Have an effective User Experience team requires that there are fundamental concepts, guiding principles, and artifacts like personas that are in place LONG before you begin the task of actually designing the user interface itself. Personas, workflow diagrams, model use cases – all of this should be done well before things get in the hands of any engineering team, and should be done in concert with a Product Manager who is the subject matter expert.

“Usability” is an equally narrow term, particularly in the parlance of the User Experience profession; in that context, “usability” typically comprises things like Bobby compliance, accessibility, cross-platform support, colors, type faces, etc. “Usability” is a very “weeds” role, not a higher-level role as you have posited above.

Personally, I believe that the holistic “User Experience” is a product role – whether that’s owned by the Product Manager or delegated to a UX person. “UX Design” is the next step, which occurs once you have the fundamentals down and have a specific problem that you’re trying to solve. And “Usability” is the lowest level on the rung – where you’re ironing out compliance and standards issues.

What I read in the article is a very technical understanding of what is necessary to have a “user experience” focus, and by that virtue, it’s a very limiting usage.

There is another role (relatively adjacent to UX) of a “Usability Expert” and that is someone who has much gained experience and is profoundly knowledgeable about the principles and best practice guidelines regarding Usability. The UX role and the Usability role most definitely interact.

For various reasons (save money, misunderstanding, business culture, convenience, personal demand), in many companies different roles are often combined under the same title. In product management this happens way too often to the title of Product Manager.

So what likely is happening is that at companies the UX role is being combined with the Usability role and affixed with an arbitrary UX title. Then for good measure this person is placed with the product management team, because he/she works with product managers, and that further compounds the ambiguity about UX.

To clarify this issue we should probably create a comparison table for UX and Usability, similar to the table found at the Product Planner Vs. Product Architect article.

If the UX expert role is to design the UI (and therefore should be called UI designer) then the arguments in the article are correct and match the fundamentals of PMTK methodology.

However, we claim that the UX expert role is much wider then presented in the article. And based on what we see as UX expert, we believe that he should be a part of product management and not engineering.

I think that if we will agree on the role of the UX expert it will be easier for us to conduct a discussion regarding its placement in the organization.

We believe that the arguments made in the article are wholly valid and supported. So the real question is: can a cogent counter-argument be made to disqualify the rationales in the article? We want to know what you think.

As a product manager, I was able to deliver successful products to the market because I had user experience professionals involved in the early stages of customer understanding and requirements definition, as they were able to identify issues and needs that I missed. Simply looking at the UX role as defining the solution misses out on a lot of the value a good UX expert can bring to the table. When organizationally UX is placed under engineering, often this value gets lost or UX is actively discouraged from focusing on up-front understanding of user needs, instead being treated as a technical resource that should always be billable and focused on producing deliverables.