The myth of the "UX designer"
elliotnash.me
elliotnash.me
But I think it means something more important: as you say, good UX requires a recognition that everything that goes into your application contributes to the experience. Software design, copy, marketing, UI, etc. etc. Everything. We all know this and understand this.
What UX is, then, is software quality systems engineering. "Everything that goes into the experience" is no longer simply visual design or UI components, but a complex web of inputs and influences to manage in order to ensure quality. A good UI designer has one piece of that puzzle and ensures the visuals and interactions are spot on, but a good UX designer takes all that and more into account and extends their influence to many other areas outside the visual. It's not their job to do all the work, but it is their job to manage the systems in place to ensure the experience is high quality.
Software is getting more complex and more interesting. The "UX designer" moniker is just a response to that; a recognition that UI designers are becoming more holistic and with wider reach. They are becoming quality management systems engineers. This requires more than just UI design, though most UI designers probably naturally have the skills and knowledge to make it happen.
It's a positive development IMHO. You may not like the broad nebulous term UX, but I think if we think of it more as systems design, maybe we can start to pin it down and make it a useful job title.
UX is about creating a clear, intuitive experience for the user (the front and back end work that makes that possible.) This is done through consistency of patterns, both unique to the application and drawn on existing and historical work (also makes for a good argument against software patents, but that is another issue.) At the very least, this requires some one or a group of people to create an agreed upon design document from the start.
Steve Jobs view of the liberal arts goes a long way in explaining UX. Everything matters. That hardly means every single team member should be an omniscient visionary with hundreds of niche interests.
1. UX designers aren't solely in charge of the user experience - Yes, UX designers have been saying that from day one. UX is about breaking down organizational barriers and facilitating collaboration across disciplines. That's fundamental to the concept, because looking at a product from a user's perspective, you don't see organizational divisions, internal politics, fiefdoms dominated by specific disciplines and so on. Users experience a product in a holistic way, but organizations are fragmented into specializations. Poor UX is often the result of organizations optimizing for the efficiency of division of labor without understanding the tradeoff for the end user. That's a fundamental mismatch that UX tries to remedy.
2. UX designers didn't take ownership away from anyone. When the discipline was first emerging, very few people cared. Over the last 15 years, the trend has been UX designers saying things like "How do I get my developers to care about the user's experience?" Now UX is starting to become strategically important, and (some, not all) developers realize that they're getting left behind. That's not UX designers doing it to you, that's a self-inflicted wound. I started as a developer 10 years ago, but quickly realized that UX was the future, and made the switch. UX designers have been banging the drum for 15 years trying to get everyone working together. A lot of developers are only now starting to wake up and realize they need to be involved, but find themselves at a 10-15 year disadvantage. Others stepped up and took ownership over something that no one else cared about and today they have experience, knowledge, skills and a track record in a strategically important area. Sorry about that. We tried to tell you.
3. Elliot comes off pretty naive when he talks about iteration. That's a pretty new idea in software, which has historically been dominated by a requirements-oriented traditional engineering mindset. As a result, some developers talk about iteration like they invented it, but other product design disciplines - architecture, graphic design, film, fashion, industrial design - have been doing iteration for many decades, probably even centuries. You know how designers talk about mockups? Here's the wikipedia definition of a mockup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockup
> "In manufacturing and design, a mockup, or mock-up, is a scale or full-size model of a design or device, used for teaching, demonstration, design evaluation, promotion, and other purposes. A mockup is a prototype if it provides at least part of the functionality of a system and enables testing of a design. Mock-ups are used by designers mainly to acquire feedback from users."
4. There are still many large barriers to developers participating in the UX process, but the important ones aren't about job titles. Here are some things developers need to deal with when getting involved in UX:
- Lack of career incentives - when you interview for your next job, are you going to be asked any questions about the UX of what you worked on? Is your performance at your current job evaluated in terms of your impact on UX? Do you hold yourself personally accountable for poor UX? If not, then like the chicken and pig fable, you're involved but not committed. It's one thing to say that everyone is responsible for a good UX. It's another to actually hold people (or yourself) responsible.
- Lack of empathy - you're building a product for someone else to use. If you privilege your own preferences and way of working, if you lack the flexibility to adopt the mindset of someone who is very different from you, you won't succeed in UX. You're probably very smart. Don't let that get in the way of empathizing with people who you think are beneath you.
- Lack of skills - you don't need visual design skills to contribute to UX. At a strategic level, UX is about understanding people: what they need and want, what motivates them, what's important to them. The best UX designers are insightful observers of human nature.
- Over-specialization - for some people, their whole lives revolve around their job. Good UX designers are relentlessly curious about a wide range of topics and activities. They don't accept artificial divisions of labor at work, and definitely don't let them carry over into their personal lives. Remember the saying: nothing human is alien to me.
Steve Jobs for example cared about every little detail that impacted the user experience. He also wanted everyone in his company to care in the same way.
My point is just that while UX designers may be leading the charge, they largely need to get off any "high horse" they're on, and understand an entire team is responsible for a good experience, even if they are the driving force.
What you describe sounds like a scenario where everyone wants to participate, but for some reason the UX designer refuses to collaborate? I've never heard of that happening, and it runs counter to my personal experience and pretty much every UX designer I've ever talked to, so my gut feeling is that you're reacting to a unique situation.
A software "architect" who can't be a developer wouldn't be useful on a small team. A "UX" designer who can't create mock ups, wireframes, or actual code (certainly CSS/HTML, let's hope for javascript) wouldn't be useful on a small team.
I have trouble believing that people who wouldn't be useful on a small team would be useful on a large team.
An iOS developer who can design and knows how to blend colours and make smaller icons will basically outdo every UI/UX/YADAYADA designer everywhere.
Not to be confused with a graphic designer. That shit is actually difficult.
Do you know who is responsible for creating a good user experience?EVERYONE ON YOUR TEAM. EVERYONE.
I understand the sentiment that the OP is trying to bring, but this statement is akin to stating something like "everyone is responsible for the commercial success of the business".
The role of a UX designer (or perhaps a UX Lead in this case) is to take on the responsibility of ensuring that frustrations of the customer are eliminating by all means possible. The problem is that not everyone in your organization - no matter how big or small - has the time to be able to empathize with your customers. So it's slightly disingenuous to assume that everyone bear that responsibility. It's the UX Lead/Designer's responsible to engage with the customer and feed that back in a meaningful way to the people responsible for actually cutting the code that renders the experience.
In larger companies there may be a need for "UX" designers like that, but at small companies when people all need to wear multiple hats, you don't just want a wireframer or flow diagrammer... you want a designer who can think about the overall experience, then design it, then create the actual pixels, then hopefully write some front-end code as well. I have yet to meet anyone who considers themselves a "UX Designer" to be able to do any of that.
Most good designers don't have time to write code, but some bad/mediocre ones are ok at with it as they are less specialized. It's rare that designers would even have time to write code even if they could or wanted to; usually developers are blocked on them, not vice versa.
So what you want is an interaction+visual designer who can also do production and on top of that can write code. And you probably want them also to be good. Your company is screwed.
But the worst UI designer I ever worked with knew how to draw pretty pictures and utterly refused to view the web as a separate media from print. Technical constraints were utterly ignored as were, frankly, a number of business constraints (Which is what really got him in trouble). A total failure.
Knowing the stuff that goes on around your UI is actually an asset. And knowing the tech deeply enough to code it is of immense value. Of course you still have to be good at your core craft.
Designers do understand the domains they are working in, otherwise they aren't very good. The developers are not that far away, so there is interaction if the spec goes somewhere where they can't (hardware constraints for phone UI, for example). On the other hand, knowing how to program would help a designer check the dev's bullsh*t that something can't be implemented, and they are just being lazy or toxic.
The reason I expect a good designer know something about the media they are working in is because this is been very traditionally part of the job. Designers have been expected know what inks can and can't be reproduced on which materials. Or which printing process will be most economical etc.
As you point out only the truly bad ones don’t know the baseline capabilities of their platform be it app or web design...
But for as for the good ones, that do know their media, - well, I don't find it odd that some would find the best way that they could learn the constraints of their media was to play around with HTML and CSS directly (or Interface Builder). And I do think that people who have of done that are actually a bigger asset that's than people who have just read up. I assume this is because they have a more visceral feel for the costs of their designs.
This does not mean that I expect my designers to code, or do production work. It just means that those designers who are capable of hacking out a toy system seem to be more capable of designing things that implement easily. And that saves me money.
So ya, given simple web/phone apps where HTML/CSS or interface builder are relevant, you could expect designers to be more involved with tweaking production assets directly. But I've never worked on those applications before, and the technical barriers for what I have worked on are quite high; expecting the designer to participate in modifying code assets is a bit crazy!
As well they should: the greatest value programmers can offer is if they use their programming skill to improve other areas of their company or solve problems in a domain outside programming itself. It is an exponential sort of value increase. We need more programmer generalists, and we need to encourage and embrace them.
Disagree. This is a false limit, and a false criticism rooted in ignorance and lack of experience. I don't know what else to say other than as a designer with a CS degree, I actually take offense to this statement. I know how much greater value I offer and would like other designers and programmers I work with to reach similar levels of integrated skill.
Specialization is for the industrial revolution—the technological age requires expert polymaths.
Designer have lots of skills, so much that even they have to specialize often along additional axises that might not even be obvious to us (motion or color design as a specialization of visual). We are happy to just get one who has promising design skills, and most of the designer+programmers I've interviewed just don't even come close, sorry.
How many programmers can draw? Is it a hiring requirement?
There's nothing but benefit for a designer to also pick up some coding skills or a developer gaining an appreciation of design and interaction. And I see no reason someone can't excel at both if they truly desire.
Perhaps the worst designers you've worked with did both, but don't let bad logic lead you to think that the best designers do not.
I guess you guys live in a hiring environment where good designer/programmers are easy to hire. For us, just getting good designers, or good programmers, is hard enough. The ones who claim to do both are not good enough at either to make it worth our time. We also suffer from a shortage of good designers compared to good programmers, so dev is always blocked on design and even if designers could code, they would never be given time to do so, they just so many other things to do! After a few years, their programming skills would become stale, and it would just be a waste. You sort of have to practice continuously to keep your skills up.
UX is basically a continuation of the project manager role (depending on what a given shop interprets that as). It is meant to steer the entire product design (and I don't mean PSD files) from the ground up, so it's not really "in passing".
Also, most UX people I know do have a decent skill at PS, so I guess they are listening to that concern.
Nope, its the iterative process. Good UX people, Good developers, and short iterative cycles. Not just market research. A good UX guy listens to the developer too.
We don't need any more articles like these.