Design is not art, and UX is not design
Why designers have ditched the art persona and hijacked the UX industry
Designers have been trying to shake the misconception that design is not art for a long time. Only recently have companies started to recognize that design is an essential component to a successful business approach. And with large companies such as IBM and Fidelity adopting “design thinking” strategies, things are looking up for designers. But there is still work to be done if we want a permanent seat at the big table.
However, there seems to be a new mixup regarding who designers are and what we do exactly. Just when we have separated the persona of the artistic diva designer from our profession, people are now confusing designers as user experience (UX) professionals.
Now, before you get upset, we must first define what UX is. According to digital.gov, “UX deals with people interacting with your product and their experience from that interaction. UX is measured with metrics like success rate, error rate, abandonment rate, time to complete a task, and clicks to completion”. And a summary definition from the Nielsen Norman Group states that “UX encompasses all aspects of the end-users interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” As you can see, neither of these definitions contains the word “design.”
Based on these descriptions, it is evident that many diverse departments and professionals are responsible for creating a good user experience, such as writers, researchers, programmers, information architects, marketers, and yes, designers.
Good UX is only as good as the sum of its parts. If a website loads too slow, causing frustration for the user, this falls into a developer’s wheelhouse. If the content does not resonate with the user or provide valuable information, this is a writer’s responsibility. And if a user receives too many emails and unsubscribes, this is a marketer’s problem to solve. UX is a broad area that touches many points beyond aesthetic usability factors.
However, even when all the departments work together with a UX philosophy in mind, if you do not employ good research, interviews, and testing, it prevents any product from having the best user experience possible. This distinction is where UX researchers and other UX specialists come into play.
I believe we should perceive UX practitioners the same way we regard digital marketing professionals. They write, interview, research, and provide descriptive and predictive analytics. And we, as designers, develop prescriptive solutions based on the data, insights, and other information and recommendations. Some may disagree with this model, but it works for my mental interpretation of the relationship between UX practitioners and designers.
Designers have hijacked the UX industry
From my experience, if you mention improving a product’s UX, people tend to think of improving the design. And from personal conversations, many also confuse UX with user interface (UI) design. While both of these approaches are part of a good UX strategy, it is not the whole picture.
Even design publications and popular resources combine design and UX as if they are interchangeable disciplines. The truth is design and UX overlap a great deal. But let’s get something straight. If a webpage has a terrible hierarchy leading to a bad user experience, that is not a faulty UX strategy. That is a poor design. It would be a waste of UX resources to point out problems that are resolvable through the application of good design principles. However, these subtleties are not what I believe has conflated UX and design.
Designers have always had trouble proving the value of their skills, and many times, what we produce is considered subjective, even if we follow sound design principles to solve problems.
Unlike other disciplines, such as technology, where something works or does not, or marketing, where conversions and impressions measure degrees of success, design has always been challenging to quantify. And because of this murkiness, we have always had a barrier preventing us from being taken seriously. I believe these challenges, plus the benefits of UX strategies, have led to the inflation of the “UX Designer” title as an attempt to be taken more seriously — plus, it comforts our delicate designer egos.
While UX practitioners and designers have the same goals, the reality is they use different skills sets to do their jobs properly. And as with many professions, there is always a degree of overlap in job responsibilities. Some days we are Coding Designers, Marketing Designers, and my favorite, PowerPoint Presentation Designers.
Many are familiar with the label “Web Designer.” However, this title is a bit outdated depending on how you define it, as most designers design for the web these days.
So the UX label may be more about perception than technical skills, and the title UX Designer will eventually undergo the same fate as the title of Web Designer. It will become self-evident that designers focus on the user experience in the same way they focus on the web — it will get baked into the job.
Playing the hero
I also get the impression that designers who identify as UX practitioners like to think of themselves as heroes, fighting for the user. This personified archetype is reasonable, considering that typical business objectives and revenue growth interests do not inherently appeal to designers and can leave a bad taste in their mouth. But users, on the other hand, we know and care a great deal about them.
Sometimes I believe UX designers see themselves as the antithesis of bad user experiences caused by malevolent capitalistic motives. This perception is an exaggeration, of course. But there is some truth to the essence of it.
Survival of the fittest
Designers have always had to adapt to new environments. As a 39-year-old designer, a dinosaur in designer years, I have had to learn how to use programs such as Flash and learn to code because that was expected in the early to mid-2000s. And as someone responsible for hiring other designers over the years, if your resume did not have coding skills, I did not even consider hiring you.
But as technology has evolved and applications such as Figma, Sketch, InVision, and Adobe Xd, have become popular, the need for designers to code is becoming less relevant. Of course, having a fundamental comprehension of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is still preferable to some degree. However, more often than not, I now see requirements of UX experience instead of coding skills on designer job descriptions.
Ten years from now, I wonder if we will write about how ridiculous it was that designers needed hard UX skills, in the same way we talk about outdated Flash skills now. Who knows, Ai learning UX software is around the corner.
So what does a designer do?
Designers are responsible for addressing the needs and goals of the business and users through good design. We achieve these solutions by effective visual communication, creative thinking, and the application of solid design principles.
However, as UX has become more valuable to businesses, designers have seized the opportunity to be part of this “design revolution.”
A real UX plan is not just about empathizing with the user and solving their needs — designers already do this to some degree, at least the good ones do. Good UX strategies require a lot of research, like, a lot. Plus, UX includes performing user interviews, testing, understanding psychology, and other skills that are not in a designer’s primary comfort zone.
But just like learning to code, we will assimilate and mold ourselves to the current design environment and learn the skills that will allow us to produce better designs and career advantages until the next big thing.
Unfortunately, the problem with integrating complex and detailed UX strategies into a designer’s workflow is the same problem we had integrating coding. It leaves less time for actually designing.
I am not sure how all designers feel, but I do not enjoy doing tons of research or conducting interviews. However, I do love investing my time and energy designing and strategizing creative solutions utilizing data and information gathered by professional researchers and other UX specialists.
But whether you are a UX/UI designer or a generalist designer, analyzing data and user needs is crucial for producing usable and accessible products and services — which should be a common goal for everyone.
Conclusion
Designers have always been UX-minded, it’s our natural state of being. And as businesses start seeing the value in adopting UX strategies, our skillset has complemented this nicely.
While a substantial portion of what dedicated UX practitioners do is serious research, ideation, writing, and other complex skills, the reality is that good UX is also a philosophy that every department from the top down must adopt and embrace, not just designers.
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