Hi Pavan,
More than welcome! I enjoy learning from other perspectives, so I appreciate different points of view.
Here’s a story that may illustrate why I think UX is on the periphery of importance and doesn’t share space with fundamental dimensions of running a business.
Every year, a company that I worked for did something called ‘Big Room Planning’. They gathered everyone in a division (development, marketing, architects, sales, customer service, program management, executive leadership) to scope and estimate all projects across the board for the following calendar year.
There were huge pieces of butcher paper on the walls graphed out to represent calendar quarters, and tons of sticky notes with initial estimates given over email. It was gargantuan, involving over 300 employees. Half of them were remote.
I only discovered it after walking past the large conference room thinking… what the heck is going on here?
I brought a few of my designers there to ask what was going on and eventually figured it out. What dawned on us was… none of the estimates had factored in UX at all. It wasn’t scoped into time/budget considerations from the start.
That particular example showcases how some enterprise companies have a HUGE dissonance and fundamental misunderstanding of UX and design. It’s also an illustration of why UX still struggles today… it’s just not a fundemental part of running a business from an historical perspective (in the long term).
Can and will that change? Probably depends on the company and the people. Design is always going to be part of the equation. Same with research. UX? I would argue that it’s a dimension of design that will give way to specialized design disciplines that follow product development and new technology.
Thanks again for the commentary!
