Raise your hand if you know who does user experience for your product?

That's how I started off a lunch 'n' learn a few years ago during a week-long Agile training conference. In attendance were developers, analysts and product owners. Realizing they were more interested in the lunch part vs the learn part, I wanted to keep it light since they had been in some pretty intense work-shop sessions. Unfortunately, though I was about to give them more to think about as we continued the transformation to modern software development methods.

I had recently been hired to set up the UX practice in an internal technical infrastructure group. I assured them that this would be the only interactive part of my presentation so they could continue eating their lunch. Since I had been introduced as the head of UX, I wasn't surprised to get the answer of 'who does UX' with "ummm...You?" Yes, I responded, that is what I was hired to do. But that is only partly correct. I asked, who else here is interested if these products' succeed? A few more hands went up and and the response was "the Product Owners?" Yes, that is also correct the two POs here are also interested in successful products. I asked the gentleman who answered what his role was at the company. He answered, I'm Java developer. And asked how many folks here were Java developers. Mostly everyone else raised their hand.

I asked what the role entailed. I got answers such "writing well-designed, clean, and testable code". I got "conducting software analysis, programming, testing, and debugging" and "preparing and producing releases of software components." All correct.

I then asked, with a show of hands, are you also responsible for the "delivery of high availability and performance". (This was before Accessibility standards had been adopted by the company) Got some head shaking in agreement. I asked who cares about that? Ah yes, besides the company, the POs, the stakeholders.... the users of the actual product cares about that... so let me ask again, who does the user experience here? Yes, that right EVERYONE in this room is does user experience.

I went on with my presentation that lightly covered topics such personas, user scenarios, wireframing, prototyping, user testing and attempting to explain the rationale and value of employing a user-centric design process. After that, I asked if there were any other questions. And I got, "what's the difference between UX and UI?" Ooof... I had my work cut out for me. Time for another lunch n' learn!

Aarron Walter, in his book Designing for Emotion, describes a hierarchy of user needs that closely mirrors Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs. He posits that superior needs, such as pleasure and delight — at the very top of the pyramid and can only be achieved after more foundational ones, such as functionality and reliability, are fulfilled. (SOURCE: Nielsen Norman Group)