Why I’m Not a UX Designer
For this rant, I’m going to address it as user experience instead of UX because it’s devolved into a catchy buzzword and nobody seems to understand the inherent meaning of it anymore.
At work, I was asked numerous times to become a user experience designer as the agency tries to grow a user experience department. We have a fearless leader with a copywriting background. The team includes a former visual creative director and a former content strategist. In other words, with 3 people, it’s not a very large team and when they are strapped with projects, they ask for help from other departments.
I was asked to help out with one particular project and the tone of it seemed to be trying to seduce me away from visual design because, “Look Sharlene! You’re great at this!”
Of course I would be good at designing for the user experience department; when it comes to work, being detailed to a woefully obsessed point is my pathos. It is also exactly why I should never, ever be employed or expected to be a fulltime user experience designer.
I would end up designing for user experience, but I would never actually be designing the user experience. I would get hung up on presentation, semantics, and argumentative research through books and references. Instead of hanging on to the big picture, all of my OCD would be enabled and I’d be fighting the wrong fight with colleagues.
Look at this way, if you take someone who is a very meticulously organized and a clean person, they would do well managing a lab. If you take that same person and ask them to manage a preschool, they could do a good job, but their anxiety would be constantly triggered and their focus wouldn’t be on the education of children but the management of them.
User experience design is often forgotten as a very literally termed discipline. When we do things, it’s an experience. When we’re asked to interact with a product, you become a case of user experience. What that experience is can be designed.
It takes a greater holistic approach. As a visual designer, the user’s experience is improved by what I can give them visually. Huge factors to consider are how the interface is experienced and that’s both making it easy and beautiful to use. Visual designers should understand what it takes to create a positive user experience, and stop going on about how they understand UX. Understanding usability is a part of the entire creation of a product; user experience designers manage that factor throughout the process.
It’s never just wireframes. Wireframes are a minute part of it all.
If you’re designing visually for interactive products, you should understand user experience design for the same reason architects do.
Fact: before the interwebz was invented so Al Gore could order moar pizza, architects always had to consider user experience.
