UX As Strategy Or Design? A Roundtable Discussion

By Jesse James Garrett 1 Comment

At UX Week 2012, Adaptive Path co-founder Peter Merholz presented a, well, provocative talk called "User Experience Is Strategy, Not Design". Peter's talk built upon some of my ideas from previous talks and drew on his own observations to assert that framing UX work as design is a misleading disservice to the work itself. Peter has summarized his talk in a blog post on his site.

Shortly after the conference, Peter joined me and veteran interaction designer Jonathan Korman for a roundtable discussion. (No, seriously, the table was actually round!) We talked about the issues raised by Peter's talk, where UX practices do and should reside in organizations, how our history with the field frames our view of it, and how newer practitioners can make sense of the ever-shifting UX landscape.

Here's audio of our hour-long conversation. Thanks Peter and Jonathan!

 

There is 1 comment on this idea.

Carl Seglem

Great to hear you three talk…

There was one point that was particularly interesting to me, and one point that I disagree with Jonathan on as he stated it that I wanted to chime in on.

First, the interesting point:

Peter (I think) contended that the discipline(s) we’re working in are the first *post-medium* design discipline(s).

I don’t know if this contention is that useful, but it did seem to be somehow clarifying for me. Maybe it has something to do with Jonathan’s assertion that we need a name for “a product, service or business process that has an interactive thing [system?] in it”. Perhaps that “a product, service or business process that has an interactive thing in it” is either a different kind of thing than previous design disciplines have concerned themselves with, or combines several of them, plus some new thing about the interactive-ness of it.

Later, Peter (again, I think) and Jonathan had this exchange:

PETER [paraphrased]: There is a role for design to deliver an intentional experience (contrast Virgin America with United). We haven’t really identified a responsibility to pay attention to details of every step of the whole customer journey/experience.

JONATHAN: That is product management.

This is where I disagree, at least in a specific detail, namely the phrase “details of every step”.

To me there are three different responsibilities around the responsibility that Peter described:
1. To set the priorities to be fulfilled by the work and ensure that they are aligned with the businesses other objectives, budgets and other concerns.
2. To provide overall guidance/direction and coherence for the whole customer journey/experience, plus feedback and corrections where needed, and
3. To define and sweat the details of every step of the whole customer journey/experience.

To me:
1. is product management,
2. is UX Design as Peter defined it in his talk, and
3. includes many medium-specific design disciplines, and interaction design and the like.

For systems large enough to be interesting to me (where there are teams of say, a dozen or more people working on interactive-thing-including aspects), 1 and 2 are almost certainly too much work for one person to do.

I’ll be interested to find out what you three (and other commenters) think.

Thanks again for having and sharing the discussion.

Jonathan Korman

Carl, I agree with the way you’ve sliced a par the different components of the problem there.

As you say, in “delivering an intentional experience” one must solve a host of design problems. But there are also engineering problems, business problems, marketing problems. As designers, we focus on the design component, but when one starts to talk about DELIVERING that product/service/process, that calls for an integration of design, engineering, et cetera. Peter was talking about that integrative work, and he’s right that it needs doing ... I just don’t want to yoke it to “UX design”, or even just “UX”, because I think it’s more useful to frame it is product management.

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