Your project costs are way too high because you don’t have a UX team.

Jordan Santos
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

This is the fourth meeting this week with that “difficult” client, they don’t agree with your current design and they believe that there design recommendations hold the most value in reaching their goals. Your development team has spent weeks creating this product only to have the client disapprove in under 10 minutes. It may be that the color isn’t right, there needs to be an extra feature, they may ask “ How do you know that this is going to drive sales? How is this going to provide they value I require?”. There is a lack of trust, so you take the disapproval and go back to the drawing board, for the 5th time.

Many businesses and agencies have gone through the pains of spending days coding projects, making them look superb, only to have the client disapprove, or worse yet fail to meet the needs of the user. This strategy waste time, which in turn waste money. Your team is burned out, they are disengaged and unwilling to put in their personal best just so this project gets finished and moved on with.

Your project costs may be uncomfortably higher because you don’t have a UX Design team whose sole job is to save you time and money, while giving the users what they actually need.

“User-Centered Design (designing with users in mind) ensures that your technology investments will meet customer needs and usability standards, resulting in higher user engagement, greater system efficiency and satisfied customers. Interaction designers quickly prototype and iterate UI designs based on user feedback before any code is written. This combination of expertise and process prevents expensive rework later because the system is designed right the first time.”- Chrys at Useagility

Where do you start if you want to try a different model to improve usability and decrease overall project development costs?

Try these 4 steps below with your design professionals.

1) Understand what “design” means in a product development world. We’re not talking about colors, logos or look-and-feel (visual design), we’re talking about workflow, navigation, information structure and use of standard interaction controls (interaction design). Get your team a good interaction designer, let that person talk with users and iterate the design via low-fidelity prototypes in a tool like Axure or Invision.

2) Find out when design is happening in your current development process and who is doing it. Then focus on shifting discovery and design prototyping to a UX resource. Use inexpensive design prototyping tools to quickly iterate UI concepts and (here’s the KEY to success) test designs with users in the early product design and planning stages.

3) Evaluate your team based on their actual activities and capabilities, not their titles. You’re not “doing UX” just because you have a UI developer. Unless your front-end developer is spending as much time talking with users as she is coding and bug fixing, you’re not there. UI developers are necessarily entrenched within development teams and are given full workloads writing code, performing QA and bug fixing. After your UX team has done their job, your UI developer will code faster and have less re-work.

4) Finally, code faster and with more confidence that you’re building the right solution. Remember, you SHIFTED design time from other team members to your UX expert. Make sure you realize that time trade off in shorter development timelines. If the UX and UI has already been designed, tested with users and reviewed with stakeholders, the rest of the team has a LOT less work to do. By this time, developers know the actual scope of what’s coming. They have fewer design decisions to debate and they have interactive design prototypes to follow that spell out what they need to build.

Remember, incorporating UX should be a time and money saving activity for your projects. At a minimum, expect it to be cost neutral with less customer support costs and increased revenue as positive business outcomes.

For the full article please read “Why Your Total Project Costs Are Actually Higher Without UX” written by Chrys at Useagility.

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Jordan Santos

Written by

Digital Product Designer | All things flow and rhythm. https://www.jordsantos.com/

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