Is UX really making a difference?

I’m noticing a trend here regarding user experience people. They’re geeks, no doubt. They enjoy being part of the solution of a system, especially if it leads to something really enjoyable to use. They’re quite intelligent and are fairly multi-talented. They’re also very nice people. I’ve met a lot of UX people in the past year or so and I’ve not met a single person I didn’t think was amicable in some way or other.

Is UX really making a difference?

I have nothing against user experience people. But I’ve been noticing a trend in the user experience industry – that it looks too self-referential (as though to say that “good UX” is demonstrated by “good UX”). There’s rarely talk about how real people’s experiences were tangibly or directly improved because of X user research or Y design solution (the ones out there now aren’t very convincing). And this is the thing that bugs me, and bugs me a lot – the lack of real world stories about how UX is changing the way products are being built and how it’s actually impacting real users.

Maybe it’s because many user experience professionals work mostly on deliverables that don’t themselves represent the final outcome of the product. Wireframes, personas, hi-fi prototypes, site architectures – they’re kind of back-stagey, iterant, and somewhat disposable. In essence, they’re mostly design tools, but they’re not actually the design in and of itself. No doubt they impact the final outcome, because they shape the process in which the products get built – but there’s very little “actual doing” that other professions can speak of, whether it’s advertising, marketing, management, or engineering.

On the other hand, maybe it’s because of the way user experience people can really get reflective, like drawing on inspiring things such as multitouch tablets or surface computers or geeky font artistry. That’s in contrast to something that’s more generative (and often more straightforward), such as producing reports, writing software, closing a sales deal, or editing a draft of a copy.

Process is not the end in and of itself

Increasingly, it seems that the credibility of a UX designer is based on how well that designer understands the process of doing user-centered design, as opposed to how many successful products have come about as a result of that process. This came to me when Darren Smith told me how he noticed that many UX portfolios have a consistent theme of explaining how well these designers understood the process of user-centered design.

Why don’t designers talk more about how their UX work has resulted in the success of a product? I mean, IDEO does it (and does it very well). Even Apple does it (and does it very well). In fact, I feel all great designers do it.

Is UX an escapist’s career?

I almost feel as if UX is a bit like a “cop-out” job. I know it really isn’t, because there are tons of well-meaning UX people who are really passionate about solving the right problems, and they’re taking risks by challenging the status quo for the sake of the users themselves. But the more I think about it – UX designers almost never begin as UX people themselves – many of them were formerly designers, or software developers, or project managers, etc. who were desperate to be in a position to solve the right problems – and left their “old jobs”.

The good news is that UX places the designer directly in a strategic position to make design decisions on behalf of the product implementers, but the trade off is having less control over implementing the actual guts the product. So, while they’re actually doing the important work of navigating the ship, they don’t actually get to man the deck and run the engine (ok, that was a bad metaphor, but you get the idea).

A compromise?

Because we’re such a small community (compared to other professions), we tend to huddle together and give ourselves pats on the back and talk about all the amazing new things the industry is coming up with, even though there are so few major players in the market. I’d actually prefer it if we mingle with senior management and developers and visual designers and marketers and advertisers and… gasp, real users! I feel we’d make a much bigger impact that way.

There seems to be a growing gap between UX and other professions (which can be a good thing), but at some point we’ll need to establish a set of norms or cultures that communicate the way UX designers can integrate with other bodies of the team to produce successful products.

The sooner we begin this process, the better.