Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams

by Peter Merholz

that automatically lumping design with user experience gives short shrift to all the other disciplines that contribute to the user experience. A user’s experience is the emergent outcome of numerous contributions, including design, but also engineering (technical performance has a huge impact on user experience), marketing (how expectations are managed affects the user experience), and customer care (a bad experience can become a good one if handled well). If a single team is labeled as the primary keeper of the user experience, that absolves other departments from concerning themselves with it. User experience must be everyone’s responsibility.