UX - what the hell is it and who's responsible?
For quite some time now, the phrase "User Experience" has been bandied about in web design and development discussions and to be honest, I've not personally understood exactly what was meant or indeed, seen it be challenged. To start with, what is it? what does user experience or "UX" actually mean to designer, developer or client? This is actually an integral part of any design and development process. It deals with the way in which a user interacts with your design, be that a product, a printed piece or a website. Of course my eyes, interest and focus of this post are on the latter of these.
A recent question on twitter highlighted some interesting responses, all of which are correct in their own way and all have given me a much better understanding of what exactly we're talking about here. As far as I can see, this goes deep into the process of web design and definitely involves a post I've not finished writing yet but I think i'm just going to publish this now and let the other post fill in any gaps i see a little later.
My initial question on twitter was "Ok, I need to say this. What you call "user experience" or "UX"...you mean "web design" in old money, don't you?" and what I was getting at was the way a website looks and functions is as important as its visual appearance and as integral to its success. As far as I can see, a website built on aesthetics alone is pretty yes, but (barring a bit of luck) not exactly the model of usability for its end user and may lead to a poor experience whether through unintuitive navigation, unstructured content, confusing calls to action and so on and so forth. The discussion sparked into life and a few genuinely good points came out in the course of this. The one thing I wanted to clarify is still open though. who's job is it? designer, developer or "UX designer" which is one of the reasons I started asking questions because in my 10+ years of web design, I'd never heard of a "UX designer" until recently. Forgive my questioning nature but if something is involved in the industry I love, I want to know all about it, who's involved and what makes it breathe.
The responses given put the field of user experience somewhere between a design thats not been thought of outside an aesthetic concern and an unexpected bit of work a developer has to deal with because nobody else has paid any attention to it. Fair points as far as I can see. Again, my concern is with who's really responsible for this and in my own opinion, this responsibility lies with both designer and developer and more importantly, where the two merge. Functionality and ease of functionality exists within both disciplines at the same time. I believe the reason that UX has become the upstart issue that it is, is through designers not knowing which functionality is possible and through developers not knowing if certain functionality actually makes sense in a design. Both parties are responsible for its direction and execution.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this as it's an issue that needs much more exploration IMHO
