Clearly, you've had interactions with fakers who call themselves "UX Designers".
Real UX Designers are not process managers - they are folks who are vital to any product development because it's their responsibility to think about and WORRY about user needs, user goals, and user objectives and then design a product/site/app that meets and exceed these user objectives.
This thinking and worrying results in design documents as high-level as application architecture or as layout specific as UI sketches and fully baked UI mockups. Within the UI mockups, they're in charge of naming conventions, layout, structure, content hierarchy, and so forth.
This thinking and worrying also results in clickable prototypes (usually in the form of HTML only prototypes or InvisionApp prototypes) that brings together the user flows, architecture, and user goals into something the entire team can wrap their heads around.
Finally, the UX designer is instrumental in testing and validating design decisions and product design decisions in a live app. This involves knowing what to test, how to test it, and then iterating on the designs to make sure the feedback from users is reflected in an updated UI or a revamped flow.
This stuff sounds like a complete antipattern to me. Who shouldn't be thinking about users? That's not a specialty.
Prototypes and architectures divorced from working code are the kinds of thing that bog a project down and get in the way of people doing the real work, i.e. making the actual product.
I know what programmers do and I know (more or less) what visual designers do and I know what the decision-maker for a product does. I don't know what a "UX Designer" does, other than claim to do all the product thinking. In my experience, they mostly talk vaguely about how important they are.
This stuff sounds like a complete antipattern to me. Who shouldn't be thinking about users? That's not a specialty.
I agree that everybody should be doing it. However - there are elements of it that are skilled and tricky to pick up. Having experts around is handy. They can do stuff better, help facilitate and teach the rest of the team, and get things moving more quickly.
I'm about half dev and half UX in my skill set. I can train anybody to do some basic usability testing in an afternoon. But that person is going to miss some stuff that I see because I've been doing it for fifteen odd years and am bloody good at it. Ditto for user interviewing. Ditto for interaction design.
You get exactly the same thing on the dev side. Everybody should have some basics about operations, database design, system architecture, etc. But in any team more than two or three people you'll usually find some folk who are experts. They'll be the DBA gal or the devops guy.
That's doesn't mean having a DBA or a devops person requires the rest of the team suddenly forget about all their database/operations knowledge, or that the rest of the team shouldn't be involved in DBA/operations work. But having an expert around is useful. They can help you solve problems that you may not have come across before. They can help teach you new and better ways of doing things.
The great DBA and devops folk get the rest of the team up to speed with database/operations work as much as possible so they can focus on the really hard problems that are going to get in the way of the rest of the team's work.
That's what good UX folk do too (in my experience). They help get the whole team focused on thinking about users, and focus on helping solve the hard UX issues that are going to get in the team's way.
Prototypes and architectures divorced from working code are the kinds of thing that bog a project down and get in the way of people doing the real work, i.e. making the actual product.
No argument from me. No argument from most UX folk I know either :-)
I don't know what a "UX Designer" does, other than claim to do all the product thinking. In my experience, they mostly talk vaguely about how important they are.
Yup. Those people suck. As do some developers with "software architecture" type titles :-)
> it's [Real UX Designers'] responsibility to think about and WORRY about user needs, user goals, and user objectives and then design a product/site/app that meets and exceed these user objectives.
I know what you think you're saying, but read it over to yourself a few times. This is a tautology: you're saying that UX Designers are good because their responsibility is to do what UX Designers do.
And it's fundamentally wrong: the real party whose responsibility it is to make sure all that stuff happens is the product owner (entrepreneur in this case). The UX Design just has a job to do. The fact that it's a definable job isn't an argument that it should be someone's sole responsibility.
Real UX Designers are not process managers - they are folks who are vital to any product development because it's their responsibility to think about and WORRY about user needs, user goals, and user objectives and then design a product/site/app that meets and exceed these user objectives.
This thinking and worrying results in design documents as high-level as application architecture or as layout specific as UI sketches and fully baked UI mockups. Within the UI mockups, they're in charge of naming conventions, layout, structure, content hierarchy, and so forth.
This thinking and worrying also results in clickable prototypes (usually in the form of HTML only prototypes or InvisionApp prototypes) that brings together the user flows, architecture, and user goals into something the entire team can wrap their heads around.
Finally, the UX designer is instrumental in testing and validating design decisions and product design decisions in a live app. This involves knowing what to test, how to test it, and then iterating on the designs to make sure the feedback from users is reflected in an updated UI or a revamped flow.