UX Responsibilities
When looking at an organization or product team and attempting to define how the experience domain should operate, I use a “hub and spoke” model. I view UX as the hub and other contributors such as stakeholders, developers, product managers, user researchers, and most importantly, users, as the spokes. All these spokes have needs, wants, requirements and expectations (referred to simply as ‘requirements’ from here forward) as they relate to a product or experience.
The UX domain’s first challenge is to capture and define each spoke’s requirements, and then distill them down to an experience that balances potentially competing requirements. The process of effectively running workshops, ideating, wireframing, reviewing designs with different spokes and delivering designs to engineers is all in service of balancing requirements.
Ultimately, the UX professional should be able to not only design an experience that balances all the spokes’ requirements, but also effectively present and explain to stakeholders how the final experience balances all the spokes’ requirements.
My UX Approach
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Technology as a Tool
Using technology is rarely a user’s end goal. Rather, technology is mostly used to achieve users’ goals.
Buying a shirt, talking to a friend, or locating a bank’s nearest branch are certainly goals that can be made easier using the right technology solution. In all these examples, though, technology is simply the path chosen to accomplish the goal. What if going to Target to buy the shirt were faster than using the Target app to do the same task? It’s likely that many users would decide to go into the store to buy. Most users don’t have any allegiance to a specific way to do a task — they just want to get it done as easily as possible.
This perspective is important to me, because it encourages simplicity while discouraging over-complication of the user experience. Keeping in mind that what I’m doing is simply empowering users to accomplish what they want or need is key to my approach.
Information Overload
I believe in the importance of balancing what a user wants to see with what is possible to see. There is a growing amount of information available in the world, and that bleeds into user experience often. Does a user want to see every possible specification of a lawnmower they are considering? Some users do, and others might not. It falls to the UX designer to (1) determine what those different users’ needs are, and (2) balance those needs and find a solution that satisfies both of them.
Summing up my approach:
Illustrations from absurd.design