6 things a UX designer does not want to hear

I’ve been working in design for around 8 years now and that’s by no means as long a service record as most but i like to think i’ll have nice little tid-bits of info here and there. Here are 3 things that break my heart when i hear clients say.

UX/UI design as a specific discipline has really only become big in the last 3 – 4 years in the UK (as far as i can understand) before now, it was something inherent in ‘good’ design as a rule regardless of whether you worked primarily in print, digital, web etc. But as the digital world takes over as people’s primary means of interaction with services and products the need for people highly competent in user centric design has become a business necessity.

But it’s still hard to stand-out as a different kind of breed. No longer the Photoshop/Fireworks/Illustrator/Notepad++ slave we UX/Ui designers push past ‘making a text change here’ or a ‘radio buttons there’ copy. paste. done. scenario. We use our insight into user behaviour and design practice to ask the questions ‘ok, how much do we want to help the user here’ or ‘what might they get stuck on here’ and ‘where does the user go from here and how can we make that clearer’.

Relying on existing knowledge of a long serving product might be all well and good for those users that have been using the product for years, had extensive product training and are ‘used to’ an ‘industry standard’ but how are the newcomers going to fair? as consumer products develop and change their UX/UI how will this continue to stack up? as the world become ever more globalised how will this translate across language and usage barriers? Just because somethings worked well for a period of time, even a long period of time doesn’t mean it will always work well. Keep asking questions. Keep developing and testing new theories and never settle just because use/time=standard.

This is one of the hardest business cases to put forward, spend time and money developing something when it’s already considered ‘better than the competition’. The question i would pose to this is “What is our aim here? to make our competition sweat and get a ‘one-up’ on them? or to empower our users with our product and help them to use our product in the best and easiest way it can be?”.

Regardless of your position in the marketplace i believe as a UX/UI designer there is a duty to users to push for innovation. To make the product the best it can be continuously, relentlessly because having a good product is good but having a great product is great. There’s always new technological advances on the horizon. Speculation and prediction of the industry and marketplace is your ally. Use these to inform the future of your products and ensure your existence in decades to come.

As a side note on this, you never know what the competition is secretly cooking up until you stumble across a live A/B test or something of the same ilk and by then it’s pretty late in the day.

This is a huge disservice to back-end and front-end devs. If there is a gap in knowledge from taking a mock up design to fully coded product then train them or equip them with a comprehensive style guide as a matter of urgency.

Dev’s are on the whole, not lazy, not dumb and not visually challenged. They have just as much valid input on user experience and how the back end speaks to the front end and how best this can work with your user friendly designs. Dev’s are friends, not there to facilitate your ‘Design masterpieces’.

Things change. Technology advances. Society adapts and adopts complimentary behaviour. All of this is short spaces of time. Over the last 10 years laptops have become lighter, tablets and smart phones have become common place and ever more powerful. Screen sizes have ballooned, become 3D, curved but also shrunk and never lost the definition of a larger screen.

Who’ll be able to say what kinds of devices we’ll have in years to come? the size, shape, mobility, how they interact with other devices or with people or their place in society. I always speculate and future-proof as a precautionary measure.

I think there’s another issue here which I’ve touched on before about discrimination across the web by device or ability. Designing for one or the select few above designing for most universal use further cultivates the web as a space in which silos exist and you’re put in a certain silo according to what you own, how you browse and your technical, cognitive or spatial function. I feel this teeters into Ableism, of which I have strong views on.

An issue that bleeds in from the first one. As with designing for different devices, screens and browsers, design for ability and understanding. Allow you users to tailor their experience if they need it. Make the text bigger, make it highest contrast, allow screen-readers to do their job without tripping over code problems.

Make the web a place where everybody can be and take into consideration ability needs and don’t ‘make consessions’ for this but build it into your over all plan and structure of your site, content and strategy.

We don’t work in isolation. Unity is important but even more important is understanding and empathy for each other and the environment in which we work. Disregarding a role or team within the place that your work (or a company that you may work with) is again, a form of discrimination. See the worth in what others do even if they perhaps do not. Know that a task, a job, a team exist for a purpose and do your best to understand how that can be made better for all involved.

This comes down to one of my favourite phrases ‘Use your words’ in the most plain, most honest way that you are able. Communicate your needs, concerns and goals with each other and know that if you consciously try to make things harder for a colleague or collaborator, know that you’re ultimately making it harder on yourself and the place/company in which your work.

I think these point boil down to a little known life skill which we (hopefully) use with gusto in our personal lives: Empathy.

Working in a problem solving role, especially when that role requires creative thinking/output, you really must exercise that empathy muscle. Done so by using your ears, brain and abstract thought processes in which you put yourself in other peoples roles to the best of your ability.