Reality Check for UX Professionals

or my answer to two tiresomely old memes in the UX community:
1) what we call ourselves and how we are understood as a profession
2) how our profession is superior to all others operating in our domain

As a UX practitioner (or designer, interaction designer, service designer, experience architect, information architect, innovation consultant...or any number of titles I have held in my 20+ year career), I have witnessed (and even participated in, to some extent) endless debates on what we call our selves as a profession, how we can ensure what we do is understood and that we are valued by clients and other professions with whom we need to work on projects.

These debates, which mirror in my view the angst and arrogance of teenagers trying to carve out an identity and sense of self in the world, seems both wrong-headed and a pointless waste of energy. What is more, there is also an air of superiority which attends these debates, in which there is aired an ongoing frustration/competition/denouncement of other skills with whom we need to work who are seen as less creative and less capable of solving the problem. And I am leaving aside the constant gripes against clients who seem to always be seen as inferior to people working in agencies because they can't ever deliver the work to match the vision of the designer or defend it against the politics of mediocrity which clients inevitably have in abundance.


On the first point about what we call our selves and being seen:

The reality is that we what clients want...and what they value...is creative and effective solutions to their specific problems, irrespective of where they come from. Clients hiring UX or Design agencies don't actually cares about UX or design per se...they have a specific problem for which they are hoping UX will offer a solution.

Mature professions focus on the problem to be solved and don't care about being recognised or understood as a profession. Teenagers are all about being seen and recognised.

In a commercial environment, your recognition comes from being good at solving the problem...or redefining the problem in a new and more valuable way...and exceeding expectations about the solution...not for being a UX person. Your reward is the trust earned and the increasing work that is given...and yes the fees being paid, which are ultimately aligned to the value created (tangible value = tangibly larger fees).

In my view, UX professionals need to quit trying to be seen and understood by clients and focus on delivering great work...and making sure that clients understand that it is the process you follow and the talent/experience you and your team have that makes that great work happen. Note that this is not the same as them understanding the process itself - but rather recognising that your process enables you to deliver value.

You can the call yourselves whatever you like and it wont matter...because you will find yourself doing great work and having a big impact...which is what we all want anyway. And btw...clients don't care what we call ourselves either...what they do care about is what value we bring to the table. Articulate and deliver that, and you can call yourself anything.

If we are talking customer experience (e.g. the realm of "service design") all the way down to interface design as a rough spectrum of impact, then there are hosts of people with significant training and experience in Organisational Design, Process Design, Management, Logistics, marketing, communications, technology, etc...basically all the skills within the senior leadership of a business and in management consulting that in many cases have business management and design training from the best schools in the world and years of experience. These professions even have the concepts of customer centricity baked into their training (just read the last 30 years of management theory from HBR).

What is essential is to remember that the problems we get involved in, the ones that matter, are complex. Far to complex for one person or one profession to solve and deliver effectively. UX can not solve these complex problems on our own. We have to build partnerships with many other professions in order to create the holistic view that makes good solutions possible.



On the second point about UX being hampered by all these other "uncreative" professions

It is essential that we rid ourselves of arrogance and gain some respect and knowledge of other professions that overlap and add value to ours. The problems that UX genuinely can help to solve are re-framing problems about the customer and user experience across and within touch-points, technologies and interfaces. That is a BROAD domain.Lets just look at some of the people that touches:

What they might lack are some of the creative skills/lateral thinking (and I would argue that even this is a questionable statement when dealing with the best people of those professions - who are often intensely lateral and creative), the specific design domain language and methods and techniques that designers and researchers bring to the table.

What they certainly are not is stupid...though you would think from listening in on many UX dialogues that somehow they are all idiots for not seeing things from our perspective. In fact, they actually bring the tools and knowledge to the table that we as a profession lack, not to mention the experience and knowledge about business, business analytics, business modelling etc and indeed the other perspectives needed to actually solve a complex problem effectively.

If anything, UX can become a bridge between these often siloed skill-sets since they tend to be aligned to a vertical view of a business function, where we are interested in the horizontal.

In my view, the true promise of UX is in the ability to bridge across different domains, building teams and multi-disciplinary collaboration for solving usto collectively own and contribute to the solution...each according to their specific skills.

But lets not confuse our orientation and broad vista with superiority. What we gain in breadth we lose in understanding the depth and detail of the individual verticals. So those partnerships with individuals and professions with more vertically aligned and depthful skills and knowledge are essential if we are to be successful.