User experience is the most misunderstood job in our timeline
Ugly truth behind User Experience and those who call themselves as UXiers
UX boom is already here and the IT offshore industry will have to train at least 500,000 UX professionals within next 3–4 years to design suck-less products.
If you know UX well enough, you know that technically the term designing UX, i.e. UXD, is wrong. It is wrong because we cannot design the user or the experience. Instead, we design the product, its features, and its delivery. There is a science behind this UX but majority of business analysts, designers, engineers in the IT/BPO industry — as corporations, professionals, individuals — have confused UX as a title with Web Design and Graphic Design.
For some reason, the passion for UX still remains with UI designers and that’s a plus but sadly, companies recruit UX professionals only to get the UI design done. Apparently the recruitment process and the selection criteria are not that different compared to when hiring graphic designers. It is not a surprise though since majority are either from web development background with an engineering degree or from graphic designing background with a design degree. Yes, this is the ugly truth. Great design skills are not the key to great UX.
Knowledge is not the only key to become a great UX professional. It takes time to become a true UX expert. Probably tens of years of knowledge and experience, learning by designing, observing a wide range of users, tasks, devices, and platforms. Apart from all that, there have to be design principles, concepts, a design language, and iterative processes across multiple disciplines in software product engineering to have a success on its delivery. This is why UX is not just one-man’s job, and clearly, not even one-step process or discipline!
This article was originally posted at kosalanuwan.tumblr.com and then at linkedin.com/pulse.
