I read this hefty (101 slides) slide deck on the topic “Are you an user experience designer” today. While some of the discussion was focused on semantics (read: not so important to daily work practice), one distinction the author made did shed some light on the difficulties I’m having in my current position; namely, the difference between designing the experience of the user when they interact with a product, and designing the *entire user experience*, which also includes support services, marketing, branding, and all contact points that the user has with the company in addition to the product itself.

Being in a UX design and research role I often come across aspects of user experience that I cannot change through product design. For example, I talk to many users who are not aware of a certain modules that my company offers, although these modules could be valuable to them and their business. This education of our users and customers is, for the most part, a marketing issue, but I come across it quite often in my work.

The question then becomes whether I decide to accept this as a problem that the UX team wants to try and solve.

One thing I did during my first few working years is to take every major user problem I came across and try to find a solution. It sounds like a good idea, but the end result is that I spent a lot of time running around talking to other departments and trying to move things along that were not really my responsibility or under my control. I realize now that I ran into a lot of problems because I hadn’t clearly defined the boundaries of my work and domain.

There is, of course, value in collaboration with other areas in the organization. For example, we are currently working together with Marketing and Support to create a ‘Tips and Tricks’ section to put in our monthly user newsletter. On the other hand, the aspect of my work that often suffered as a result of my ‘extra-curricular’ efforts was what I now see as the core of my responsibilities – that is, the design and development of our products.

There is also the question of whether certain user problems are best solved through the product itself – by including some blurb text in the interface about other software modules the user is not aware of, for example -  or through some other means, such as through our user newsletter or product pamphlets, or through a combination of the two.

This topic brings to mind a write up of a lecture I recently read by Don Norman on the design of services.

As of now, I am not entirely clear on the boundaries between the user experience of the product itself, as opposed to the users experience as a whole – including marketing/branding, support, and other contact points with the company such as sales and billing. A lot of the UX literature I read comes from design firms such as Adaptive Path who seem to have a say in many aspects of product strategy and branding that are simply outside of the realm of a UX specialist working inside a larger organization. This trips me up sometimes. I think that being aware that a distnciton exists will, however, help me make better, more focused decisions in the future about how I spend my time.