My take on the journey of UX
By: Chris Risdon
Tags: Product Design, UX, UX Design, User Experience Design, User Experience

I wrote this in about an hour, re-read it twice to make obvious edits, then spent about 30 minutes making pull quotes, adding links to just break up the monotony. It is admittedly a stream of conscious thread, though of things that were obviously in my brain. So it’s reductionist and full of generalizations, and probably spelling errors—but it’s my hot take on the influences and seismic shifts that have affected UX over the last 20 years...

In reading Jesse James Garrett’s Fast Company article on the disillusionment in the state of UX design, I couldn’t help think about how much debate it would provoke. There’s a lot that was spot on, but also a lot that wasn’t covered—which I’d presume is more about focus and constraints in article length more than any blindspots.

I didn’t think I had anything I could add in social media commentary after reading the article—I intended to sit back with my popcorn and watch the debate unfold. But then a friend and colleague asked me what I thought of the article. I proceeded to give him a couple hundred words in response. I realized I had thoughts on the matter, mostly expansion on what forces have influenced and shaped the field of user experience design. It is my take from what I’ve observed and experienced in 20+ years of web producing, product manager-ing, information architecture-ing, graphic designing, UX designing, interaction designing, service designing, individual contributing, design leadership-ing, in all it’s IMHO FWIW value.

The influence of agile

First, I couldn’t be in more agreement on the affect of Agile software development on human-centered design practices, and user experience design specifically. The need for Agile to create more efficiencies in software development has had more of a Taylorism effect than the intention of the Agile manifesto. Before engineers take affront, I don’t believe individual engineers are the cause, but the Silicon Valley-esque product structure (patriarchy?) that has demanded speed, scale, and efficiency, which has then increased the pressure to focus on velocity, points, burn rate, and tools and ceremonies over the interactions, customer communication, and responding to change.

When I’ve been in design leadership positions and have had influence over how the design team operates, I’ve adopted a dual track agile framing of the design work. Also referred to as continuous discovery, I’ve preferred the “dual track agile” framing specifically to give the appearance that design discovery is compatible with the prevailing agile structure. When in reality, it allows me to decouple design discovery (the exploratory nature of UX as Jesse describes it) from the actual agile stream, where the discovery track has no elements of agile except for making loose commitments for what will be done in a given two week sprint.

The bottom line is that trying to extend agile upstream to design creates an assembly line commoditization of design practices.

The influence of product

But there’s more than just Agile. That product power structure is a big influence. The same product power structure that made Agile into Taylorism has also made UX design into product design. (more specifically on that in a moment)

UX was a reaction to product management not asking the right questions to generate the best product outcomes

As Peter Merholz (Along with Jesse, another Adaptive Path founder) has put it, “the entire field of user experience exists because of inefficient product management.” (6:58 mark) I take this as UX was a reaction to product management not asking the right questions to generate the best product outcomes. And as a former product manager, I wholly agree with it, from a historical standpoint. One issue with UX (I see in hindsight) is that it didn’t successfully include product management directly. Maybe UX should never have appended “design” onto its practice label? (though, as someone who had a “maker” itch, “design” certainly played a part in attracting me personally)

I believe this happened due to the consultative nature of UX in the early days, its best practices and field leadership, back 10+ years ago, deriving from design consultancies—teams of designers. So it wasn’t in the optimal position to influence in-house product management (and UX design) practices.

UX wants to measure twice to cut once. Lean (product) and Agile (development) want—at least the product executives want from it—to ship product fast and efficiently (among many reasons, to secure market share and user growth before competitors do).

The influence of UX’s many sub-disciplines

UX was born of the web. Jesse’s model for the planes of UX highlighted the difference between web (hyperlink structures) and client software, by segmenting IA for web against IxD for software. This wasn’t wrong at the time, and he eventually erased that distinction into a single “structure” plane as web increasingly accommodated the fine-grain interactions of client software.

But UX, early on, pre-mobile, was predominantly about websites. I did some work on client software as a UX designer, so again, I can tell you it’s a generalization, not exclusive. But, by and large, it was the case.

A UX skillset incorporated the principles and best practices of other disciplines. While lots of T-models and broken comb models tried to make sense of a half-dozen or more skill sets—the implication was that you needed a diverse range of skills represented across multiple designers, who each went most deep on a couple of the skills while others went deep on other, complimentary skills. No one should’ve been expected to incorporate all the skills fully—these are whole fields of practice in themselves.

it became the in-house norm to have one designer per team/project

UX skillsets were most predominately defined early on (again, generalization) by information architecture and usability or human factors, with interaction design coming up as websites became more dynamic, or when UX was applied to client software. (and all those fields valuing—in theory—a human-centered approach of user/customer inquiry/research) Sure there had to be interest and influence from many other fields, but these were the skill sets that most defined a user experience designer.

And whether it was a matrix/agency model (centralized designers assigned to projects owned by a product manager who needed design support for a particular [defined] project), or an embedded model where product, design, and engineering are on a team together, it became the in-house norm to have one designer per team/project. Again, the vanguard of UX (Adaptive Path, Cooper, Frog, among others) were found in consultancies, showing how it’s done with 2–4 designers working on a problem, specifically hired to inquire, research, and reframe. These designer-teams having a range of complimentary skill sets, sometimes explicitly codified with unique titles like communicator and synthesizer. But showing best practices through multi-designer collaboration.

In-house gap (consultancy vs in-house reality)

This represents what I’ve called the “in-house gap”—where in house designers operated differently from design consultancy teams. Design consultancies were the thought leaders on how to implement UX design, while in-house designers were confronted with being the one designer on the team that must do research, IA, usability, and interaction design. And they were the measure twice to cut once people while their lean product managers and agile software developers were about speed and breaking glass. I

The influence of visual design

And further more, one practice was absent in UX: visual design. As I said, UX most closely was born from information architecture. Information architects developed the underlying structure, navigation, and flow of a website, while a visual designer/web designer created the visual layer over that underlying structure.

For some reason, the UX design practice was happy to distill and incorporate the principles and theory of many practices that are whole fields in themselves—ethnography, IA, IxD, usability—except. visual. design.

Of course there are many reasons why UX designers were allergic to the thought of doing visual design. With those IA roots, it seemed like a logical separation (structure from aesthetic)—they were even separate layers on Jesse’s UX model. Many from the OG generation were more social scientists, or conceptual architects, and visual design (née graphic design) was a “creative” discipline.

Also, understandably and truthfully, among all the fields mentioned above, visual design had the least human-centricity baked to it. It was all auteur theory—designer as insightful genius. It wasn’t grounded in the inquiry of human needs and all the dirty problem reframing and questioning that ethnography, IA, IxD, human factors, et al incorporated.

I, personally, can tell you that visual design is as easy/hard to absorb into greater UX as IA or IxD. They each have foundational principles that can be distilled in a list of a dozen or less and learned at a basic level in application over a few projects. (for better or worse) And visual design at that level is as “creative” as designing a subway map for maximum clarity. Absorbing CRAP (contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity) is just as easy or hard to grok as feedback loops and affordances, or taxonomies, ontologies, and concept models.