This week Andy Budd wrote a piece entitled The Industriali[z]ation of Design (or why Silicon Valley no longer needs UX designers). There has been a lot of conversations about its validity or truth, and even its framing, but something in it for me resonated. I don’t work in the Valley, but I often feel victim to it (that’s not what this article is about). But I think like all good articles, it really got me thinking about what Andy and others are trying to get at in regards to a perception of the reduction or dilution of what we had hoped to be the UX Design practice of today.

I think, the X is bad. I admit it as the person who put the X in Interaction Design, that the X is hurting us. It hides the pairing that is important in the acronym — EXPERIENCE. And while I’ve written about the whole UI != UX thing elsewhere, I think there is something here and it is about “industrialization”. As much as great people like Alan Cooper have spoken ad nauseum about the post-industrial era, capitalism at its core is a system that values efficiencies more than it does depth. There are many examples, but I’ll give you 3:

Anti-intellectualism and anti-science. Why? because it brings up the subtlety of the universe around us and it just takes too long and its too hard and I’ve got too much to do to think about all this stuff. Do you have a chart? Outsourcing in all its forms. Why should I own every part of my business where others can do it for me (and other companies) at larger scale than I can deliever and manager and at a cheaper rate. Even though that means that outsourcing leads to labor issues both locally and globally. The generalist. Why should I pay 2 people to do at quality what I can get 1 person to do at good enough?

Andy’s article is about a victim of this industrialization: depth — depth of practice, depth of understanding, groundedness in what we execute, how we plan, what we plan, etc.

One of the casualties for the user experience design practice area has been the design of experiences. We stopped designing experiences for the most part because we no longer in our tools and practice envision the impact interfaces will have on the people who use them. We test them. We observe people using them after the fact, but we don’t create the simulations that will guide us to better understand how what we will do will impact the people who will consume the artifacts of our design execution. We have no story.

If you think of the interface as the experience, you are missing the point. Forget about the notion that experience can’t be designed, we can only design for experiences. I get it. But if we are to design FOR experiences we need to move beyond the interfaces that empower and constrain those experiences. Designing an interface is the equivalent of writing a script to a potentially great movie if you are only allowed to use nouns and verbs with maybe 1 or 2 modifiers. A real script is dripping in modifiers. It is consumed in it. The emotions of the experience of a movie are driven by the modifiers around the nouns and verbs. But as interface designers and even information architects we are only designing nouns and verbs.

That’s the first problem. We aren’t using our full vocabulary. But an even bigger issue is that we are designing interfaces without understanding the human impact of our designs’ ability to reach outcomes. Yes, these stories are just hypotheses of possible futures, but at least we have guidance about the emotional, social, and business impacts that our solutions can have when we create these simulations of interfaces being experienced.

In the current age of Lean though, interfaces doesn’t express value. The value is not in the interface, but what the interface delivers. How do you express the hypothesis of what value you expect your work to create is the real issue we need to be designing for if we are to validate our value propositions.

I’m not suggesting that experience designers don’t need to design interfaces. Interfaces are the execution of the filming, sound, set production, etc. of our stories, but executing without a plan is akin to having the best football players in the world heading onto a field without a set of plays. We need our grand script, our vision.

And not just for us. It helps us validate our assumptions with stakeholders and customers. It aligns a team from being mercenaries into being missionaries (coopting a recent line from a talk Marty Cagan gave recently).

So tell your story and make it happen.