The Top 5 Blockers to Building a Robust UX Culture: Part 5
This post is part 5 of a 6-part series on Blockers to Building a Robust UX Culture.
This post is part 5 of a 6-part series on Blockers to Building a Robust UX Culture.
You can find part 1 here.
You can find part 2 here.
You can find part 3 here.
You can find part 4 here.
The Top 5 Blockers to Building a Robust UX Culture
- Placing UX culture in traditional organizational hierarchies.
- Keeping UX separate from Agile transformation.
- Allowing silos between UX and Engineering to form and become embedded.
- Hiring the Wrong People.
- Not integrating UX with a strong Product IT Culture.
Hiring the Wrong People
In the above video, Don Norman describes the use and abuse of the term UX, which has traveled far away from its origins as a practice. As Apple’s market’s dominance accelerated, the idea of “user experience” began growing. Don Norman’s seminal text, The Design of Everyday Things, sparked a growing interest in the concept. In 2018, McKinsey helped this acceleration with their widely cited “The Business Value of Design.” But as Norman notes, it’s gone off the rails as the field is beset with people who literally “do not know what they are doing.”
The name “UX” and its emergence through Norman can be misleading because Norman’s practice originates in many older practices. For example, there is something called the anthropology of technology, reified by the anthropologist Pierre Lemonnier and his seminal text, Elements for an Anthropology of Technology (1992). Lemonnier and his disciples looked at the anthropology of techne throughout human history at all stages of technical advance. Still, others like Marcia-Anne Dobres and Susan Leigh-Star worked to understand the social and cultural systems in which digital products are embedded, arguing that developers who fail to embrace this would fail.
There is also a field called “Human Factors,” which emerged in the late 40s and took root in industrial design in the 50s. Defined as the concerns of humans as it impacts the design of complex systems, Human Factors frequently did work similarly to what Norman called UX during his time at Apple. As far as my career, I was working between engineers, creative services, and the business and it was sometimes called “New Media” enterprises or Human Factors, equally. Sometimes, I wasn’t called anything in particular other than a media or IT consultant who understood both creatives and engineers.
As the graphical internet began to take hold in business and we moved everything — newsletters, VHS talking head videos, industrial films, employee handbooks — from analog to digital, the importance of using sound visual design principles in the design of these materials also became important. At this point, the term UX starts to become very muddy. Suddenly people were taking the term “graphic design” and changing the name to “UX.” Realizing their field was shrinking, print designers began calling themselves UX designers. As Norman notes in the video, anyone who designed a web page or the visual design of an interface started referring to what they were doing as UX. Business leaders who knew the importance of the buzzword but were hazy on the principles accepted this.
The result is that training in the field is very uneven. In my time consulting, I have seen entire marketing departments be suddenly rebranded as UX teams with “UX Managers,” simply adopting market research approaches and calling it UX. I’ve also seen print design trained UX leaders ignore mobile development because they are only used to designing for large screens, as well as managers who are hired for their agreeability rather than any actual knowledge of UX.
This dominance of visual design and UI design has been remediated in part by the renaissance of “UX Research” as a separate specialty when it is more accurate to the original spirit of simply “UX.” More and more, “UX Research” is championed by people with advanced degrees in the humanities and social sciences. But the field is embattled as it struggles to find its place — -is it a handmaid to UX Designers (who are most frequently, in reality, UI designers)? Who does the research team report into? How is it supposed to fit into Agile software development? Should it be centralized or distributed? Should we “democratize” UX research? What does that look like?
Mindset Shift:
Know the difference between UI design and UX. To gain the full impact that design had at places like Apple and Proctor & Gamble in the 90s and early oughts, imagine a UX design program at your org that embraces the whole experience and the service your brand provides. Understand that all digital tools and physical products exist within a social and cultural context you ignore at your peril. If your UX team exclusively focuses on an app, a website, and interfaces, if there are no service blueprints, journey maps, and personas, if your design leaders are not working closely with engineers to architect complete experiences… you’ve hired the wrong people.
