UX Isn’t a Designer

This week, we’ve got an industry insider post by our very own Erica Klosterman. As a Lead Architect at PRPL, Erica wears many design and architecture hats. She’s taking a stance on the User Experience Designer term, and here’s why.For some time now, I’ve seen job postings around the internet calling for a “UX Designer” with various mixes of skills within Interaction design (IxD), User Interface (UI) design, visual design, Information architecture (IA), usability, and more. The problem is, this depicts UX as a standalone job done by an individual with a random cocktail of design skills under their belt, all depending on where they are working. But this isn’t what UX means. It’s not a person. It’s not done by a type of designer.There’s obviously confusion. I guess this stems from how the term UX came about. It was introduced by Don Norman in the early 1990s while Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple. He explained,

“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 its meaning...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, it’s origin, history, or what it’s about.” ¹

As you can see, it was created as an umbrella term, used to group a number of specific design practices together and convey their outcome – the experience. But this is where things went awry. In an article written by design veteran Dave Malouf, he states:

“...trouble started when our clients didn’t realize it was an umbrella, and thought it was a person. And they tried to hire them...They think there must be a person called a 'user experience designer' who does what other designers 'who've tried before and who failed' can’t do. The title 'user experience designer' is the target they are sniffing for when they hire. They follow the trail of user experience sprinkled in our past titles and previous degrees. They sniff us out, and 'user experience' is the primary scent that flares their metaphorical nostrils."

Then somehow this horrible trend of referring to UX as something a certain designer did spread like wildfire, until job boards, agencies, and even designer’s themselves started using the term incorrectly. Shortly thereafter, the job title “UX Designer” was born. But it’s not too late. We can stop this madness, and start using the term the way it was intended: as a way to describe all aspects of a person’s experience, not the one designing it.

Nobody stands behind the term “UX”

The fact that so many people use the term (and the title) incorrectly has made it very difficult for the industry and the academic world to stand behind it in a unified sense.Did you know credentials for “UX” don’t exist? No diplomas, no degrees, no certifications – nothing. Not even any academic associations! Academic design programs exist for disciplines like IxD and IA, but none for UX. Why? Because there is no concrete definition. How can credentials be given to something that doesn’t even have a concrete definition?According to Malouf,

“Without a shared definition and without credentialed benchmarks, user experience is snakeoil. What’s made things even worse is the creation of credentialed/accredited programs in 'service design,' which take all the same micro-disciplines of user experience and add to it the very well academically formed 'service management,' which gives it academic legitimacy. This well-defined term is the final nail in the coffin, and shows UX to be an embattled, tarnished, shifty, and confusing term that serves no master in its attempt to serve all.”

“UX” just covers up the complexity

This once great solution to describing what we designers do in a way that was easy for our clients to understand has come back to bite us, becoming a term that everyone uses, but no one really understands. I’m not saying the term “UX” should be eliminated from our vocabulary; I’m just saying it needs to stop being used to describe a type of designer.Lets think for a moment again about what Don Norman said when he came up with the term “UX.” He said he wanted a way to refer to all aspects of the person’s experience with the system, including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual. This means UX is referring to the sum of many complex interrelationships between design disciplines like Industrial Design, UI Design and IxD. These disciplines are also entwined within traditional design, engineering, business disciplines, and more. Do your clients understand that complexity when you talk to them about the UX of their product or project? Probably not.“UX” just puts a warm blanket over all the complexity that goes into what we do. We oversimplify what should be given more time to be explained clearly. We use the term as a crutch. But when we do so, we hurt ourselves, the industry, and our clients. Let’s take time to really explain the complexity and the skills involved in our work.

Controlling the Experience is Limited

When you really think about it, can one really design the experience of another? How do you manipulate the mood of each of your users when they reach your interface, be it on their phone or on the web, or out in the world? How do you control their beliefs, emotional state, assumptions, and preexisting perceptions?UXdesign.com explains in an article that “We design interactive systems, not people. The most a User Experience Designer, UI Designer, or Interaction Designer can do is design interactive systems that elicit statistically predicable responses (the science) and influence people’s behavior and level of enjoyment (the art).”To me, that pretty much sums it up. We have much more control over the design and influences of an interactive system than the design of each actual experience a person has while using it. This is why the title “UX Designer” just isn’t appropriate.

UX can stay. UX Designer can go.

I don't mean to come across as a proponent of eliminating the term UX from our vocabulary. In fact, I believe it has an important place for describing the outcomes of our efforts. But no longer can it remain in job postings, or function as a description of one's area of expertise. It’s time to educate ourselves on what “UX” really means. It’s time to retire the title of “UX Designers.”