Fear, Risk, and UX Rocket Science
Do you ever watch Saturday morning cartoons and think, “The Roadrunner is pretty lucky the Acme company that Wile E. Coyote ordered all his stuff from has no UX process”?
The principles of User Experience are poorly understood by many people, even inside the tech world. By now, everyone has heard the somewhat demeaning dismissal of UX’s job being “to make things look pretty.” We do a whole lot more. But it begs the question to those who don’t know the value of UX. It is this:
The real value of UX is that it minimizes risk.
UX ensures that collaborative work delivers a product that meets our users’ needs. Of course, this is coming from a UX Designer and Researcher, and you might be inclined to roll your eyes and say, “Oh, sure. When you’re a hammer, all your problems look like nails.” And yet, look at all these nails everywhere. Well, we’re doing something about all these pesky nails.
Often in development, departments begin developing a product based not so much on user research or analysis, but on a guess. These guesses usually are presented as anecdotal tales of a single influential person’s experience. But to go to development straight from ideation doesn’t honor the science of what we do. It’s just an untested hypothesis, and it leaves discovery and testing out of the process.
All of us experience stress. There is stress from the pressure to deliver and ship a product. We feel anxiety over whether or not we’re performing. Everyone wants to be a valued asset to the team. It’s normal to feel these sorts of pressures. All of us feel them every day. But we must understand that there is one big dirty F-word driving all of these impulses: Fear.
There’s a chain of causality that fear generates while we’re living in a state of uncertainty. Uncertainty leads to anxiety, anxiety leads to a clouded mind, and such a mind often makes bad decisions.
But fear not! There’s a way to rid ourselves of all this fear and pressure by gathering knowledge through discovery. And that’s one of UX’s main pillars.
Anxiety’s Estuary and the Light of Discovery
“There is nothing in the dark that isn’t there when the lights are on.” — Rod Serling
UX’s methods of discovery, research, prototyping, and testing are the tools we use to minimize uncertainty, and therefore risk in the equation. We don’t want to wait to react to whatever is happening — we want to act. It’s always in our best interest to get ahead of the curve and lead, not just follow along.
UX helps us discover whether or not we are creating the right thing for our customers. And if we haven’t looked into it, the “risk factor” is infinitely higher. Without UX we have no guarantee that marketing can promote what we produce or that the salespeople can sell them. For instance, by show of hands, how many of you had iPods? Now hands up for those of you who had Zunes. I rest my case.
We Can’t Afford to Not Have Good UX
In our business, the actual risk of not applying UX to product development is in the form of colossal wastes of time, money, and energy. Ignoring UX leads to proportional levels of frustration, both for our customers and ourselves. It’s of utmost importance to know what problems we need to solve at the beginning of our process. We need to understand what our users value. We must be sure that our decisions stand on solid facts and not assumptions.
As advocates for the users, UX researchers also develop empathy between product development and our customers. Doing this doesn’t mean we have to engage in a lot of unsolicited hugging or anything. It just means we train our focus on solving the user’s problem by keeping their values in the front of our minds. Empathy development is a critical step in creating products that make our customers happy and loyal.
Go a Little Bit Out of Your Depth
Ah, but there it is again. That little nagging fear of departing from the establishment and the illusion of safety. The devil you know. It’s the reason why people stick around in horrible relationships or never leave the hometown they can’t stop complaining about. There’s comfort in “the known.” Sometimes even a certainty that things will continue to be generally miserable is preferable to the unknown. To paraphrase The Shawshank Redemption, it’s like the walls of a prison that you can depend on. But if we let ourselves remain confined in that prison, we can also be sure that we will never learn or grow.
David Bowie, a fearless leader of transformation if ever there was one, famously said, “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
Essentially, we need to get out of our comfort zones to grow. We must take risks. Risks are indeed frightening, but there are tools to minimize those risks and the sharp spikes of fear that go along with it. If we never take risks, we get stuck in the dark of uncertainty, anxiety’s estuary. Better to pluck up our courage and take a leap rather than hang around in a sense of low-grade gloom forever, watching the world pass us by.
From Crossing the Street To The Sea of Tranquility
This is not to say that a little fear can’t keep someone out of the path of oncoming traffic. The risks we take must, of course, be calculated ones. Imagine you have to get across a busy street on foot, but (for the sake of argument) you’ve never seen traffic lights, pedestrian signs, or crosswalks before.
If you take a moment to observe and watch for patterns, you begin to figure out that the flow of cars moves in a certain way when the lights change in a correlated order. You then deduce that crossing at the corner when the “walk” sign on is preferable to just leaping out into traffic and hoping for the best. This is how discovery and research lead to results with less risk. Blindly wandering out into traffic is, well, the other thing.
You could conclude that the safest course of action is to simply never try crossing the street at all, but doing nothing also guarantees that you’ll never get anywhere. And going nowhere isn’t safe either.
There is good news, though. If we adopt UX principles and minimize our risks, we build a track record of good decisions. And that leads to the coveted quality of certainty. And eventually, with enough certainty, there comes confidence. And few things are as valuable as true, honest confidence.
Confidence is the warm beating heart that took humanity from cowering in trees to walking on the moon. Of course, getting that far had its pains of growth. But as with any worthy achievement, we researched, tested, and made prototypes along the way. Yes, sometimes we failed, and that came with a cost. That cost would have been orders of magnitude higher if we had not researched, tested, and experimented before strapping some crazily brave people to the top of a rocket and blasting it into space!
Luckily for us, the stakes are rarely that high, but I choose to use this as inspiration. The next time you’re involved in a development cycle and there’s no testing or research, think of it as though it’s a rocket you’re going to strap yourself to. Then ask yourself if you’d rather be Alan Shepard or Wile E. Coyote.
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”— Marie Curie
“…” — Wile E. Coyote
