Sharing Ownership of UX

The Dominance of Engineering

In engineering-driven cultures, engineers have the ultimate power as the final arbiters of what goes into a digital product. After all, they’re the ones who actually build software products. In such cultures, products are commonly not implemented to spec. Engineers often feel free to “cherry pick a spec”—as Kim Goodwin has described this phenomenon—and implement only the parts of a specification they choose to follow.

Or perhaps, as Luke Wroblewski described in his column on UXmatters, “Developing the Invisible,” what you “get back is half of the design. By half of the design I mean that all of the features, content, and functions are there, and they are working as designed. … What’s missing is what’s invisible: alignment and whitespace.” These are subtleties that some engineers do not appreciate or care to bother about.

In such cases, UX designers are often forced to persuade individual engineering teams or even individual engineers to implement their user interface designs as specified. This can be a time-consuming process, so things may fall by the wayside when deadlines are tight. When designers do not succeed in getting their designs implemented to spec, the product user experience usually suffers, because, generally, engineers who think they know better what a user interface should be actually do not.

The best one can hope for in an engineering-driven culture is that engineers are savvy about user experience, care about usability, and believe in user-centered design (UCD). If this isn’t the case, the UX team will have a lot of evangelizing to do.

No C-Level UX Management

When UX has no representation on an executive management team, the unavoidable consequence is that UX will be subordinate to product management, engineering, or some other functional group within a company. In such a case, the very existence of the UX organization within the company is dependent on the goodwill and sponsorship of another functional group. For any of a number of reasons—financial, political, or just a change in management—such a UX organization can lose its sponsorship and perhaps even cease to exist.

Even if such dire consequences don’t ensue, UX is subordinate to a function with which it should be equal. This can make it more difficult for UX professionals to represent the best interests of users when conflicts arise on a product team between UX and the function to which it is subordinate—whether product management, marketing, or engineering. It might be difficult to get budget for staff or user research or usability testing. The concerns of both product management and engineering might overshadow those of user experience—simply because UX is the only functional group that plays a key role in product development, but has no representation on the executive management team. Perhaps no one at the table can effectively make the case for UX.

When the management of a sponsoring group highly values UX, usability, and UCD and understands the need for the UX teams’ autonomy, UX architects usually have parity with product managers and system architects on product teams. The UX team might get all the staff it needs and budget for usability labs and UCD activities. Even so, a situation in which UX is subordinate to another group is less than ideal, because over time, things might change for the worse.

Communication Breakdowns

In corporate cultures that are antithetical to the shared ownership of UX, some of the most egregious communication problems are so common that well-known metaphors exist for them:

• “throwing documents over walls”—Rather than working collaboratively and iteratively on true product teams, product management throws a Marketing Requirements Document over the wall to UX, then UX throws a UX Specification over the wall to engineering. This is waterfall development at its worst.
• “information silos”—Rather than sharing information across all members of product teams with the goal of creating the best possible products, a competitive or even adversarial relationship exists between different functional groups, which silo information in a misguided attempt to create political advantage for their own groups.

All of the problems I’ve described are likely to result in user experiences that are less usable, useful, and desirable. While product teams can overcome the cultural barriers that impede their ability to share responsibility for UX, product teams within a corporate culture that fosters shared ownership of UX are much more likely to achieve this ideal and create great user experiences.

Working With Multidisciplinary Product Teams

Creating great product user experiences takes a village—a smoothly functioning multidisciplinary product team that shares ownership of UX. This is the ideal.

“Our goal is to work in multidisciplinary teams to produce effective, pleasurable designs rapidly and efficiently. … Let the programming and marketing teams know how the product will look and behave at the very start of the project. … Become an essential part of the team, so our input is provided simultaneously with everyone else’s.”—Don Norman

Characteristics of a Multidisciplinary Product Team

Ideally, a multidisciplinary product team has the following characteristics:

• It is a team of equals, on which the product manager, UX architect, and system architect—who represent the three key disciplines on a product team—have equal voices.
• Balance exists between these three key roles, which together—like the three legs of the three-legged stool shown in Figure 2—provide the greatest stability and balance.

• The product manager, UX architect, and system architect make decisions pertaining to their own roles, but receive input from one another and from other team members in their disciplines, enabling them to make the best decisions possible.
• The members of the product team
  • communicate effectively with one another
  • work closely, collaboratively, and cooperatively with one another to achieve their common goals
  • trust and share information with one another
  • develop effective processes that help ensure their success
• Product management, UX, and engineering share responsibility for UX—or ownership of UX.

Collaboration on Multidisciplinary Product Teams

The three key members of a multidisciplinary product team—the product manager, UX architect, and system architect—work together collaboratively to define a product’s vision, functionality, and form. Each key member of the product team has primary responsibility and decision-making authority for a specific aspect of the product vision, as shown in Figure 3:

• The product manager is primarily responsible for establishing the business goals for the product and envisioning a value proposition that satisfies those goals—defining the product and features that a specific market segment needs, differentiating the product from those of competitors, and devising a viable business model that can lead to success in the marketplace.
• The UX architect is primarily responsible for analyzing the needs of the target users and how they perform tasks that relate to the product domain; envisioning a holistic product user experience that supports users in performing those tasks, while satisfying marketing requirements and observing technical constraints; and conceptualizing an optimal UX design solution.
• The system architect is responsible for devising a system architecture that optimally supports all of the product goals the product manager and UX architect establish and enables engineering to efficiently develop a robust, high-performance product.

Each of the key disciplines on the product team plays an important role in defining the product’s functionality, as shown in Figure 4:

• The product manager has primary responsibility for defining what the product can do and the scope of the product’s feature set, which to some extent determines what users can do with the product.
• UX is primarily responsible for the product’s interaction design, which determines the workflows for specific tasks, how users can perform specific tasks using the product, the product’s behaviors in response to user interactions, and at a more fine-grained level, what users can do with the product.
• Engineering is responsible for informing designers of technical constraints, implementing the product’s functionality as specified by UX, and ensuring that the product’s implementation has few defects.

Each of the key disciplines on the product team also plays an important role in defining the product’s form, as shown in Figure 5:

• The product manager is primarily responsible for defining the product’s marketing requirements and features, which determines the product’s platform and overall form.
• UX has primary responsibility for designing the product’s visual user interface, which determines the presentation of the product’s functionality, expresses its task flows, and in some cases, the affordances that let users perform specific tasks.
• Engineering is responsible for implementing the product’s user interface as designed by UX and ensuring that the user interface has few defects.

By working closely together in harmony, product management, UX, and engineering can achieve synergy, making the product user experience greater than the sum of their individual efforts, as shown in Figure 6.

While each discipline on the product team has its role to play, it is the true teamwork and collaboration of a cohesive product team that makes great user experiences possible.