Understanding UX roles

A deep dive into User Experience design roles

This guide will step you through each UX role and what their expected outputs might be along with context on the work done by each.

Firstly let’s answer CX vs UX and what’s the difference? You can see from the diagram below CX is about all the touchpoints and the entire experience across all channels. UX is about one specific interaction where a customer is trying to achieve a goal.

The Nielsen Norman Group does a great job of articulating that into 3 levels of connection. Interaction, Journey, and Relationship levels. You can read more about that here.

What does a CX designer do?

In smaller organizations your CX design will often be done by your UX designer, this is the case with my role. I oversee both aspects and the entire experience. A CX designer typically works on the end to end experience and produces outputs like customer journey maps, service blueprints, and personas.

So what are the different UX roles?

UX breaks down into 6 core roles. UX Researcher, UX writer, UX designer, UI designer, UX manager, and UX strategist. Oh and don’t forget there is also a special 7th one, the UX unicorn!

Design thinking

Before I break down each role I need very quickly to talk about the design thinking methodology of EDIPT. This is the 5 stages that work across User Experience design and by understanding those you can see where each roles outputs and activity sit.

You can learn more about design thinking here, but for a quick overview.

Empathize — This is where you need to understand your users and their pain points, more than that how they live their lives, but what that they think, feel, say and do. You can learn more about user interviews and user testing for this stage here.