"Do the UX for this page."
There is no faster way to see a designer’s eyes roll.
Why we still hear this, I don’t know, but you won’t hear it from within the design team. It’s the engineers, product managers, architects, executives, and so on speaking about user experience design as if it’s an entity that can be molded and released within a number of development sprints
This isn't to point blame and blast them for ignorance as, honestly, it’s not really their fault. It’s a symptom of our industry still incoherently trying to define and describe what it is we do. How a UX role in one company is defined can be entirely different from another next door.
However, while I was doing my daily exploration of the Twitter-verse yesterday, I came across an intriguing thought from Ryan Singer in describing "UX" as a reaction.
“When the experience isn’t right, you change the product to produce a different experience.”
This spoke to me.
Considering Ryan's argument, the experience of the user is not something that can be explicitly designed, regardless of how we describe the value of our practice. Perhaps this is makes "UX Design" a misnomer and so chronically hard to explain.
What we design are the interfaces and interactions between a series connected touchpoints over one or more channels that, done well, helps the user solve a problem they had. If we meet or exceed their expectations, we hope to see a favourable reaction of satisfaction and repeat business.
Said another way, we’re designing the environment and conditions that we hope leads to a positive user experience.
Being pedantic can be beneficial in re-shaping our perspectives. We have no more ability to provide a “user experience” than wishing for a genie to bend someone's free will.
UX is not a design, it’s a reaction to one.
