In my experience of building and supporting UX teams, most of them are significantly under-resourced. In fact, the term “team” can often be a stretch, with many user experience professionals finding themselves alone in their roles.

Typically, there are way more projects that impact the user experience than the team can realistically work on. Consequently, most UX teams are in a constant state of firefighting and achieve relatively little in improving the overall experience.

We can complain about being under-resourced as much as we want, but the truth is that our teams are unlikely to grow to a size where we have sufficient staff to address every detail of the experience. Therefore, in this post, I want to step back and reconsider the role of user experience professionals and how UX teams can best improve the user experience of an organization.

What Is The Role Of A UX Professional?

There is a danger that as UX professionals, we focus too much on the tools of our trade rather than the desired outcome.

In other words, we tend to think that our role involves activities such as:

• Prototyping

• User research

• Interface design

• Testing with users

But these are merely the means to an end, not the end goal itself. These activities are also time-consuming and resource-intensive, potentially monopolizing the attention of a small UX team.

Our true role is to improve the user experience as they interact with our organization’s digital channels.