Why UX ≠ Design (Alone)

As many people do, towards the end of 2017 and as another new year approached, I was spending some time reflecting on my career to date, and my professional progress so far. Something that hit me is that I am extremely close to being able to say that I have been working in the technology industry, specifically within software companies, for almost a decade. In that time I have experienced and learned a lot.

Something that I have played witness to in that time period, is the evolution of the term "UX Designer".

Back in 2009 when I first started out as a Technical Support Coordinator at a small, yet well established, scientific software company in Leeds, we did not have a UX Designer helping to build our products. I don't think we even had anyone with the term designer in their job title. So did that mean we did not design our products or care about the people who used them?

No, it just meant that this was done through a combination of giving our developers the freedom to be creative, and truly listening to our customer feedback and incorporating this in to our development. We ran well organised beta tests each year before our annual software roll-out (yes, we still released standalone software!), face-to-face Voice of our Customer meetings with users throughout the year, and User Centred Design studies through a third party consulting firm when we really needed some additional input. We were not Agile in any way, but our software advanced and we continued to gain new customers, keep old ones and grow each year.

They were more than just content, they relied on our products and frequently vocalised their satisfaction.

Of course as the years passed, I myself grew and evolved, and the company completely transformed. By the time I left that organisation in early 2015 I had held the titles of both Key Account Manager and Senior Sales Executive; and the organisation had become Agile, re-structured, re-branded, hired a Business Analyst and Product Manager (among many other new roles, growing from 60 FTE to 100), launched 2 new products, re-designed their flagship product, and formed a long-standing relationship with a local design agency. The one thing that remained constant throughout all of that was our dedication to our customers, and to our end users. We listened, we challenged and we recorded the outcome. We prioritised, designed & engineered based on this, and our company and our products went from strength to strength.

We still did not have a designer, and no-one else had the term "UX" in their title.

I went on to work in two other small software companies after that, within business development type roles. I finally started hearing the term 'UX Design', but still did not work with anyone who claimed that name. The talented people I did work with though were Product Managers, Customer Experience Managers, Business Development Managers, Engineers, Front-End Developers, Web Designers.... (the list goes on). We made great products and we kept our users coming back for more.

Since then, I have transitioned out of the solely customer facing positions I had for so long, and recently in to the role of Technical Product Manager at a large, multinational, learning science organisation. A progression that seemed so natural after so many years of being the person out in the field talking to my customers, getting to know them, and helping to translate their needs in to business requirements for the product teams I worked with. I finally work with these mysterious people titled UX Designers. I also work alongside Learning Scientists, Usability Experts, Software Engineers, Quality Engineers and other Product Owners, all of whom provide me with information that I can use to make the decisions about the designs that we choose.

So now, if there's one thing I know beyond all measure of doubt, it's that User Experience does not belong solely to the people that spend their days using Adobe Illustrator, Sketch and InVision.

User Experience refers to the consideration given to ensuring that when end users encounter products, they have the best possible experience. That process consists of so much more than creating the designs, and so it's inaccurate and misguided to associate it solely with designers.

User Experience should be at the core of everything that anyone working in the tech [and other] industries, does, says or decides. Even the sales and support people should be talking to their customers about the overall user experience, and then bringing that information back to the teams who are building the products so that they can integrate it in to designs, experiment with that, iterate, and keep pushing for excellence for the people that matter, the customers, the USERS.