UX design in a vacuum is a fake design
User experience, or commonly known as UX, is a fancy word with plenty of broad meanings. User Experience is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system, or service — that’s what the Wikipedia page tells us.
by Alec Vishmidt Design
ISO defines it as a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system, or service.
Such broad definitions play for a win, covering lots of scientific areas, discussion topics, leaving no stone unturned. It also has drawbacks — people start to over-generalize things and bring other, non-UX activities under the definition. Sometimes, they do that unconsciously, sometimes, they do that for a purpose. Anyways, the consequences could be harmful but hardly noticeable. Maybe you’ve experienced something familiar before — the process is set, the resources are at place, time is passing, but there are no real, tangible outcomes.
This happens because some UX designers and companies offer and try to enhance UX without the understanding of its real business purpose.
They just follow cargo cult, doing nothing but supporting rituals. As a result, you would not have your business grow or observe a customer satisfaction surge. The time would pass, and you would throw User experience into a trash bin as another overhyped methodology, missing a great opportunity to boost results significantly. But sadly, many companies have already failed with the transformation, and many would fail. And one of the main reasons is. Poor user experience. Today, we will emphasize typical UX mistakes that generally come up during the building process of SaaS products for business customers.
So, what are the signs of fake UX? The most destructive group of those signs come from focusing on features, not on solving problems. As an analogy, features are pain killers which ease the pain. But they don’t treat the illness itself.
The majority of business owners, product managers, and product designers think that they develop the product by adding features. Designers offer new user experiences by adding new controls, actions, and data entry points.
But in fact, customers just observe new buttons and forms appear here and there; the interface becomes clunky, overwhelming, and unintuitive. This is how cool products rise and fall. So, adding a feature mindlessly is a fake UX.
But wait, how to develop a product without adding features? It is a tricky thing, and the answer would take more time than the article itself. Still, here are some markers that help to detect fake UX design activities.
UX design without “why” questions is a fake UX design.
There are no why questions while discussing a new feature. If nobody is interested in how the feature brings value, the chance of the success of the feature is meager. With the low level of critical thinking inside the UX team, user experience design becomes a subjective art rather than a constructive solution-finding process.
No KPIs is a fake UX design
There are no KPIs set for an iteration, an enhancement, or a feature, or the feature has no direct impact on business, but it is good to have it. No indicators mean the result would always be unknown.
Thus, all returns on investments or even losses would be spread among other quantified processes like operational costs or sales efficiency.
A new feature without argumentation is fake UX design.
Features come from brainstorming sessions and directly from leadership and management, rather than from marketing research and data analysis. For sure, someone should take ownership of features ideation and execution, which the UX team is capable of. But it should always come with some argumentation and a sane amount of supplementary data. Moreover, this argumentation should be clearly communicated to the team to make sense.
Just a “happy case scenarios UX design” is a fake UX design.
No doubt, any reliable system must work as expected and bring customers seamless and enjoyable experiences. But those happy cases should not be treated as more important compared to other, unhappy scenarios. Life happens, and most customers would pay attention to how the system is tolerant to mistakes, discrepancies, and tons of other things that might go wrong.
So, that is a fake UX when the UX team fails to respond to such questions as “how the system would act in case there is no connection? In case there is no relevant data? If the user made a mistake and wants to fix it?” For that, there is no room to answer like “it depends on an engineering team” — UX is not about engineering capabilities, it is about user experience.
UX design in a vacuum is a fake UX design.
One important piece that constantly falls off from the most so-called UX designers is the context of using the product. People live their lives, do hundreds of things, and the product you are involved in takes a small chunk of their attention. Anything else — their problems, daily routines, even apps they use, all of those create the context that UX designers should include. Devices that customers use, their age, gender is just a small piece of a context iceberg.
UX design for “a person I know personally” is mostly fake UX design.
Have you heard something like “I have a friend that does something exactly as envisioned, and that proves the hypothesis”? No, this doesn’t prove anything. But extrapolating one event to the whole situation is one of the psychological biases which is often overlooked.
Still, subject matter experts' feedback is valuable and much appreciated. UX design team should ensure that the context is set properly, and the person is the real source of the feedback —thus, it is worth relying on the interview or professionally managed observation.
UX design with no tangible outcomes is fake UX design.
Each activity, even the broad one, should have tangible results with actionable insights. But not all UX deliverables work as actionable pieces. When the UX team works and produces empathy maps, persona profiles, and storyboards, they are still deliverables for internal use and mean nothing to product and business.
The long absence of a result that brings real value for the engineering and/or product team could mean that the UX team is running circles or just follows rituals.
UX design without failures is fake UX design.
Failures are the main source of knowledge. A UX team that has not thrown away any initial hypotheses could be the luckiest team ever, but in reality, it could mean that there is no proper hypotheses validation process. People fall in love with their ideas, and they are hard to admit that they were wrong. But this trait is one of the most valuable for the UX professional. So, if you see that all ideas went successful, the list of failed ones is empty could mean that it is just wishful thinking, and the real UX design process is built on a tickly basis.
Conclusion
UX design is a complex professional activity that covers such a multi-disciplinary field of expertise as user experience. It exists on the edge of engineering, psychology, behavioral economics, and even neuroscience. It is hard to understand its depth for people outside the profession, but we strongly believe that it should be easy to get what is going right or wrong.
