Antoine Valot knows a think or two about User Experience strategy. With over 20 years of experience working in the industry for such companies as Spiremedia, Immedient and Whale UX, Valot has seen it all and knows what works. According to Valot, these are the four headlining disciplines of UX.
The Four Noble Disciplines of UX
User Experience has become an umbrella terms for four main disciplines, each with its own approach, focus, tools and personality. A great User Experience professional needs to appropriately embody these four personalities at different times in the software development life-cycle. What are these four?
Usability
There’s your Usability Engineer, with her white lab coat, running user tests in controlled environments, mining survey responses and usage analytics for insights. She’s very good at finding little problems with existing software and prototypes, and fixing them. Without her, users get stuck and stay stuck. Her prophet is Jakob Nielsen.
Information
There’s your Information Architect, who would have been a librarian a few decades ago. He’s working lists, pondering semantics, and uses tools like card sorting and Subject Matter Expert interviews to gain complete domain knowledge, so that he can name, classify and organize chaos. Without him, confusion reigns. His prophet is Roget’s Thesaurus.
Interaction
There’s your Interaction Designer, the creative type, who’s passionate about aesthetics, but hopefully also a born problem-solver. She knows the importance of visual balance, and uses color, typography, white space, and animation to orchestrate interfaces that look and feel wonderful. Without her, the others’ work fails to engage. She has many prophets, and one of them is Sir Jonathan Ive.
Experience
But most important, in my mind, there’s your Experience Architect. He’s a bit of a different breed. He uses the tools of User-Centered Design: Ethnographic studies, field work, user interviews, personas and goals, to effect change and go beyond the obvious solutions. He gets to the heart of what people actually want, instead of what they think they want, or what they say they want. Where the other three are good and finding and fixing problems, he actually uncovers opportunities. He’s key to winning the competitive game, to securing a fanatical user base, to making software achieve its promise of changing the world. Without him, the others might do something nice, but never something amazing. His prophet is Alan Cooper.
I did not list them in order of importance, because each is crucial at a different phase. If you are or aspire to be a User Experience professional, you must learn and master these four disciplines, and you must learn to embody each of their creeds, in turn, when the moment comes.
If you are hiring User Experience professionals, you must look at creating a balanced team. If you need to prioritize, know this: A usability engineer will fix and smooth all surface flaws. An Information Architect will clarify and simplify a well-understood problem. An interaction designer will make anything look and feel beautiful… but only an Experience Architect can figure out what to focus on, and tell the other three what to smooth, simplify, and beautify.
Without the architect, it doesn’t matter how good your builder, electrician, and interior decorators are: the house they build won’t change your life.
