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 :-)
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 :-)