Over a dinner party, Quentin Tarantino asked Terry Gilliam how he gets his unique vision out of his head and onto the screen.
Here' is Gilliam’s brilliant response::
As a director….you don’t have to do that. Your job is to hire talented people who can do that. You hire a cinematographer who can get the quality that you want…you hire a talented costume designer to get the color you need….YOUR job is explaining your vision to them. Your job is articulating what you want on that screen.
The word “experience” conjures up many things, and yet is hard to describe because it’s so personal. What is a good experience for one, may not be for another. It’s a feeling you get when you enter a building, visit a museum, call customer service or gesture between apps. It’s a lot of big and small things that are difficult to quantify.
But UX departments are full of talented specialists, from visual designers and researchers, to writers and developers who are often tasked with the impossible; to create a great experience. Yet if experience is something not quantifiable, how do you know which hammer in your toolkit should be deployed? It’s very often the job of someone a few levels above a project to determine who and what gets deployed from the UX team. Or in many cases, the business owner prioritizes one aspect of the experience over another, if at all.
The glue that holds them together however should not be someone looking at it via a RACI chart, but rather someone (let’s call them ‘experience owners’) skilled in design, with a deep insight into the user problem and business need. This person will marshal the talents as needed by the specialists, helping define the problem, technical constraints, and attributes of the desired solution.
The specialists are there to build great products, while the experience owner is there to help shape what product to build and how it will feel to all users. Doing it the other way around is the equivalent of the portrait artist being asked to design the details of a museum show.