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A Business Analyst's focus is on stakeholders and the bottom line. The UX's focus is on the end-users. Although we UX people do keep business objectives in mind when we design, the nuts and bolts of our job is more user centric, while the Business Analysts's job is more business centric and strategic.

 

Although I consider myself a UX person first and foremost, I've often worn the BA hat. In the process of gathering requirements and understanding the targeted end user, I discover issues that are much more high level such as market niche, workflow, roles, organizational hierarchy, product strategy. Making recommendations to streamline/address these problems, then implementing a design that facilitate desired output goes hand in hand. When I wear my BA hat, I tend to work more closely with stakeholders and my deliverables are in the form of competitive analysis, intricate workflow flowcharts, excel docs that break down roles and rights, product requirement documents, and business rules documents. In my opinion, you can't design successfully until you've done this leg work, or work with a sharp PM who does some of these functions.

 

Ha (yep, that's my name)