Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Brett Hales

I’m exploring why UI and UX are often separated and I feel this shouldn’t be the case. What should it be.

Hi everyone, I’m back to writing some more stuff after I did my original bringe of 19 articles in 30 days and since then, I’ve travelled to Europe and Asia twice and landed in the Bay Area for a few weeks ‘to drink from the firehose’.

I’ve started helping startups, corporates and everyone in between looking to understand their product vision, their company values and to understand their customers. I’ve mainly dabbled in the fintech area, with a keen interest in the neobanking space so I’ve met a few neobanks over the last 3 months, however I’ve helped a range of companies now in smaller workshops that aren’t just fintech related. Blockchain, Crypto, AI and Real time payments have been the flavour — however a lot of the conversations has come down to product design, interface design and user experience.

I wanted to write about User Experience moving into User Interface design, which I feel is sometimes misguided or misrepresented and everyone has an opinion on what makes someone great at this role and how it’s constantly evolving.

If I’m building a product focused company from the ground up today, one of the first 3 hires would be a Product Generalist, rather than a UI designer, UX designer or CX researcher. I’d let them own it all too — including the vision and be the driver rather than a passenger in the product side. There are a few reasons for this;

KYC — Know your customer vs being a visionary. Doing the research and asking questions is key to put you in the mind of your customers. However being a visionary is critical and understanding not where the customer is currently, but what could be. Steve Jobs probably would have been a great UXer, but he was unparalleled in what could be as a visionary.
Good Designers are specialists, Great designers are generalists. For some, understanding the framework from A to B to do X is critical and many UX specialists fall into this category. Great designers can understand A, B, C, D and all the way to Z, understand the user pain, understand the technical approach and what’s possible and design in high def from a very early stage, all while aligning the vision and company beliefs into the mix.
The What, the Why and the How. What is the series of problems we are solving, why does this exist, and how can we solve it. All important — however why are we solving this? Science vs Art. This is part of the driver seat.

In the fintech community in Asia and Australia, whats evident is technical ability and business acumen, yet too often I feel that businesses aren’t spending time or putting enough effort into understanding why they are doing what they do. We all know Simon Sinek’s: ‘People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it’ and on my recent journey, most of the leadership team that I met in these companies were very mixed about why they exist, besides making money and someone had an idea!. Most are extremely versed in technical ability or the Science behind what they do, but what about the art?

However the Art aspects of what you do are equally as important. When science meets art, your get wonder! It’s really difficult for a two, three or four people to come together to make the wonder side.

Science vs Art = Wonder.

Design is meant to show the intent that exists behind an action or an object in a clear way. Great design strips away all possible interpretations of intent, leaving only one. Hard to do, but if you have all the tools and the brain capacity to solve it, you’re one of the elite.

What makes a GREAT generalist is the ability to get in the minds of the customer, see their evident pain points and create a detailed, in-depth and efficient user journey and after the branding and the style is created, go straight to high def design.

Square in Action

Square, one of the most known companies in the fintech circles was founded by a guy who was legendary for being UI/ UX designer and a known product guy. He has an eye for design, detail and thats evident with every company he’s started, yet had the vision and understood the values of the company and the customer and aligned both.

I’ve keep tabs (for obvious reasons) on Square over the years and more often than not, the first thing people say about Square is how beautiful and clear the design is, and the processes to get active and taking payments are frictionless and simple for anyone. Even as the Square team went from about 30 odd staff at beta launch to almost 2,000 employees today, their design team in San Francisco has kept incredibly small and generalist. Square even acquired a Product Design firm called 80/20, a small 6-man boutique Product Design firm out of NYC and that team came onboard to handle much of the Product side.

There are no User Experience Designers employed at Square. From a quick amount of research on Linkedin, there are two people currently with UI designer titles, but both are actually UI/ Engineering Designers. Everyone in the actual design team is a Product Designer which, for me and the people I know at Square means a UI/ UX Designer + more.

It’s not just Square that is like this, Spotify have a range of interviews and YouTube videos suggesting that their designers are required to do both UI and UX. Spotify limit their UX to research only roles which actually flow into content marketing, not product.

Great Product Designers often opinionated, and have strong opinions of what the world should look like. Even when those opinions go directly against common wisdom and what is expected. Exercising strong opinions and making them come to life in a rapid period of time is a hallmark of a great product head because the difference isn’t about how the layout is positioned, nor about the difference in quality, it’s a difference of kind.

This is not to say that that the world doesn’t have a place for UI or UX specialists, yet I feel most early stage companies feel enamoured to break these two parts up.

I’ve met some great product designers and all seem to share one trait: they are prolific learners and combine both science and art to create WONDER!

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

What makes a good UI/UXer GREAT. Are they called UI/ UXers anymore? was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What makes a good UI/UXer GREAT. Are they called UI/ UXers anymore?

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