The real reasons designers get sniffy when you put UX and UI together

We UX professionals are an oft-misunderstood bunch, burdened as we are with a profession which none of our loved ones quite understand (as my dear Mum used to observe, ‘Gareth works in computers’), and which if we are being honest, we occasionally haven’t quite fully worked out ourselves. Amid the confusion, this author muddles through with humour and an ongoing attempt not to take myself or my profession too seriously.

The latter gets challenged from time to time, when I experience the more egregious of UX misdemeanours, such as UX project briefs including the phrase “wow factor”, teams pursuing delight as the only barometer of user experience, or HIPPs making wild yet confident claims of what their users definitely want from an experience founded only on guesswork and personal preference. I’ve learned to calm myself down over this whole thing, realising that we’re all on a UX maturity journey (admittedly traveling at different speeds) and doubtless I hold beliefs right now which future-Gareth will find embarrassing.

Despite all that there is a UX crime which continues to make my left eye twitch every time I encounter it, which is the conflation of UX and UI, and in particular the job role youexyoueyedesigner. I’ve often thought about why this causes me a silent internal primal scream. Has my infamous pedantry finally overtaken me? I appreciate there are more important things going on in the world, and surely other hills for UX professionals to die on that this one. So why this one?

1. User experience is everyone’s job, not just a designer’s

How your users feel as they interact with your product and service is a function of the work of your designers, front-end programmers, back-end programmers, security engineers, product owners, fulfilment people, business analysts and project managers. Achieving exceptional user experience is much too difficult to rest solely on the shoulders of one individual or even a single design department.? If you are going to call your UI designers UX / UI designers then you need to consistently name your entire team, with job titles including UX / programmer, UX / network analyst and UX / front-end developer.

2. User experience includes how your product works as well as how it looks

Sometimes programmers are better placed to improve user experience than designers, because users need certain functions in order to have a positive experience. I was recently involved in a piece of work involving sales agents who used a CRM portal to manage clients, products, appointments and stock. While user research provided a range of insights, the overwhelming user need uncovered was that of integrating the portal’s calendar and diary system with the personal diaries of sales agents. This work, currently in progress, is being developed entirely by software developers and has no impact on the interface whatsoever.

3. User experience guides feature prioritisation, including saying no

American jazz trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis famously observed “It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play” when reflecting on what made him so talented at his craft. The same is true of digital products. User experience provides us with tools and techniques to properly identify user problems – both spoken and unspoken – and methods to understand how acutely they are felt. This in turn allows us to determine what features to build and by extension what features not to build. In particular, it empowers project teams to avoid building solutions for problems which users don’t have, and to invest time building features whose benefits align with actual real-world need.

4. User experience guides investment and informs a business case

As well as helping product teams to understand current user needs, UX offers a variety of frameworks and research methods to forecast future user needs. While no-one knows the future and what users value is notoriously difficult to predict, these techniques at least allow product owners and investors to make more informed decisions around areas of potential competitive advantage relative to others in the marketplace both now and into the future.? As this author has previously observed, one of the key benefits of mature UX process, namely early validation, also provides confidence to investors that the product they are backing has some level of validated market fit.

5. Much of a user’s experience lives outside of the product (and by definition, its interface)

A cursory glance at some of the world’s leading products will reinforce this self-evident truth. The Uber experience relies on a polite driver turning up with a clean cab and taking you to your destination. The Deliveroo experience depends on tasty, hot, fresh food being delivered to your door. The Amazon experience hinges on a product arriving to your door very quickly after it is ordered, with the assurance that if there is an issue with it, that you are protected by a no-quibble returns policy. In each case the digital product is only part of a wider delivery ecosystem, and to restrict the definition of that experience to the narrow confines of the product’s interface is to miss the point entirely.? The product interface is one of many factors which influence a user’s experience, and often it’s not even a major one.

So this crusty old UX veteran is shaking his fist at clouds and dying on this hill because UX primarily focuses its attention on good outcomes across design, technology, investment, competition and service delivery. UI’s focus is on good outputs (a high-quality interface) which supports that overall experience.

I’m not arguing that one person can’t simultaneously have skills in UX and UI – clearly they can – I am positing that the conflation cheapens both disciplines and limits the X in UX.

In short, X > I.