Omar Raddaoui
Follow Engineer and creative individual with years of experience at the confluence of UX research and design, UX analytics, and product ownership in the automotive industry. I characterize myself as a complex system thinker. Contact me at omar.raddaoui@example.com. September 29, 2023
Maybe you’ve been in this situation: Mariya is a fresh graduate who joins an electronics company as a UX researcher and designer, and she’s eager to receive her first assignment and demonstrate what she can bring to the table. She is invited to an early project kick-off meeting. These early conversations involve key stakeholders seeking to choreograph the path forward for product exploration and development, including assigning roles and responsibilities. Twenty minutes into the meeting, another technical manager joins the call, and the next thing you know, the encounter derails into a debate about the superiority of technological solutions, what the product would look like, and its use cases. Mariya keeps quiet, listening to the big thinkers argue about things way above her pay grade.
This article teaches you how to troubleshoot UX design problems you may encounter during your practice. Think of it as a Hitchhiker’s Guide to UX Design. It aims to share a comprehensive, systemic assessment of critical problems and stumbling blocks hindering the delivery of useful, user-centered products. With augmented awareness of these issues, I believe UX designers can better spot subtle red flags and symptoms of dysfunction and proactively counteract them. As you know, changing course and fixing issues further downstream may prove prohibitively expensive.
Symptoms of dysfunction to look for
As an astute UX practitioner and observer, here are two good questions you may ask: When should I worry that the UX process is being impaired and deflected away from its foundational premise? Which symptoms of dysfunction bode ill for the experience I’m designing? Think of early warning signs of dysfunction, but do not confuse those with behaviors integral to a healthy UX process. Characteristically, UX processes are not necessarily clean, highly defined, circumscribed, and sequenced as though they were run in a chemistry lab. UX design is a different beast; if you do not hear or see indices of chaos, lack of structure, serendipity, and improvisation, you’re right to be concerned that the process is less than healthy.
Now, let’s talk about some symptoms of dysfunction:
- Heated, divisive debates: Exchanges between two or more participants from the same teams or from across teams overlap and heat up; conversations are unproductive and go against consensus building.
- Working in silos: The UX team is living in Lala land, developing idealistic solutions not shaped by input/feedback from other teams and existing workstreams.
- Jumping the gun: During the early phases of the project, teams formulate early consensus, jump to solutions all too prematurely, and start choreographing product attributes and use cases.
- Putting the cart before the horse: Product teams, including the UX team, decide on a path to a product. Yet, little evidence justifies the need to bring the product into being.
- Shutting the barn doors after the horse has bolted: Teams rush to the actual design component based on a loosely defined idea, then go back to close the loop and attach an improvised problem statement or use cases post-facto to suit the design.
- Squeezed discovery: UX designers are hard pressed by an action-oriented manager to skip ahead and deliver on tangible design specifications and are not allowed enough time to explore and deliberate on a problem.
- Mistaking movement for achievement: The UX team spends excessive time exploring a problem; they cannot decide and thus move the conversation past this stage.
- Jumping on the bandwagon: Assumptions or thoughts entertained during early exchanges between teams turn into givens at the level of collective awareness without being subjected to a proper validation process.
- Shiny but not useful: The UX team is called upon in the solution space only to pretty up a design.
- Streetlight Effect: The proposed solution does not address the problem identified initially. The Streetlight Effect is based on a story about a drunk man who once lost his keys. Instead of searching for them where they were lost, he started searching where there was more light!
- High versus low decision power: In one-on-one meetings, working-level sessions, or roundtable discussions, some teams or individuals act overconfident, dominate the conversation and hijack the direction of things. As a result, the UX team or UX designers feel sidelined, with little say in what gets debated or approved.
- UX team fed with a heavy dose of constraints: they’re tasked to operate within circumscribed perimeters from the get-go. This stifles their proverbial ability to think outside the box.
- Poor documentation practices: Knowledge about the problem is conveyed in an unstructured way and over a series of meetings with team members and stakeholders. Consequently, no proper documentation is left to trace the development process.
- Personal biases trump over method: Questions about UX are based mainly on the team’s personal experiences and not on known UX-specific methods, approaches, or tools.
- Much ambiguity, little confidence: Scoping is loose, direction is shaky, and objectives are unclear and sometimes conflicting.
- Who’s doing what?: There is no clear and documented distribution of roles and responsibilities.
A systematic overview of issues
To visualize the problems attendant upon UX design, let me briefly introduce the Double Diamond Innovation Framework (DDIF). DDIF splits the innovation process into two consecutive and iterative spaces: The problem space: This is where designers deploy divergent thinking to discover a problem both by measures of depth and breadth before converging on a well-grounded problem. The solution space: This is where designers diverge again to create ideas that solve the problem. Gradually and iteratively, designers converge on the most optimal solution.
Adapted from model by the UK Design Council
Two types of issues come to the spotlight:
- Issues at the level of overall project management. These suggest a lack of guardrails to prioritize and maintain user-centeredness throughout the process.
- Issues internal to the UX team. These are weaknesses in how the UX team carries out its UX tasks.
Project management issues impacting UX design
Here, we’re going to catalog issues based on where in the process they are likely to occur, with user centricity as a core value. As you review the columns below, remember that some issues might apply to both the problem and solution spaces.
Issues in the problem space
Issues in the solution space
Product teams do not follow a proper process for idea maturation due to a lack of awareness of adequate design processes
UX team surrounded by weak product leadership. Teams lack clear goals, milestones, vision, and strategy
“Budget, time, and resources limitations” squeeze the discovery process
Teams, including UX, move forward based on major, unproven, or invalidated assumptions
UX team overburdened by various teams’ expectations from the very start
Product teams do not view UX team input as critical throughout the development process
Technical teams decide on a path to a product in the absence of UX involvement
Product teams or individuals shut down new and novel ideas or solutions for fear of being confronted with the unexpected
UX team not well integrated into the product/team workflows
UX process and deliverables not mapped onto the product/software delivery roadmaps
UX team problems
Issues in the problem space
Issues in the solution space
Groupthink and conflict avoidance dampen divergent thinking by prioritizing social cohesion over accuracy
Lack of empirical research to validate assumptions; insufficient prototyping, testing, and iteration
UX team involves many functional partners; the process becomes chaotic and incoherent
UX team develops ideal solutions in isolation from other teams; no buy-in from key teams
Paralysis by analysis, indecision, fear of uncertainty, and failure
Idea fixation, delusional thinking, and personal biases
UX team efforts lack focus and prioritization
Feedback collected only from a few users
Solutions to common UX problems: Your way forward
So far, we’ve talked about symptoms of dysfunction and singled out issues arising at the problem and solutions spaces of the design process. As we seek to upgrade the UX designer’s toolbox, we must think in terms of first principles as they relate to UX design and apply them to the two central spaces: the problem and the solution:
- Ensure sufficient user involvement and research throughout the UX process.
- Prototype and iterate often on far-from-finished products and seek inputs from users.
- Rinse, lather, repeat.
