Being a practitioner of User Experience Design in a company isn’t always an easy task. People, Time, Budget, are all sorts of factors we need to take into account to deliver a good user experience for the product. Here is a piece of good advice to overcome the hurdles of being a UX designer in-house.

Why we struggle to bring user experience design in companies?

As we know, user experience design consists of observing, testing, iterate, and learn about people’s problems and business goals to find the best solution.

This, what we also call the design process, takes time, and what does a company often doesn’t have? Time.

You probably heard this sentence before.

“The day the product team is put together, the project is over budget and behind schedule.”

So, that means that all these wonderful, early explorations, tests, and iterations are an obstacle to the person in charge of the project because it takes time and budget.

The product owner will often say:

“Yeah, what you want to do is the correct way of doing it, but we don’t have time. So we will have to skip it or maybe short-circuit it. Instead of spending a week, you will have a few hours. But next time, we do it better!”

And of course next time there isn’t because next time it’s the same story that happens.

What’s the solution to overcome this obstacle in user experience design?

We have to adapt to what we are doing.

This means we should always be studying people even when there is no product in mind; on the side; so that when the product team is assembled, we’re ready, we can say, “Oh yeah, we’ve been studying that”. It also means have to short-circuit the pre-established methods to fit with the modern days’ constraint. We do a few cycles in a day so we can learn something quickly. It’s really important that we keep up with the product cycle because the standard methods don’t really fit what we are trying to do.

The new Agile programming methods are a good example of that. These methods are excellent for developers to start coding on the very first day of a project but not so good to designers because we don’t really know what we want to build yet. We can’t say, “Oh no, you must do it our way”. We have to figure out how to work with other team members as partners.

Be able to observe, understand how the team in the company your working with operates, and find solutions to adapt to their needs. That’s also human-centered design.

More…

If you wish to learn more about UXD or find the source of my article, I recommend to read the book from Don Norman “The Design of Everyday Things” or go check articles on the Nielsen Norman Group’s website.

Do not hesitate to reach me on my twitter @MsterMF if you have any questions or find any typos in my writing (English isn’t my primary language).