I’ve seen a frustrating trend lately regarding how many outside of user experience teams think of the discipline. Their opinion may be simply ignorance, or may have been influenced by how UX folks on our side “sold” themselves (or the capability). This opinion is one-dimensional: They leverage UX practitioners to create visual designs, storyboards, etc. to help in “storytelling” a “net-new” experience to sell customers.
This activity in-and-of itself is fine, and if it can help “close” deals so much the better – but when we UXers do such “fit and finish” work, we are usually not involved in defining the new experience to be visualized. Either we come in too late or not even considered as needed to help craft such an experience. Not taking advantage of UXers to define such an experience is, as Spock said in Star Trek II, a “waste of material.” That’s the whole POINT of being a UX practitioner, after all.
Leveraging the full “UX Stack”
Applying a user-centered design approach to a project – be it a new app, workflow, or BOT – means you bring the right people, at the right time – especially the right UX folks. You need UX practitioners to do more than just create pretty pictures. The best use of UX talent in a virtual/blended team is to investigate, envision and validate the new experience – optimally before any code is written or any requirements are locked in. These activities can still occur in the aforementioned sales cycle – even though it would be in a limited “time-boxed” way.
The reasons why to do this work should be self-apparent (though to many it is not): UX teams focus on the user, on how they work and what they do – and by doing so you determine the best possible feature set to serve the needs of these users. When you skip this type of “due diligence”, you do so at your peril.
I should know, because I have been on the outside-looking-in at projects where UX was engaged solely in the aforementioned “fit and finish” effort during the sales cycle, and when the project starts there is no engagement of the UX team. The frequent outcome that results is the creation of a solution looking for a problem that no one needed solving, and a failed initiative.
I’ve also seen UX engaged on projects where we do “only” X – be it design reviews, research, or design documentations. Supporting projects with a single-threaded effort or work product (wireframes, storyboards) helps the individual’s person’s reputation (and definitely builds their body of work/portfolio), but the opportunity to have deeper integrated engagements usually stops at such an activity.
The problem is these single threaded activities can be perceived as “optional” or “nice to have” (more and more the case as Enterprises move to an agile methodology vs. traditional “Waterfall” development). This results in the UX team being viewed as a cost-center instead of an investment in making sure the solution is appropriate for and desirable by the end-users.
Bringing the full “UX Stack” (research, ideation, testing, and design) to projects – and showing the value of these activities in real world project motion – means that a UX team will never be considered optional…. And the resulting experience will be better suited to help people do and achieve more.
Leaving UX to experienced practitioners
Even worse, I’m also seeing some teams think that they don’t NEED to partner with any UX team, because they assume (sometimes correctly, other times not) that the work done by the UX team can be done “in house” by themselves or their peers, or “farmed out” to a partner. Yikes.
I’m all for non-UX practitioners leveraging the tools and techniques that a UX “toolkit” brings… but I’m not OK with people thinking that they could do the whole “UX Stack” themselves… or paying the lowest bidder to “check the box” to keep costs low.
Closing
Maybe it’s just me, but as I see UX becoming more and more important across the Enterprise, I see a big risk when UX is just perceived as a visual/UI design activity. We have to do better at communicating what the full and rich capabilities of UX is, otherwise the key capabilities and value we bring to the table will wither on the vine… And products and services will become less and less accessible and usable by consumers.