I’m not a User Experience Designer. And neither are you.
What? How would you know what I am or am not?
I don’t for sure. But give me a chance to back it up. In order to make such a claim I need to establish what I mean by the term user experience. To do that, let’s roll back to 1995. Gangsta’s Paradise by Coolio is the number one hit song and Don Norman publishes a SIGCHI proceedings paper, in which he writes…
In this organizational overview we cover some of the critical aspects of human interface research and application at Apple or, as we prefer to call it, the “User Experience.”
And there it appears (emphasis by me). The first occurence, it seems, of that compound noun ‘user experience.’ Norman coined the term to encompass a range of elements from a systems perspective.
He explained the term further in an email to Peter Merholz a few years later, stating “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 the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual. Since then the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose it’s meaning.”
It’s in this broad sense, one that reaches across all aspects of the human-product relationship, that ‘user experience’ entered our vocabulary.
As Marc Hassenzahl reminds us, if a product’s purpose and function is the ‘what’ then the experience created through our relationship with it is the ‘how’ and ‘why’. We’re actually quite good at mastering the ‘what’ and to a large degree the ‘how’ of product design. We can invent things that help us accomplish tasks and solve problems that we once only dreamed about. But when we talk of experience, the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of design are the means, not the end according to Norman. Ultimately, product experiences emerge in the form of narratives that describe how they enhance our lives. And just like traditional stories, we tell them to others.
What does ‘user experience’ mean today?
UX itself still retains its original meaning in some circles, but has been used more and more frequently as a surrogate for more specific domains such as interaction design, visual design, or usability. Some professionals who’ve been perfectly satisfied calling themselves web|product|interaction|app|etc designers (or just designers) now feel an urge to adopt this more loftier sounding ‘user experience’ prefix. Perhaps it’s seen as something one graduates into if they’ve been designing long enough. Or maybe it comes from a fear of being perceived as lagging behind forward edge thinking in their industry. Whatever the motivation, it’s hard to argue that the term hasn’t become diluted among a broad range of practitioners.
Peter Merholz interviewed Norman a decade after their initial correspondence in which Don reflects once again on the term he helped popularize:
Yes, user experience, human centered design, usability; all those things, even affordances. They just sort of entered the vocabulary and no longer have any special meaning. People use them often without having any idea why, what the word means, its origin, history, or what it’s about.
Can you sense a little disappointment there? I think it comes from a growing disregard for the systems nature of product design. What’s taken hold is this notion that because a user’s experience with a product is influenced by that product’s design, the experience as a whole can therefore be designed.
This is false. What is actually being designed is a support system to facilitate the formation of user experiences.
Design as a support system
In a comment on Marc Hassenzahl’s thoughts on UX, Norman explains where experiences ultimately come into being:
To use another design term: we can design in the affordances of experiences, but in the end it is up to the people who use our products to have the experiences.
Put another way, we can use what we know about our own brains to create a framework that guides users toward having the experiences we’d like them to have, but it’s up to them to actualize them. We have full control over things like objectives, features, interaction design (i.e. one can make a user complete a process in a certain way), information structure, UI design, visual design, and written language. But even if you control all of those things yourself, you still can’t say that the system will result in a predestined experience.
The products we create are systems that support positive (we hope) user experiences. You could think of the things we design as experience facilitators or experience enablers.
Why I’m not a UX Designer
Design implies control. Experiences resulting from things we design and saying we design those experiences are not at all the same.
I don’t call myself a UX Designer for one simple reason: I don’t believe experiences can be designed. At least not outside the realm of science fiction or without knowledge about ourselves that we have yet to discover. I view User Experience as a field of study with a range of disciplines within it, not something we author (particularly not by a single designer). Products are designed. Experiences are their resultants.
Many will disagree. But for me it seems presumptuous and a bit hubristic to view it any other way.
What does UX design mean to you?
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30 insightful responses to Why I’m not a UX Designer (and neither are you)
‘UX Design’ has a funny and buzzy ring to it. I believe experiences can be crafted, but no user will hit 100% of your vision. I treat ‘user experience’ as a sum of design choices, but I would never call myself a ‘ux designer’.
As a Product Designer I care for everything related to the product, what the user experiences, and what potential users experience (marketing). Visioning and big picture thinking is also important parts of what I do as the product designer.
Great article, I agree with majority of it!
I feel something that has been looked over is the role of a “UX” researcher/consultant – this isn’t necessarily (though can be) a different person – but involves more “abstract” decisions based on information gathered.
Talking to users, audience targeting, summarising the problem, user goal ideation, talking to the team, consider business objectives, use “UX methods” and other things of this irk.
Then guiding the people who are involved with the project on what they need to be doing – not how, but what.
I’m unsure what this role should be called, but is how I always envisaged what a lot of UX Designers do (but feel that the design part is very wrong in this case)
Just my thoughts
Today, there are so many vague descriptions of jobs without a good reason. Mostly because of some individuals trying to ‘do’ something new and exiting.
Nice read. I’m not fond of the term when it’s used in job titles. I call myself a “Web Designer”, I don’t feel the need to qualified that I do indeed consider user experience, just like I consider accessibility and all other aspects of a good design process. A lot of people talk as if to imply that “UX Design” is somehow different than what us mere mortal “designers” do.
Ahhh. The changing of semantics through the use of overuse.
Yes. User Experience is becoming a blanket term that can be raped by a great many people and their disciplines for the sake of buzzzzz. The word “Gentleman” was once a description of status, having nothing to do with the personality or demeanour of the person. A word like “nice” is now used to generically and innocuously describe virtually everyone. Articles like these are interesting, but ultimately meaningless. Everyone will have their opinions, and some of these opinions are unnecessary overanalyses of things that are obviously happening, especially to the people in the field.
I feel like I’ve read this argument before. I don’t remember where but it evoked a similar response in me.
Aaron, I think you’ve done a great job organizing your thoughts here but to me this argument puts a lot of weight on small probabilities.
The points you make on it being up to the user to experience our products the way they choose to are correct. A designer should always be aware of this idea and it should factor into their decisions as you are suggesting with this article. But to me this isn’t to say that an experience can not be designed and therefore you and I can not be user experience designers.
Let’s take for example a haunted house. What I gather from this article is that the argument would be that not everyone is going to be scared by the experience they have in our haunted house. Plenty of people will be capable of adopting the mindset that they don’t give a damn about this haunted house and they want to go home. This is true but unlikely. The more common event will be that people come to our haunted house because they want to be scared and will be delighted to take part in the terrifying experience that has been designed for them.
Along the same lines, if a drunk driver gets into a wreck because they ran a red light does it mean that the stoplight was poorly designed?
I believe a user experience can certainly be designed and I think we see it all the time. When it comes to digital interactions a lot of these great pieces are put together by UX designers and I think the deserve to hold that title.
Users are going to have an “experience” with your website, service, or product one way or the other. Good designers can almost always show a track record of curving this experience towards the desired result.
So I say I am a UX designer and you might even be one too!
Thanks for offering those salient points here, Jason. I liked the way you describe ‘curving’ the experience. That is how I view it as well. Great designers can curve that experience trajectory tighter, but the main takeaway is that trajectory is indeed separate from the product design itself.
There were some analogies I was tempted to include in my little essay here. But let’s use your haunted house. What you say about this experience is on point, though I choose to take into account more factors outside the haunted house designer’s control. It’s unlikely that one designer controls every aspect of the product — in this case things like, but not limited to, the size and location of the house, the operating budget, the experience and effort of the actors hired, the volume of customers (of the very few haunted houses I’ve been to, the more people in them, the less scarier they seemed to be), and the price of entry, Those all weigh into the haunted house “user” experience.
Even if the designer could control everything about the house from soup to nuts, there are still elements that could overpower it in an experiential sense. Maybe two people had an argument on the way there, totally killing the mood. Or maybe you’re on a date with a girl you’re super into, and she gets frightened and falls into the safety of your arms, making you feel like superman.
At the risk of overquoting the Don, “nothing is an island” when it comes to UX.
LOL – this is nitpicking masquerading as deep thinking. Yes, you can misread the term “user experience designer” in an extremely literal way, but that doesn’t prove that designers actually think of it that way.
Norman says the term has become so broad as to have lost any meaning. Maybe. But this is the exact opposite of your claim that “UX” has turned into a very specific meaning of being in total control of the user’s experience.
To put it another way, how does this information help me as a designer? If I remind myself that I can only influence, not totally control the user’s experience, what would I do differently? Everyone learns at an early age that people have different subjective experiences, and designers are reminded of this on a daily basis when they get feedback on their designs. If we really believed we could totally control users’ experiences, this would be a shocking wake up call. But it’s not. Every designer knows it.
I think that overall discussion topics on what people should title themselves are interesting academic exercises. That said, your point about recognizing a minimal level of control over the user’s actual experience is an important design principle. Design with the unknown variables in mind.
One word: “for”.
We design for experiences. “UX designer” is just shorthand. Does an interaction designer design interactions, or for interactions? Oh, and what does a web designer design?
You nailed it, and here is briefly why I share your point of view → http://kaish.in/ppVKYv
An interesting POV but in my opinion it’s just over complicating something simple. When one refers to themselves as a “User Experience” designer they are likely meaning that they are attempting to create an interface that will leave the user feeling happy and not frustrated.
Of course you can never design exactly what every user will do but that’s not what the term means. There really is no need for such a term since, as you said, it only exists in science fiction.
Still an interesting read. Got me thinking. Thanks for sharing
Re-reading what I wrote, I can definitely understand the reactions expressed by people like Mike and Peter. (Aside @Mike: I don’t consider my thinking on this deep. I’m merely restating what Norman and Hassenzahl have already pointed out themselves.)
I think I was pedantic on the semantics angle, and understated the systems argument.
Here’s the point I should have spent more time on: Experiences are derived from systems. One “UX Designer” does not a system make. The user’s experience is the result of many direct and indirect factors. Engineers, copywriters, visual designers, the brand, the product’s purpose, context of use, user intent, user expectations, previous user experiences with similar products, etc.
When I interviewed Andy Budd a while back on User Experience podcast, he said:
“I love the term “user experience design” and it’s a really handy kind of umbrella term to use for what we do. However, if you actually unpick what it’s trying to say, the term is trying to say that our system designers have control over the experience that people have of our products inside their heads. And we can’t do that. Some industries can; you know, Hollywood is incredibly good at creating these linear narratives where the pacing of the plot and the design of the soundscapes and the narrative and all that kind of stuff allows directors with a fair degree of control to decide when people are going to be happy, when people are going to be sad, when they’re going to be emotional, when they’re going to jump out of their seats. And I think with that sort of art form you are able to craft an experience which is quite controlled and in which you have a pretty good understanding of what people are, how people are going to react. Even then it’s very difficult to craft that experience, you know, if you’ve someone kicking your seat or noisily eating popcorn or texting who’s sat next to you.
So even then there’s quite a lot of uncontrolled factors. I think on the web, all we can really do is we can nudge people towards, or slightly control some of the aspects of how the experience might be, but I think it’s really naive of us and I think it’s a bit pompous actually in some regards to say that we’re designing the experience, because there are so many factors which are out of our control.”
I think he was spot on in his comments. Full interview transcript is at http://www.infodesign.com.au/uxpod/uxuk
Great summarizing article!
I completely agree with the addition Peter is making with the word ‘for’. Have been using this term ‘design for experience’ for many years now and it never fails to truly explain what we are actually (capable of!) doing as designers.
In addition, I have been talking about Design AND Emotion when I refer to the topic and ‘design for emotion’ when I refer to the practical side of it. We create the context and triggers that evoke the emotions, but not the emotions themselves. Funny thing is that there are like three books coming out this year with exactly that title ‘design for emotion’. Hope to see they will be making the same distinction as I am.
This argument has, as others have noted, been made before, I think Oliver Reichenstein wrote a blog post on the issue a while back.
It is semantics, but it’s also important. No kittens die if someone uses “User Experience Design” in a way that ignores the distinctions made in this blog, but equally our praxis is not served well by people who don the mantle of “UX Designer” but have never pondered the nature of the craft, semantic or otherwise. This particular little riff is just a handy lodestone for such nuance.
Here’s a webinar by a guy from Gartner: http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=202&mode=2&PageID=5553&resId=1733531&ref=Webinar-Calendar
PDF http://www.gartner.com/it/content/1733500/1733531/august17userexperiencervaldes.pdf?userId=54878620
UX Designer is a fairly new concept to me – I thought this was just something that a web designer was expected to do as part of the job, but I think this needs to be seen in a broader context and within a corporate environment where managers like to have snappy job titles in order to get things done.
I’m going to go on a slight tangent here but I think a lot of people use the term UX designer because it is what clients and employers want to hear at the moment.
UX is such a massive trend at the moment that people think they are getting more for their money if they see it in your past job titles.
However, I don’t think anyone who doesn’t conduct in user testing can ever deserve to use UX when describing their skills. Otherwise the User Experience they are designing for is always their own.
To be a true UX practitioner you have to watch users use your designs (or somebody else’s) and research where improvements are needed. As well as this research you should also be validating your designs by conducting further user testing sessions as regularly as possible.
I know budgets don’t always stretch to this and in those cases you should try to fit as much in as you possibly can or at least draw on experience from previous tests.
However, I would love to see how many people who advertise their skills as UX have never been involved in any testing of any kind.
Usability testing at Emma | Emma Tech
I like the article and I feel the true since of User Experience is gone from the job title.
Too many designers have adopted it,but they don’t understand the first thing about the psychology behind UXD. It is less about the design aspect and more about the research, study and evaluation of a product.
I think web designers should think twice about using the term. I myself can’t draw a circle or use photoshop expertly so I don’t call myself a web designer because I am not.
For my love of the strategy and research that goes into my work I am proud to call myself a User Experience Architect. With no shame.
Interesting read. I have always found that we get too carried away with semantics when we are really describing the same thing.
I consider Interactive Design to be the title people should use. Which is the pragmatic scientific ‘engineering’ process used to help facilitate user experiences aided through design; a user experience is a bi-product of great design, not the result of a forced effort. (meaning, UX is not something that can be artificially created, it is something that naturally occurs)
I don’t think there is anything wrong with using the term UX designer but the person should understand that UX is not designed but shaped through a number of precess.
That’s why i don’t call myself UX Designer but rather Usability Xpert because that’s what it is. I have some experience in usability so i can design good user interface in order to get goot User Experience. I think this is the good explanation
Embedding User Experience Design in large organizations: issues and recommendations
Great article, and I agree with your points. But if I were to have to debate you, I think I could posit the notion that we can design user experiences by incorporating comprehensive user testing. The word “experience” is riddled with differing semantic perceptions, but in the broader sense of the word, one can theoretically design user experiences if he tests enough users and gets their feedback on their experiences with the interface. After enough testing and tweaking the usability of the site (based on user feedback) the Designer could design a user experience, and be aware of what that experience is for the User, based on test subjects’ feedback.
UX Designer as a title seems meant to convey to recruiters and teammates as an indicator of being evolved in one’s craft; that you subscribe to Design Thinking. This moves the designer away from the notion that designs are created in a vacuum, without real human world context. It may also imply some capability in UX Research, at least in observation and artifact collection and generation. Point is, this posture is often expected in the workplace and so the title is adopted. Semantics do mean things to some people.
These are shifting times. We are socializing new job roles in new kinds of work organizations. It is important to make distinctions about such things as whether a designer is creating an experience out of whole cloth that will be meaningful to everyone the same way. The discomfort comes when we find ourselves being skewed into role expectations differently than the ways we see ourselves.
Has no one commented on the irony that the term “user experience” has actually evolved beyond its intended use?
How’s that for an inability to design the users’ experience!
Your article conveys my perspective of this recent UX phomenon. In addition, the skills required to create a website that moves the viewer to surf the site require not only web software and graphic skills, but with those skills, human factors training & experience, some level of psychology training, adequate writing skills, and the ability to write an applicable test procedure , perform the test on a variety of individuals, analyze feedback, and implement the results. Is this actually feasible for a single individual to complete? Perhaps it is feasible for a so called UX design team, but not a “UX designer”.
Well done! For ages I’ve had recruitment agencies asking me about UX / UI posts and to this day I have no freaking idea what they’re banging on about.
I’m a senior digital designer, I’ve always done the scamping, wire framing, I’ve had to take the client through the journey… I always thought as a designer, that is our job. So these terms UX/UI are basically what most designers do in there day to day lives.
Everyone is a UX Designer | Joseph Ekloff
“I don’t believe experiences can be designed” – obviously you’ve never been to Disney. That’s exactly what they do and they do it well.