Render unto Caeser the things which are Caeser’s and unto the Designer…

As IT advances and become more complex, new specialized roles appear and take over the tasks that were previously done by more general purpose roles. For example, in the ’90s everything related to websites was done by the webmaster. But later its tasks got split among other roles like the web designer, the front end developer and the content editor.
This didn’t happen overnight. But who comes from this experience and in the past held this positions, slowly accepts the changes. And this is the case of my role, user experience and interface designer, which was previously performed by:

• PMs
• Analysts
• Business Consultants

Now that the UX role exists, which is the behavior by whom held his/her position in the past?

There are three different world which a UX designer deals with:

• product industry, that produces devices, appliances
• media agency, specialized in products that use interfaces, but throughout a software
• software enterprise, that is the field of the consultancy agencies.

My experience till now was made in these latest two world and between Italy and Belgium.
I started my carrier in the late ’90s working for a web agency and my role was manly to design nice and useful interfaces. The content organization, the navigation etc. were all competences owned by the consultants, or sometimes even the account that was in charge of the client. A designer could give some suggestions and for me was a daily fight, especially for choosing the way to present content.

Some years just to make a step forward

We went through accessibility problems and then more deeper into usability while the technology became more complex to manage. So the need of more specialization arose. Especially when the projects became bigger, the needs to split the work created new professionals.

In the last years there were a lot of changes, especially in the agencies, but a lot of work need to be done in the enterprise world, where I’m working now.
End-users are not so smart and sophisticated, but they need to use applications every day and I feel myself responsible for making their working life easier.
It is a very different target from the agencies’ end-user. Here the first thing is “do something new and smart to sell”, but enterprises buy software like its furniture, because they need it. So there is not so much interest doing it in the best way possible.
But sometimes, somewhere it happens that there is the request for someone to take care of ergonomics: the usability expert. Which takes over the tasks previously performed by other professionals. And conflicts arise:

• PMs that don’t understand who you are and why you are here
• Analysts that are suspicious
• Consultants that want to be the content ideas’ leaders and don’t want you as an interpreter of the client’s needs

How to deal with it and make an impact?

First introducing the culture of the “user needs” that is a plus for the business goals, and not just more effort and cost. Then showing that “usability” analysis is not a technical analysis, that can solve and prevent problems instead of adding more. But never forget to listen who work with you, there is always something to learn from who did part of your job before you.

I hope that the windows 8 UX revolution can help in this path, but the enterprise world is still much more old style than what we are used in our private life