Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, and terrible engineers can also completely ruin the process. As can a terrible manager. What's your point?

A real UX person will be able to and should provide high-fidelity mocks of the entire flow, preferably with an interactive demo of some kind. They will certainly have design skills and preferably programming skills. However, those high-fidelity mocks are the last stage in the UX design process. If all you want are those final mocks then you are doing nothing more than asking for a new coat of paint, and what you really want is a graphic designer.

So, you're right, everyone on the team should be responsible for good UX, but it really helps to have someone who can slam together some mocks after the meetings, or whose job it is to come up with a completely new idea to solve our nasty onboarding flow problem. Because George, the guy who's in charge of making sure our DB doesn't implode under load? He might be able to help out with the UX, but he's already got a full-time job to do.

Your image of a UX person that produces no mocks, no prototypes, no designs, and just sits in meetings is a sad one. Those people should be fired, because they are not doing anything -- certainly not UX.

If a UX designer produces mocks and designs, they're a designer. If they produce software prototypes, that's called an engineer.

My point is that "UX Designer" is a largely unnecessary job description that is filled by quality execution in more traditional roles.

Sadly, "designer" is a poorly-qualified term. When I hear someone say that it's hard to tell whether they mean a graphic designer or a UI/UX designer (or possibly even a product manager or something).

And yes, there is a huge difference between the two. UI/UXers need to have extremely strong graphic design skills (and for 98% of the projects out there, they will be good enough by themselves), but for a perfectly-tweaked, masterfully perfected paint job to layer over the final UX, you should hire a graphic designer for a final pass (Apple does this, for example). Similarly, graphic designers, if asked to design UI, will usually produce something that looks gorgeous and is completely unusable (or, more frequently, completely ignores the corner cases that end up being deal breakers).

Or perhaps you mean _product design_, which involves a terrifying gestalt of UI/UX design, technical design (eng), and market planning/vision (management, PM, ...?). The person (or people) in charge of that varies by project and company, but in the most successful cases seems to be either someone who is good at all three or a 2-4 man group of representatives from the three domains.

"Or perhaps you mean _product design_, which involves a terrifying gestalt of UI/UX design..."

Terrifying, indeed. The people who obsess over terminology are, in my experience, often the same people who bring the least practical talent to the table.

Are you arguing that there is no difference between UI designers and graphic designers? It may all seems like "silly design stuff" but I promise you -- there's a big difference between the two. For example, UI designers usually need to be able to code (if perhaps only rudimentarily).

Or perhaps you're implying that there is no difference between UI designers and product designers? Admittedly, sometimes those are the same person, but usually the person who fills the PD roll is a manager or CEO (if at a startup). They'll certainly consult with the UI designer (and eng), and they may design most of the product with the UI designer. Or they may not. Not necessarily the same job. It really depends on the people and the company.

If this seems like bullshit to you then...I'm sorry? That's how most of the industry works (at Google, at Apple, at ...). There are not these strange creatures called "designers" who do everything and have all skills (some do exist! but they are shockingly, painfully rare. And they're usually not in charge, so it's hard for them to do product design).

Maybe you meant something more specific, but you seem to be implicating yourself. Here's what you said above:

"If a UX designer produces mocks and designs, they're a designer. If they produce software prototypes, that's called an engineer."

The problem is that "designer" can mean very many different things to different people. There's a large chunk of the world that always read "designer" as "graphic designer". Mixed up with this is the problem that the various communities of practice are, I think, searching for a more common identity.

In the development world we have "developers" or "engineers" - which include all of: * back-end coders * front-end coders * devops * folk focussed on building automated tests * folk focussed on tool development to support the rest of the team * database experts * etc.

... and we're also quite happy to have people be good at bits multiple categories and be

In the UX community we have: * interaction designers * graphic designers * UI designers * content strategists * usability testers * user researchers

And like the dev world there are people who are good a bits of multiple categories, but there isn't really a good general identity. As I said "designer" is often seen as just graphic design. UX Designer is a ghastly clumsy phrase, but at least it doesn't suffer that problem.

I'm a UX designer and I do both code and design.

You must know both to be a real UX designer. That's the person you want, and yes we're expensive. We may not be the best at either one, but our ability to bridge the gap between the two gives us a unique perspective that allows us to make experience improvements.

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