Who Owns UI Design?

Who owns UI design? It's a bit of a silly question in my estimation. We all do. We all own the consequences of the design, because we all have to live with the thing as it has been instantiated in the world.

Our customers, our marketing team, our support team, customer success team, our content team, our business and product leaders, our engineering team... We all own the results of the design.

But if everyone owns design, then no one does. So, an organization brings on a designer so that someone is intentionally taking responsibility for the design.

Because design is felt by all, a designer is often a cross-functional team member. They are at their best when they've developed solid relationships with these various members of the company, so they can represent their interests in the design and also communicate the impacts of the design to them.

This also means that as a designer, it behooves me to be very open to criticism and feedback from other team members. It also behooves me to lean into the natural capacity of most humans to be able to articulate their feelings, intuitions, and ideas about the design at hand.

The primary means of facilitating this dialogue across the organization and with customers is through artifacts – visual representations of the form of the design: the patterns, principles, attributes, constraints, trade-offs, thinking, etc.

My preferred artifact is an interactive prototype. But lower-fidelity models are often just as helpful at sparking conversation, and are often used at the start of a project.