What’s a UX Designer ?
Let’s compare notes, shall we ?
A few days back, i told you why i try to perform field investigation along with my user interviews in another article .
Like i mentioned in this story, at that time i was already relying heavily on a user centered approach for most of my projects, but never really met anyone claiming to do UX design.
When we decided to bring that team together for this project, my boss brought someone in the team, supposingly in charge of the design, while i was in charge of the project management.
So, during the first exchanges with our client, future user of the software we were meant to produce, this person, supposingly UX designer, started to claim he could tailor and fine tune the software to the customer’s wishes, thanks to his AdobeXD account. As he explained, he would be able to export the code in order to save time for the developers, and so on …
Don’t get me wrong, Adobe XD has proven to be a very useful tool, and can certainly help fasten development in some cases. The issue came afterward, when this person asked me to provide the features list, the user journeys and the wireframes. Of course it was supposed to be “just a quick sketch” and supposingly based on my exchanges with the customer as a project manager.
It turns out that, once i provided a simple user journey and wireframes made with Pencil (pretty basic, but quite enough), this person opted out of the project, claiming my work was enough to go forward and that finally Adobe XD was a little bit overkill for a project of this size.
Claiming you can’t do UX design because of a client’s budget or project size is like claiming you can only drive Sport cars !
In a nutshell
My first experience with someone endorsing the title of UX Designer made me wonder about my own definition. What is on the job list and what is common sense in similar projects ?
All around the web, you can find a list of the usual aspects that are parts of the UX Designer profile. In a form or another it matches UX roles, and goes like this : UX Research, UX Writing, UX Design, UI Design, Front-End Development (mainly for prototyping and tweaking UI Design)
In my opinion, all those aspects are only ways to express a single idea :
A UX Designer is a product designer that puts the end user at the center of each and every step of it’s design process
Tools are meant to be created, adapted or used, according to situations encountered, and not the other way around. You don’t look for projects that would benefit from your expertise on this fancy tool you mastered, you provide the right tool for the situation at hand.
For those of you that expected a more practical or a more detailed description of a UX designer’s life, i might get to that in another article, but i thought it was worth sharing this little story and my take on what should be at the core of each UX Designer’s approach.
It can seem trivial to remind this fact, but there is a lot of people out there abusing the title and the values it should stand for, no matter what.
I hope you enjoyed. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts and advices.
