The original UX Consultant/Architect role, the role that made UX famous, was inherently research and design, specifically research INTO design. We just made great products because we did the research, learned the user needs first hand, and then designed those needs into a prototype, which we then tested and iterated repeatedly.

Product development was the domain of the UX Consultant. We made great products because we baked the user need into the design and we had a process to do it.

All in one. No product managers to get in the way. No departmental civil wars. A project/delivery/traffic manager breathing down your neck, yes, but that was organising the activity and not directly managing or performing it.

Then the 2015 UX gold rush happens. In the ensuing years, designers flood the market and UX/UI dominates. UX is no longer about research into design, it's about design. Then product management jumps into the mix and starts shaping product development in weird and wonderful ways.

Having had what was previously an all-in-one role split into distinct practices has not gone well.

- Design has dominated

- Research has been destroyed as user research and reborn as market research

- Product managers have been creating a new practice on-the-fly and whilst the practice is developing there's wild variance, including DIY research

For UX to live on in this distributed practice way needs management and agreement on user centricity and that means accepting that user centered design is better on every metric for product development than either product manager or designer centric design.

Heads of departments like Research, Design, Product need to get together and agree how user centricity can be executed across the practices.

This means process and workflow for most. It's not rocket science, it really isn't. Just work out how to turn research insight into design solution, and do it on a BAU basis rather than a big chunky research effort.

User research should always be a BAU activity, light and regular

Market research is always a big chunky expensive DULL research effort 😛

The point of this post is, remember or discover what made UX great - user needs into design solutions - and why it was more than just optics. UX was a user centric process that performed, and has been executed by a single practitioner historically, so how can you get the principles and process into and across your teams?

This is your mission, should you choose to accept it 😎

The rewards are huge and priceless. Real transformation, real performance. Happy people. MONEY.....all you've gotta do is CTRL-Z the Design dominance and bring balance to the UX force ;)

[you have no idea just how much prompt hacking I had to do with GPT/DALL-E to get it to produce this image, which is frankly naughty and GPT really didn't want to do it for me....but I'm flexing because I fought the AI and I won 💪. So totally worth it, I've also got a Sith version too 🤓 ]