There's something wrong with the UX Designer job title
I’m a User Experience Designer and the UX title is making no sense to me.
“Experience” encompasses everything and it’s unfair with the UX Designer and with whoever is working with UXers.
I haven't yet come across an industry that has its discipline as a continuously positive, happy, easy, 10-step-quick-learn. However, it feels like with UX Design all you need is to do a quick course, run a workshop, follow some usability steps, apply usability heuristics and job done…the UX Design title is yours. The article below is an example:
How to become a self‑taught UI/UX designer (2021) —" Do you want to become a professional UI/UX designer but don’t know where to start? Well, you’ll be happy to learn that you don’t necessarily need a formal degree to build a UI/UX career in 2021."
If you google "How to become a UX Designer having no experience" there are 184 million results…
When was UX Design born?
Don Norman, the first person to add User Experience on his business card did so in 1995. He was a cognitive scientist that joined Apple in the early 90s as their User Experience Architect. He came up with the term “user experience” as a way of encompassing all that UX is. As he explains:
“I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow: I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.”
UX was invented inside Apple (easy to guess).
Coincidently, doing a Google Trends search I found that "Web Designer" is dying a slow death and "UX Designer" appeared on searches after 2007 (guess what?! After the first iPhone launch or the death of the Nokia N95) and will probably take over Web Design by the next 2 years.
What is User Experience (UX) Design?
From the Interactive Design Foundation on the article "What is UX Design":
“The process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function
So… it's…
Will businesses give UX Designers this responsibility?
UX Design, according to the NN Group, the world Leaders in Research-Based User Experience:
“User experience” encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.
They continue with some interesting final remarks:
We should also distinguish UX and usability: According to the definition of usability, it is a quality attribute of the UI, covering whether the system is easy to learn, efficient to use, pleasant, and so forth. Again, this is very important, and again total user experience is an even broader concept.
Interesting… because usability can be measured through metrics (quite easily), but how can UX be measured, being such a broader concept? How far do you need to go and how far have you gone with the experience? Tough to say as it's so broad, encompassing "all aspects of the end-user's interactions with the company, services and products"… "all" is a lot, so how do you create a metric for that?
I've once tried to measure how many times a user smiled on the usability test and it worked. Many things can become a metric in UX.
With the approach proposed by the NN group: in the same way you have a CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) expert analysing what converts best in eCommerce, an interesting approach could be to narrow UX Design to Usability and Heuristics Designer…
Then that's UH Designer (which could be an onomatopoeia for disbelief if your design failed "UH?").
Think about it… Usability and Heuristics Designer?
What makes a good experience?
According to the Interactive Design Foundation:
Products that provide great user experience are designed with not only the product’s consumption or use in mind but also the entire process of acquiring, owning and even troubleshooting it. Similarly, UX designers don’t just focus on creating products that are usable; we concentrate on other aspects of the user experience, such as pleasure, efficiency and fun, too. Consequently, there is no single definition of a good user experience.
"Consequently, there's no single definition of a good user experience"… okay…
_________Pause for an Agile challenge moment________
I'll pause this article to include an Agile/Scrum challenge within the world of UX.
The "Definition of Done" is really about getting something working, which is code that doesn't break and it's functional. But here is the curve ball: there has never been a definition of "working" or of "done" from a UX perspective. Who is measuring the quality of the "definition of done"?
An experience never ends. And once your delightful moment becomes the basic expectation it's time to think about new delightful moments… Things that are exceeding expectations today will eventually become a basic expectation.
_________End of Agile challenge moment ________
The Interactive Design Foundation just said (four paragraphs above) that "Consequently, there is no single definition of a good user experience."
Think of a doctor telling you "There's no single definition of good health" or an engineer telling you "there's no single definition of good engineering". Well, if your bridge collapses, that's a clear definition of what's "not good engineering".
Of course there is a definition for good UX. Jared Spool proposes, in what he calls UX Outcomes, the following:
"If we do a great job delivering a well-designed [feature/product/service] how will we improve someone's life?
This improvement should/must deliver some benefit (add value) to a user.
"To improve someone's life" is meaningful and magical. Aim for that.
Who owns the experience?
In a big company building digital products, you will work with product people such as: Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Front-End Devs, Backend Devs, QA Testers, UI Designers, Industrial Designers (maybe), Copywriters, Systems Architects, Data Analysts, Business Analysts, Researchers, Heads of Product, Heads of Design, Marketing, Branding, Finance, Social Media Managers, Customer Support Agents and the list goes on…
All these people are also crafting experiences to add value to the business and the users. However, here comes the UX Designers with "User Experience" in the title…
Based on what I've seen, UX Designers are getting requirements from POs, populating the design system in Sketch/Figma, journey mapping in Miro/Mural, creating wireframes for a new journey, prototyping, testing the usability of interfaces with users and handing over the work to devs.
- Who is looking at the data and analytics?
- Where are users coming from and going to in the acquisition funnel?
- Who is making sure customer support is feeding back the learnings from customers' calls?
- Who is measuring frustration and delight?
- Who is creating test assumptions and writing USER STORIES that will eventually become requirements for the definition of done?
- Who is measuring the quality of "done"?
- Who is unblocking devs and helping with estimation to build more useful features?
- Who is picking up the phone every single day and tagging every single call to troubleshoot customer problems day in, day out?
- Who is measuring increased developer cost and waste, when building features that are not valuable for the customer?
- Who is analysing why customers are abandoning the journey?
- Who is writing and reporting customer satisfaction surveys?
- Who is recruiting participants for usability tests?
- Who is measuring the decrease in productivity inside a company because employees are struggling to find meaning and purpose in their work?
- Who owns the roadmap?
- Who is mapping every touchpoint of the user journey?
These points above and many more encompass the experience… Are UX Designers OWNING all these points as well?
Should UX Designers own all these points?
Should UX Designers own user journeys or user experiences?
If there is a Product Owner, should there be an Experience Owner? (i'd love this title 😜)
Is the Head of UX the main head accountable for the experience of the product, or is it the Head of Product, or Product Lead?
Who owns what after all?
In my experience: the Product Owner will report to the Head of Product, the UX Designer to the Head of UX, the Devs to the Head of Technology, CRO to Marketing or Finance, the QAs to the Head of Reliability and so on…
If you've experienced the problem above, you might get lost with how you measure success. Every player inside the team or squad is reporting to some different area with their different KPIs.
Meanwhile, your product or service is like…
Because UX is such a broad term and when accountability and roles & responsibilities are usually not very clear, UX Designers might ask from time to time: “what do I actually own?”
Am I feeling like this because the industry is undefined, or is UX undefined up to a point that makes me feel like this inside the industry?
On the flip side, there are people embracing the idea that everyone is a designer. To me it would alleviate the problem and remove the weight of carrying the title "User Experience Designer".
Below you can check out one of the great articles about it, from Daniel Burka, who worked at Google Ventures at the time:
This is gold:
Whether you like it or not, whether you approve it or not, people outside of your design team are making significant design choices that affect your customers in important ways. They are designing your product. They are designers.
There is something wrong with the UX Designer job title.
If I was a Copywriter, I would know what to do and what is expected from my job… if I was a Dev, a PO, a UI Designer, a Head of Product I'd also know.
Hypothetically, if I was a Wireframe Designer I’d be extremely happy because I’d know exactly what I had to do. Get the requirements, wireframe it, test it (possibly) and hand it over to a UI Designer.
Doing some research to write this article I came across two articles from Scott Kiekbusch:
- Raise Your Hand If You’re Sick of the Letters: UX
- The term “UI/UX” is bad for designers; 4 reasons to stop using it
He's got some interesting quotes,
Ask ten people what a UX person does and you’ll get ten answers.
And this beautiful one:
Creating a user experience isn’t a role for a single person or department. It’s a practice for which an entire team — or even an entire organization — is responsible.
Job title suggestions?!
Jared M. Spool has “Maker of Awesomeness” as his job title and so does everyone that works with him (how cool is this?!).
I've also heard, in a talk, from a VP of Design at Microsoft, that they're running an experiment about getting rid of specific titles to have everyone as a Designer or Product Maker. This is what was said:
Our title is "Designer", we don't use industrial designer or interaction designer, because we have so many different flavours. And we talk about ourselves as "Product Makers", including engineers and marketers. The idea is to thematically dissolve the silos that you bring in as you come as a specialist. We are trying to stay away from special lingo that you have in UX Design or Industrial design to have a common vocabulary.
In this article I mentioned some specific job titles, such as:
- Usability and Heuristics Designer (the UH Designer 😅)
- Experience Owner
- CRO Designer
- Human interface and Usability Designer
- Wireframe Designer (why not?)
If it's as broad as "Maker of Awesomeness" or "Product Maker", or as narrow as "Wireframe Designer" or UH Designer, I believe it's never too late to start this conversation.
What if UX is the process, not the job title?
Have your say!🙋♀️🙋♂️
I want to start a discussion that UX Designers and businesses seem not have very often:
If UX Design is the answer, what is the question?
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