Business: Role of UX

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

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

If there has ever been a time when UX designers have seen their role profoundly questioned, that time seems to be now. As artificial intelligence (AI) demands our collective attention, the profession of UX design is reeling from both this technology’s extraordinary possibilities and the huge unknowns that come with its adoption. What are the opportunities and threats that AI presents to the UX design profession?

The performance and creative potential of AI and, in some cases, the ability for anyone with little or no technical expertise to use its capabilities, have become fuel for thought on the future of the discipline of UX design. What will continue to make our profession distinctive and indispensable? Read More