UX as Disruption: Managing Team Conflict as a Productive Resource

Over the past 30 years, there has been an ongoing shift in software from a system-centered to user-centered approach. When user-centered approaches are introduced to teams and organizations, conflict often emerges. Conflict could be dismissed as idiosyncratic differences among team members. In this paper, the authors account for conflicts as a clash of worldview between occupational communities: engineers and UX designers. They define the engineering worldview as the application of science and mathematics to structure sociotechnical processes to solve concrete, pre-specified problems, from an external perspective. By contrast, the UX worldview is a human-centered exploration, through iterative cycles of design and inquiry, of the contingent and context-sensitive ways people mediate activities with technologies and systems. Interpersonal conflict in teams symbolizes a conflict between sharply contrasting ways of seeing the world. By considering the root causes, project managers can productively leverage the expertise of both communities by managing expectations, relations, and artifacts.