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UX's meaning (aside from sounding cool) is so unclear that people are writing articles since years, trying to explain it. It is a useful, buzzword-y term to sa

by dgb23 6y ago

UX's meaning (aside from sounding cool) is so unclear that people are writing articles since years, trying to explain it. It is a useful, buzzword-y term to say: "I care about how users interact with this". Or: "The UX in this part needs improvement". "UX Design" however is confusing especially when attached to a role. The output of a "UX Designer" is (at least eventually) a UI. So they are a UI Designer? Well no, it is all about the "experience"! My UX is pretty bad here because the software is buggy. Is the engineer who fixes the bug a UX Designer now? You often see the term UX alongside UI, like this: UI/UX. This is because the designer wants to emphasize what they care about, but they secretly know that the thing they design is the actual UI, not the "experience".

robertlagrant 6y ago
Yes indeed. Subsets of it are real, but it's also used as a lazy shortcut that hides reality.
weego 6y ago
My experience of UX almost everywhere is 'this label gives me jurisdiction to apply my personal biases to the redevelopment of this site'. Only one company I've been at had UX people who spent as much time talking with existing/possible future users to ground their ideas in genuine data as they did using and understanding the product.
- dgb23 6y ago
  And the "UX people" you describe were doing important work right? Maybe stuff like testing/QA, building domain knowledge, analyzing feedback, building trust with clients/users, writing specs, mockups, documentation, designing UI components etc. The thing that is useful here is this: the company you refer to understood that there needs to be people, who understand the whole process and talk to each other. The slightly annoying part is that we call them "UX people". The term doesn't acknowledge at all that they are doing important, challenging, specific things. And I get that this is about "experience" somehow, but everything is. We are so bad with terms in our industry.
  - notatoad 6y ago
    >the "UX people" you describe were doing important work right? Maybe stuff like testing/QA, building domain knowledge, analyzing feedback, building trust with clients/users, writing specs, mockups, documentation, designing UI components etc. I think the frustration with "UX people" is that they aren't necessarily doing any of those well-defined things that are all part of UX, but instead doing some nebulous stuff because nobody really knows what UX means. Calling some people on the team "UX people" carries the implication that everybody else on the team (testers, customer service, documentation, ui designers, backend devs, SREs) are somehow not working on UX. Everybody on a product team is a UX person, so for somebody to only be a UX person essentially means they have no role.
    - loopz 6y ago
      UX people would ideally be like a scrum master, ie. be the person facilitating UX in teams. They end up designing in a corner stuff that takes ages to be picked up in dev, while ignoring test.
logicallee 6y ago
>The output of a "UX Designer" is (at least eventually) a UI. Not only. For example if you add 2000 ms to 15000 ms of latency after each click then you might think it is still the same UI. In fact in a sense it is still the same UI. In my opinion by contrast (and contrary to your sentence) the UX designer's output can include the latency budget by which the page must be fully returned. This additional output is captured by a term such as UI/UX. A UI designer has no say about responsiveness (latency). A UX designer does.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  latency is still UI. It is the way it operates, you're confounding two things: 1) How does something operate 2) How does something visually look in 2D space They're both the same when we talk about UI including a bunch of other things - smell (stores?), haptics (button response), sound (beep when you autofocus on the camera), texture and a whole bunch more. There is no need for this bullshit term - UX. It is designer woo woo. "Experiential value" - oh you mean, the way user interfaces with the world? It is still an interface. User Interface. An interface to the user. What more do you need to define?
- ricardobeat 6y ago
  > A UI designer has no say about responsiveness (latency). A UX designer does That is definitely not true. UI design encompasses usability, including interactivity, feedback, animations, etc. Otherwise it's just graphic design. I think the term UX was defined to go way beyond those concerns, and into areas from marketing, branding, copywriting, all the way to what the actual product is, how it is offered, even pricing. Some simple examples: timing and content of emails, purchasing options and how they are displayed, how multiple platforms (mobile, desktop, snailmail, phone) are tied together, content strategy. You can see that aspiration reflected in the designer responses in the beginning of the article: they are the ones mentioning the business side, and not the managers.
  - logicallee 6y ago
    >I think the term UX was defined to go way beyond those concerns, and into areas from marketing, branding, copywriting, all the way to what the actual product is, how it is offered, even pricing. Interesting! I'm totally on board with this set of concerns - but can you find any reference for your statement? (Anybody on the web who gave a definition of UX similar to yours?)
ivan_gammel 6y ago
There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what UX really is, but it’s quite easy to give a good definition: it’s a data-driven approach to UI design, which is based on studies of user psychology and diversity and using those studies to align UI with the business needs (which may not coincide with user needs, hence „dark UX patterns“). UX is never about personal perception or preference of designers and developers, there‘s no place for likes and dislikes. The „UI/UX“ in the job title is a non-sensical recruiting bullshit, usually describing a visual designer without any real UX knowledge.
- gregmac 6y ago
  While I agree about not being personal, I don't agree that it has to be data-driven in the formal way you seem to be implying. Its also quite possible to build horrendous UX (even it it's supposed to be a dark pattern) while being data-driven, just like it's possible to build garbage software despite having thousands of unit tests with 100% coverage. I think it really comes down to: can your users effectively use the software. To me, having to refer to documentation, go through training, or just "get used to it" are all indicators of poor UX. At the same time, in some cases those are acceptable requirements because, for example, you're building medical UIs that only highly-trained medical professionals are going to use. (I'd still argue you should make it better: a pro won't care that a tooltip defines an acronym, or a warning appears if you set possibly incompatible parameters, etc) What constitutes "good" UX is always going to be somewhat subjective. There's some software that's got a truly awful interface (ever look at ERP stuff?) but whose users spend most of their day using it and are massively effective because they've memorized shortcuts and all the quirks. It has good UX for existing users, awful UX for new users - so how does that get classified?
  - ivan_gammel 6y ago
    Data-driven means proven efficiency for target audience in the long run, so it’s good by design. This may still create bad UX for people outside the target group (e.g. by creating a steep learning curve because of the trade-off between discoverability and performance), but things outside the scope of design do not really matter and do not have to be classified. Inclusiveness does not matter in technical and design topics if it has no business value.
zepolen 6y ago
No it's really quite simple. Annoying = Bad UX. What does a USER experience when interacting with your product/company. So yes, everything is a part of UX. The UI, the software, hell even customer support.
nitrogen 6y ago
It doesn't help that people keep broadening the definition of terms to be basically all-encompassing. I wanted to write a comment about industrial interface design as an example of a concrete and useful discipline, but I can't find any useful information now. It's hard now to find information on human-machine interfacing vs. computer user interfaces, but as I recall those were once separate disciplines. A quick search for HMI had an article about social distancing of all things.
kyle-rb 6y ago
> It is a useful, buzzword-y term to say: "I care about how users interact with this". Or: "The UX in this part needs improvement". This. I like the term "UX bug" a lot, ex. >We have a lot of support issues with doing X. "Hmm, that's not a bug; users are just doing X wrong." >Ok, then maybe it's a UX bug.

by dgb23 6y ago

robertlagrant 6y ago

Yes indeed. Subsets of it are real, but it's also used as a lazy shortcut that hides reality.

weego 6y ago

My experience of UX almost everywhere is 'this label gives me jurisdiction to apply my personal biases to the redevelopment of this site'. Only one company I've been at had UX people who spent as much time talking with existing/possible future users to ground their ideas in genuine data as they did using and understanding the product.

dgb23 6y ago
And the "UX people" you describe were doing important work right? Maybe stuff like testing/QA, building domain knowledge, analyzing feedback, building trust with clients/users, writing specs, mockups, documentation, designing UI components etc. The thing that is useful here is this: the company you refer to understood that there needs to be people, who understand the whole process and talk to each other. The slightly annoying part is that we call them "UX people". The term doesn't acknowledge at all that they are doing important, challenging, specific things. And I get that this is about "experience" somehow, but everything is. We are so bad with terms in our industry.
- notatoad 6y ago
  >the "UX people" you describe were doing important work right? Maybe stuff like testing/QA, building domain knowledge, analyzing feedback, building trust with clients/users, writing specs, mockups, documentation, designing UI components etc. I think the frustration with "UX people" is that they aren't necessarily doing any of those well-defined things that are all part of UX, but instead doing some nebulous stuff because nobody really knows what UX means. Calling some people on the team "UX people" carries the implication that everybody else on the team (testers, customer service, documentation, ui designers, backend devs, SREs) are somehow not working on UX. Everybody on a product team is a UX person, so for somebody to only be a UX person essentially means they have no role.
  - loopz 6y ago
    UX people would ideally be like a scrum master, ie. be the person facilitating UX in teams. They end up designing in a corner stuff that takes ages to be picked up in dev, while ignoring test.

logicallee 6y ago

>The output of a "UX Designer" is (at least eventually) a UI. Not only. For example if you add 2000 ms to 15000 ms of latency after each click then you might think it is still the same UI. In fact in a sense it is still the same UI. In my opinion by contrast (and contrary to your sentence) the UX designer's output can include the latency budget by which the page must be fully returned. This additional output is captured by a term such as UI/UX. A UI designer has no say about responsiveness (latency). A UX designer does.

systemvoltage 6y ago
latency is still UI. It is the way it operates, you're confounding two things: 1) How does something operate 2) How does something visually look in 2D space They're both the same when we talk about UI including a bunch of other things - smell (stores?), haptics (button response), sound (beep when you autofocus on the camera), texture and a whole bunch more. There is no need for this bullshit term - UX. It is designer woo woo. "Experiential value" - oh you mean, the way user interfaces with the world? It is still an interface. User Interface. An interface to the user. What more do you need to define?
ricardobeat 6y ago
> A UI designer has no say about responsiveness (latency). A UX designer does That is definitely not true. UI design encompasses usability, including interactivity, feedback, animations, etc. Otherwise it's just graphic design. I think the term UX was defined to go way beyond those concerns, and into areas from marketing, branding, copywriting, all the way to what the actual product is, how it is offered, even pricing. Some simple examples: timing and content of emails, purchasing options and how they are displayed, how multiple platforms (mobile, desktop, snailmail, phone) are tied together, content strategy. You can see that aspiration reflected in the designer responses in the beginning of the article: they are the ones mentioning the business side, and not the managers.
- logicallee 6y ago
  >I think the term UX was defined to go way beyond those concerns, and into areas from marketing, branding, copywriting, all the way to what the actual product is, how it is offered, even pricing. Interesting! I'm totally on board with this set of concerns - but can you find any reference for your statement? (Anybody on the web who gave a definition of UX similar to yours?)

ivan_gammel 6y ago

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what UX really is, but it’s quite easy to give a good definition: it’s a data-driven approach to UI design, which is based on studies of user psychology and diversity and using those studies to align UI with the business needs (which may not coincide with user needs, hence „dark UX patterns“). UX is never about personal perception or preference of designers and developers, there‘s no place for likes and dislikes. The „UI/UX“ in the job title is a non-sensical recruiting bullshit, usually describing a visual designer without any real UX knowledge.

gregmac 6y ago
While I agree about not being personal, I don't agree that it has to be data-driven in the formal way you seem to be implying. Its also quite possible to build horrendous UX (even it it's supposed to be a dark pattern) while being data-driven, just like it's possible to build garbage software despite having thousands of unit tests with 100% coverage. I think it really comes down to: can your users effectively use the software. To me, having to refer to documentation, go through training, or just "get used to it" are all indicators of poor UX. At the same time, in some cases those are acceptable requirements because, for example, you're building medical UIs that only highly-trained medical professionals are going to use. (I'd still argue you should make it better: a pro won't care that a tooltip defines an acronym, or a warning appears if you set possibly incompatible parameters, etc) What constitutes "good" UX is always going to be somewhat subjective. There's some software that's got a truly awful interface (ever look at ERP stuff?) but whose users spend most of their day using it and are massively effective because they've memorized shortcuts and all the quirks. It has good UX for existing users, awful UX for new users - so how does that get classified?
- ivan_gammel 6y ago
  Data-driven means proven efficiency for target audience in the long run, so it’s good by design. This may still create bad UX for people outside the target group (e.g. by creating a steep learning curve because of the trade-off between discoverability and performance), but things outside the scope of design do not really matter and do not have to be classified. Inclusiveness does not matter in technical and design topics if it has no business value.

zepolen 6y ago

No it's really quite simple. Annoying = Bad UX. What does a USER experience when interacting with your product/company. So yes, everything is a part of UX. The UI, the software, hell even customer support.

nitrogen 6y ago

It doesn't help that people keep broadening the definition of terms to be basically all-encompassing. I wanted to write a comment about industrial interface design as an example of a concrete and useful discipline, but I can't find any useful information now. It's hard now to find information on human-machine interfacing vs. computer user interfaces, but as I recall those were once separate disciplines. A quick search for HMI had an article about social distancing of all things.

kyle-rb 6y ago

> It is a useful, buzzword-y term to say: "I care about how users interact with this". Or: "The UX in this part needs improvement". This. I like the term "UX bug" a lot, ex. >We have a lot of support issues with doing X. "Hmm, that's not a bug; users are just doing X wrong." >Ok, then maybe it's a UX bug.