Is anyone else confused/frustrated with what UX currently is? My old report is now Head of UX, he’s building component libraries in React. My old gf is now at Uber as Head of UX, she runs reports and soeaks at conferences and lives in powerpoint all day. My workout buddy is at Autodesk, UX Director, basically just a project manager ensuring consistency across platforms. Another friend, Head of UX at FAANG, just works on design systems and is a CSS guy. Another girl I know, UX Director, shes just focused on clicks and organic traffic. There are tools: Figma/Sketch - focused on comps and layout. InVision - focused on design systems and UX prototypes. Usertesting.com - focused on Qual research ClickTale/CrazyEgg - focused on...mixed methods? Adobe/Google Analytics - Quant focused data Looking at transitioning from eng to ux but seems super confusing. I can deal with learning a bew technology stack but cannot deal with an ambiguous moving target. Thoughts on this? What in your opinion is UX primarily responsible for?
People who cant deal with ambiguity or moving targets 🤬 I have one on my team and I hope he gets PIPed
Let me clarify: I cant deal with being accountable to 3 different people / orgs, floating between disciplines. I sort of have a boss but am accountable to a different team. One was adamant that I go to Adobe Max this week, the other insisted I’d be more effective going to Summit, a third team questioned why I should be going to either conference.
Yes, it’s quite confusing. It’s different across orgs and companies. There’s UX Strategy which many times bleeds into Product Management, Business Strategy, etc. And then there are the tactical/executioners who actually build the product, like UI Designers and UX Prototypers. Being Heads of anything means you’d be more on the strategy side of things, which means more meetings, more office politics, and perhaps more PowerPoints
That is right, at the manager level it is more about leadership and strategy. On the other hand, I am worried about people without UX background being Head of UX. This doesn’t make sense and could be counter productive for the design org.
From what I have seen UX = User Experience . They are the ppl responsible to the UI design, look and feel and user experience: make sure users like the UI, colors, styles, easy to use, flows well defined, etc
That’s called a designer. Designers design. Edit: hit send too soon. that’s just it, there’s different expectations on different orgs. usertesting.com doesn’t mention creative or design once in their entire onboard process.
Nope. You just described a UI designer. A UX designer is involved with the business decisions, strategizes the research before design starts, gathers business documents, analyses data, and synthesizes the information to meet the business needs with a user-centric solution. They coordinate with engineering to understand tech debt and limitations, then iterate on a User flow solution. Once all stakeholders understand the various touchpoints of users and affected backend systems, and agree to the scope, then designers start on the UI designs. At that point, there will be people coming out of the woodwork with opinions of how it should go. So you must then user-test, and socialize your designs, and uncover more requirements. Iterate several more times. You'll to gather data-driven proof on the success of your designs. Then you need to oversee the engineers who will likely butcher your designs. Unless they are miraculously front-end specialists. Fight to ensure you approve the work before they launch it. You should also have an analytics or metrics gathering plan to prove ROI and KPIs. Work with the analytics team to have analytics reported back to you.
And then there’s research
UX is not supposed to be about graphical design. It is about the experience that a customer has holistically with your brand and the products. The customer journey, the journey integration with channel partners, sales teams, marketing, fulfillment, support, operations, finance. Can UI foster the UX, of course. UX is a poor way of saying "brand experience, from the perspective of the users of our brand, with the only things we have control over, the journey that we own."
It isn’t about graphical design? So you can get rid of all of your visual designers then?
Try it this way: Graphical Design is about UX, not the other way around.
If you can't deal with ambiguous, moving targets, UX isn't for you.
Let me clarify: I cant deal with being accountable to 3 different people / orgs, floating between disciplines. I sort of have a boss but am accountable to a different team. One was adamant that I go to Adobe Max this week, the other insisted I’d be more effective going to Summit, a third team questioned why I should be going to either conference.
There's tissues in the supply cuboard. TBF, every company is messy where they make the sausage. As many have said here , and entirely respectfully, if you don't like the kitchen, find a different spot in the house to do your thing.
A lot of it is bs and title inflation, but UX by its nature requires competency in several different areas. You may choose to specialize in one discipline, but UX teams should expect to cover a lot of area.
All the areas.
UX Director: Sets strategy, works with leadership, presentation, blocks for their team, advocates for design, customer focused decisions, manages team, etc. UX Designer: Fuck if I know anymore but: Mostly defines the experience for a product that the customer touches. Some do visual design, some build flows with previously-designed components. Figma/sketch/photoshop(?!)/framer/Principle/etc Not UX: - Managing spreadsheets - Directly building component libraries (there are a handful of exceptions out there who can design and build but I have come across VERY few of these) - Running reports (if that’s all you do) - PMing (if that’s all you do) - Metrics management All of these items above are things a designer COULD do some of but if it’s their primary function and they don’t actually work on the actual design of the product they work on then they’re not a designer. Design can also include: - moodboards - usability and contrast work - user testing - user interviews - typography - color, space, layout - animation - competitive analysis - illustration - wireframing - sketching - whiteboarding - brainstorming - brand design - logo design - production design - design for marketing - surfing Pinterest
I find this to be the most accurate and thorough answer. Although I will chime in with everyone else that your role within UX can vary quite a bit depending on org needs. That said, we all know once you start hitting Director, Head, VP kind of levels in any discipline your job becomes a lot more bullshit and politics for sure. So I would wager the people you're talking about could be either A, they know how to play the game and were able to find themselves a spot with great pay and security and were able to figure out what was wanted out of the position (i.e. please the people above them) to make themselves successful or B, they may have started out as designers or working in UX in some manner and worked their way up the ladder and are actually not particularly happy with doing all of the people mgmt, cat hurding, and politicking they now have to do. BUT, they make a crap ton of money so they're not going anywhere unless they have to or they find a better gig.
That’s kind of like asking “what is a developer responsible for?” It really depends on the needs of the organization. At the end of the day your role exists to maximize the experience of the end user. And that end user could be grandma buying a flight on delta.com, a driver of a brand new Tesla, an IT admin managing their Slack instance, or a holiday shopper at Williams Sonoma. You would need to think of the discipline widely yes, but hone in on the purpose of the business you’re supporting and how they define UX. Who are their end users? Where are they most challenged today in supporting their customers?
Pixel pushers.
UX Design is is huge umbrella of specialties. You have: - researchers - UI designers - design system creators - UX strategists - Content strategists - UX copywriters - interaction designers - visual designers - UX developers (CSS coders) and more... I'm sure I'm missing some. But most junior designers start out learning only one of those skills. Senior designers will have mastered three or more of those. Managers and directors will like focus on producing a narrow scope of work, while having a deep understanding of all of them.