Reduce design complexity or effort required to process all information.The Big Ball of User Experience: from UX to Product Design

Journey from information architect to UX designer to product designer and the current state of our industry.

Over 20 years ago, one day, I woke up and decided to change my job title from Information Architect to User Experience Designer. I remember many usability experts, information architects, interface designers, and interaction designers telling me that it was fashionable at the time. The term is imprecise, it’s bullshit, can the experience be engineered?

And then, few years ago, one day, I woke up and decided to change my job title from User Experience Designer to Product Designer. And some UX designers told me it’s fad and there’s no real difference between UX design and product design. But for me it’s different. And above all: for me, this new title is more modest and true. And I think that’s what UX designers need most right now: more humility.

I’m not suggesting that you change your title like I did. Honestly, you should not do it. I don’t care, really. But I’m here to tell you my reason and how I see the current state of our industry. At the surface level, it is the most boring theme in the world: the title, just hit a dead horse, but as a designer, we still like to discuss it, we are not Are we? But maybe it’s a little deeper. It all starts with our need to be more important I’ve always loved the title Alan Cooper recommends: Interaction Designer. I think it’s always great to capture the essence of the piece. But that seemed too narrow 20 years ago.

Digital designers want to grow more and more and UX Design seems to be a bigger responsibility. And it was lost. Nowadays, UX is extremely popular. Everyone uses this acronym, but the problem is that everyone understands it differently. After all these years, it’s still a very vague concept. In an interview with Peter Merholz, Don Norman had the following to say about the birth of the term UX:

“I coined the term because I think a person’s interface and usability is too narrow. I mean all aspects of a person’s experience with the system, including corporate design graphics. industry, interfaces, physical and manual interactions. Since then, this term has extended largely, both begin to lose its meaning. ”

It has lost a lot of meaning that now Mr. Alan Cooper thinks there is no UX design … How do UX designers come and what do they really do? In our efforts to determine our scope of work as wide as possible, we have a lot of UX’s shadows, that it is at risk of breaking. UX is currently “staged experiments through various communications”, organizations, strategies, innovation, marketing, designing all applications for advertising, service and equipment, Location, events, even crops of the company.

And maybe it is. But in fact, there is no really good UX design to do all that alone, you need another expert army to create a complex digital product. I can say that many UX Designers have inflated their egos and don’t have enough skills or experience for their ambitions. I am also responsible for recruiting and most of the people applying for this position are: UI/UX designer, real graphic designer who doesn’t have a lot of skills in the art of information architecture, defining goals and requirements, creating interaction models and business aspects of everything. They live on Dribbble. UX designers who make a living creating wireframes to specifications and sometimes also doing usability testing. (By the way, they are the people who have the potential to become full-fledged product designers. A lot of seasoned UX people call them “wired monkeys”, and I really hate that needless disregard. They forget that they themselves are probably stringed monkeys from early childhood.)

Design Thinkers – people who run workshops, love post-production and their oil paintings, but often can’t turn the results into actual designs. Of course, this is an oversimplification, but from my observations a lot of UX people fall into one of these three groups. Not many people have both strategy and tactics, ideas and execution, business and design and experience. There is a huge gap between how UX designers perceive the importance of their industry, what they actually do, and how useful they are to the business.

UX isn’t really the center of everything, a lot of “What is UX?” diagram is displayed. I recommend you check out this excellent presentation by Paul Addams, titled “The End of Navel Gazing”, from UX London 2018. The title says it all. UX Design nowadays is very much like a religion and its representatives are often very secretive No wonder, there are even UX evangelists! If you disagree with them on some pillars of their faith, they will gladly rip your heart out.

Suffice it to say that user research is not always necessary or practical and they will gladly tell you that you are not a real UX designer without it and can be a very human being. evil. If you personally don’t like certain methods, such as personality or the like, you should run or be stoned! It’s very sad. UX people always want to be the most creative team. But I feel like they’re not.

Their biases drive them to be truly innovative, to try different ways of doing things, to really come up with new ideas, to be different and flexible, to be experimental, practical, entrepreneurial and trivial. To truly innovate is to chart your own route, to go against the bad, to take risks.

Don’t repeat the simple clichés people say and follow the simple recipes.

I fear that UX Designers often get seriously confused between map and territory, pattern or buzzword and reality. (Only innovation consultants are more predictable: they all read the same books, they all say the same predictable things.)