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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
| Aspect | UX Architect | UX Designer |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | High-level user experience, information architecture, and user journey. | Specific features, UI, and interaction design. |
| Key Responsibilities |
|
|
| Involvement in Process | Early phases (research, ideation). | All phases, including implementation and refinement. |
| Skills Needed |
|
|
| Tools | Miro, Figma, Lookback, behavioral analysis tools (e.g., LogRocket). | Figma, Sketch, usability testing tools. |
| Methodologies |
|
|
| Career Path | Senior-level role; typically requires prior experience as a UX designer, researcher, or product manager. | Mid-level role; often follows formal education or a bootcamp in UX design. |
| Education | Degrees in HCI, psychology, UX design; high-value certificates like CUA or UXQB. | Degrees or certificates in UX/UI design or related fields (optional). |
The key skills needed to be a great UX architect should be relatively obvious by now, but let’s recap them.
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.
Developing an information architecture is a skill in itself.
A great UX architect needs to know how to
in a way that’s user-friendly and intuitive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Let’s look at some of the most common tools and methodologies UX architects use.
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.
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
To prioritize hierarchy
To design experience
To test
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).
Let’s wrap up with some of the most common questions about the role of a UX architect.
UX architects are responsible for the holistic user experience of the product, including customer journey, information architecture, and hierarchy.
While UX architects focus on the product’s high-level experience, UX designers work on specific features that complement that experience.
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.
User research, information architecture, communication, collaboration, general UX principles, usability, and accessible design.
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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