UX is More Than Design
When you think of the typical UX Design role, what do you picture? A notebook and some sketches? Someone with Figma open? Storyboarding? Prototypes? Beautiful interfaces? As someone who’s spent the majority of their career in this role, this is a large part of what I spend my time doing. Over the years, I think combining the terms, “UX” and “design”, has caused many people to conflate “user experience” with “usability”. Perhaps this is due to how teams are typically organized or projects are managed.
The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother.
Notice, in this quote, there is no mention of interface; just the ability to “meet the needs of the customer”. This means that what features users are interacting with are just as important as how they’re interacting with them. By relegating UX to only the “design” portion of your process, you’re isolating an incredibly important consideration that can seriously impact the success of your project as a whole.
UX as Strategy and Scoping
This is the step where some of the biggest decisions are being made about your product: what you’re going to build. Strategy is where things like user research will help you uncover your users’ needs and set the direction of your product. In a typical organization, this may have already happened by the time the project has come to you, as it’s often the justification for assembling a team to build a solution in the first place. At this point, it’s vitally important that your research is strong and the problems of your users are well understood because this step sets the context for everything that comes after.
Scoping is the most important step, yet often overlooked when it comes to engaging your product team. This is the time to start considering tradeoffs. Unless every problem can be solved tomorrow, you need to consider some of the following questions to bring shape to what you’re building:
- What is the priority of each problem?
- What resources does our team have to solve them?
- How much time or money is the business willing to spend?
- How well are the problems actually understood? (See Wicked Problems)
From these questions, each problem could have many potential solutions. And it’s these solutions that will form the backbone of the user experience of your product (and you’re never going to get to all of them). By engaging your UX team at this point, you will be much more confident that you can effectively and quickly solve the problems you want to address while balancing the constraints of the business and time (more on agile in a future post).
UX as Design
Back to where we started. Yes, this is an important step, usually the one everyone is already familiar with.
Once the scope of an application or feature is known, it’s time to get into the specifics:
- What is the visual hierarchy?
- How does the user flow through the interface?
- How do all the interactive elements work together?
All of this, and more, can be answered in a strong wireframe. Build a prototype, share it with some trusted users. Again, we’re interested in making sure that the time we’re spending is not being wasted. Wireframing is a great way to bring clarity to the abstract concepts you had in the scoping phase (in fact, it may be useful for the team to do a bit of wireframing during scoping as well). Once you’re confident with your wireframe, you can get into the design specifics of fonts, colors, etc, knowing that you have a strong foundation.
UX as Implementation
As a designer and developer, I cannot stress this step enough. Just as strategy and scoping set the tone for everything that follows, the success of everything before relies entirely on the implementation.
This is the most concrete step of the process, so there is no room for abstraction. Up until now, everything has been conceptual. A good UX team will have been working together before reaching this point, ensuring that everything scoped and designed is feasible and possible.
- Does the application load quickly and feel snappy?
- Does the application work well on all necessary devices?
- Is the interface accessible?
- Are there any edge cases worth addressing?
By continuing to work together, the team can ensure that the complexity of the real world is being handled effectively.
UX plays a crucial role throughout the product development process. It’s not enough to simply hand a designer a scope of work and hope they can “UX” it. Yes, specific details must be considered, but the weakest link of this process deteriorates the success of the whole project. Poor scoping means there’s no way to know if what you’re building is feasible or useful (or if you’ll be able to get to the other infinite things in the backlog). Poor implementation means you’re wasting all the resources you spent in the earlier phases.
During each step, we must balance our drive for perfection with the reality of the effort required to build a high-quality product. It will get messy, it will be challenging. But by embracing constraints, making small bets, and ensuring what you’re doing meets user needs, you’ll be able to deliver meaningful solutions more and more quickly.