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Should UX Design be a separate field?

over 5 years ago from Benjamin Valmont, Designer

  • Timothy Hykes, over 5 years ago

    I disagree. If you design something and have 30 people test it and they all experience the same thing good or bad you've designed the experience. Looking at the trends in the research from your testings you can see the experience you are designing, and you can shape that into a positive or negative experience based on what you've designed. The issue with UX Design is ... we haven't set the foundation on what UX Design is and what a UX Designer does. We have left this up to each company and their HR Department.

    5 points
    • Omer BalyaliOmer Balyali, over 5 years ago

      The answers are as good as the questions. You test for specific cases, which you think will be the use case, but this is not how things works in real life.

      You can design a Fruit Knife and you can test it with most fruits, but somebody will hijack a plane with it, test this instead if you can really design & test the experience. That's why I already said... you can "design for the experience". It's like a wish. You wish nothing will go bad, but instead of just wishing; you develop it further and this is what DESIGN is. But even if you try your best, unexpected use cases will happen and you can not design these experiences. But you can design the knife, so whomever use it will have mostly a good experience, but you can not guarantee this.

      Also research about how Behavioral Psychological Tests are approached. When you're doing a psychological test, you mostly deem the person as a black-box, and look for the outputs this particular persons gives under specific inputs. This is exactly the basis of Usability and/or Ergonomy Tests. Think about A/B Testing... If you can really design the experience, you would focus on the experience, not on the input. But the output happens as a result of the input and if the output is without errors, you think that this is a good experience. But you only change the inputs and look for the differences between the outputs.

      You give a monkey a rotten banana, he doesn't like it. => Bad Experience You give a monkey a fresh banana, he likes it. => Good Experience

      As a designer, we are like farmers trying to grow the best bananas, so the monkeys will be happy USING OUR BANANAS may he eat or may he stick it to somewhere depends on the monkey, not the banana. BUT the banana has the affordance of to be stickable, as the knife has the affordance of ability to cut.

      9 points
      • Timothy Hykes, over 5 years ago

        This is an excellent discussion, and I thank you for sharing. I see your point but... if you took a knife and put it in from of 30 users and asked them what this object is and they say it's a cutter, and you ask them what do you think it's used for, and they say to hijack a plane. As a UX Designer, I will take the knife change the name to the cutter and design it to work best on a plane. As a UX designer, the process is never over. There will always be a new use case. When these use cases arrive you design for them to make them better experiences. That's why I say we design the experience. We may not be the first one to see the use case, but when it's presented to us, we shape it for the user.

        3 points
        • Omer BalyaliOmer Balyali, over 5 years ago

          Yes! Definetely the point where I'm trying to explain. As you said, if the experience is not good, we change the design of the knife, or how it's branded... so at the end the user won't have much confusion using it. So we design the product better, as a result we hope for a better experience for the user.

          My point is that designers for decades already been caring about these things. Every designer is responsible to research about the user/customer/people, use cases, edge cases and design accordingly, and to improve it with feedback from users, or from the extracts of the research. But still... you aim for a good experience, so you design a better product/service/solution.

          If you want to label the designers who research about their users and use insights from research to develop a better product: then you have to label all designers, regardless of the discipline as UX Designer, which is kinda pointless because the label Designer already fulfills this need. Most important problem with the title UX Designer is that this approach excludes other designers who is aiming at a good User Experience, like they don't care. That's why there are many articles which discusses UI vs UX, as if User-Interface Designers only care about romantic visual values in designing the interfaces, not focusing on the UX. This is simply wrong. If you say you're User-Interface Designer, that means you design for a better UX, but if you don't care about UX... then you're not a User-Interface Designer, not even a Designer.

          We always have the problem of explaining what is Design. Instead of explaining it clearly, we're making it more vague, because people now think that you must be labeled as UX Designer, otherwise you don't care about the people you're designing for.

          As another commenter noted, companies and employees love this title because it helps them to get more money from clients & companies.

          So you are a designer? Meh. Why did you choose to be a designer, while you could be a UX Designer? You loser...

          8 points
    • Rey AlejandroRey Alejandro, over 5 years ago

      I think the comment is saying that fashion designer, architects are all trying to influence the experiences of their products but they are not called UX Designer, If they test and do research, they will still not be called UX designer. I just think the title is vague, Product designer, Web designer, Software designer, App Designer is more semantic and clear.

      1 point