A presentation at Amuse in in Budapest, Hungary by Mike Atherton
So I was on Linkedin the other day, browsing the news feed as you do. Looking for pearls of business wisdom in between all the motivational JPEGs from shiny-faced marketing managers. Now you might think of the LinkedIn feed as a human centipede of regurgitated brain farts. You might think that, but since I got my new job I’m not allowed to punch down.
I play a game with myself to find all the UX memes. Just what is it that people think we do all day? Well never let it be said I don’t do my due diligence. I’ve thoroughly researched it on LinkedIn and I feel confident that I can now tell you exactly what UX is.
UX is a horse. The saddle is where we get our pleasure. The reins are designed to be useable. And the horse’s legs are our core functionality. Simple really. Thank you and goodnight!
Oh - not convinced? Well then…
UX is Heinz Tomato Ketchup. Not the glass bottle mind, that’s just the product. There’s no experience to be gained from using a glass bottle. The experience comes from putting the ketchup in a squeezy bottle.
So product design is not the same thing as experience design. There’s no inherent experience in a product and no inherent product in an experience. Case closed!
Well you must know this one. Our old UX friend, the desire path. People make their own shortcuts. Stupid old design. What does design know? Design thinks you want to go straight on, but wily ol’ User Experience knows you want to veer off to the left. Yay! One-nil to empathy. So User Experience and Design are natural enemies. Which makes me a little curious about User Experience Design.
Now you can laugh (but why start now). This stuff is dangerous. These memes are well-meaning, and if you squint you can tell they are valiantly grasping at something that’s sort-of true, but they’re so very open to misinterpretation that they do more harm than good in helping people understand the role of user experience design. And don’t forget - the people on LinkedIn swallowing these frankly bizarre definitions are the same ones who we’re trying to get hired by.
Now in a roundabout way, this is why I don’t call myself a UX designer any more. And this is after a 20-year career of making websites, running UX teams in agencies and startups, and transforming the BBC with information architecture. But quite suddenly, around the end of 2014, I couldn’t get a job. And I didn’t work at all for seven months. The landscape had changed.
The jobs on LinkedIn weren’t for UX designers. They were for UX/UI designers.
Yet here’s another meme you might have seen, that states quite emphatically that UX is not UI. It outlines some things that UX has; analytics, site mapping, satisfaction and so on. And some other things that UI has; input devices, action button, content, and the mysterious ‘tools’.
What’s interesting here in comparison to other memes, it is that it positions UX quite squarely as a process - all these are procedural methods, whereas the UI components are interface-level outputs.
Now I was really interested in this UX/UI distinction, especially since I was going for jobs and not getting them. And seeing as I had some time on my hands, I wanted to explore it. UX was going strong, but of late it seems to have gotten polluted. The definition and understanding has gotten fuzzy.
I wanted to understand where UX is now, in a world of Agile development, product culture, and of course UX/UI.
Now I like to do ‘just enough’ research so I went to the UX community with a survey. I asked people how confident they were in defining what UX is.
59% of people said they were very confident in defining UX. These are pretty senior people with 5 years experience or more.
But opinion is divided on whether UX refers to the process of design or the outcome. If there’s a lack of consensus here, wait till you see what happened when I asked them what they thought it meant to be a UX/UI designer.
We know from our meme that UX is not UI. Does this UX/UI designer get you two for the price of one?
Let’s see.
I offered a few options. Was it a graphic designer working on an interface, with or without research? Was it a UX designer, but on a day when they just happened to be making an interface? In fact the winner by a small margin was ‘none of the above’. Interesting.
But the verbatims said…
“A term used by people who don’t know what either really is.” I can relate to that. When people say UX/UI out loud it always comes with this sort of hand-waggle, suggesting they see the two terms as broadly equivalent.
“A Visual Designer working in the field for a long time. It means that he/she is able to design but not to innovate.” So design is distinct from innovation? Interesting. We might be coming back to that one.
“A person in their mid-20s who has been using Sketch and hanging out on dribbble or designernews and found they can get a much better day rate by adding UX/ to their job title.”
Wow, sick burn bro. But finally my all-time favourite…
“Someone lost in a sea of opportunity who can’t define themselves in any meaningful way.”
I want that as a tattoo.
No-one would call my survey rigorous but but what I take from this is that UI is the thing to be designed, and UX in this context is the user-centered design process of getting there.
To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, once you eliminate the UI whatever remains, however improbable, must be UX. Sometimes those leftovers can again be, well, interesting.
This is taken from actually a great article by Golden Krishna, but it tends to cast the UX designer as kind of digital Willy Wonka, spreading delight and enchantment and magic. Which is nice and all. Bit hard to put on an invoice.
Seriously though, this common idea that UX is about delivering surprise and delight cheapens us. We contribute more to the experience than putting a chocolate on the pillow. I sensed a lot of venom from people in the survey, and beyond, about being seen as ‘mere’ UI designers. And indeed, the UX toolbox is bursting with user research, sketching, wireframing and prototyping, information architecture, and usability testing. But all of these things are ultimately manifest in the creation of a user interface.
Be honest. Look through your portfolio. How many things are not user interfaces? Look through the tools installed on your Mac; Axure, Sketch, Framer, Origami. Tools explicitly for the creation of interfaces or at least for documenting what should go into them.
And still 58% of you say that a UX designer designs more than user interfaces. What I understand so far is that with the rise of UX/UI jobs, traditional UX designers are feeling undervalued. That they have more to offer than making just an interface. But perhaps that’s partly to do with how we currently think of UI.
So let’s talk about UI.
Like many of you here today, I started out as a child. Unlike many of you, this was in the early 1980s when our attitude to technology was very different.
My two older brothers had built their first computer from a mail order kit, where they literally soldered chips onto a circuit board. Computers were an amateur electronics hobby, and very concerned with the physicality of just getting the damn thing to work.
If you think coding looks hard today, you should have seen it back then. Getting performance needed machine code. Literally writing binary or hexadecimal values to memory addresses on the chip. Writing to the metal, as they say today. This book was for kids like me, if you can believe that.
Machine code gave rise to languages like BASIC, abstracting away the hard stuff into something more simple, straightforward, and human. And from there we were off to the races, with more levels of software, firmware, middleware between us and the machine.
The command line interface, which seems archaic now but for kids of my generation marked the transition from being a computer programmer, to a computer operator.
Command line gave way to GUI, and the computer moved from geek to chic. The GUI ushered in the idea of the computer as a productivity appliance. As our design iterations became more sophisticated, this device became less and less technical. More approachable. More mainstream. I’ll bet most of us here haven’t ever thought of our machines as ‘computing’ anything. Some people treat their shiny Macbook Air as a $900 Facebook machine.
For how much longer does it feel right to call them computers? We’re flying high above the silicon here. The hardware is no longer our mental model. When we think of the difference between a Mac or a PC, the image we call to mind is that of the desktop interface, with its windows, icons, menus, and pointer.
Desktop gave way to mobile, and a much richer vocabulary of gestural interaction. These devices can be far more powerful than the desktop machines that came before. They afford far greater sensory input, effectively for much more sophisticated computing opportunities.
And yet the technology feels further away than ever. We use these pocket supercomputers to reach our friends. To share our stories. As an extension of our long-term memory. For all the drag and tap and swipe and wave and twist and shout of the extended interaction design vocabulary, we look straight past the device to the people and information we want to connect to.
This is no longer Human-Computer Interaction, but Human-Human Interaction, with the computer merely an intermediary or, you might say, an ‘interface’.
When we talk about Facebook, we don’t talk about Facebook. We talk about the stories people share. Like the mother and daughters who wanted to collect books for her school. Like the man who decided to run on behalf of people who can’t. Or the woman who needed help finding her birth mother.
Arthur C. Clarke famously said ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. How true! Not just because of its sophistication, but because of its ephemerality. The technology gets out of the way.
It becomes invisible, sometimes literally so. All that’s left is people connecting to people, ideas, and information. What a time to be alive! So what does it mean to be a commercial interface designer in the age of the Echo? Where the technology has receded so far that our means of interaction has reverted to good old fashioned conversation? (Which, by the way, makes it a great time to get into content strategy.)
And to come back to computer programming, when the magic happens partly or completely through algorithms and artificial intelligence - where personalised content comes to you passively based on your behaviour and activity - who on the team is really responsible for ‘designing’ the experience? It’s about altitude.
We’re no longer designing closed systems, but connected ones.
The user interface is the interface between the customer and the business. It is our window on the world of structured content, networked relationships and business transaction.
There are many such windows. Shaped like phones, like watches, like conversation. But they all look out over the same vista. And all of them must be crystal clear.
The service design and internet of things crowd speak about the difference between service avatars or touchpoints and the service ecology. The avatar might be one surface–one window–like a mobile app or an Alexa skill. And yes, each avatar needs careful interaction design, visual design, information architecture, content strategy, and of course, engineering. But each one is deeply intertwingled into an ecology, some of which you don’t see but implicitly experience - like the magic that delivers me Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist or delivers me a Domino’s pizza. And when we look at interface design in those terms, the whole UX vs UI debate loses meaning.
We’re designing the ecology to support effortless non-linear journeys across contexts and across time, rendering our customer’s intent.
Experience and utility, which has moved steadily away from the guts of the machine, is now beyond the device completely. The user experience of Amazon isn’t their clunky-ass website. It’s getting whatever I want, in my hands tomorrow, for cheaper than I could get it downtown! The user experience of Google isn’t typing into a form field - it’s the magic that gets the right results in front of me, sometimes without me typing anything at all.
UX is UI. UI is UX. We’re interfacing people to people. Designing all the means by which the customer and the business can interact. We’re relationship engineers.
And relationship engineering is pretty important because businesses are built on trade. And it’s a lot easier to sell more to the same person you’ve built a relationship with than to keep finding new prospects.
Which I guess is why management godfather Peter Drucker said ‘the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer’.
Look at the most successful companies over the past ten years. You could look at this as a comparison between traditional old-world companies and modern tech product-driven companies. Which is true, but there’s something else - for the most part we’ve moved from nasty evil corporations to nice evil corporations, who are very, very good at building personal relationships and creating personal value at scale.
So you’d think if creating value and designing relationships are central to business success, then UX designers should be more or less running the company, right? Sitting on the board, going to the management meetings, defining proposition and strategic direction.
I’ve been to a lot of UX conferences around the world, and I haven’t exactly found this to be true. Instead I find people who feel disenfranchised. Who are frustrated about not being listened to. Who, worst of all, feel like they’ve been hired to do a job, and then are actively obstructed from doing that job by the incumbent culture.
That sucks. Your job can’t be fighting for the right to do your job. Any company hiring for a role needs to make sure that job is set up for success. We as UX designers have a bunch of useful skills to get us close to the customer, understand the relationship, and uncover those unmet needs. But we need to step up our game and be taken seriously. Right now, the people we need to convince are sitting on LinkedIn thinking UX is a horse. And we’re the ones who told them that!
Let me tell you a secret. I’ve always had a love/hate thing with User Experience and UX. I mean I love the iterative, user-centered process of making meaningful, desirable, and well-crafted user experiences. But sometimes, I’ve hated UX.
‘User experience design’ is dedicated to pushing the envelope of the art of the possible, rooted in real-world business and consumer problems and cogniscent of the responsibilities and consequences of the empowering services it creates.
But ‘UX’? Oh, the unbearable lightness of UX. Is it just me or does it feel like a cult? A religion? It’s a religion some find after becoming enchanted by the interaction design on the glittering holy relics of Cupertino.
It has its patron saints; the grizzled former industrial designers, the usability bogeymen, people who once read a book on psychology. And at gatherings the world over, we the faithful come to debate ideologies, defining our creed, determining our dogma. It is in these councils we decree - The homepage is dead! Personas are still relevant! Wireframes aren’t Agile! Designers should code!
The things we talk about; they’re all about how the sausage gets made. This is perhaps my biggest beef with UX. We’re in love with our own processes. We like nothing better than going out to coffee shops and interviewing users. Getting busy with the Sharpies and the Post-its. Making persona posters about Eric who lives in Copenhagen, drives a Trabant, loves pina coladas and getting caught in the rain. As Cennydd Bowles once said, we’re in danger of becoming ‘the scene that celebrates itself’.
Oh don’t mind me, I’m just being mean and projecting my own biases. Process is of course important, especially as we develop our skills. We care about process, but the business doesn’t care about how the sausage gets made. All they see is the output. Maybe that’s why they think UX is about designing screens - because that’s the output they’re ultimately paying for. And if you think that’s limited to UX design, it’s not. Over in content strategy we have a similar perception problem - our output is content, so people think we’re copywriters. Your UX techniques are your own tactics.
UX is no more about wireframes and prototypes than accountancy is about spreadsheets. What you have to deliver is business and customer value.
I now work at a company who obsessively tracks results. (sorry, I wasn’t allowed to show you any real graphs). I sit in meetings looking at graphs of user growth, engagement, time spent, churn rate - and all the design and content work we do is aligned to these business metrics.
Though from past experience, some clients need to be educated on what digital can do for them. It’s one thing if their digital proposition isn’t aligned to business goals, but often they just don’t have any business goals for digital. They see it as a cost-centre, not a profit-centre. It’s marketing, and not very effective marketing either. So budgets get squeezed, because if you think you’re pissing money down the drain you want to stem the flow.
If we want them to see digital as investment in the future, they need to understand the return on that investment.
Where does the untapped value lie? How will success be measured in money saved or money earned? So minimise risk. Quantify return on investment. Grill them on what success looks like.
I’m often asked “How can I convince the business of the value of UX?.” I think this is the wrong question. The business is only convinced of the value of business, but need help understanding the opportunity of using digital channels to build customer relationships.
So the better question is “How can I make UX valuable to the business?” This is our opportunity to influence digital strategy. Again the word ‘altitude’ comes to mind. Just as we rise above device design to consider an entire service, so we rise above process to focus on objectives and results. We can’t be seen just as the people who put the delightful chocolate on the pillow, or the people who are really good with people.
Empathy alone won’t cut it. This needs leadership.
But, you say, but. Isn’t that the product manager’s job? Ah yes, the product manager. A key role in many digital teams now, managing the creation, launch, and sustained future of a product or service.
According to one of their own memes, Product Managers put themselves at the sweet spot between Technology, UX, and Business. And they are one of the biggest hirers of UX/UI designers. In a culture of Agile development, design is hard. Functional increments win out over holistic design systems. UX is reduced to an haphazard implementation of interface components. Designers try to keep up with a development process seemingly all about diving in head-first.
Maybe that ‘visual designer with a bit of UX’ is all they think they need. The product decisions are already made - just come in and make it pretty. We’re better than that. We’re good at relationship building. We’re close to the customer. We need a hand in ‘what’ gets made, not just ‘how’.
81% of you believe that UX should be involved in a project right from the start.
And 59% think that a product manager and a UX designer should be equals in a product team. And I agree. I think the role of UX leadership and Product leadership should be indistinguishable. Our Venn diagram probably doesn’t entirely overlap right now, but what product managers are doing today gives us a vision of where UX can step up.
Because ultimately we have the same goal: Not just making stuff right, but making the right stuff.
The designer Scott Jenson has a great line stating that ‘value must be greater than pain’. It sums up neatly what we do. Any outcome must be more valuable than the pain endured in achieving it.
Usually that value exists beyond the screen. It’s connecting to our friends. It’s catching a plane. Even getting a pizza delivered. As UX designers we’ve focused on the pain part. Reducing friction. Making it effortless to get to your goal.
But maybe we can do more to define those goals. Create the value, not just ease the pain. And this is where I’ve landed. The part of UX that is distinct from UX/UI is about personal and business value generation.
That means going upstream. Finding the right problems to solve. Validating hypotheses. Getting deep into proposition development and being mission critical. In fact we’ve always known this to be a part of UX since the original full-stack design.
Back in 2000 in the Elements of User Experience, Jesse James Garrett offered this stack, with strategy as its foundation. Product strategy is where it all begins. Everything downstream is just execution. And in this age overwhelmed by startups, finding a differentiated proposition–a truly unmet need–is more important than ever.
By the way, that’s something I call the ‘Shit-Flavoured Lollipop’ problem. If your business plan is based on selling shit-flavoured lollipops, experience design won’t save you. The website can be made pretty, we can layer on all the surprise and delight in the world. But at the end of the day, you’re still selling shit-flavoured lollipops.
So designing a truly meaningful experience has to involve designing the proposition itself. A clearly communicated value proposition is fundamental to user experience. It’s a team sport. UX, product management, and everyone on a cross-functional team have to work together on defining problems and designing the end-to-end. UX comes from more than boxes and arrows and trinkets of interaction.
Our experience is shaped by everything from how aggressive our server caching policy is to the language we use in our customer support centres.
Supporting a positive experience is the collective responsibility of everyone in the organisation. But still it needs a conductor, a cheerleader, and sometimes a cop.
That’s where we come in.
Y’know, we have a saying where I work - ‘nothing at Facebook is someone else’s problem’ - our fences are not made out of sausage, but we have a bunch of people with a bunch of skills finding and taking on the most pressing problems. No one says ‘this isn’t my job’. We just do whatever needs to be done. It works pretty well.
Instead of siloing and segregating communities of practice, we need unity. Unity within our teams and within the UX community. And none this ‘othering’ between UX and UI. Not these Medium posts saying ‘You’re not a UX designer if - dot dot dot’. The god of UX is the same god of customer experience, service design, even interface design.
Time to wrap but finally, I challenge everyone to find better ways of communicating the value of user experience design, especially on social media. Memes are good for traction, but they’re terrible for nuance.
Simplicity isn’t everything. Some things are complex, and that’s okay. Once a reasoned, contextual argument is ‘simplified’ it becomes dogmatic. Even nonsensical.
Instead of being reductive, we should sequence complexity through ‘clarity’. That goes for all our work. And at the very least, our explanation of what we do.
Beyond the screen. Beyond the process. Beyond the UX department. We facilitate and validate the creation of personal and business value. We open the doors of possibility. We connect with people to connect them to information, to services, to other people.
Interface is a relationship enabler.
We design relationships.
Businesses are built on trade. Their purpose is to keep a customer. We have to produce business and personal value with our processes. We help the business finding the value of digital. How van we make UX valuable for the Business? We need to focus on objectives and results. Empathy is not enough.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
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