Do you have the time and cash to do user-experience design by the book? I mean, do you actually? OK:
- User research.
- A thorough analysis of users and tasks.
- One or more rounds of card sorting.
- Design your information architecture.
- Tree test said IA.
- Produce wireframes.
- Usability test wireframes.
- Revise and repeat.
- Prototype or mock up.
- Usability test.
- Revise and repeat.
- Launch as A/B test.
Throw in reviews with stakeholders and executives, and you're looking at real time. Do you have that luxury? If not, then you live in the real world with me. The reality is that for most situations in most companies you're not going to invest in the people and the time it takes to go full send on methodological correctness. You need code written and functionality out the door.
This has been the theme of my career: You don't have enough people and time for rigid process. You never have enough consumer research. You have technical constraints. You have business process constraints. You have pressure to get features launched. None of these are exceptions — they're the baseline. This is normal, and guess what? It's not a complaint. It doesn't make designers special or uniquely put-upon. Everyone has to do the most with what we have.
So what do we do?
The answer is exactly what happens anyway — pragmatic UX. Let's call it pUX. pUX is playing the cards you're dealt, not the ones you wish you had.
The design toolbox is just that, a toolbox. There's no UX machine that must clack through a required series of steps to produce the optimal outcome; you pull the tool(s) out that you need and have the bandwidth and time to use. If all you have is some napkins and a Sharpie, then those are your wireframes. If you can run five or six guerilla usability tests, great! If all the user research you have is call reasons from Customer Service, OK, go talk to them. You'll know more than you did before, even if it's not ideal.
Better is what we're realistically going for: Better than the alternative, which is no UX work. An ideal perfect user experience might exist. We can have that philosophical discussion, sure. Is the time, effort, and staffing you need to reach that Nirvana state worth it to you, though? If you're Apple, maybe. For most companies, the answer is no. And that's OK. I'll tell you a little secret: You invest in the level of quality sufficient to support your business objectives. The user experience, or customer experience if you will, is a measure of quality, and it has a ceiling. Where exactly that ceiling is depends on your business model. You don't need to spend money on gilding the UX lily unless that investment has a return.
It's not the hammer, it's the carpenter
Another lesson I've learned is, tools are only as good as the people wielding them. The quality of the thinking is more important than the process. No amount of consumer research or methodologically correct usability testing is worth a damn if you draw the wrong conclusions from it. Any amount of time spent on user and task analysis will pay off bupkis if the thinking that went into it isn't smart.
Spend any time at all among UX designers and the discussion will eventually turn to tools. It'll take on religious overtones, wherefrom you'll get the impression there's no way you can do “real” UX without Figma, or whatever the tool-de-jour is. I call bullshit. Before that it was Sketch, and before that, I don't know, Axure and Balsamiq. Enough already. Tools come and tools go. It's what you draw, not what you draw it in. And it's the quality of the thinking that happened before that drawing even materialized that matters.
I would rather have two smart, intellectually flexible designers with real-world experience who don't (yet) know whichever tool we happen to use than five who've learned UX by textbook and only know how to follow a rote, dogmatic process. You know the allegory of the engineer who charged $50,000 to turn a screw? TL;DR: That was one dollar to turn the screw and $49,999 for knowing which one to turn. I'll hire that engineer any day of the week.
Baby != bathwater
pUX is not about throwing methodology out the window. It's not permission to do things wrong and fast or, worse yet, put crap UI out there on the assumption we can fix it with a “fast follower”. Spoiler alert: That future improvement goes in the backlog, and you're not getting to your backlog. It's a black hole because tomorrow there'll be a new business intiative or a fire to put out.
What pUX is about is maximizing your effort-to-accomplishment ratio. Strip everything down to basics and first principles. You are building [something]. That [something] is going to [do some good thing for the business] by [solving some problem or meet some need for your customer/employee/prospect]. Given the time and bandwidth we have, which are the methods and which is the process, meaning sequence of events, we need to design the best outcome with the least amount of fuss?
pUX is (probably) for you
Odds are good you don't have the budget or time for a fully-staffed UX practice. Odds are you have platform and business constraints that mean UX isn't going to get everything they want; we can design until we're blue in the face, and it makes no difference if our designs can't actually be built. The sooner we reconcile to reality, the better. The worst of both worlds is operating on the exectations that UX will work as it was described to you in a Fast Company article or the sales pitch from an expensive consulting firm if you don't also have the money to sink into it that it really takes.
Instead, hire smart designers, trust their thinking, and let them be agile. You wouldn't bring a contractor to work on your house and tell them how to do their work or which tools to use. A good design thinker knows which tools and which parts of the process to pull out of the toolbox for any given task, to accomplish whatever needs done in the time available.
