Let’s talk about what we mean when we talk about UX, UI, & Product Design
In today’s diversifying universe of tools, technology, and specialities, it’s important to understand how and why the terminology around design needs to be consistent and inclusive.
There was a time, not long ago, in a distant land of message boards, HTML tables, blazing dialup internet speeds where you could download a massive 12MB of information in just an hour, and where those that created commercial art where called “graphic designers”. A time when we were asked to create logos, design business cards, layout brochures, understood what it meant to get artwork ready for color-separated films, and if you had a copy of GoLive CyberStudio you might be able to create a “web site”. A time of lumberjacks, Rachel haircuts, unreadable text, sinking ships, and everyone was swing dancing.
I understand that this makes me a graphic design-o-saur — but like all dinosaurs you should be terrified, as if I were a Tyrannosaurus Rex or some flying terror bird or whatever. Ok, that doesn’t make any sense, but the point is that over the last few decades a majority of work done by a traditional graphic designer has drastically shifted. From the dot-com boom of the late 90s, or the app revolution brought about by the launch of the iPhone over the last decade, our work has become more robust, specialized, and technical.
Since I began as a junior graphic designer in 1995 (where my first project was designing a window sticker wherein the client hovered over my shoulder giving me directions; but that’s another story for another time), our industry has evolved, expanded, and grown more complicated, and so too has the language we use to describe our roles and responsibilities. And with this growth has brought with it confusion, obscurity, and ambiguity. We all assume that if we’re speaking the same language that we’re saying the same thing. Far too often the shortcuts we take in our everyday communication isn’t interpreted with the same meaning we ascribe to it.
It’s important that we are understood in order to be effective communicators. If your job requires you to work with clients or stakeholders (which let’s be honest, that is almost everything that requires a design solution), the necessity of clarity in what your skills and responsibilities encompass is fundamental to providing insightful and successful solutions. A lack of precision in describing and explaining what we do allows others to fill in the blanks of our verbal void.
Why Does This Matter?
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
— STEVE JOBS
Why should it matter how we understand and define the field of design? In the grand scheme of things, and the meaningless speck of time our lives occupy in the expanding and unknowable universe, I suppose none of this really matters. But since this isn’t an article about the existential dread of our impending demise, let’s just agree it matters for now.
How do others understand the terms we use when we use them? Does what they hear and comprehend align with what we’re assuming is understood? Is there even agreement within our own industry of what we mean? Why can’t we all just be graphic designers again? Can I ask another question? In order to speak more clearly about our careers, we have to describe the commonalities and differences within the various roles and responsibilities.
People not involved in the design industry don’t understand the difference between user experience and user interface (or is it user interaction?) designers. If you asked a random stranger on the street what UI or UX means, they wouldn’t have a clue, and I doubt they would they even care. If you asked a client or a stakeholder, or even a fellow designer, what UI or UX means, you wouldn’t get a consistent answer. While Director Of User Experience at my previous job, I frequently received emails from internal and external people who believed I was in charge of customer service. Hell, even Lexus just launched a new crossover called the UX.
Why is it important for anyone else to understand? Because understanding fosters trust, value, and unity, and the more widely our profession is trusted, valued, and unified, the more opportunities we have to influence, grow, and expand the ecosystem of digital products that focus on positive, productive, and valuable human interactions.
So What Is UX, Really?
Far too often we use the term “UX Designer” as a vague, all encompassing title that covers the gamut of “digital” graphic design in describing our careers — often for no other reason than it is a trending title on job boards. We can easily justify the usage because “user experience” contains everything, in that people literally experience everything, therefore calling ourselves UX Designers allows us to design anything for everyone without infringing on any perceived barriers of the design practice.
While such a broad and expansive definition might seem helpful to designers, it has the side-effect of being at best bewildering and at worst meaningless to others (and honestly, even ourselves). Let’s not discount the benefit (or more accurately, the revenue) in promoting the value of studying, learning, conferencing, coursing, workshopping of UX as an empirical antidote to the problem of design subjectivity.
What any user experiences while engaging with your product contains a full range of emotions, motivations, desires, thoughts, and actions. In order to create a data-backed and user-centered experience it’s necessary to do thorough research into potential and current users of your product. The purpose of which is to identify and anticipate their needs, assumptions, and objectives by testing and observing various experiences in order to create validated and optimal visual solutions.
But UI Is Just The Pretty Stuff, Right?
When it comes to identifying the responsibilities of design, far too often the role of UI is placed into a corner of trend chasing, unscientific, superficial and trendy subjectivity. All of the attention — the courses, the certifications, the think-pieces and articles, the job titles, and expert “opinions” — are focused on just one fragment of product design as a whole. While it’s true that design does have an element of subjectivity to it, a well intentioned, carefully considered, and astute UI is far more than mere pretty colors and images. The dominance of user experience evangelizing has had the unfortunate side-effect of turning the practice interface design into at best an inferior skill and at worst an afterthought.
As reasonable as it seems to call everything an experience, it’s just as plausible to call everything we connect with an interface. From the time you wake up in the morning till the moment you lay down, you interface with hundreds of things: a faucet handle, a doorknob, a coffeemaker, the knobs on a stove, the buttons on a shirt, the zipper on a coat, the key in a lock — all of these are forms of interface that require an intentional design strategy and methodology.
What any user interfaces with while engaging with your product contains a full range of visual perception, understanding, interpretation, intuition, and judgement. In order to create an attentive, nuanced, and user-centered interface it’s necessary to do comprehensive analysis and insights into competitive solutions and adjacent users of your product. The purpose of which is to learn about their predetermined biases, learned patterns, and expected behavior in order to deliver practical and usable visual solutions.
Wait, Everything Isn’t UX?
The problem with our understanding and communicating of the current field of graphic design in the digital age is that it lacks clarity in defining the nuanced responsibilities between UX and UI.
While it’s generally understood that UX involves a lot of research, one doesn’t think of UI as also involving research. Similarly, it’s generally understood that UI is focused on design, does not mean that UX has no design components. Between one end of the spectrum of UX (focus groups, interviews, or surveys) and the other end of UI (concepts, prototypes, or final design), is an overlap of skills and practices with a commonality in the form of research and design.
Research
Research seeks to observe, learn, and test insights. The purpose of vigorous user research is to discover and mitigate potential problems that can waste time and money, and test and improve observed problems that will maximize time and money. The goal of user-centered research seeks to minimize risk and contextualize design solutions into more scientific validity. Minimize risk. Maximize results.
- UX research involves gathering a wide range of user data by conducting various quantifying and qualifying forms of testing, observations, questionnaires, surveys, in order to create personas, identify pain points, create empathy and journey maps to turn into designs.
- UI research involves gathering a wide range of user behavior insights by gathering competitive analysis, culling best practice resources, identifying applicable trends in the field in order to conceptualize, build, and refine interfaces and interactions that turn into designs.
Design
Design seeks to explore, create, and execute ideas. The purpose of thorough user design is to analyze and conceptualize potential solutions that help develop understanding and engagement, and discover and evolve executed solutions that will improve understanding and engagement. The goal of user-centered design seeks to fully capitalize on visual impact and innovation by applying research insights into performant solutions. Minimize confusion. Maximize interaction.
- UX Design involves the creation of user personas, empathy and journey maps, user flows, decision trees, or wireframes by analyzing the provided research from user testing, observation, questionnaires, and surveys in order to validate research.
- UI Design involves the creation of concepts, mockups, interactive prototypes, exploration and finalization of pattern libraries, design systems, and asset management by analyzing the provided competitive analysis, best practices, and understanding applicable trends in order to validate research.
It’s Time We All Get Along
The truth is that most “designers” (in the most generous sense of the word) either are already skilled at or are exploring the possibilities of what is provided through traditional UX and UI practices. Without an accepted understanding of these ill-defined practices, it’s far better to unify under a more inclusive, contemporary, and substantial title, than exist in a continual state of ambiguity.
What Are We Researching And Designing?
There are still plenty of graphic designers creating a broad scope of traditional work like business collateral, branding, annual reports, posters, print layouts, or rudimentary websites, but a large majority of our industry has drastically shifted, along with the pace of new technology, toward digital solutions over the last decade.
These new digital solutions encompass an equally broad scope of work, whether that’s creating e-commerce platforms, online software tools, connected content, variable data-informed experiences, or some other very long-winded techie sounding thing. They also come with a new set of challenges and skillsets; from learning and using new software and tools, monitoring and analyzing data, or collaborating with frontend and backend engineers to manage experiences and deliver assets. All of these new digital platforms are commonly called products (but you knew you that).
All products start with an assumption. For every assumption there’s an insight. For every insight there’s a hypothesis. For every hypothesis there’s a test. For every test there’s an outcome. For every outcome there’s a data point. For every data point there’s analysis. And for every analysis we create a story by which users are guided through product experiences. The job of a product designer is to utilize their range of skills to create and iterate on those experiences and interactions through research and design.
So Why Should We Call Ourselves Product Designers?
Our present technology-centered consumer ecosystem revolves around products, that’s why it makes sense to call ourselves product designers. A product designer is the blending of user experience and interface research, along with user experience and interface design into one common identity.
While I can’t tell you what to call yourself, I do believe the title allows for a more concise definition of our profession; a profession that contains a varied amount of experience, abilities, and expertise as it relates to creating user-centered digital environments. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t specialize in specific areas, especially as you advance your experience, but that’s no reason to limit your ability to explore and learn new skills.
Most product designers range in their interests and abilities within those four quadrants of skills. It doesn’t mean that product designers can or should do all of the skills at their disposal, because that’s not always realistic or beneficial. But it allows for anyone to explore and improve their skills in whatever methodology they’re interested in developing without having to change their job title or career path. It also assures that we are able to explore the full spectrum of skills that both UX and UI research and design offer, in order to create the most effective products. No one wants to put hours and hours of effort into research that turns out to be false, nor does anyone want to spend hours and hours of effort into design that turns out to be ineffective.
That’s why as the Head Of Design at Alchemy I feel it’s important to focus on building and developing a team of product designers who can specialize in UX and/or UI, who equally apply the skills and tools needed to do research and design. So if you’re in the digital world of designing products, perhaps you’ll join me in calling yourself one too?
