Why are you still trying to define UX?

Tell me what you do for a living?

Me? I’m a UX Consultant and when people ask me what I do I usually answer “Have you ever used an app or a website or just a system of some kind and wondered ‘What do I do now?’ The answer invariably being “yes”, I reply “Well it’s my job to ensure you never have to ask that question.” Snappy yes, handy for social get-togethers, but if the next question is a simple “How do you do that?” that’s a good two hours of both our lives taken care of while I watch their eyes slowly glaze over.

You see although I’ve been doing this for many years even I struggle to simply define what it is I actually do. I’m not alone either, you don’t have to look far online before you see some forum or some personal update on LinkedIn or a Tweet request trying to define what UX is; trying to find a nice tidy pigeonhole to fit it in, hoping for a throwaway phrase that can easily fit into a 140 character sentence on a CV or in a wiki somewhere.

As much as that might be desirable, to some people, the problem is that it simply isn’t that easy. For a discipline that prides itself on finding simple solutions it's an oddity, why is that?

UX deals with people, with real human beings ,and we’re a messy, contrary, often bloody-minded and obstinate species and any process that caters for that is also going to be just as messy and ill-defined. It’s also true that UX is often seen as being something that exists just in the digital world and while it’s very true that IT in particular is the largest focus for UX it isn’t the whole story. UX is also part of industrial design, of service design, of brand interaction of . . . in fact the real world.

You see what I mean? It’s messy and trying to find a simple way to encompass all that is just nightmarish. Unless you can describe every aspect of what the word 'experience' means and every aspect of the 'human condition' in a few simple phrases . . . you’re not going to find an easy definition of UX.

So you know what? I’ve given up trying. Instead I’m going to try and describe what it isn't, so now I'll take a look at some of the descriptions that often pass for UX definitions that I’ve encountered over the years and highlight where I personally find them flawed.

Let’s start with the most familiar definition.

UX is just UI
You and I can no longer be friends; leave now and I promise not to hurt you. This one still gets trotted out with an alarming frequency and is just wrong in almost every aspect. UI is concerned with the dashboard the driver uses, while UX concerns itself with the drive and driver’s needs, part of which includes the dashboard. UI is indeed part of UX but it is only a small part of it.

UX is the creation of page elements that UI designers can then place aesthetically on the page
Check the last answer then pack your bags and leave now. I still hear this one occasionally from PMs and some BAs (you know who you are). The thing is UI is incredibly important, setting that engagement level – especially in something like games or even just simple Interaction – is essential to good UX and there are specialists in it that discipline that deserve far more respect than they are given but it is a different discipline to UX. If it looks a Ferrari and you expect a Ferrari and it then drives like a Clown Car . . . it isn’t a great experience. It works the other way around too, if you have a system that soars like an eagle but looks like a turkey, you’re going to lose a lot of users before they’ve even started.

UX is Common Sense
No, no it really isn’t – so many will argue with me here - my life would be so much easier if this was true. If that was the case we would have no need for User Research, we could just use common sense to build a UI or Service. People, as I pointed out in the introduction, are often contrary and erratic – check the news headlines if you don’t believe me - even if the end user comes from same ethnographic culture or grouping as you and I, they will have different experiences to us, which lead them to decisions we wouldn’t make and have behaviour we couldn’t and shouldn’t guess at. UX, maybe, could be described as the tailoring of a design to a shared experience and need but that doesn’t make it common and isn’t exactly satisfying as a definition, is it?

UX is the maintaining of consistency
Yeah, not so much. A system can be consistently bad, it doesn’t make it a good place to base your design on. Okay that’s flippant, consistency of good practice is a good thing but occasionally a change to an existing design patterns is required. Sometime they just don’t fit the users’ needs and you have to break consistency to meet that need. This might be just a tweak, a derivation on the existing pattern or it might be a completely new interaction or layout pattern. The thing is that the users needs aren’t going to change to fit the consistency of a system - the system needs to change to meet the users’ needs, even if that makes it inconsistent.

UX is about how humans interact with the digital world
No, sorry but thanks for playing. Actually that’s harsh and you could be forgiven for thinking that, especially given how much UX sits within IT when most people encounter it for the first time. If your business need is just an app or a website or desktop program then of course you’ll expect a UX to be focussed on that need. The problem is – I know I’m sounding like a broken recording - you’re dealing with humans not just some abstract concept of ‘user’ and humans, last time I checked - and I admit it’s been a while - people don’t have a button on them that switches between digital and analogue. The real world influences people and most UX are familiar with the idea of ‘Real World Mental Models’ or ‘Analogous Life Behaviour’ (or whatever the buzzword is this week) that leads us to try and mirror online with offline terms and patterns – the term ‘Home’ being the obvious example - but real UX stretches well outside of digital, it is how humans ‘experience’ your services, your brand, your products, your marketing, your staff, in fact your entire organisation and everything about it they encounter.

UX is Development with Design
No, that’s old thinking that’s the way systems used to be designed – and to be fair it worked for a long time – but Dev and Design are too often driven just by Profit or Marketing requirements and the end users’ requirements aren’t part of that equation. I’ve touched on design earlier so let me just say that UX, on the whole, doesn’t care about code. Oh it cares if the code works, it cares if it behaves the way it is supposed to do but only in as much as the user isn’t inconvenienced by it. UX isn’t Dev. I’ve met extraordinary developers, people who can actually talk in C#, HTML and .NET and spot a buggy line of code amongst 5000 lines of good code by just glancing at the screen. Impressive as all that is – and it is bloody impressive when you see it done - it means nothing to the end user. There are some really good UX who can cut code, it is one of the industries that a lot of UX leave to become UX, but the emphasis there isn’t on the word ‘code’ it’s on the word ‘leave’ in that that the developer has chosen to leave coding to do UX. Coding isn’t UX any more than UX is coding.

UX is Converting Business Requirements into User Requirements.
Nope, that might be the job of an Agile BA - if you push the idea of creating User Stories to its widest possible definition - but not a UX. The truth is that User Requirements are often directly the exact opposite of Business Requirements, that's because a lot of businesses don't realise that User Requirements are Business Requirements. Ignore your customers needs and they'll go to a competitor that doesn't. Users, humans, are pretty flexible and despite received wisdom are usually tenacious in trying to make something work but if you send your user to some place on a website they don't want to go, because the business wants to 'cross-sell', or flood them with pop-ups and adverts, because the business wants 'extra revenue from third parties', deluge the users with content that the business wants to 'put out there', or try to sell the user something new before they finished buying what they want to buy . . . your Business Requirements will have just alienated a huge amount of your users and no amount of documenting those decisions as User Requirements is going to change that.

UX is the modern name for Customer Care
Customer Care is good, don’t get me wrong I’m all in favour of caring for your customers, but Customer Care is a service, a service that can and should be shaped by UX. Customer Care is not only visible it trumpets itself, it should do, it has to, ‘Over here to find Customer Care,’ says the store’s signs, ‘click here for the Help Section’ says the website, 'contact our Helpdesk’ says the brochure. Unlike Customer Care UX is invisible, it’s like special effects in a movie; if it’s done correctly no one knows it’s been done at all. The user just knows they’ve done what they wanted and possibly enjoyed doing it.

UX is wireframing a system so it can be tested and presented before Design and Dev
Partially true this one. Wireframes are generally part of the UX Design process, yes, but they’re a tiny part. The testing too is truly important, but a wireframe’s importance often doesn’t lie within it being a test subject or even in the image itself but within the annotations that explain the UX rationale as shaped by the user motivation and anticipation. The research, the design refinement, the patterns of interaction, engagement, UI and behaviour, how they form and fit into the user journey and answer the user story . . . that’s where the real UX lies.

Finally

So where does that leave us, leave me, when I'm asked what it is I do for a living? How do I define UX? The answer is I don't, not any more. I just answer, "I work with computers." that seems to satisfy just about everyone but me, but hey at least I don't have to watch eyes glaze over any more.

Here’s a final disclaimer.
This is a personal view from the trenches, not an academic treatise, not a dictate that you should follow else know my displeasure, just my own findings from my own experience. So I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, (like most UX I actually do want people to disagree with me so I can defend my choices or accept the data and logic behind a counter argument and refine my design accordingly (‘Design like you’re right, test like you’re wrong’ is a truism I find has served me well)). I do hope at least to give those people still trying to define this infuriating, often counter-intuitive, bewildering, completely rewarding discipline something to think about.