Once a UX, always a UX - the human in the machine

Right now there is a cleverly orchestrated spat going on in the blogosphere about whether the role of user experience designer is really necessary, or even if it exists. Sparked (I believe) by a blog post from Ryan Carson (http://thinkvitamin.com/opinion/ux-professional-isnt-a-real-job/) and countered by Andy Budd (http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2010/09/why_i_think_rya/index.php) as well as a flurry of tweets, essentially the argument goes like this:

1. User Experience is just a product of code+colouring in
2. User Experience is easily addressed by a diligent developer+designer
3. User Experience therefore doesn't exist.

It's obviously a no-brainer that I'm going to disagree. I've been working on the 'human factors' side of the internet for 10 years or so (I remember the days when I was keen to stress how long, now it just belies my age!). But what has sucked me in to this argument is not a need to add my voice to the yay's, but because so far the reasoning is all wrong.

UX is a valid 'profession' because...

1 - Designers and Developers are professionals, and should necessarily be immersed in the business of producing the best code / visual experience as possible.
2 - Users are not a definable or static entity. So the argument that you can learn to do 'good UX' while billing all your time for dev or design is impossible. The point of having a UX onboard is to assess the current context of the user experience and discover the particular requirements. If you pay a UX to come in and just tell you what their last client's users needed, you're not getting good value.
3 - Jack of all trades is master of none. As a UX pro, I like to keep up to date with development, hardware and tech, design styles etc. so that I can have useful conversations with these fields and anticipate issues. But I don't code and I don't draw (apologies to the design folk, I know I'm being reductive), and if I were to spend all my time learning how to and staying up to date then I would let my specialism slip. I have suspicions about any pro who claims to be such a polymath that they're master of all.

Size does matter

I've been paid by tiny clients to work on 5-page brochureware before. And I've tried to persuade them not to. In this case, there is a big argument for sharing best practice and letting the team get on with it themselves. So I'd focus on improving that client's process: best practice libraries, reusable questionnaires to elicit needs, overarching principles etc. But this is not where I earn my bread and butter.

My road to UX started at Ofsted, a high-profile UK government department responsible for the inspection of (then) schools, educational institutions and childcare across England and Wales. These reports were published on a website. Internally, a staff of thousands spread across the country and at home struggled to keep in tune. Quite frankly, it was a mess. Yes, there were developers. Yes, there were contracted designers sometimes. But the UX niche was carved to create a backbone of rational response to human and organisational need, which could be delivered by these parties.

I've heard web development and communications teams around the globe sigh with relief at the emergence of the 'UX professional' as a resource - something that can deliver the high level strategic requirements and the detailed interface and structural designs to fill in the gaps of their existing team knowledge.

It's not who you are, it's where you come from?

OK, but my biggest gripe with the current debate is to do with the background of practitioners. Way back, in the glory days of the Sig-IA list, there was an almost continuous feeling of 'show and tell' as the community emerged from a wide variety of different backgrounds. At that time, 'Web Developer' was way down the list of likely backgrounds.

The list of skills in a UX role has grown alarmingly in recent years. Now, it is not unlikely to see a job spec that expects candidates to develop and design interfaces. I'm not suggesting that a proficiency in these areas should prohibit people from being a good UX, but there is a genuine worry that the closer the UX designer gets to the 'machine' the more sympathy they may have. When we are good at something, we find it hard to imagine that anyone else might struggle. I now use a lovely Mac on a fast broadband wifi connection. But it is nice to remind myself of what it's like using an 5-year-old Dell on a dialup every now and then. Some people still don't have iPhones you know.

If what you are after is a basic level of easiness in your web projects, fine: Read a few articles on A List Apart and get it done. But if you genuinely want to deliver digital services to a population, then get away from the keyboard, walk the street, and find someone to be the advocate of the technophobe.

Developers: give yourself credit. Development is important and highly complex. You don't need to hang a fashionable UX tag round your necks to feel necessary.