We Do Product-Experience, not UX/UI
User Experience
- User experience is an outcome that everyone is responsible for, not just UX teams
- Having a dedicated UX department can inadvertently limit ownership of user experience to designers and researchers
- This structure allows other functions to abdicate responsibility for user experience
- Multiple functions impact user experience significantly:
- Business decisions affect value exchange
- Pricing influences adoption comfort
- Product management determines feature timing and readiness
- Engineering impacts through performance and bugs
- Marketing shapes expectations and understanding
Organizational Design Insights
- I refer to our team at Brio, as “Product Experience Strategy”, rather than “design,” “design & research,” or “product design”
- Design is a distinct contributor to user experience outcomes
- Design can achieve multiple outcomes beyond UX, including employee experiences
- Service design is gaining increased attention in the field
Evolution of UX Field
- Active conversation about rebranding as “experience designers”
- Field is recognizing expanding scope beyond traditional UX boundaries
- Growing awareness of limitations self-imposed by current terminology
- My Recent presentation “Experience is the Product” argues:
- Minimal functional difference between UX and product management
- Product management may have greatest impact on user experience through shipping decisions
- Traditional role distinctions can work against delivering better user experiences
Last note
From a functional standpoint, there’s almost no difference between user experience and product management. If you want to point to a single role that has the most impact on user experience, it’s actually not design. It’s product management because of the decisions they’re making about what to ship and when it’s ready.
