There is no such thing as UX Design

Controversial statement?

Yes, also a stolen statement - taken from a recent excellent article by Peter Merholtz on the origins of ‘UX’ design and why it is not relevant to burden a single team with the label ‘UX’ anymore.

You can’t design an experience. Well at least no one outside of perhaps an authoritarian regime can honestly say they that by the power of their thoughts, people will act - exactly and accordingly.

We can design process and interface, this is a discrete skill and a deliverable and is performed by designers. You get many types of designers - visual, interaction, information, but in effect they are designers. In a way, we’re kind of all designers - as Jeffery Zeldman puts it:

“We are all designers. You may call yourself a front-end developer, but if you spend hours shaving half-seconds off an interaction, that’s user experience and you, my friend, are a designer. If the client asks, “Can you migrate all my old content to the new CMS?” and you answer, “Of course we can, but should we?”, you are a designer. Even our users are designers. Think about it.”

Adding the term ‘UX’ to a designers job title though is asking them to fulfil a function that cannot meet. No wonder the term UX has a bad name in many organisations.

As Peter alludes to, it us unfair and un-realistic to to peg the user experience of the site and it’s users to a single team. The user experience is the concern of the whole team responsible for building, testing, managing and deploying the website.

The user experience will be determined by how well all of those people have collectively done their jobs and how much the user want to engage with they are presented with.

UX is everybody on the teams job, from the researcher to the designer to the product manager to the QA tester.

But please, let us leave the word UX from the job titles.

Your’s sincerely

UX Designer