Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Barry Prendergast

A plea to stop abusing basic design terms.

In his book Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote:

“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts…”

Language is prone to change, but these changes can lead to as much stagnation as innovation. I believe that the words we use as designers are so important. This is my attempt to disambiguate some terms that we use and abuse in design every day: customer experience, user experience, service design, and product design.

Services, and CX

Imagine for a moment that you work at a company that cares about people, and how it designs for them, and that I am your customer. Your organisation provides me with a service.

A service can be defined as ‘The action of helping or doing work for someone — Oxford English Dictionary

At any given point, I can experience very specific emotions about the quality and usefulness of your service, that determine how likely I am to be able to use, and keep using it. This might be how you made me feel when I was engaged by your marketing campaign, whilst buying something, or perhaps getting some support when things go wrong.

When you talk about how I feel using your service, you’re talking about my customer experience (CX). CX about human beings having emotions, thoughts and feelings, within their minds, that we can observe and quantify. It’s a measure of pleasure.

In commerce, customer experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organisation and a customer, over the duration of their relationship. — Wikipedia

Caveat: If you work in government, you have service users, not customers — simply because they don’t choose your service. In fact they usually have no choice but to use the service.

Designing to keep my experiences positive through better quality services is ‘service design’. Some people call this ‘customer experience design’, which is adequate, but be very clear that we can’t design or have control over human experiences and emotions. We can only design better services that reduce negative experiences and build positive emotions. In my humble opinion, and in this context, ‘service design’ is more-correct.

Service design is the activity of planning and organising people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers — Wikipedia

Products, and UX

You might also, as part of that service, provide me with some products to enable and enhance the quality of service.

A product can be defined as ‘an article or substance that is manufactured or refined for sale’ — Oxford English Dictionary

Again, at any given point, I can experience very specific emotions about the quality and usefulness of your products, that determine how likely I am to be able to use, and keep using them. This might be how you made me feel when I was trying to, for example, search or browse some pages, understand some new controls, or even just understand the words and images presented on a screen.

One can have services without products, but it’s rare, perhaps even impossible, for products to exist outside a service. If you have customers, you’re providing a service of some kind.

When you talk about how I feel using your products — my experience as a user of your products, then you’re talking about my ‘user experience’ (UX). Again, it’s about human emotions, thoughts and feelings. Its not –and I can’t stress this enough– not about the things on the screen.

The overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use. — Oxford English Dictionary

Designing these products is simply ‘product design’, which in turn, is made up of activities such as user research, content writing, information architecture, interaction design and graphic design (which, let’s face it, is usually what non-designers mean when they talk about ‘UX’, which it’s not), usability testing, and a whole lot more.

Some people also call this ‘user experience design’, which is adequate, but not the most sensible. Again, be clear that we can’t ever design or have control over human experiences and emotions. We can only design better products that reduce negative experiences and build on positive emotions. In this context, ‘product design’ is more-correct.

Now you might be thinking CX and UX are the same thing. And yes, service design and product design are very close cousins. As areas of interest and design processes, they share most if not all concerns. People first. Iterative. Data driven. It’s the outputs that differ.

UX is not a verb.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, I want to move onto the main offender.

‘Can you UX this for me?’

What is being said here is “can you user experience this for me?” which makes little sense. No wonder most folks find this malapropism, this proxy for what we really mean, so difficult to effectively grasp. Using “UX” in this way obscures the real work being done. But worse, we don’t actually need this proxy. We already have a perfectly appropriate verbal noun for this.

“Design.”

“Can we design the content before we get to designing page layout?” “Can we hold a workshop to design how the interaction flows?” “Can we have a conversation about the visual designs?”. Whilst design may not be universally understood, it’s arguably more prevalent and transparent than “UX”.

Now I’ll hold my hands up and say that we *gestures to all designers* are to blame for this. An ever-changing landscape, emerging practices and technologies, emerging roles and responsibilities that didn’t exist in previous decades. It’s a lot to keep up with. We invented these terms in order to understand and cope with these changes. We’ve come to love these new entities and all they’ve helped us to achieve. We foisted them upon our colleagues and said “now, talk like us!”. We’ve let the meaning of terms slip, or maybe we didn’t differentiate them clearly enough to begin with. Regardless, the worst thing that we can do is to acquiesce, and give in to ambiguity. Clarification is good for our design process, the conversations we have with colleagues, and ultimately, better for our customers.

“What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about… the worst things one can do with words is surrender to them”— George Orwell.

Thank you! I welcome your feedback in the comments below, on Twitter, or on LinkedIn — Barry

Barry Prendergast | Professional Profile | LinkedIn
Barry 🎮👻 (@render_ghost) | Twitter

“Can you UX this for me?” was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Can you UX this for me?”

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