
UX is not UI - davepoon
http://www.helloerik.com/ux-is-not-ui
======
ryanbrunner
I get that UX is not UI. I really do.

The one thing that consistently confuses me is that when someone explains what
UX _is_ , it always ends up being explained in a very nebulous way where a UX
designer seems to have authority over virtually everything in a company, and
responsibility over very little.

It can occasionally feel as though UX people want to be PMs, UI designers,
marketers, developers, and data analysts all at the same time, but of course
when pressed, they "aren't supposed to be about UI / PM / dev / etc.".

The list is a great example. "Company Culture evangelism" is a UX discipline?
Really?

~~~
martin-adams
No, they want to work with the PMs, UI designers, marketers, developers, and
data analysts, enabling them to have the right tools to make better choices.

~~~
untog
But "work with" as a very euphemistic term. Are they instructing the PMs etc.,
or are they acting on their orders?

I know that in an ideal world it's 50/50, but I don't think a position that is
involved in every single step of the project has any chance of success unless
you happen to also be in charge.

~~~
derefr
> Are they instructing the PMs etc., or are they acting on their orders?

What does a consultant do? A UX designer is basically another name for a
consultant who, by training, knows a lot of stuff about _the experience your
users will have with your product._ Like with any consultant, the relationship
can be anywhere from asking them direct questions, to getting them to make you
mock-ups, to modifying your product, to having them tell you what to do. As
with any other consultant, you hire them for their perspective and experience,
not for some particular skill.

A UX guy is not necessarily good at creating pretty designs--although he'll be
able to tell you, using user-testing et al, whether a design _is_ pretty. And
so forth, for each thing they do. It's not a collection of skills; it's an
approach.

(A similar question might be "what does it mean to hire a _scientist?_ " Not
skills; approach.)

~~~
eflowers
Being an internal consultant is often what happens. It's a horizontal role
that might look like it's owning a bunch of things, but really it's support
various needs in various domains that have a touch on the user/customer
"experience."

So yeah, I'll be in a PM meeting and then leading the PM meeting. Then I'll go
out and into a meeting where we're analyzing analytics on the website, then to
a meeting with devs on how we're implementing the interface literally, and
getting me set up so I can run builds, edit the html/css, write all the front
end views while devs create the models.

And then the CEO pulls me aside and wants to know what 'I'm doing to help turn
this company culture into one that is user-centered and customer driven."

So it is like being a consultant on this huge spectrum of "customer/user
experience" touch-points, and it's way more than just 1 or 2 people can do.
And then all of this is rolled up into the perception that you're there for
"look and feel" which probably only takes up 15-20% of your actual job.

You've made a really good summary of how I feel often.

------
Sarien
So basically he is saying that some parts that have been traditionally
considered a part of UI design are not a part of UI design but of UX and that
is why UX and UI are different. "Boohoo, nobody takes me seriously, they all
think I just make pretty dialogs." I know that feeling but I don't think
coming up with more names and vague definitions that nobody knows is going to
help.

~~~
seivan
Performance and Speed is UX. Something UI designers never really will
understand. It's not just UX, but the only UX that's actually quite objective.
No one ever goes "Oh gosh this app is too fast"

Another non developer talking about things that they can't implement.

~~~
eflowers
I agree. That's one of those places where being in a UX role is way outside of
UI design, and I'm taking the apps on-site with customers (I am mostly b2b)
and observing and testing them as they use it. Recording their responses, as
well as the applications. When logging in to the system takes 40 seconds
because of database performance (or lack of), that's a UX insight that needs
to be observed and reported. That's not something I can control but it has a
huge impact on the user's experience.

There's an element of user-advocacy that I'm doing where I take the experience
they are having and translate it back into business, design, and development
goals as when someone is trying to use an enterprise piece of software and the
experience is terrible, that is going to fall on designers, developers, PM's,
and all the other people involved in the creation of the "thing" which becomes
the user's experience.

That's another ambiguous situation. I go spend 2 days with users out at a
company HQ, and I come back with tons of data that now has to be consumed by
devs, designers, pm, marketers, executives, QA, customer service etc etc. The
experience of what we build is a collection of every role in the entire
company as far as the user is concerned, and all those various business roles
need that UX information brought back. So at this point I'm so far from UI and
visual design I'm closer to a PM or product owner now, but soon will be
jumping back into the design an development realm to start to fix those
experience problems.. unless the problems result in bad business drivers or
invalid use-cases, so then I'm back at the PM and management table,

I still can't find a clear distinction about what I'm supposed to say I do. I
just know that there is a certain disservice to just tell people "UI design,
look and feel."

------
TheZenPsycho
So let's take all this stuff that a UI designer does, claim that a UI designer
doesn't do them and can't possibly understand them, and invent a new term, UX,
to mean the thing that UI design used to mean. Okay.

~~~
derefr
Well, no. All those people who were already doing those things _are_ UX
designers now. I think the point of the rename is mostly that "UI designer" is
limited and derogatory in the perception it encourages, like "code monkey" or
"web designer." Nobody just does UI, so nobody is, or was ever, just a UI
designer.

~~~
TheZenPsycho
That reminds me of the universities that I went to that tried to rename the
Graphic Design departments to "Communication Design" or "Graphic
Communications" or anything but the image of a lowly pixel pusher. Graphic
Design has been greatly devalued by the prevalence of the adobe suite of
software- it used to be about solving large organisational problems. now
people just think "The way it looks" and that perception has become impossible
to shake. It's a real problem.

I don't think it's solved by coming up with new airy fairy words that nobody
understands, and are never clearly defined. It gives the strong impression
that it's not a real job. Like "social media consultant".

------
joshcrowder
Great Article. UX is the new buzzword in pretty much every sector at the
moment, especially financial, my last contract was "UX Developer" I'm not even
sure what it means, but from my day to day, I wrote javascript HA!

~~~
davepoon
Heheh, so they intended to hire a front end developer, because of the new
buzzword, and then they hired as a UX Developer to chase up the trend...

I have seen a lot of companies doing that, they also guess a UX designer could
do everything...

------
everettForth
relevant: [http://design.org/blog/difference-between-ux-and-ui-
subtleti...](http://design.org/blog/difference-between-ux-and-ui-subtleties-
explained-cereal)

------
whizzkid
To the people who consider UX as a job title. If you want your online business
to be successful, UX is the first thing you should think of.

Design is like the strawberries on the cake, UX is, how the cake tastes.

~~~
tlarkworthy
I have another set of people, the product designers, who will strongly
disagree on your unqualified use of word "design", saying that design is the
all encompassing use of a "thing" in a context. Largely being what you call
UX.

My larger point is that the geeks of the web, in trying to come up with
pointlessly precise definitions of what they do, rebase themselves from where
they came from.

~~~
whizzkid
I totally agree with "trying to come up with pointlessly precise definitions
of what they do"

what i am trying to say is, what makes product successful is not the interface
design.

I don't care if your product looks so beautiful and lovely if i can not use it
with bad bandwidth for example, or on my mobile. I don't care how cool colours
you use, if i need to click everywhere to find what i am looking for.

~~~
rimantas

      > "trying to come up with pointlessly precise definitions of what they do"
    

A few years ago I was following a few IA (Information Architecture) blogs, but
dropped them quite quickly, because that was pretty much the main concern of
theirs :)

------
lttlrck
Who doesn't understand the difference between Interface and Experience?
Clearly using tools with virtually no interface at all can be a great
experience.

~~~
johnward
Also UI can be a huge part of UX.

~~~
crayola
CLI is an interface too, though.

~~~
GeneralMayhem
Yes, and it's a UI. GUI is a strict subset of UI, as is CLI.

------
jol
Since when UI ( =User Interface) is only visual? To me it seems as UI got too
narrow understanding of just visual in the wild (i.e. general population) and
then people who really understand what they are doing decided to rebrand
themselves as too many people saying they are related to UI where just visual
design related...

------
madoublet
Yes and no, IMHO. The list on the left are all tools to solve interaction
problems. But, I think "UX" professionals tend to fall into the trap that this
is a process needed for every problem. Sometimes, good UX is just UI/Visual
design. And, that is just fine.

------
weixiyen
Out of curiosity, how many people did not know that.

~~~
rhizome31
At least a few :) Here is my anecdote.

One of my friends got an offer from his company to evolve his current position
into a UX position. A while later, they have an actual project on which he
could work as a UX designer. The only thing they ask is how fluent he is with
a specific image editing software.

~~~
ams6110
Heh... like qualifying a programmer by how fluent he is with Visual Studio.

------
jamesdelaneyie
Cool, so UX is just good old fashioned design.

------
eflowers
Hello, I wrote this article. I can check one thing off my bucket list - an
article of mine on the front page of HN (spot 28 as I write this).

Reading the stuff here in HN, I agree with almost everything said. My intent
wasn't to take a hard line tone, and in retrospect after getting tons and tons
of feedback, I'd write it differently, but I'll take this chance to clarify
some things, both for myself and for others.

It is not written in a snarky or superior voice. It wasn't a rant. If it
sounded so, I apologize. It also comes off as a list of "this is what a UX job
title should be", which also wasn't my intent. The simplest way to say what I
was trying to convey is that if you label yourself as anything "UX whatever",
it is perceived as "graphic artist for interfaces."

The article often seems to convey that UX "owns" all these different things,
like it's a panacea role above all others. It's not.

It's not something that I can clearly define. On the little 2-column lists,
the things on the left were supposed to be things that I/we "do" in the sense
of what often becomes the reality of the job, not in the sense of
responsibilities that should be granted to use to be accountable for. And if
that large list does become the reality of the job, it's more than anyone can
or should do. It was intended to be a "these are some of the things a UX
person might be responsible for." And yes there are some silly ones on there.

I don't think UX is in a position of being a land-grab of everything that
isn't writing code because "it's what we do", but it's more of a "this is what
we are often doing" list. And some of the things on it should be owned by
other discrete jobs careers. The motivation to write the article came from
being in role after role where that list on the left was the list of things I
was inadvertently responsible for, but "graphic designer for interfaces" is
all that is seen by others, which isn't fair to UX people who don't focus on
interface design, and isn't fair to interface designers who don't focus on the
UX work that isn't based on UI or visuals or interaction.

It's sort of just a response to the introductory conversation I have the first
few weeks at any job. "What is your role here?" "Well I'm the new UX guy."
"Great! Our stuff is ugly, you're gonna give it that sexy look and feel?"
"Yes, but I am going to be doing other things that sort of result in that look
and feel you want" And then when I list off some of those things, typically
the other person looks at me like I'm a lunatic and we both end up confused on
what I'm actually supposed to be doing, and the disappointment that I'm not
just there for look and feel.

But for sure, the article is not meant to be a land-grab or king of the hill
situation of "UX OWNS EVERYTHING", but just a glimpse into the terrible
ambiguity of what UX is and how the very common initial perception of "graphic
designer for interfaces" makes it even more unclear.

------
itsbits
well written article..

