RJ Owen’s article What makes a “User Experience expert”? is a worthwhile introduction into the skillsets and traits of user experience practitioners. In addition, Owen also summarizes skills some practitioners don’t have, as a warning against consultants who promise anything and everything with a catchy, trendy name. And though his article is meant as an overview, his summary devoted to user research lacks necessary clarification.
But first, Owens summarizes that the current web design, programming, and strategy workforce
…is very well-intentioned, and either doesn’t know the difference between what they do and real User Experience work or are just as eager to learn as anyone else. Yet they know that talking about User Experience sells projects and so continue to talk it up.
He continues that he has been
seeing too many people buy into User Experience methodologies that are half-baked, if baked at all. User Experience, for most people, boils down to making pretty interfaces. Good color palettes, Flash for everything, and anything that sort of looks like a Mac interface are often presented as the whole of good User Experience.
Where I begin to lose Owen here is if he’s purporting that clients only expect good color palettes and are ready to release their new work unto the world since a UX expert blessed the color scheme, or, if the color scheme, Flash, and Mac-like UI are the only deliverables a so-called UX expert provides his clients.
That brings us to another of Owen’s points about what characterizes a UX expert: They do user research, which he clarifies more by stating “they have a healthy respect for how much they don’t know, and they absolutely insist on observing real users at work before they ever start a wireframe”.
Now, during my graduate studies at UMBC I was constantly reviewing research studies that examined how people interact with computer systems, usability, and interaction trends to know enough about how research is conducted (in addition to actually doing it professionally as well). As a result, I argue simply saying “they do user research” is really inadequate; rather, a UX expert needs to know how much and what kind of research is necessary to fully design a user experience.
Often times companies will pat themselves on the back after conducting one or two usability sessions with about 5 to 10 participants each, for a site that may be viewed thousands of times a day, or even per hour. Is that sample sufficient? If it must be, (which in some instances is the case), then that client better have a UX expert who can also provide heuristic evaluations based on years of experience evaluating systems and conducting user tests to glean how people generally interact with similar interfaces–Mac-like UI or otherwise.
It almost seems the novice UX practitioner could unwisely advocate for either the wrong type of testing (surveys instead of contextual observation, A/B testing rather than interviews, etc.), lobby for not enough testing, or simply fail to understand how to interpret the data aquired through testing.
In short, it’s simply not enough to say, “well, I test, therefore I am (a user experience expert).”
