Roles and Responsibilities of a UX Designer
By : Kamaksh Gangani
You are sitting on your desk, creating that
perfect user experience through an appealing
user interface. You were up the whole night,
solving an amazing interaction problem, spent
days designing a sales dashboard that presents
some very useful insights to show to the sales
manager. You think you are ready for the
stakeholder meeting, have taken all the right
decisions and are pumped up about walking the
team members through your decision-making
process. But, on the day of the presentation,
things unfold very differently from your
expectations;
You: “This is the dashboard I have come up
with. As you can see, the graph shows some
amazing insights like…”
And before you can finish, you are flooded with
a host of inquiries and evaluations.
Product manager: “I don’t like this graph. You
should have used a bar graph…”
Developer: “It will take me 30 hours just to code
this small potion of the data!”
Project manager: “This is not what we agreed
upon. This will need one more sprint to
develop.”
Stakeholder / Client: “Can we change this circle
to a hexagon? My wife loves hexagons! (This
actually happened to me once).
Now what? Even if you think you are a 100%
right and this is the best possible experience for
the user, suddenly the hero inside you who
wanted to conquer the meeting by showcasing
an amazing solution, dies. You feel undermined,
and your designs are limited to various
contrasting opinions.
Give me a high five if these are the thoughts
running through your mind: “These guys don’t
know how UX works”, “Why do they have a say
in design, I am the designer!”, “Only I know what
is best for the user”, “Nobody is letting me
work”, “Why don’t they mind their own business,
have I ever told them their pitch deck sucks?”
Are you wrong? No. But are they wrong? Also
no. Then where is the problem? The problem is
not in the field of design but the way people
think it works.
I always compare the field of design with the
movie industry. A director takes 10 months to
make a movie and it takes the audience and
critics two minutes to pass their judgment
towards it. But only the director and the backend
production team know all the tumultuous
conditions that helped bring the story to life.
The fact is, the visual form of any product
becomes very easy for people to comment on.
Understanding and experiencing design is
subjective. There is no right or wrong. It’s about
whether it works for the user or not.
So whose job is UX really? Why are others
telling you what to do and why do they have an
opinion only on design and not on coding and
other technical aspects?
Newsflash- UX is every member’s
responsibility!
Now before you think that your job is in danger
and you start looking for other career options,
let me try explaining why you are indispensable
in the product ecosystem. There is one area
where the job of a designer becomes unique;
more than making design decisions, your job is
to make informed design decisions. Even more
so, your job is also to defend design decisions
for the best interest of the user.
Here are some expertise/tools you have to
prove that you are exercising the right decision
decisions and also evade blind feedback going
in to design.
Understanding UX as more scientific than a
creative practice- UX is not conventional art. It’s
an art of solving problems through science. A lot
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