UX collaboration is a terrible user experience - let's fix it
How many have you sat through a User Experience meeting? If you haven't, it goes a little something like this:
A talented and educated individual with a design or technical background (and glasses), spends weeks splitting their brains open to work out all the ins and outs of an application. Their intellectual investment in research, gap analysis, hierarchy of needs, and the user journey manifests itself into a 15-50 page pdf document, expertly and thoroughly organized and annotated. [America! Fist pump.]
This isn't just how the newsfeed is going to be reinvented or how the interface is going to fold up like a paper airplane. It represents the answers to questions like: What happens when a user loses their internet connection during a post request and then decides to restart the app? It's the things your users won't reward you for giving them, but sure as hell will let you know the minute they don't!
It sounds wonderful, doesn't it? A role that helps design and development do their job. A roadmap for the team and the product owners on what is being built! I mean, how could you possibly do ANYTHING in digital without great UX?!
THERE IS JUST ONE PROBLEM!
It's broken. It won't take you long to realize that almost no one likes looking at 20-50 page PDFs with annotations, regardless of how valuable that information is!!
Why?
- (Good) Designers need the freedom to reinvent UX patterns, and no matter how good the documentation, not starting with a blank slate can kill creativity.
- Engineers and developers now have incredible volumes of tools that increase their efficiency and productivity at their disposal. They need to have conversations about UX, not have it dictated to them.
- Project Managers and producers can't keep teams engaged in meetings or a document where they are constantly referencing different page numbers and having to remember points of flow.
- User Experience designers, (as in the people who are making the documents) even hate them because any time someone on the product team has an idea or major change, it requires a significant investment to get everything in the document to line back up.
IF THAT, wasn't bad enough... (which it is)
- Clients and business units don't like them because it's too hard to track a user journey across multiple pages, while paying attention to the technical details. They either don't understand it, don't care, or let it take place until they see the app functioning so that they can later decide everything needs to change. :) It's not your fault.
Crap. So now what?
Well readers, when we started Eight Bit Studios it gave us a chance to think differently about everything it meant to collaborate with clients. One MASSIVE pain point was watching UX professionals cracking their heads open, only to have their work dismantled as it entered design, then again in development, and one last time for good measure by the product owner.
We knew UX was important. Really important. Most people (and you) agree! But something had to be done to put it back into the heart of the project and give it the life it deserved. It needed to evolve.