Pragmatic Design Solutions

 In the last edition of Ask UXmatters, “Prioritizing Parts of a Design Project,” a reader asked what to do when you’ve come late to a project, find there’s no time or budget to make maximal UX impact. This has been an increasingly important topic as everyone admits that the dream of UX really changing the business is probably over, and we need to start building formal processes within the constraints we all work in.

Make Your Case

I can always work as quickly and cheaply as clients want, but is that what the product needs? Don’t just accept what they ask you to do, but explain your real value, your capabilities, and be ready to allay fears of your work adding time and complexity. Even when you have to work in limited scope, be sure to define what you are going to do, and not do, to set expectations.

Design Only the Structure

If I had to choose only one thing to do on every project, it would be to work at the information-architecture level—process, flows, tasks, behaviors, functionality, and data —without designing actual pages. The costs of fixing a faulty process are almost invariably much higher than building something right the first time. MVPs may benefit more from this than UI design with an indifferent backend.

Limit the Product Scope

Challenge team assumptions. More often than not, a website is cheaper and quicker to make than an app or several, and will be available to more customers instantly.

Find Out What You Really Know

Don’t trust the goals and objectives you see on the kickoff PowerPoint. Instead, find out where those assumptions came from and why. If one executive or a few customer complaints are driving all of them, dig deeper. I have often seen a few complaints lead to changes that angered the many other customers who liked the user interface the way it was. Complainers are always loudest, but not always right.

Watch Out for Third Parties

A lot of your design will be constrained by the use of frameworks, and actual third party providers of services. Ask, and learn all about them early on so your design time isn’t wasted and ignored or shoehorned into them. The other concern is with product teams assuming that third parties, competitors, and even OS makers, always know best and must be copied slavishly, instead of letting you design freely. Like the first tip, level set and know what you are going to be allowed to do.

Do It Right Anyway

Just because you get to design the UI for a handful of pages doesn’t mean you can’t consider the design more broadly, and make them all share a single style. If everyone likes the results, tell them what you did; you might be given more work, more responsibility, or more time for the next phase or piece of work.

Make a Style Guide

The biggest design issue that I see resulting from UI-only design methods is consistency. Too many design groups are their own worst enemy and approach each feature and each page individually. To create a single vision of a product design, you need a style guide. You can often make this as an internal document first, to guide your work, without formal approval to make it a deliverable. It will help your design work and you are set up the future.

Use UI Defaults

Consistency is important, but identifying what must be consistent and with what can be the trick. The style guide can help you maintain consistent structure and a general look and feel across platforms, but you mustn’t take this guide too far. You should use a whole lot of things just as they are for the operating system (OS) or Web browser.

Don’t Build What You Should Borrow or Steal

Let’s take this even further—to features, not just UI widgets. You rarely need to build your own maps, address book, photo system, contact form, and more. You can just embed or link to existing applications and features.

Read More

Getting hired is just the first step. To be successful—and most of all happy—in many cases, you’ll be able to define the scope of your job and help improve the organization and the products you work on. Read the whole article at UXmatters.

https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2021/05/pragmatic-design-solutions.php