on your success.

Suddenly the truth of the gifted program becomes clear. For some reason or another, some kids got a jump-start on their intellectual development. The top 8% were identified as efficiently as possible and accelerated. I guess that’s the best public school can do, and I’ll never fault them for that. They simply can’t help everyone. But it certainly does reveal a few things about the pattern I have observed as the lot of us age into gifted ex-children.

As you grow up, the special programs tend to disappear, and by the time you reach college it’s assumed that you are capable of finding something suitably challenging on your own. Additionally, your exceptional intellectual growth as a child has probably slowed down and the other students are catching up to you. You may even be starting to see them pass you. Just like that, the gifted label is gone. Children are gifted. Adults are ambitious, hard-working, and driven.

So what happens to you now? The understanding that you are somehow different from the people around you has already become a part of your subconscious. You might struggle to fill the void of the “gifted” label with something else. “Nerd” or “geek” maybe. You might feel pulled towards engineering and computer science, where the myth of exceptionalism still thrives. Or maybe you just let it go quietly, and mourn the death of your childhood potential. It was nice while it lasted.

But the fact is, you were never gifted. No one is. No one is deemed worthy of some special gift that makes them better than everyone else. And the myth that you were may – may – have prevented you from doing the things that you needed to do to become truly great. Like working hard. Seeking challenges. And not taking anything on faith.

I spent four years in college doing more or less nothing and wasted every good educational opportunity I had because I believed I was too good for it. Because it’s hard to hear that getting good takes work – no more, no less. I’m lucky in that I have a singular love for what I do that kept me plugging away at it, but I still struggle with the notion of hard work and practice. I get angry at myself when I don’t do something perfectly the first time. I have to coach myself to keep trying. It gets better slowly but only through extreme, sometimes painful awareness of the fact that I am not gifted.

But in a way it’s kind of nice. I always felt guilty, that I never deserved whatever “gift” I got. Now I know that it’s just a frame of mind — and that can be taught. And where there are people willing to teach, we are all gifted.

It was almost two years ago that I joined the company. In that two years I learned more than I ever could have thought possible, met some truly exceptional people, and discovered something exceptional within myself. I can’t do justice to the experiences that I had there in words, so I’m not going to try. It is a truly unique place.

And today I filed my notice.

You may think I’m crazy. I even think I’m crazy sometimes. But this is about a lot more than the work, the company or even whether or not I was happy there. One of the things they ask you to do when you become a manager is to define and write down your “core values” so they can inform the decisions you make. Six months ago I didn’t have any core values. I couldn’t have picked out a core value in a lineup.

It was in thinking about what’s important to me that I realized my situation at Google was unsustainable. I may have been comfortable there, but I’m idealistic and ambitious and I needed to move on. I often wonder how long I can hang on to this particular brand of naïveté, but it’s one of the things I treasure about myself and I will keep it as long as I can.

These are the things I stand for.

1. Nothing is impossible. Even unbreakable rules can bend.
2. It makes no difference if it’s magic or sleight-of-hand as long as you can still perform the trick.
3. You owe it to yourself to believe in what you do.
4. Aspire to be bigger than you are. You can’t do it without honesty and courage.
5. Love the people, not the brand. Even large organizations have a soul, you just have to find it.

I want to have a reason to try something new. I want to work with people who might not have much more than heart and good ideas. I want to help independents and small businesses and open source projects. I want to follow what inspires me. These are just a few of the reasons I’ve decided to leave and strike out on my own.

I am as much scared as exhilarated. I don’t know what’s waiting for me out there. But I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t try. Which brings me to my final “core value.”

6. You can’t fly if you don’t jump.