My definition of UX is not your definition and almost certainly not your employer’s so who is right?

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Given the chaos of this profession who and what should you believe?

A recurring theme on LinkedIn and Medium is who to follow for good UX content. There are some obvious people of course, Darren Hood, MSUXD , Debbie Levitt ???? , .Joel Barr. etc. who talk from experience and success and who any aspiring UCD practitioner should follow anyway, but the more I think about the proposition the more I think the answer is: ‘it depends’.

Largely it depends on what you mean by UX.

There are so many definitions of UX, some completely different from other and often the definition is set by people and organisations that have never actually been involved with UCD in any form so they create a loose set of requirements, call it UX, and see who they can attract to role. If that business definition, is your definition of UX then the names above aren’t going to be of any help. In fact following them will be very annoying because they won’t tell you what you want to hear, though they’ll probably tell you what you need to hear.

So, instead of asking who to follow for good UX content, the question is actually be 'Who should I follow to learn more about my own definition of UX?'

Gotta love some good old fashioned Confirmation bias!

I’ll say it again. My definition of UX is not your definition and almost certainly not your employer’s. UX follows the scientific method: observe, hypothesise, predict, test, confirm or refute. The reality is that it is more often akin to theoretical science where UX is relative to the observer, or even the uncertainty principle where you can’t be 100% certain of the conditions of UX.

I can’t think of many other industry where this is the case. Tell people you’re a developer and people know what you do, they might ask if you’re backend or frontend or what languages you code in, but they know what you do.

• Tell people you’re a surgeon they might ask what physiology you work in, but they’ll know what you do.
• Engineer? What tech?
• Shop worker? What part of retail?
• Police? Which area?
• UX? … you’re doing what now?

There is no single definition of UX, which if you’ve been doing this for longer than a couple of decades is not just frustrating it is infuriating beyond belief because there did used to be one, Don Norman defined it over quarter of a century ago. That was then now there is no clear, easy, definition, and my god are there a thousand different definitions competing to replace it.

Now for those of us who lived in caves when this industry matured our version of UX is quite simple, the experience you get from any touchpoint, be it brand, service or product is one experience, all joined up. Get one bit at odds with the others and it’s a bad experience, fail to understand your users and meet their needs and the whole thing is a bad experience. Build joined up experiences to mitigate bad experiences.

Easy huh?

Not so anymore. Look around and you’ll see definitions that are purely product, purely UI, purely digital, purely comms, purely service, and all of them kept well away from each other.

The web is full of learned articles (and a lot of Ill-informed ones) that illustrate what Best UX Practice is and what it isn’t, there are masses of studies that show the quantifiable benefits from places that have done it well and countless horror stories of those places that failed to do so. Yet so many of these articles come down to: “Join the dots and make it easy to develop”. Reducing human interaction to templates and 'what looks good'.

Why is that?

There are a lot of reasons, market forces, lack of understanding, lack of empowerment in strategic positions, lack of design leadership at C-Suite level, lack of regulation and processes, rigid production processes that allow for little change, misinformation, lack of awareness of the history of UCD and the scientific method, UX at the end of the process instead of at the start (and all the way through) and a hundred more reasons, but what it all boils down to is this: The definition of UX comes down to who is paying for it, not who is doing it.

The process of UX should be malleable, it must adapt as needed to different user needs and requirements. The definition of UX, being about recognising and meeting user needs, shouldn’t be, but it is.

Even the definition of user isn’t universal

What most would consider the most basic definition of what we do has become controversial, being ‘user centred'. I genuinely don’t understand how the term user can become ill-defined, but it has.

Oh, the howls of some parts of our profession that the term ‘user’ is dehumanising – though they seldom offer an alternative term to describe the subsection of humanity who are using our solutions and how you differentiate their needs and actions from other people.

Don’t get me started on what the difference between a customer and a user is, those unending arguments benefit no one, especially the people who we’re supposed to be providing solutions for.

Examples?

We all know business owners who define user as somebody who they can sell to. Never mind meeting their needs so they want to buy, just somebody they can sell to.

There are POs who define a user as somebody who finds a product or service usable, useful doesn’t come into it, if it is usable that is all that matters.

Product Managers that define the end user as somebody who is paying for the solution, so that's another business or business unit, which somehow achieves sentience and needs emotional design.

My idea of user and theirs do not match.

You’ll need to find your own contributors who match your idea of user.

Then there is the siloing

Siloing is so established that it has even become defensive. User insight into Product will be denied by Brand because it doesn’t agree with their guidelines or messaging. Brand demands of Service will be denied because it interferes with the market research that created their vision and strategy. Service insight will be ignored by Product because it interferes with development times and roadmaps. All are part of the entire experience, but many organisations keep them as far away from each other as possible.

You’ll need to find your own contributors who match your idea of what UX process is correct.

UX software that isn’t about UX

I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve seen arguments on which software package is the best for UX. Here is the answer:

None of them.

Oh, there are arguments over which has the best features for flow-diagrams or journey mapping, or which is the best for complex micro-interactions or UI to CSS capabilities but frankly they’re all design focussed not user focussed.

Real user insight, real UX, that drives design, requires data, qualitative from psychological research, quantitative from system diagnostics, and the ability to sort that data into meaningful conclusions about users. That’s mental heavy lifting and that can’t be done in a software package.

The best package for UX is the one between the seat and the keyboard and what they bring to the process in the way of inspiration, creativity, skill and ability. Software is not UX anymore than a screwdriver is engineering.

You’ll need to find your own contributors who match your idea of what tools are correct.

TLDR?

UX/ CX/ XD/ UCD/ HCD/ HFE/ MMI/ HCI/ <insert initialism of choice here>/ very rarely drives business, and business very rarely listens to them, or if it does it is only when UCD agrees with what business wants to hear.

UCD is very rarely joined up, hell it very rarely is allowed to talk to its component parts.

UCD even has different definitions of what a user is.

What this employer defines UX as is different to that employer’s definition, what this part of the business defines as UX is different to that part of the business. The actual UXers themselves don’t get asked their opinion.

What that all boils down to is there no such thing as Best Practice just Ideal Practice (which seldom exists in companies that see UCD as a bolt-on to enhance decisions already made) or Working Practice (which usually means making things as good as possible but not as good as they should be) and Operational Practice (which just means fitting in to your employers’ expectations and not rocking the boat).

You’ll need to find your own contributors who match your idea of what UX is!

Can it change?

I’m not sure, anymore, what can change that, after all once you’re over the cliff it is hard to stop falling. There aren’t enough of us at C-suite to change it, there aren’t enough at production level to change it and no central body to govern it.

Over the years we’ve wanted someone in a better position than us to just make a single definition that works, bring everything together (again) and then implement a process to ensure it delivers.

If only, huh?

Now in a very round about way this takes me back takes me back to the start of this posting: who to follow for good UCD content?

Well forget about defining what UCD is (in all its implementations) what about just cutting through this noise to actually putting place the strategies and tactics to make it work?

Two people who are doing their utmost to restructure this chaos, are Joel Gill and Karl Smith.

Karl is leading the charge on how UCD is utilised in Business-ops, using an Agile methodology, from top down (https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/agile-world-incorporated/), Joel doing for the same for Experience-Design-ops from bottom up in the EXD team at Shell (https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/jgillux/).

I’ve known Karl for longer than I care to think about, he’s often cited in the Top 100 Global Thought Leaders and has made the sort of C-Suite level strategic transformations that most can only dream of.

Joel has done the same but at the tactical implementation level but has purposely avoided appearing on lists. The model he has built is now being copied in other orgs, simply because it works.

UCD is at the core what they both do, the end user, the end customer, whatever term you want to choose, is at the start, middle and end of how they work. Watching both of them build their own strategies is simply joyful, knowing that they both want to achieve the same thing and watching them not just talk but actually build and install the methodology to make it work is astonishing.

No more words, just actions based on years of constantly delivering.

I’ll give you an example. Three years ago, Joel hardly had a department. Now, his EXD department has Research, Service, Product, Content, and everything else that goes into UCD, all sitting together (metaphorically, they’re all over the planet, in reality) working to produce joined up a UCD experience. He has even got UCD ways of working written into compliance, so, if you’re not compliant you don’t get resource. It is amazing how quickly UCD gets accepted when your budget requires it.

Karl is making the same progress but across multiple businesses, with multiple decision makers and challenging and correcting some of the awful implementations of Agile and UCD out there. He too is making great progress in getting users put at the heart of business.

If you’re at the stage where you’re questioning if anything will ever change, if you’re wondering if or when someone will step up and provide a voice, I seriously recommend following both of them. At some point it is inevitable their work, and others less visible but doing the same thing, will meet-up and when it does … listen to the noise level drop and the harmony rise, much to the dismay of those who don't really care about end users.