Eh, specialization is good, if you can afford it. There's real value in having dedicated QA people, security people, DBAs, Ops folk, and yes, UX people. What I can't help but notice is that we're trying to make everybody wear all the hats at once, in many cases these days. There's also value in being a jack-of-all-trades, or a T-shaped person, but you just can't be expert at everything, and some aspects are going to fall through the cracks.
I assume you didn't read beyond the title, as your point is pretty much the basis of the article. It calls for a wider adoption of the design-thinking, users first mentality and embraces various types of ux designers.
So, the article actually criticises how broad the term ux is and that we should have more specialisation and appreciate that.
No, I read the whole thing. It brought to mind the protestations that eliminating dedicated QA teams at Microsoft wouldn't cause any problems, because now quality would be everyone's responsibility.
"Extending responsibility for the user experience across your organization requires at least a six-month plan...Dan Gardner is CEO of Code and Theory"
I don't disagree with the premise but it's pretty clear this is a thinly veiled piece of content marketing for his digital agency. Hey I'd love to get fat 6 month retainer agreements for "digital transformation" projects too!
Side note/rant: I've never seen it more clearly illustrated when working as a waiter back in the day. The head chef(more like head guy in charge of kitchen not really a chef). Got flustered whenever it got busy and then just barked out commands to NO ONE. The end result was, that while the restaurant was at its busiest there was a scary dude yelling "SOMEONE get me new spoon". Because he didn't delegate or assigned this task to anyone. THE WHOLE kitchen came to a stop and ppl looking at each other wondering who is going to give the yelling beast a new spoon.
> And it means employees can get closer to the work they love.
Wow these people are all in on the koolaid. Am I interpreting the meaning here correctly if I think they mean employees can work even longer hours to incorporate this?
This is dumb, I cannot say it more specific. UX today is both an area of expertise and a set of tasks to be done - making everyone doing it is the same as making people from the whole organization writing software in addition to their other daily tasks. It’s not just that most of people are not qualified for this job and need to be educated and get necessary experience, it’s also about them losing their focus. UX as a discipline was created because there was a need in specialization: the tasks that could not be done by other people and required a dedicated person to work on them. What is really necessary today is to go further and specialize more: stop talking about UI/UX and emphasize that UX is not UI. And even more: UX research is not the same as the interaction design or data science. And more: DesignOps is something that needs focus. And more: accessibility design is something that does require attention, focus and expertise.
May just be a coincidence, but no one I've ever worked with who had "UX" in their title seemed to A) Know or B) Care about users as human beings and their experiences. Most were primarily concerned with turning whatever app/page in production into their personal art gallery, almost always at the user's expense and would respond with a blank stare if you tried to discuss, say, gestalt issues.
Yikes. That's a problem when people conflate visual design and UX. Happens constantly. It's very easy to judge "good" visual design, so good visual designers tend to rocket into the ranks of UX/Product design without real knowledge of how to best design for user needs and goals.
You wouldn't be able to get away with that in most large companies where there are large and established ux practices. They, like other orgs have to justify their existence through value they deliver.
That only reflects the quality of people you tend to work with. It's like saying engineers suck.
I've worked with UX professionals who were the powerhouse behind amazing products and were sometimes the only people at the entire company batting for the end users (which is the point of the article).
It really is a great experience to be a developer when there's a skilled UX designer working full-time on such a hard problem upstream from you. And it's a harder job than I think most people realize. Balancing UI with the constraints of being human friendly is its own class of engineering.
Looking at all the UX turds that developers come up with because UX is hard, you'd think the top comment would be a bit more understanding or appreciative of UX work. I guess this hubris is why good UX is so rare, especially among "Show HN" projects. ;)
BTW, the article doesn't trash UX professionals as unnecessary which is how you and other HNers want to interpret the title. Rather, the article does the opposite. It points out that ideally you strive for good UX at the systemic/organizational level, not just depend on some UX hotshots to save your ass.
I didn't offer any opinion as to whether the work of creating goid user experiences is _necessary_. Since you brought it up, I think that it most certainly _is_ - just that in my experience, people with "UX" in their title tend to be the most adversarial to that concern.
That only reflects the quality of people you tend to work with.
Wherever you worked, may be they were low in design maturity ie., without optimal ux culture. There would be 100 such places for 1 that has robust design driven product development culture.
Also, that place may be hiring poorly, which in turn reflects on the leadership of that place, and so on..
Oof...I feel you completely misrepresented the spirit of the original comment. They didn't speak in generalities, and they shared only their personal experience.
I've had the same experience as you're describing: graphic designers who believe user experience is the same thing as art direction. There is a whole level of learning they just don't get from the purely artistic, 'gut feeling' perspective. They can design beautiful branding, visuals, and print-ready elements, but it's seems hard for them to understand everyday users.
I'm trying to move away from front end/software and into a more UX/Product design role. I think my experience is valuable because I have have good 'digital taste', user empathy, and desire to make data-driven decisions. I generally lack the graphic design skills of visual designers outside of wireframes and low-fi mockups, but I make up for it in the ability to bring together business, creative, and technology. UX is building a 'sweet spot' balance of those things.
Sorry, this is a long answer. I haven't perfected my 'switch pitch' yet. lol
I worked at a marketing agency from 2016-11 to 2019-06. Went from developer to 'Director of Software' in Jan 2019. Fancy title at a 15-person agency, really just part of the leadership team. I couldn't put my finger on what it was I wanted, and I thought I wanted to return to being an individual contributor to software. Management role was fine by itself, but I didn't feel like my seat had an end 'work product' result; and I also didn't feel valued since it was basically a dual role and was paid relatively poorly.
Any given day, I was working with strategy (client), creative, marketing/copywriting, and software teams to get on the same page. I was doing all of these things:
- story writing (user stories, criteria, and tests)
- wireframing and workflows
- low-fi mockups in Sketch
- information architecture
- data/analytics research
- technical guidance
I had input on every step of the process, from running ideation meetings with clients to launching new apps. And my work product was always well received and useful to every team.
So, I departed for a startup earlier this year, but realized quickly I wasn't missing deep coding. I came to realize I was missing the work I was doing outside of my management role. I read more about ux/product design and the type of work involved really spoke to me. So, now I'm trying to figure out that transition professionally.
That's cool, I've made a recent switch from front-end to product design myself. I'm finding that my engineering background is an advantage over other designers without technical experience.
And by the way, it's totally possible to learn good enough visual design skills to be effective. IMO the idea that only certain special people can be visual designers is part of the same false narrative that causes us to trust people with no technical understanding to design interfaces.
Thanks! It's cool to hear about other people who've made that same transition. I agree, the technology understanding is a big piece of how I want to present myself. Just a matter of finding the 'right' next position.
I've worked with UX people who were extremely focused on users. Sometimes to the point that developers would wish they would just forget about them and knock out a UI design so they had something to implement.
Unfortunately in most companies those who wear the UX title are just UI designers. Real UX is about researching and performing experiments on how your customers interact and use your software. So you can make proven decisions on how to design your product. Not I think buttons should look prettier and how do we make this look cooler.
I feel like that sits too closely to what product managers should be doing, rather than shadow managing eng teams that don't have enough heirarchy in them.
That's not 100% true. It's like Henry Ford said. If you asked people what they want they'd say faster horses. Sometimes UX involves taking risks and getting people to adopt new paradigms. And if you're not working with a screen you'll probably have to invent something. Research us useful but has it's limits.
UX research isn't just asking people what they want. If you do it right, it can help you assess the risk and reward of the new paradigms you're considering.
Asking people what they want is a very small part of it. You research by watching how users interact with the system, then you take risks by experimenting and seeing if changes improve the outcomes or not.
It'd be nice if we could but it would require people to have different sets technical skills and emotional capabilities for one job role.
UX is about cold efficiency and UI is touchy-feely.
Having someone do both UI and UX is like having your architect also be your interior designer. On the surface, it seems like one person could do both, but in reality they require VASTLY different skills and knowledge bases.
>Having someone do both UI and UX is like having your architect also be your interior designer. On the surface, it seems like one person could do both, but in reality they require VASTLY different skills and knowledge bases.
Good analogy since almost everyone needs an architect for their software as well as their buildings, but much fewer can be seen to benefit from a designer in either case whether they use them or not.
I wouldn't cry over it because I've been in favor of broader technical skills and emotional capabilities for a long time, just old fashioned I guess.
> The role of “experience” is to hide programmability or even customizability of the system, to minimize and channel users’ interaction with the system.
>UX fills awkward moments when AI fails. It brings “user illusion” to a level where users have to believe that there is no computer, no algorithms, no input.
> It is achieved by providing direct paths to anything a user might want to achive, by scripting the user and by making an effort on audiovisual and aesthetic levels to leave the computer behind.
> We are giving up our last rights and freedoms for “experiences,” for the questionable comfort of “natural interaction.”
> But there is no natural interaction, and there are no invisible computers, there only hidden ones. Until the moment when, like in the episode with The Guardian, the guts of the personal computer are exposed.
Oh yeah. (Two short article quotes below.) Many of the most-valuable sites I traverse looking for valuable information* are 'primitive' in the good way this author is promoting.
On the other hand, there are the endless 'corporate glitz' sites which look great but convey no immediately useful content (e.g. RSS links). If they do have it, their slick emptiness endeavors to obscure it. [Disclosure: I admire Zeldman].
*
"So layouts, graphics, scripts, tools and solutions made by naïve users were neither seen as a heritage nor as valuable elements or structures for professional web productions."
"I am mainly interested in early web amateurs because I strongly believe that the web in that state was the culmination of the Digital Revolution."
> We are giving up our last rights and freedoms for “experiences,” for the questionable comfort of “natural interaction.”
This assumes intuitive UX forces you to use a product a certain way. There's no reason this has to be true. Good products can be used intuitively and can grant their users programmer-like powers.
Take Google Search, for example. It's easy to use; you can largely speak to it like you would to a human -- type "what time is giants game tonight" and you'll get the answer you're looking for. But you can also use operators and other power features to perform specific and precise searches. So good UX merely gives less savvy users a leg up; it doesn't force a mediocre experience on power users.
I read the linked article, it's great. And it does make a point that "experience" part of the UX isn't about being a conduit to experience, but about designers authoring an experience and guiding users through it.
Tools have always guided their usersas much as users guided their tools; UX is doubling down on the former.
> It should result in advertising content that is more personal and emotionally resonant
Exactly at the moment I read this, an auto-playing Volvo commercial started making noise just below that paragraph. Ugh. We're a long, long way from advertising putting "users" first.
If you know everything about your system. Chances are, you don't.
It's a known programming adage that you should start by getting data structures right, and proper algorithms will follow. In my experience, the shape of data and ways you work with it have so huge impact on what must be presented on the screen that I'm starting to feel it might be best to delay UI/UX work until you have all that figured out.
I can't help but notice that the rise of designers and UX coincided with the end of being able to tell which things on the screen are clickable and, having clicked them, whether I actually clocked them and, having done that, whether my device is loading anything.
Maybe it's a coincidence, idunno. But Windows got this right like 25 years ago, and somehow it's gone away in spite of us now having "UX designers".
Ja my biggest gripe with UX-Ppl is that the ones I have encountered are all ex-graphics-artist with a new title.
Not a new education or new field of study they did... It was just on Monday they were graphic artist... and on Tuesday they were a UX-Expert ! If someone tells me make this button yellow and move it down. I want to quantitative science on yellow and why ? Or at least a statistical test(call it A/B if you want).
I have no idea where all these sudden so called experts came from overnight.
As that one quote goes. "If we don't have data and only opinions let use mine.(sic ?)"
UX is a stupid neologism for user interfaces. I do think expertise in this field is its own discipline, but I associate the expression with corporate misbehavior patronizing users.
Maybe because the first and most prominent products using this term had profoundly bad UIs.
>When the digital revolution first spawned the user experience discipline, it was a radically new idea.
Nope, by the time Feld was complaining, it was one of the most fundamental things that had been sorely forgotten; that programmers are supposed to naturally always craft everything with the users in mind without needing a non-programming designer, and have it come out more usable that way.
Without programmers adequate enough at all levels, the shortcuts & workarounds can work out fairly ugly even if the interfaces look fairly attractive on the outside.
This whole article is about overcoming the technical debt in organizations that skipped the effort necessary to build their group with fully user-dedicated programmers from top leadership on down to begin with.
50 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadSo, the article actually criticises how broad the term ux is and that we should have more specialisation and appreciate that.
I don't disagree with the premise but it's pretty clear this is a thinly veiled piece of content marketing for his digital agency. Hey I'd love to get fat 6 month retainer agreements for "digital transformation" projects too!
Wow these people are all in on the koolaid. Am I interpreting the meaning here correctly if I think they mean employees can work even longer hours to incorporate this?
You wouldn't be able to get away with that in most large companies where there are large and established ux practices. They, like other orgs have to justify their existence through value they deliver.
I've worked with UX professionals who were the powerhouse behind amazing products and were sometimes the only people at the entire company batting for the end users (which is the point of the article).
It really is a great experience to be a developer when there's a skilled UX designer working full-time on such a hard problem upstream from you. And it's a harder job than I think most people realize. Balancing UI with the constraints of being human friendly is its own class of engineering.
Looking at all the UX turds that developers come up with because UX is hard, you'd think the top comment would be a bit more understanding or appreciative of UX work. I guess this hubris is why good UX is so rare, especially among "Show HN" projects. ;)
BTW, the article doesn't trash UX professionals as unnecessary which is how you and other HNers want to interpret the title. Rather, the article does the opposite. It points out that ideally you strive for good UX at the systemic/organizational level, not just depend on some UX hotshots to save your ass.
That only reflects the quality of people you tend to work with.
Wherever you worked, may be they were low in design maturity ie., without optimal ux culture. There would be 100 such places for 1 that has robust design driven product development culture.
Also, that place may be hiring poorly, which in turn reflects on the leadership of that place, and so on..
I'm trying to move away from front end/software and into a more UX/Product design role. I think my experience is valuable because I have have good 'digital taste', user empathy, and desire to make data-driven decisions. I generally lack the graphic design skills of visual designers outside of wireframes and low-fi mockups, but I make up for it in the ability to bring together business, creative, and technology. UX is building a 'sweet spot' balance of those things.
I worked at a marketing agency from 2016-11 to 2019-06. Went from developer to 'Director of Software' in Jan 2019. Fancy title at a 15-person agency, really just part of the leadership team. I couldn't put my finger on what it was I wanted, and I thought I wanted to return to being an individual contributor to software. Management role was fine by itself, but I didn't feel like my seat had an end 'work product' result; and I also didn't feel valued since it was basically a dual role and was paid relatively poorly.
Any given day, I was working with strategy (client), creative, marketing/copywriting, and software teams to get on the same page. I was doing all of these things:
- story writing (user stories, criteria, and tests)
- wireframing and workflows
- low-fi mockups in Sketch
- information architecture
- data/analytics research
- technical guidance
I had input on every step of the process, from running ideation meetings with clients to launching new apps. And my work product was always well received and useful to every team.
So, I departed for a startup earlier this year, but realized quickly I wasn't missing deep coding. I came to realize I was missing the work I was doing outside of my management role. I read more about ux/product design and the type of work involved really spoke to me. So, now I'm trying to figure out that transition professionally.
And by the way, it's totally possible to learn good enough visual design skills to be effective. IMO the idea that only certain special people can be visual designers is part of the same false narrative that causes us to trust people with no technical understanding to design interfaces.
Any resources you felt helped you in that switch?
However UX professionals tend to take a more scientific approach to experimenting and analyzing user behavior.
UX is about cold efficiency and UI is touchy-feely.
Having someone do both UI and UX is like having your architect also be your interior designer. On the surface, it seems like one person could do both, but in reality they require VASTLY different skills and knowledge bases.
Good analogy since almost everyone needs an architect for their software as well as their buildings, but much fewer can be seen to benefit from a designer in either case whether they use them or not.
I wouldn't cry over it because I've been in favor of broader technical skills and emotional capabilities for a long time, just old fashioned I guess.
http://contemporary-home-computing.org/RUE/
> The role of “experience” is to hide programmability or even customizability of the system, to minimize and channel users’ interaction with the system.
>UX fills awkward moments when AI fails. It brings “user illusion” to a level where users have to believe that there is no computer, no algorithms, no input.
> It is achieved by providing direct paths to anything a user might want to achive, by scripting the user and by making an effort on audiovisual and aesthetic levels to leave the computer behind.
> We are giving up our last rights and freedoms for “experiences,” for the questionable comfort of “natural interaction.”
> But there is no natural interaction, and there are no invisible computers, there only hidden ones. Until the moment when, like in the episode with The Guardian, the guts of the personal computer are exposed.
On the other hand, there are the endless 'corporate glitz' sites which look great but convey no immediately useful content (e.g. RSS links). If they do have it, their slick emptiness endeavors to obscure it. [Disclosure: I admire Zeldman].
*
"So layouts, graphics, scripts, tools and solutions made by naïve users were neither seen as a heritage nor as valuable elements or structures for professional web productions."
"I am mainly interested in early web amateurs because I strongly believe that the web in that state was the culmination of the Digital Revolution."
This assumes intuitive UX forces you to use a product a certain way. There's no reason this has to be true. Good products can be used intuitively and can grant their users programmer-like powers.
Take Google Search, for example. It's easy to use; you can largely speak to it like you would to a human -- type "what time is giants game tonight" and you'll get the answer you're looking for. But you can also use operators and other power features to perform specific and precise searches. So good UX merely gives less savvy users a leg up; it doesn't force a mediocre experience on power users.
Tools have always guided their usersas much as users guided their tools; UX is doubling down on the former.
Exactly at the moment I read this, an auto-playing Volvo commercial started making noise just below that paragraph. Ugh. We're a long, long way from advertising putting "users" first.
When designing a system you always need to start top down.
Too many times I see a developer sit down an immediately start from the database.
Start from the UI or API. Just like we have UX for UI, you should be taking experience into account when designing an API.
It's a known programming adage that you should start by getting data structures right, and proper algorithms will follow. In my experience, the shape of data and ways you work with it have so huge impact on what must be presented on the screen that I'm starting to feel it might be best to delay UI/UX work until you have all that figured out.
Maybe it's a coincidence, idunno. But Windows got this right like 25 years ago, and somehow it's gone away in spite of us now having "UX designers".
Not a new education or new field of study they did... It was just on Monday they were graphic artist... and on Tuesday they were a UX-Expert ! If someone tells me make this button yellow and move it down. I want to quantitative science on yellow and why ? Or at least a statistical test(call it A/B if you want).
I have no idea where all these sudden so called experts came from overnight.
As that one quote goes. "If we don't have data and only opinions let use mine.(sic ?)"
Maybe because the first and most prominent products using this term had profoundly bad UIs.
Nope, by the time Feld was complaining, it was one of the most fundamental things that had been sorely forgotten; that programmers are supposed to naturally always craft everything with the users in mind without needing a non-programming designer, and have it come out more usable that way.
Without programmers adequate enough at all levels, the shortcuts & workarounds can work out fairly ugly even if the interfaces look fairly attractive on the outside.
This whole article is about overcoming the technical debt in organizations that skipped the effort necessary to build their group with fully user-dedicated programmers from top leadership on down to begin with.