The User Experience Team of One. Leah Buley
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experience design is about designing a user’s interactions with a product from moment to moment. Lots of user experience professionals have one of those titles, but it’s also common to see people mixing and matching these terms into inventive but nonstandard titles like “user experience architect” or “user interaction designer.”
What’s in a Name?
An alphabet soup of acronyms has been adopted as shorthand for user experience. Which one you use depends largely on what term your organization or professional community has adopted to talk about user experience. Although they vary quite a bit, all terms tend to be variations on the theme of “experience.” Among them, you’ll find: UX (user experience), XD (experience design), and UE (user experience, again). Although the acronyms differ, they pretty much mean the same thing.
Things get a little trickier when you start talking about the subdisciplines that make up UX. Being a somewhat new field, the user experience community hasn’t done a great job of standardizing its job titles yet. A quick scan of user experience job postings will unearth a grab bag of titles: UX designer, UI designer, user researcher, customer experience researcher, interaction designer, information architect, user experience architect, usability engineer, graphic designer, visual designer, Web designer, copywriter, tech writer, content strategist, design strategist—and infinite permutations on all of the above. Ultimately, these roles fall into one of just a few categories:
• Interaction Design or Information Architecture. Someone who designs the structure and detailed interactions of an application or product, similar to an architect. This person decides which rooms need to be in a building, how people get from room to room, and where the windows and doors are placed. Note that some people see the two roles as distinct. You could argue that interaction designers focus on screens, detailed interactions, and workflows, whereas information architects focus on information structures, controlled and uncontrolled metadata, and ultimately, findability. However, both roles share a fundamental goal: designing how a user moves through a complex information system from moment to moment. So, for simplicity’s sake, I have placed them here together.
• Visual Design. Someone who focuses on the visual layer of an application or product (color palette, typography, hierarchy of information, and visual elements). Although layout of screens and pages is typically considered to be the interaction designer’s job, a good visual designer will also have a point of view on layout. If the interaction designer is like the architect, the visual designer is like the interior designer.
• User Research. Someone who conducts research into user needs and behavior. This could be qualitative (for example, one-on-one interviews with a handful of people to gain a rich understanding of their motivations and experiences). This could also be quantitative (for example, sampling large pools of people to uncover broad trends in attitudes, behaviors, pain points, and the like). The research usually spans up-front discovery of user needs all the way through to product validation and usability testing. If the interaction designer is like the architect and the visual designer is like the interior designer, the researcher is like the demographer that uncovers who really lives in this place and what important factors characterize them.
• Content Strategy or Copywriting. Someone who thinks strategically about the role of content across the entire product. This person considers what messages are being delivered to users, how the language should be framed, what the voice and tone of the product is, and how and when the content will be created (and by whom). This person makes sure that all in-product content is consistent, on-brand, and contributes to a unified experience. Basically, the content strategist sets the tone for the tenor of conversations that take place here. What topics do people talk about? What’s the local dialect? What stories get told? How do the people who live here ultimately communicate with each other?
Most UX teams of one act as generalists, blending some or all of the above roles together. If you see the title user experience designer, it’s usually one of those catchall roles.
But there are other disciplines that certainly contribute to the resulting experience that a user has with a product, even if they may not fit as snugly into the job description of a user experience designer. These disciplines include visual design, content strategy, copywriting, business analysis, product management, project management, analytics, search engine marketing and optimization, brand marketing, and even engineering. In this field, there are lots of heated discussions about who gets to claim ownership of the user experience. Without fueling the flames, let’s just say that for the purposes of this book, if you do any of these things, you’re contributing to the user experience of your product, and this book is for you.
An Example
Personally, I think it’s easier to understand UX when you think about what it’s like to actually use a product. For example, right now I’m sitting in front of my computer, hopping around within the operating system and keying from my word processing program to my email program to my music program. My perception of each of those programs is impacted by how it looks, how it functions, and how well it serves its purpose in the personal need that it satisfies. (Helping me write a book; managing my personal and professional communications; and listening to some tunes that keep me tapping my feet as I work, respectively). In any of these programs, a thousand little decisions were made by someone—or more probably, many “someones”—to create what I experience as the flowing, seamless experience of working (see Figure 1.3).
And that’s just the software. My user experience is also impacted by the physical hardware of my computer: How big and bright the screen is, and whether it feels like “enough” to help me effectively use the hodgepodge of programs for which this laptop is intended. The tactile feel of the touchpad as I scroll down long Web pages. The satisfying clickety-clack of fingers tapping their way across the keys. These are all user experiences, too.
And what about the products and services that are connected to my laptop? Recently, I set up an in-home music system that integrates wirelessly with software that I run on my computer and my mobile phone. I can control the volume from an app on my phone and watch the volume level change on my computer while I hear the music get quieter or louder on the speakers in the other room. This is great execution on the part of the music system manufacturer. But it also casts a warm glow back on my laptop and my mobile phone, for being well designed to support such integration. Sometimes, a user’s perception of the product is beyond the control of any one manufacturer. It’s the cumulative effect of many (see Figure 1.4).
FIGURE 1.3 A user’s experience is the cumulative effect of many factors, some that you can control, and some that you can’t.
FIGURE 1.4 In the absence of better alternatives, users will try to hack together their own solutions, as this baseball fan has. But the companies who make the products that we love do a better-than-average job thinking about the complexities of the user experience.
Where UX Comes From
As a team of one, knowing the history of user experience helps you reassure people that it’s not just something that you dreamed up in your cubicle. If I were to sum up the history of UX in a few short sentences, it might go something like this: villains of industry seek to deprive us of our humanity. Scientists, scholars, and designers prevail, and a new profession flourishes, turning man’s submission to technology into technology’s submission to man (see Figure 1.5). Pretty exciting stuff.