Can business analysts become UX designers?

Mike Gualtieri and Mary Gerush of Forrester Research have just published a paper entitled Business Analysts: Seize the opportunity to deliver compelling user experiences – Make a big difference to your organization by focusing on its customers.

Abstract:
Is anything more important than how users experience your Web sites and software applications? If your customers can’t effectively and efficiently meet their goals by using your sites and apps, they will go elsewhere, leading to lost revenue and increased expense. If employees find sites or apps too hard to use, they become frustrated and less productive. To maximize productivity, smart organizations place a strong focus on user experience (UX) as part of the software development process, but not every firm has people with the right skills and focus on this important discipline. This is a great opportunity for business analysts, but it requires a shift in the way they define requirements. UX skills are often absent from business analysts’ (BAs’) tool kits, because BAs have been trained to engage “the business” to learn about requirements but not to do true user research that will deepen their understanding. By gaining key skills, performing user research, and actually “becoming” their application’s end users while defining requirements, BAs can improve the user experience — and organizational outcomes — by helping create apps that are useful, usable, and desirable.

Adobe’s Steven Webster disagrees:

“You see, Design is a profession…and I think we have to be incredibly careful in removing Designers from the Design process. At surface level, there are techniques employed by designers that unravel and reveal the insights that will inform a subsequent design…user interviews, creating user personas, ethnographic research techniques that allow observation of end-users engaging in existing processes with existing tools, are all means by which an experience designer can try and find the “soul of the solution”, the key insight or insights upon which an improved design might emerge.

I struggle initially with the idea that by taking these techniques away from designers, giving them to business analysts so that the analysts write better requirements (through the lens of the user), that a better user-experience will emerge by giving these requirements (now informed by a user) to a designer to create a new user-experience.”

Read Steven’s reflections