You walk into a client meeting and take a seat. You’ve introduced yourself as a “user experience designer” and someone across the table leans forward and demands “So, what is a user experience designer?”. It’s a fair question; as a job title it can sound a bit ambiguous, like an excuse to charge a lot of money for some vague reports.
Of course, we don’t make a lot of money and the work we do is very solid, backed by research-based theory and analysis.
I’m sure all of my colleagues in the UX field have often had to fight to have their work valued or may have seen their work shot down in flames when the business decides that users are no longer important. So when that persons leans forwards and asks that question, you might be tempted to overcompensate in your defence of your work and value.
But it’s important to have in your mind a firm understanding of your work and particular specialisations so you can sell yourself, even once you’ve secured a job, to ensure ongoing collaboration and cooperation between yourself and the business.
I like to start with Peter Morville’s honeycomb diagram of user experience and it’s the reason that I transitioned to using the term “user experience designer” because I see it as an umbrella term for several different fields. It covers usability, accessibility, information architecture … even copywriting and marketing.
UX certainly has some of it’s own underlying concepts and objectives that I see help link the various facets of user experience together, but for the most part my work falls into sub-categories that are based on my experience, skills and career. My background is primarily in web application development rather than psychology or research which is where some of my colleagues have come from, so I see myself as a more technical UX designer; a “designer-implementer” is generally how I refer to it.
I chose the role title “web user interaction designer” to firstly restrict my work to the web (although UX concepts are applicable to any sort of product or service design) and by focussing on “interaction” I’m trying to communicate my lower-level involvement in user experience design; my greatest value-add is in implementing user interfaces and overseeing the successful transition of wireframes, UI specifications, prototypes, user experience strategies and style guides into the final product. I don’t do quite so much coding these days, but I keep my HTML, CSS, JavaScript and W3C-compliance skills and knowledge up-to-date.
So while in my work I’m getting down to the nitty gritty of widget placement, responsiveness, feedback, optimising page load sequences, accessibility and progressive enhancement etc it all falls under an overarching aim to implement a good user experience. That’s pretty much it. I’m looking out for the users. I represent the users. I consult the users. I go up against the people looking out for the business’ wallet or the schedule and negotiate to ensure a win-win for the business and the user. My interface with users is through User-Centered Design (UCD) principles and techniques, user testing with concepts and prototypes, user research and persona development – plus expert heuristic analysis (which you can read more about in my presentation User Experience Design Heuristics). That’s why I moved away from the role title “front-end developer”.
So … that’s what I do, that’s in part what user experience designers and architects and any of the other dozens of job titles that fall under UX do. It’s a commitment to a good user experience, but there’s always going to be some underlying specialities that represent the other 90% of your experience, skills and work. So qualify your “I’m a user experience designer” with those other things so people understand what it is you actually do and how you’ve spent the last 10-20 years of your career to get to this point. What can you offer, how are you going to ensure that together you will deliver a better quality product, a successful product.
Without considering the user experience or customer experience element of a product or service, it is entirely possible to waste every single dollar invested in a project. In fact, it’s entirely possible that a wholly technology-focussed system and interface upgrade will do more harm than good; it can be a step backwards and have far-reaching implications in the case of business productivity systems such as HR or financial systems for employee satisfaction, staff turnover and the ongoing viability of a commercial organisation. It’s that serious. That’s how you make yourself valuable.
You might also want to read Peter Carvill’s recent article Why front-end developers are so important to the future of businesses on the web.
// purecaffeine.com, UX, design, social media and Gov 2.0 blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
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Thanks for a good article. And reminding me of the blinding simplicity of the UX honeycomb. Still good reference.
not enough people think about these things. I get lost in most websites, then I just leave :(
Nice article and definition of what a UEX is. I can relate to the “so what is it you do…” question.