I’ve led design for decades. I initially prefaced my design title and the company-wide name of the organization at IBM that I led with “user experience” or the abbreviation “UX” for most of my career. Until I didn’t. In 2008 I took stock of where the industry was going and the ascendance of user experience design and how it was becoming what most people thought of as “design”. I therefore changed my title and the name of IBM’s program and organization to simply “IBM Design” with no qualifiers. We still had specializations within design, such as visual, user experience, content, service, etc., but the entire discipline was called simply design. I had some pushback with people saying that developers design too but they design code and are generally referred to as developers or coders. I still felt that most people in our industry at least understood that design meant was we did. We’ve used the term ever since on our websites, Twitter handle, and internally across the company. We’ve also hired a huge number of designers and elevated the importance of design in the company using that term. The name has served us well.
With the ascendance of user experience research, I’ve been pondering whether it is time to claim a new name for the discipline. Let’s first consider another names often given to our profession.
Design Research
Many in the community use the term “Design Research”. I did too, until recently. And in fact the IBM HR system’s job classification system still uses “Design Researcher” as a sub-discipline of design. However, when I took on my new role as the Vice President of Client Insights, colleague Lauren Swanson and I conducted a listening tour to get to know the members of my new organization. We visited key locations and reached out remotely to other locations around the world with our workshopping. We learned pretty quickly that the staff didn’t want to be called design researchers. Nothing in their education prepared them for being a form of designer they argued and that they simply didn’t do design. They adamantly wanted to change the name of the discipline.
UX Research
I decided that we should conduct a poll in our organization’s Slack channel to see what alternative name my team wanted us to use. The results of the poll indicated that the most frequently preferred term was “UX Research” which of course is the abbreviation of User Experience Research. That’s what we’re using now.
I enthusiastically agreed with my staff members that we’re not designers. And upon reflection, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the design part of design research. It’s also important to point out that we also have a separate organization of members of this discipline with me as the vice president. My VP of Design colleagues and I report to our General Manager of Design. I encourage people to say Design and Research when referring to our collective organization.
However, that got me thinking about what the discipline should be actually called. Should we continue to use the UX or user experience qualifier or is our discipline now mature enough and recognized enough as research to use that term without a qualifier?
Research
Let’s consider the use of “research” as the term for our discipline. It’s simpler and more authoritative. You have design and designers and equivalently you have research and researchers. Some will say but that our use of the term will be confusing because other people do research. In fact, IBM has a whole division called IBM Research and they’ve received Nobel prizes for their research. I consider this similar to the situation regarding the argument that developers also design. Of course, as I pointed out above, they’re still called developers or coders even though they may design code. Research is a little different in that staff who work in IBM Research do call themselves researchers. However, I believe that the context is important. If you’re talking with a researcher on a product team, you’re likely talking about one in our discipline. But then, are our researchers all that different from others who now carry the name researcher? Many of my staff have PhDs and if they weren’t working on my team, they may well be doing work at a university and doing research.
What do you think?
I’d love to hear from you about what you think. Is the UX Research discipline and community sufficiently mature now that we can claim the term “research” without any qualifiers? Yes, no, why or why not? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below or on my LinkedIn post. Thanks!