Who Owns the User Experience?
There’s a tendency (at least among designers) to think that it’s designers who own the user experience. After all, designers are the ones who define it, right? This button goes there and it’s blue. But the more I think about it, the more I come to realize that ownership rests in those who provide the resources to get the product built, and in those who actually build the products: the developers and manufacturers. They are the true owners of the user experience.
I say this because their decisions, more than anyone else’s, can affect the overall experience of using a product. You could design the most amazing features in the world, but if they’re inside a cheap case being powered by unreliable code, the experience is not going to be good.
The best experiences, digital and analog, almost always start with reliability. A sporadic service or device, unless truly exceptional, novel, and/or rare, need to have some consistency of use. When I press a key, I want something to happen. When I go to a store during business hours, I expect it to be open. I have to trust that my expectations will be met. If they repeatedly aren’t, I will lose faith in the product and look elsewhere. Most things start in stability.
This reliability begins with enough resources (time, money, staff, equipment) to build and eventually maintain the product, and then to actually do so via development and manufacturing. While designers often have input into these processes and occasionally are those builders, more often than not, they depend on the expertise of others to accomplish what they have imagined. Designers may be the generators of the product vision, but they are not usually the owners. It’s designers’ job to convince the real product owners of the value of their vision so that the products of the future can be built.
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6 Comments
designers should take not only the business requirements into considerations but also the business abilities when designing an experience.
I worked for a company that hired ‘offshore’ programmers years before it was cool and the thing I learned is that for all their passion they couldn’t work within the constraints of user-experience. For instance, I think that user flows should start with all of the possible errors and work backwards, not walk through all the possible successes.
anyway, at the end of the relationship the user owns the experience. I for one hate APPLE products with a passion only equal to those who tattoo the logo into their skull. I think that Apple hides shit experience behind fantastic industrial design (physical and software) rather researching quantitative use, but at this point I am sure to be biased, like all users. No designer owns my bias.
Thanks for continuing to share your observations and insights Dan.
As you clearly describe, many factors and people have a significant impact on the design and eventual creation of a product.
More and more I view user experience design as a competency, and not as a person with a certain title or even a single department. User experience design is more of a team sport that requires leadership and responsibility, not ownership.
Working in a team with no dedicated designer at all it is quite clear that we developers have a huge amount of responsability in creating a good user experience. We need always to aim for delivering what the user expects to get. We try to keep work flows simple and easy to use. Luckily many of us are not only programmers but good UX designers aswell.
That said, having someone with time dedicated to keeping the overall user experience would be nice. As it is, our business peeps check so that everything works accordingly but that is simply not enough. Also, with the work load we have we don’t have time to think of all the improvements we can do to the current design and graphic design is simply not in our job description (to my dismay!).
Dan,
Isn’t it still the case that the designer needs to consider the user experience of the user in order to best choose which buttons the product should have, where they go, and how they get used? Doesn’t the designer want his or her design choices to reflect the interests of the end user?
I hope nobody takes from your article that there is no need for dedicated User Experience Designers/Interaction Designers in companies D
This is definitely NOT a call for no design involvement. Nor am I saying that designers shouldn’t be the ones responsible for defining the form and function of products. I’m also not saying don’t consider the needs of the user.
What I am saying is that ultimately, designers rely on those who make our designs and those who provide the resources to do so. It’s our job make them feel like what they are: the ultimate deliverers of the product to the users. Almost always, our work gets made thanks to them.
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