What is a User Experience Team?

What is a User Experience Team?
Photo by Jason Goodman / Unsplash

Explaining UX teams and what they do is a topic I’ve discussed often in my career. During those conversations, I’ve found this quote helpful:

“UX is an emergent outcome of cross-functional work. It is not what some department does.” —Peter Merholz

Most organizations in modern companies are staffed with teams of people who do the thing described by their organization’s name.

The Accounting department has people who do accounting, the Design department has people who do design, the Engineering department has people who work in engineering, and the Marketing department has people who do marketing.
…and so on.

The difference with UX is that the User Experience department is not a bunch of people who do UX. There is no such thing as a UX practitioner.

The User Experience department has teams of people focused on the following:

  • Customer Service
  • Product & Service Design
  • UX Research & Testing
  • UX Writing & Content Strategy

Further complicating the issue is that in mature companies, those teams of people may be organized around different phases of the user journey, such as:

Pre-Membership → Onboarding → Membership → Evolving Use & Exit

So, when you think of UX in your company, think of cross-functional teams working to deliver the best possible user experience around a particular phase of their journey with the company’s products and services.