Earlier this week I met with a small company to discuss UX training for their whole team. The founder expressed how he didn’t want UX to be owned and so to speak “carried out” by one person only, but that UX should be something everyone was involved in and a way of thinking.
His belief and idea behind it was that UX should be the responsibility of everyone because it is part of everything. He brought up how he still saw there being a role for a specialist UX, but how he aspired to train his whole company in UX thinking – why it matters, what it means, the tools and terminology used and how each role could benefit from more UX thinking. And then he asked what I thought.
This morning I read Leisa’s post There is no UX, there is only UX. It’s a great post that brings up some of the broader challenges that comes with projects and the necessity of integrating UX into the whole company. Whilst I completely agree with Leisa that UX belongs everywhere, that the UX of a product shouldn’t just be the responsibility of one person but the whole team, I don’t agree with that UX belongs nowhere, or that we should exclude ‘UX’ from job titles.
As the founder I met with pointed out to me, there is still value to have a UX specialist and for many smaller companies – or larger companies for that matter – there is one or maybe a couple of people doing everything from research to information architecture and interaction design. And for these organisations I definitely think it makes sense to have titles that involve the word ‘UX’, and that UX is owned by them. Not in the sense that it’s just their responsibility, but there needs to be someone who advocates it, who drives it forward, educates clients and internal stakeholders on what it is, why it matters and how to incorporate it into the organisation. And last but not least, there needs to be someone to go to for UX related matters. Here it makes perfect sense to include ‘UX’ in the job title. And in many other cases it does too.
Over the last 3 years that I’ve been freelancing I’ve been hired under a broad range of different titles from Information Architect, Interaction Designer to Experience Architect. Every single time my role and the type of work I’ve done has been the same. To go back to Leisa’s post I couldn’t rightfully call myself a researcher or just a designer. It’s part of what I do but neither of those are my specialities. I call myself a UX designer as that’s the title that best describes the broad range of what I do. And in the end it’s the “what I do” that matters. Not what we call ourselves, as long as people understand what we do.
We’ve just managed to get companies from startups to established big corporations excited about UX. There is talk of howUX designers are taking over Silicon Valley and the other day Fast Company wrote thatUX is the future. The transition of creating more awareness of the value of UX and how to incorporate it into organisations is very much in its early stages, still, and whilst it in some places may be needed to remove ‘UX’ from job titles to really hit home, in other it’s needed to include it to accomplish the same.
So, what did I then tell the founder of the company I met. I told him that I couldn’t agree more. That I too believe that UX should be an integral part of the whole organisation and as such that UX thinking should definitely be something that everyone is trained in. And I also agreed with him that it’s still good to have a specialist UX person. Training can only go so far and just because someone can make wireframes, put together personas, flows and user journeys doesn’t mean that it’s going to be good.
Over the years I’ve come across many people who think that anyone can do UX but even more who’ve had experience with those ‘anyones’. People who have trained, – or actually not – called themselves a UX designers, charged high day rates but brought very little value or UX thinking into the companies they’ve worked for.
Whilst we can all train to develop our skills in UX, visual design, development, project management or marketing, we can’t all be specialists at everything so there’s definitely still a need for UX specialists, what ever they may call themselves. And as for myself, I’m happy to call myself a UX designer for now. People understand it and it makes it easy to explain that what I do is not just one thing. It’s a mixture that touches on and works with pretty much every aspect of running a business.
Image: A slide from one of my in house training presentations
