UX: please, ask the punter
Fourteen years ago I created my first wireframe. it looked nothing like a website, but since no one knew anything about UX it impressed everyone. I suggested that a menu would let people find sections of the site they sought. After that, I became a guru…until rafts of university digital output began to demand something of value. Blow me, this is serious. Things got worse. I spent more and more time on UX sites being introduced to things like Mental models and latterly persuasive design. What? Clearly, marketing had passed this way and left spoors than had grown and become UX artefacts. IA and suchlike disappeared for a while as UX Design (rather close to visual design in certain instances) began talking about, ‘advocating for the user’. Really? You, rather precocious 20 years old can put yourself in the shoes of someone in their seventies coming to terms with digital. You really understand their ‘mental model?
the truth is UX is full of crap artefacts and methodologies. For me, the business of research, personas, user journeys, testable designs are the core of what we do. We arrive at a solution without a penny being spent on development. For sure, a super-duper sized website will demand many of the tools in the UX toolbox, but for most of the sites we work on they are not. Research and resulting insights are the keys to it all. The user is the best director of web design there is.
‘Advocating for the user?’ This phrase is nonsense. The truth is that this is the language of a good number of agency types with a profit to make and little time to do significant user research will be happy with this.
Signicant research should grow wherever digital produces are produced. It pays in the end, unless, as an agency, you are simply driven to deliver something quickly for a profit. I trust your Agile staff know enough about the importance of research and testing too You believe in it — on and accessibility too.
