Business: Role of UX

We discuss two topics in this column:

• using verbs as nouns in user interfaces
• UX roles in organizations

Ask UXmatters is here to answer your questions about user experience matters. If you want to read our experts’ responses to your questions in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your questions to: [email protected]. Read More

UXmatters and the UX research consultancy User Fountain recently teamed up to survey UX professionals around the world on the role of User Experience within their organization. The Role of UX: 2020 Benchmark Study explores UX roles, tools, methods, and organizational structures, as well as organizations’ various levels of UX maturity.

Our analysis of the survey’s findings explores three key themes:

1. How did the work of UX teams change in 2020? What impact did the COVID-19 pandemic have on these teams and their work?
2. What might 2021 bring for UX professionals?
3. What impact has User Experience had on organizations?

Finally, we’ll take a look at the UX professionals who participated in our survey—particularly their role within their organization—and the UX community resources on which they rely. Read More

If you give users what they ask for, they’ll continue to ask for more. As I sat reading the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to my son one evening, I started thinking about its applicability to our consulting for clients. If you do not know Laura Numeroff’s story, it is what some might describe as a circular tale. The plot centers around a little boy and a mouse. The mouse asks for various items and, when the little boy gives the mouse what he wants, the mouse asks for something else. If you give a mouse a cookie, it will want a glass of milk to go with it. If you give it some milk, it will eventually want something else—until you get to the very end of the story, when the mouse wants just one more cookie. So, the tale could conceivably go on forever.

My children love this book. They think it is very funny and ask me to read it again and again. It was during one of these countless readings that I realized this story holds some great messages about how I find myself interacting with clients every day. How many times have we gone through multiple iterations of designs, only to come back to our original design? How many times have we given the users what they want, only to find out the solution tests poorly and user adoption is low? Sometimes, during an engagement with a client, I feel as though the biggest impact of a request I’ve granted is simply that it begets yet another request. Read More