The Most and Least Valuable Contributions of UX Designers

Making Meaningful Work

“This question connects nicely with our recent UXmatters article, ‘Guiding Practices for Making Meaningful Work,’ and the practices we described there will help answer this question,” respond Dan and Jo. “We focus on the valuable as a way of seeing what is not valuable.

“Getting everyone on a project team and in a business to understand that they can play a role in creating a well-understood narrative is important if the business is to deliver on the promise of making meaningful work for everyone. Consider these ten example practices that support meaningful work:

1. Understand other people’s backgrounds. Demonstrate that User Experience is about discovering needs. User Experience is all about people and their contexts—whether customers, users, or stakeholders—so be respectful of that.
2. Listen before talking.
3. Use examples from alternative industry domains to provide different ideas. Take inspiration from what is possible in other domains. Move people outside their own domain and out of their bubble.
4. Use sketching as a way for people to open up, have some fun, and start building their confidence in their design abilities. Design is not always about creating finished, high-fidelity designs. Explore ideas by drawing sketches.
5. Demonstrate design artifacts that provide the structure for a project story. Show how the project story can help teammates create their own version of meaningful work.
6. Keep your toolkit simple, and ensure that tools are grounded in their context of use for your work. It’s not about the number of tools you know. It’s more about the tools’ quality and the outcomes you can achieve with them, in improving design solutions for people.
7. Find user groups to which people can relate. User groups reveal stories, and stories reveal observations that have implications for small and large elements of a design.
8. Set up a space in which collaborative work can happen. Ask probing questions to encourage conversations.
9. Listen to users’ stories and look for learnings that bridge to design opportunities. When walking through your designs, use your current learnings to support design decisions. Also, look for gaps in your learning.
10. These integrated practices support continuous learning and help us to mature in our UX design practice:
    
    • understanding users through stories
    • sensemaking of users’ stories you’ve collected
    • discovering observations
    • gleaning insights that have design implications
    • working collaboratively to improve designs
    • applying these example practices in your daily work
    • opening up conversations about the barriers to making meaningful work that your team faces at work today”

Dan and Jo also recommend your reading their “Make Meaningful Work Manifesto.”

Working with a Product Team

“Members of the best product-development teams all take some responsibility for a product’s UX design,” answers Jordan. “The UX designer should not be responsible for every aspect of the user experience. Assigning responsibility for the entire user experience of a product to a single person or department lets the rest of the product team off the hook. UX designers are most effective when they use their expertise to educate and support the rest of the product team in making important design decisions. So UX designers’ most valuable contribution is educating and supporting their team. UX designers contribute the least value when they make unilateral design decisions or accept authority over all key design decisions.”

Get Involved Early to Ensure a User-Centered Product-Development Process

“This might sound simple, but providing a foundation in user-centered design is a UX designer’s most important contribution,” answers Mark. “Too many products get designed with marketing or leveraging some great, new technology in mind. But you can build the most technologically sophisticated tool that will be impossible to market and sell unless it’s useful and usable. So ensuring that the product-development process is really oriented around listening to the voice of your users is the UX designer’s most valuable contribution.”

“By far the most valuable contributions I make to projects are the earliest ones I can make,” says Steven. “Defining the product scope, helping define the audience, and understanding users’ real needs are key. You can do this through analysis or research. I think ethnography is vastly more important than doing usability testing on a prototype. Ethnography leads to pure understanding, instead of just an 80% validation of an idea.

“Sometimes, the best contribution is killing a product that wouldn’t meet a real user need. Your analysis might show that an organization would do better by improving an existing product, instead of creating yet another app that would muddle their brand. Once you’ve progressed to testing prototypes, completion bias, the sunk-cost fallacy, and escalation of commitment may make it is hard to change direction significantly or determine that a product is a bad idea. At that point, it’s slightly less important to help with the data architecture, build a good information architecture, or help write content and labels that make sense.

“Designing the user interface (UI) is nice. It’s fun to do. It’s good to add to your portfolio. But, in comparison to the many other things a UX designer can influence, UI design has the least impact on the product overall.”

“The best contribution, in my opinion, is adding design input that is informed by research throughout the design and development process,” adds Ben. “What have you heard from users? More importantly, what does it mean for the future of the product? UX designers’ contributions are limited if they fail to advocate getting designs in front of users early and often. Designing without input or validation from users is a recipe for disaster.”

What Detracts from UX Designers’ Ability to Contribute?

“UX designers’ least-valuable contributions result in what I call ‘feed-the-development-beast’ environments,” answers Mark. “In these situations, there is no user-centered foundation and, instead, the UX designer is simply responding to feature requests, bug reports, or making spot updates to existing designs. This is generally no fault of the designer, but a result of the organization’s structure or processes. When design is simply a response to a business request or a technical bug, it’s not adding enough value.”