UX architect vs. UX designer: Roles, responsibilities, and more

As products grow bigger, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain consistency, clarity, and a cohesive user journey across all touchpoints.

For this reason, many larger organizations decide to onboard UX architects — they’re dedicated people responsible for maintaining the architecture of the user experience and products.

Let’s dive deeper into what this role is and who it is for.

What does a UX architect do?

UX architects, also often called UX strategists, are responsible for developing and maintaining the fundamental user experience within and across the product. Although they rarely design specific features, they dictate how the overall user experience should look, which guides other designers in designing and integrating dedicated solutions.

Key responsibilities of UX architects include:

Defining information architecture

Some products, such as banking apps, can be overwhelming with the amount of features they have.

UX architects collaborate with business stakeholders to clearly organize those possibilities and prioritize which options and information should be presented to users first and which can be further in the flow.

Maintaining user journey map

When developing features and solutions, it’s easy to ignore how particular steps fit into a user journey as a whole.

UX architects help evaluate and design new ideas in a way that adds to a well-thought-through user journey and prevents situations in which feature creep makes the holistic experience worse.

Designing user flows

UX architects often design or approve user flows for particular features and sub-journeys.

Since UX architects are usually among the most experienced people in the company and have a bird’s eye view of the design roadmap, setting up user flows for designers to design around helps maintain consistency and quality of user experience.

Wireframes

In some organizations, UX architects prepare wireframes for UI designers to work on. They rarely do this routinely, though, and work on wireframes mostly for “special projects” that touch the most important aspects of the user journey.

UX architect vs. UX designer

Although the exact distinction between a UX architect and a UX designer depends heavily on a particular organization, the principles are usually the same.

UX architects work on a high level and optimize the information architecture and user journey of the product as a whole. They often provide guidance and input for UX designers who work on specific features.

From their design process experience, UX architects are heavily involved in the early phases (research, ideation) and rarely work on UI, interaction design, or branding. They tend to be more full-stack and contribute to all or most design activities within the feature/area they work on.

Skills required for a UX architect

The key skills needed to be a great UX architect should be relatively obvious by now, but let’s recap them.

User research

One can’t design a great experience without understanding users. Therefore, it is essential for architects to nail research methods such as user interviews, usability testing, and surveys to understand who they are actually designing for.

Information architecture

Developing an information architecture is a skill in itself.

A great UX architect needs to know how to

• prioritize information
• group related items together
• build hierarchies

in a way that’s user-friendly and intuitive.

User journey design

Designing a long-term user journey within a product is different than designing a single experience.

Managing the Psych level, keeping in mind what information and experience the user was presented with in previous steps, and understanding how user fatigue increases with each step is a skill in itself.

Communication and collaboration

Working with business stakeholders to understand the priorities and objectives the information architecture and user journey should achieve and then effectively collaborating with designers across the organization (often from the position of informal leadership) requires a fine set of social skills.

Half of the job is about effectively communicating and collaborating with others.

How to become a UX architect?

Do you feel that becoming a UX architect could be the right career choice for you? Here are some tips on how to become one.

Education

Although formal education isn’t a requirement to land a job in UX design, let’s face it, it helps to differentiate from purely self-made or boot-camped designers.

Consider degrees in human-computer interaction, UX design, psychology, and communication to boost your credentials.

Certificates

Although there are many haters of UX certificates, they do help to fill the gaps and boost a specific skill set. They do more good than harm as long as you won’t start bragging, “I’m certified…” at every step.

For UX architects, I’d steer away from typical UI-oriented certificates and instead consider

• Certified Usability Analyst (CUA) — a 10-day long intensive boot camp in usability evaluation
• UXQB Certifications — International Usability and UX Qualification Board provides numerous certificate programs focused on high-level and psychological aspects of user experience

Experience

Lastly, nothing beats experience.

Ideally, you should start as a UX designer, researcher, or product manager. A UX architect is usually in a senior role, so previous experience is a must.

Once on a job, start specializing. Start contributing to high-level artifacts such as user personas and user journeys (and if there are none, be the one who starts the culture!) and become the champion of alignment. Be the first one to spot inconsistencies, organize syncs and workshops to keep everyone on the same page, help others design features that fit well within the user journey, and evangelize prioritizing information architecture to stakeholders.

In other words, start working as a UX architect without the title.

It’ll help you gain the skills you need and some good portfolio cases to get the actual job down the road.

Tools and methodologies used by UX architects

Let’s look at some of the most common tools and methodologies UX architects use.

Tools

Miro and Figma are enough for 90% of the job, to be honest.

Miro (or any other virtual whiteboard) is a great place to maintain and develop a user journey and information architecture, while Figma (or other design tools) is often essential when working on actual solutions.

Depending on specific organizations and needs, UX architects might benefit from virtual usability testing tools like Lookback or behavioral analysis tools like LogRocket.

Methodologies

There isn’t a big difference in methodologies used by UX architects and UX designers. Tools are the same, that is, UX architects can use:

To understand users

• User interviews
• Empathy mapping
• Surveys

To prioritize hierarchy

• Card sorting
• Affinity grouping
• Dot voting

To design experience

• User journey mapping
• User flow mapping

To test

• Usability tests
• Heuristic evaluation

The tools are all the same. The main difference is what they are used for (e.g., designing a low-level experience of a specific feature vs. designing a high-level product architecture).

FAQs about the UX architect role

Let’s wrap up with some of the most common questions about the role of a UX architect.

What does a UX architect do?

UX architects are responsible for the holistic user experience of the product, including customer journey, information architecture, and hierarchy.

Is a UX architect different from a UX designer?

While UX architects focus on the product’s high-level experience, UX designers work on specific features that complement that experience.

How do you become a UX architect?

It is helpful to get a related degree in HCI, UX design, or psychology, as well as dedicated certificates. However, the most effective way is to start working as a UX architect, even without the title.

What skills are required for a UX architect?

User research, information architecture, communication, collaboration, general UX principles, usability, and accessible design.

Conclusion

UX design is getting a lot of titles. It’s easy to get lost.

However, it has merit. The larger the product and organization, the more pressing the need for dedicated UX specializations.

Dedicated UX architects help solve the problem of inconsistent products and many designers pulling in different directions. They cater to high-level user experience and deliver artifacts such as customer journey maps and information architecture, setting a foundation for other teams to work on.

Thanks to shared fundamentals, if executed well, this can dramatically improve the product’s user experience while improving delivery speed.

If you are considering becoming one yourself, the best thing you can do is to start doing the job. Education and courses can help, but nothing prohibits you from taking on an architect’s responsibilities without the title. Most people will be actually grateful that someone does the work that makes their life easier. Use this to gather enough experience over time to formalize the position within your current and next organization; voila, you are an architect now.

Whatever your future endeavors are going to be, good luck!

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