By Carlos Andrés Ruiz Palacio from Pixabay
For 25 years, experience professionals have been incorrectly viewed as “designers.” While design is a tool experience professionals use, design is not what experience professionals do—certainly not the entirety of what they do.
The widely held notion that Experience Work = Design Work is simply false.
Experience work is often equated to “design,” or at least what design is perceived to be by those outside the experience profession—tactical and tangible outputs like screen layouts, visual styling, and the sequencing of screens into workflows. This misconception often confines experience work to a “design box” that crowds out the context-seeking and the strategic scale and dimensions of experience work that are essential for its practitioners to deliver and sustain successful outcomes for businesses, users, and stakeholders.
FIGURE 1: Experience Work Confined to the Tactical “Design Box.”
Experience work is often wrongly equated to tactical design work like the layout of screens, visual styling of screen elements and content, and the sequencing of screens into workflows. This misconception confines experience work to the “design box.”
This misconception hasn’t just stunted the profession; it has actively compromised the quality and integrity of its work—so much so that the experience profession is at risk of never achieving its full potential, or even dying before reaching maturity.
Think about it: No leader would hire a criminal defense lawyer to manage legal strategy for their organization’s intellectual property portfolio. No CEO would think of staffing a finance department exclusively with accountants. Yet, this is akin to what happens when companies place experience professionals and experience-related work into the “design box.” These “studio” and “design org” models—popular during the period from the Great Recession through the dawn of COVID-19—have led to the misalignment of skills-to-needs at great expense to everyone—and everything.
I’ll be presenting a poster at IAC 2026 in April. At the conference, I’ll share some of the ideas and techniques I have used to (try to) help organizations broaden the definitions and scope of experience work beyond the boundaries of design. The goal is to help organizations rethink what experience work is and rearrange how experience work should be performed to improve the chances for success and achievement of desired outcomes—throughout the enterprise, into the marketplace, and beyond.
FIGURE 2: Different Ways Experience Teams Can Deliver Value.
Experience teams are often staffed, equipped, and positioned into tactical roles, yet expected to contribute effectively and meaningfully to strategic efforts. Such misalignment rarely produces the desired results or expected outcomes.
Experience teams are often staffed, equipped, and positioned for tactical roles, yet frequently asked—or tasked—to do so without the necessary context, involvement, staffing, inputs, time, or resources to deliver successfully. Certainly not deliver successfully with any regularity or consistency.
Experience professionals—and the work they do—must be freed from the confines of the “design box” to survive and achieve their full potential. Only then can the profession thrive and its professionals fulfill their core mission well into the 21st century: making things better for people, so that people can do things better.