Two or three years ago, it seemed that while universities were churning out students who had taken classes in Needs and Usability Assessment, User Interface Design and Development, and Social and Organizational Issues of Information, industry was still denying the benefits of such expertise on their products. These roles were confined to corporate research labs, and only the bleeding edge companies (at the time) like Google and Yahoo. In the past few years, more companies seem open to the idea of having designers on their development teams, but still not being able to quantify their benefit in terms of Return on Investment (ROI) figures, they are trying to sandwich User Interface Design and User Experience Research between other roles.
UI/UX != Graphic Design
Graphic Designers are artists and extremely creative. They have amazing visual talent, and most likely honed their art through other mediums, then realized years later that the foray into technology meant more money. User Interface and User Experience designers should have a technical background complimented with expertise or familiarity in psychology, sociology and cognitive science. It’s not necessary they have a degree in computer science and a degree in psychology, but one or the other, with familiarity in each is necessary. In simplest terms, Graphic Designers make things look cool, UI/UX designers make things functional and usable for the user.
Looks Cool, But Doesn't Work
I use this analogy to highlight my point: My mom is an interior decorator. She makes homes look beautiful for our family and all of her customers. She has a good eye for patterns, fabrics, and colors, and is familiar with feng shui for organization. While my mom understands the purpose of the room, and can arrange it to succeed the goals of the room (for cooking, for leisure, for games), she’s not designing the fabric patterns, the tchotchkes, and the furniture herself. There are experts for each of these things. My mom is a UI/UX designer for homes, the pattern experts are graphic designers for the things she puts in the homes.
To employers and product managers out there – hire a UI/UX person to work with the users to understand the problem and design the product to solve that problem. This person (if they are good at what they do) will build you excellent activity diagrams, interactions diagrams, wireframes, and, if they are awesome, the beginnings of data and functional specifications. They will understand the difference between radio buttons, checkboxes, and drop-downs, and be able to give you a 360 degree view of the application in its design phase. In the wireframes, they reserve space for content, forms, and graphics. They won’t design the graphics themselves because there are trained professionals (i.e. Graphic Designers) for this, and you can hire them on freelance and save yourselves (and your company) lots of money. Besides, you will want to free-up your UI/UX person to move to the next project, or to work with the software developers through implementation.
UI/UX != UI Engineer
When Software Developers are Left to Design Error Messages
In absence of a real UI/UX designer, the role of UI Engineer is perpetually confusing for me. I have to say first that UI Engineers are no different than other software engineers. Just because they know how to write JavaScript, PHP, HTML and CSS does not mean that they are better suited than other software engineers for working with the users to design a better solution. That being said, for years experts in the industry have been saying that software developers should not be handling user feedback. When software developers are left to their own devices without user interface designers to give them guidance, we get open source projects. Firefox aside (because they had UI/UX people come help), how many open source consumer applications are used by more than a few percentage points of the population? I myself forayed into Ubuntu and Mepis, backed out 4 months later, and ended up buying a Mac. OpenOffice maybe has 11 mm active users in the US, which would be roughly 4% of the population.The operating system and applications were not intuitive or easy to use, and when they crashed, they crashed so hard that I had to use the terminal to get anywhere (but usually ended up no where).
Rarely is an excellent software developer (front or back end) particularly good at connecting with, interpreting, and responding to other people, let alone are able to translate what those people’s goals are to usable interfaces. These are all traits demanded by a good UI/UX designer. Furthermore, those of us that take a UI Engineer position expect to have more input into the UI design while still contributing some code to the application. Often what happens is that the UI Engineer is stuck with a crappy design from a Project or Product Manager not trained in UI/UX or Usability, and is expected to do much more development than they ever planned. The company and application/product suffers from not first understanding what skills they needed, and, second, finding the right talent for the job.
All in all, I think any company is lucky to find someone that is really truly good at both graphic design and UI/UX, or UI/UX and UI engineering. Otherwise, you’re compromising your product, and sitting in disillusion thinking that you can sandwich these roles into something tasty, good, edible and marketable (where the user is engaged, likes the features of the product, and wants to use it).
Related posts:
I’m not sure my graphic design colleagues would agree that they are “artists”. The ones I work with do research, work methodically and are exceptionally skilled at visual communication in print and on screens.
Their efforts help my wireframes, UIs and services function better and communicate more clearly.
This does not mean, however, that anywhichwhoever graphic designer can do the job well. A great deal of domain knowledge is required.
With regards to developers, it’s important to remember that they, too, enjoy using tools and interfaces that are learnable, effective, efficient and pleasurable.
In the last five years, I’ve seen more and more developers that are sensitized to user needs and interested in making usable and enjoyable services. Personally, I’d love to be able to research, design, code, test, refine, improve and release tools all on my own.
In his book “Designing Interactions”, Bill Moggridge talks about how, while interaction design as an area is here to stay, the idea that it is a completely different discipline is nearing its end. Think of Inquisitor, NewsFire, Tweetie and all the other great apps that are designed and coded by the same person.
Here’s Bill’s quote on the matter: http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3587.asp
With regard to titles and job roles, the market at large doesn’t know much about UX and IXD, but when usable services make more money and giants such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Twitter tout the importance of usability (etc), people will try to emulate them.
Dave Malouf has a great deck about why an interaction design education requires a different foundation than, say, graphic design or industrial design (which I studied, btw).
http://www.slideshare.net/dmalouf/interaction09-foundations-of-interaction-design?type=powerpoint
Have you joined the Interaction Design Association (IXDA)? Judging from your post above, I think you’ll find a great deal of interesting information in our archives and in the daily discussions.
http://www.ixda.org/discuss
Comment by Fredrik Matheson / @movito — October 12, 2009 @ 2:11 am
Hi Fredrik – I believe we agree that there is a separation between a UI/Interaction Designer’s role and a Graphic Designer’s role. Perhaps me calling them ‘artists’ sounds condescending; I do not intend to play down their role in the development of an attractive interface and product.
As for developers, I have many friends that are conscientious about their users, but in my own experience, the excitement to build things takes precedence over the design. I do have the luxury of being able to design and code my own projects, but I realize it’s very hard to be good at building scalable web applications and at designing world class user interfaces. At some point, my expertise ends, and I defer to someone else who is much more skilled at back end and application development. This is all being part of a team, emphasizing each others strengths and deferring to others on your weaknesses.
I also think we agree that the industry needs to evolve more. I think it’s unfortunate that Moggridge believes interaction design is coming to an end, because I don’t believe it ever came to fruition. That being said, everyone, not just people in software, will need to start coding, even if it’s just HTML and CSS.
Finally, the one point I’m not sure you are making, is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Twitter have good interaction design. I would fundamentally disagree. Facebook is the one most plagued with this confusion between UI/IX Designers and UI Engineer; to be part of their design team you have to be a tried and true developer, which I believe is hurting their application. See this set I’ve been creating on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/honeyroastd/sets/72157622136990700/
Thank you so much for all the pointers and for taking the time to leave valuable input on the conversation.
Comment by Lindsay — October 19, 2009 @ 8:57 am
I disagree with the statement that “It’s not necessary they have a degree in computer science and a degree in psychology, but one or the other, with familiarity in each is necessary.” There are many other backgrounds in the field… Librarians, Graphic designers-turned-UX, etc. I find that those with less ’science’ in their field of study tend to be more adept at design. Not to say there isn’t room for scientists, they seem to take on more of the testing and analyst. Not scientific, just a personal observation
Comment by Cindy — November 4, 2009 @ 7:55 am
When I encounter UI designers that don’t have any type of tech background (some familiarity with a coding language or how the application layer or databases function), I find that they choose designs that are impractical to implement and they miss out on key steps in the interaction that the developers have to fill in, and may fill in to the detriment of the overall user experience. They miss a drop-down option, an alert warning, or a step to collect a piece of required information altogether.
But note that I do say that the computer scientists should have a familiarity in psychology to be an effective UI designer, and that psychologists should have a familiarity in computer science. 100% of either alone will not produce a well-rounded UI/IX designer. (Please note, when I say “psychology” my generalization was intended to include fields in the social sciences, like cognitive science and sociology.)
Remember, user interface design is not just about the basics – grouping like information together, placing buttons where the user’s mouse will be, or highlighting the most important data. It’s also about understanding the users goals and practically mapping those goals to something software can realistically support.
Comment by Lindsay — November 4, 2009 @ 8:44 am
Lindsay,
Perhaps we’re blurring the distinction… I’ve been a User Experiece/Information Architect for over 10 years, so I’m well aware of the field. There has been much discussion on this topic over those years. We currently have a UI designer that does graphics and HTML/CSS. Our User Experience team does the interaction design and information architecture (as well as some other disciplines involved in the overall ‘experience’). I still disagree. A degree in CompSci or any psych discipline is not required at all. In fact, I find it preferable not to hire folks with that background to design. That said, it does help to have knowledge of how things work on the backend… BUT, I caution that you shouldn’t necessarily design for those constraints AT FIRST. Collaboration with devs can help alleviate those roadblocks anyway.
Comment by Cindy — November 4, 2009 @ 8:55 am
This is where you have lost me Cindy. I understand and respect that you have been in the industry for a long time, which gives you much more experience than I have. But, the degree/education/background I describe for people in this role is that of Human Computer Interaction, which is fundamentally the marriage of psychology and computer science. The curricula for this expertise is designed specifically for user experience, information architecture, usability and user interface design. If you won’t hire and work with people that have a degree specifically for this type of work, are you denying yourself benefit from the most capable and trained?
Could you explain why you wouldn’t hire someone with a compsci or psych background?
Comment by Lindsay — November 5, 2009 @ 4:23 pm