UX Design is not the cherry on top
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes”
-Albert Einstein
Admittedly I'm a sucker for the most beautiful and elegant user experiences. Poetically timed animations, great color palettes, emotion evoking brand elements, minimalistic and clean UI components that evoke emotion are all various aspects of a great user experience.
Unfortunately my experience has been that there is a large spread misconception within product teams related to how these amazing user experiences are created and the necessary steps taken to achieve these best in class results. Time and time again I'll step into a new product team and as I'm being given a tour of the various customer facing products there is always a sort of bashful explanation as to why things look the way they do and that they are working on sorting things out. This is all fine and dandy and it is completely understandable that there are things that need to be improved within the application. Hell, I'm thankful that there are things that need to be improved or there wouldn't be much need for my services. The challenge in these situations typically arises when we discuss how a better user experience can be achieved.
What these product teams don’t realize is that I can look at these disjointed customer facing user experiences and peer directly into the product teams disjointed product development processes. When given these tours I might hear something like “we are going through some changes with product management” or “we are ironing out some issues with our roadmap” or “our we are revamping some of our product management processes”. I always think to myself, I know I can see it clear as day in your product.
The big misconception here I believe is that design is often looked at in these types of product organizations as the fixer, as the person or team that comes in and cleans up the UI and puts a cherry on top. And to a certain extent that can be true but it doesn't do any good to put a cherry on top of the cake if customers want vanilla cake and a chocolate one was baked. It also doesn’t do the organization any good to put a cherry on top if the improvements are not sustainable and repeatable. What if the designer leaves, then what happens? A good designer can definitely compensate for some of the shortcomings of a misaligned product team but it will be short-lived and with sporadic results. The best and most experienced design and product leaders understand that great UX design is achieved systematically and requires an entire product team working together as a well orchestrated team able to Discover and Deliver repeatedly and consistently.
The vast majority of best in class user experiences are not achieved by isolated junior or mid level designers that receive design requests with little context on user needs and business goals related to the specific design request and are just following generic orders like “make it pop” or “make it look and feel better”. Great user experiences are achieved by well synchronized product teams big or small, that effectively discover what their users want and deliver it to them consistently and collaboratively.