User Experience designer: fact or fiction

The digital landscape has changed considerably in the past decade. As we grow to entangle ever more intricately our daily lives with this thing we call the internet there’s no doubt that it will continue it’s charge as a booming industry. It just so happens that with booming industries come leeches. The online digital interactive experience pie is a big one and in the last few years I’ve noticed a slight shift in whose eating at the dinner table. User experience designers seemed to have pulled up a chair, grabbed a knife and fork and started to feast but is their company in sharing the meal really worth the time and effort of the cooks and the clients who are preparing the pie?

A few weeks ago I started reading A project guide to Ux Design for user experience designers in the field or in the making by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler.  It took me approximately 15 pages to decide that this book wasn’t for me. I closed it, placed it back on the shelf and it’s now covered in 3 weeks of dust. Why? These few short pages actually made me question whether a ‘user experience designer’ is even a legitimate job in the online industry. Not a bad accomplishment for a book whose purpose is to help those who are trying to carve themselves a job by calling themselves “UX specialists”.

As I’ve said in a previous post, the online environment is now so big that the early 90s model of a ‘web designer’ no longer exists. There’s too much riding on any project now to have one person responsible for the database connectivity, the graphic design and front-end development and because of this we’ve seen job titles crop up over the past few years that have been further refining the existing roles and turning what was once an all-rounder in to a team of specialists. We now have 2 types of developers (front-end and back-end), a graphic designer (who doesn’t necessarily need any online experience simply to create graphics for web – this is a discussion for a whole other post). There’s the salesman/marketer whose job it is to get the work, the digital producer (or project manager), and assistants, directors and junior and senior positions across all of them, the list goes on. Of course, what happens when there’s no longer anything left is that people invent a term called “User Experience” and it provides an additional job for every online project that a studio wins.

What does this have to do with the book? Well, I’ve been struggling to see what value a user experience designer adds in to the project mix. For me, it was always a ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ scenario. I thought this book would hold some magical secret to the meaning of life for a Ux Designer within the context of a project.

Mr Unger and Ms Chandler tell us that “to be successful, the user experience design must take in to account the business objectives, the needs of the users and any limitations that will affect it’s viability (technical, budget or time restraints).” Alarm bells should be ringing in every graphic designers head after reading that but I’ll come back to it. The book also tries to describe the personality of a Ux Designer, they use words like ‘curiosity’, ‘comfortable working with many shades of grey’ and, most importantly a Ux Designer has ‘empathy’. There’s the defining word, empathy. I noted down as I continued to read, no other role description mentioned in this book uses that word, empathy. Even in the “Other roles you may play or may need” section of the book where it describes the most common overlapping roles including:

• Brand strategist
• Business analyst
• Content strategist
• Copywriter
• Visual designer
• Front-end developer

None of these roles use the word empathy when the authors describe each position. In fact, they go as far as to degrade the ‘visual designer’ (apparently that’s what the Ux term is for a web designer now) simply to being “responsible for the elements of the site or application that a user sees. This effort includes designing a look and feel that creates an emotional connection with the user that’s in line with brand guidelines.”

Need I say HA? It was at this point that I closed the book and it all comes back to ‘empathy.’  Yes, I’m taking great pains over this word. The problem I see here is that this book has been published and released to a whole group of people who consider themselves Ux Designers or who at least want to pretend to be. It only takes 10 minutes of reading this book to find out that your job is the most important of them all because you’re the only one in the whole project team who thinks about the user. However, nowhere does it mention that the whole basis of successful graphic design is that the user is front of mind when you sit down to ‘create an emotional connection’. To reduce the role of visual design to simply ‘being what the user sees and making sure it adheres to brand guidelines’ shows a very strong misunderstanding of the role that the visual design plays in what is essentially a medium where sight is the only sense we have.

The internet is a visual and aural medium. Until we enter an age where we can change the surface texture of on-screen elements for a touch-screen (like making furry buttons) or invent online smell-o-vision, sight is the one sense that everyone using the web relies on. But, according to this book, the role of the person whose specialty is ‘the visual’ is simply and solely responsible for creating that emotional connection and adhering to a company’s brand guidelines. It makes no mention of the part that the visual designer plays in leading the eye of the user from start to finish across a web page? Of controlling the pacing of copy, of making sure the key messages are communicated with clarity through employing a successful visual hierarchy.

It all comes back to this description of a successful user experience design:

“to be successful, the user experience design must take in to account the business objectives, the needs of the users and any limitations that will affect its viability (technical, budget or time restraints).”

Apparently this is not the job of the visual designer? To be honest, I could not have summed up the role of the visual designer any more succinctly than that so the book does get a gold star for this, even though they didn’t mean to. I would love to ask the authors whether an Ux Designer, with no visual training, could successfully guide the user’s eye to call to actions like the monthly sale or the ‘register now’ button which may be the two key business objectives of a project. And what of the needs of the user? Can a person who lives only in the world of wireframes and business analysis make the judgement call on whether the body copy is too small, too light, not big enough? Can they judge the success of line spacing, paragraph spacing and heading weights in controlling the pacing of copy and how easy the page will be to digest for the user? Does an Ux Designer even know the technical limitation of a 16-column layout, screen-size restrictions for desktop vs. mobile applications, colour variations across monitors and how to design it so that the largest number of users have access to whatever you’re designing? These are the questions I, and I’m sure every other decent ‘web designer’, ‘interactive designer’, ‘visual designer’ whatever you want to name it ask themselves every time they need to weigh up the balance between business objectives, needs of users and technical limitations. If that’s what the role of a visual designer is, where does the Ux Designer fit in?

Ux Designer sounds professional and cutting-edge, it allows them (as well as big corporate organisation with some disposable income) to believe that they are. They’re able to charge exorbitant consultative fees to get a project to a point where it gets handed over to the visual designer who could, in the space of a few short days and some incorrect colour choices, completely reverse the work of the expensive, cutting-edge consultant by leading the users’ eye down the wrong path. Sure, the design may still ‘adhere to brand guidelines’ and it may ‘make an emotional connection with the user’ but if the key business objective is to make people click a ‘register now’ button and that register now button is not sufficiently distinguished from the rest of the elements in the interface so that the users are giving their immediate attention to the 32pt Arial Black Headline on the other side of the page first, it’s a very expensive fail.

It seems to me that, according to this very popular, supposedly useful and well-written guide book to the realm of Ux, the role of the Ux Designer in the online world is the same as a visual designer but the Ux Designer may not necessarily have the visual skills or the confidence/ability to successfully critique colour choice and decisions around visual hierarchy. If that’s the case, should a Ux designer need formal visual design training before they can call themselves a true Ux designer? Or is organizing the expensive exercise of post-design user testing enough to justify this role and decide whether or not the visual designer’s ideas have been successful? If a Ux designer has not had visual design experience, how much of the online pie should they really be getting?