
2 minutes conversation and learning of a lifetime
3 things related to design that I learned retrospectively from a short conversation I had at the start of one of my projects.
Imagine that you had the following conversation at the start of a major UX project.
Person A: “We want to do complete UX Refresh of the product after ‘many’ years. When can we get the Wireframes?”
Person B: “Wireframes!!!? What do you mean by UX refresh?”
Person A: “We need new fresh look and feel.”
Person B: “But, why are we doing? What do we want to achieve?”
Person A: “New funding, we need to show ROI asap. This product needs to sell like cakes. You should do your magic by putting some colors”.
I am sure you must have identified a couple of major challenges at multiple levels. But, according to me there were 3 underlined challenges…
- Misplaced priority — Intent is important
- Lack of design awareness — Others need to understand design
- No Empathy — All stakeholders need to understand the user context.
In more detail…
Misplaced Priority
“New funding, we need to show ROI asap. This product needs to sell like cakes…” CHALLENGE: We are improving the product because there is a new funding available at our disposal.
In this talk Simon in a very interesting way touches an important aspect of … INTENT - Why do we do what we do?
Therefore, if the reasons are not right, no matter how and what we do, right results would not come through. A UX refresh/improvement/new product/feature development should be to solve a user problem and not because we intent to sell the product like cakes. Dont get me wrong, we exist in the business to make money.
Customers will buy the product only if it solves something for them at an expense which is worth saving the effort.
Lack of Design Awareness
“We want to do complete UX Refresh of the product after ‘many’ years. When can we get the Wireframes?”
CHALLENGE: Design = Wireframes/hifi mockups
Most of the time teams which are not exposed to Design, tangible end product is equivalent to design. What they do not realize is that…Design is the Design (abstract process/method) to Design (create, tangible act of making) a Design (concept/form/idea).
Although a twisted quote, I really like this definition because it successfully wraps the complexity of “Design” with the tricks of language in one sentence. So design is not just about designing a product.
A great product is possible only if the organization around the product is carefully crafted and the processes, methods and tools used are thoughtfully adapted to bring the required out come.
No Empathy
“We need new fresh look and feel.”
CHALLENGE: Without caring about user’s actual need, most stakeholders think that a new look will be an experience panacea.
“Empathy fuels connection” and connection with users is important as it is the only way to identify and address the real problems. It takes a lot of effort, honesty and courage to be truly empathetic. And it is not enough if just the design team gains empathy. All the stakeholders should have a periodic access to users.
Regular participation of stakeholders during user interactions (like user research, validations, focus group study) works as eye opening session and provides them a first hand perspective on the real problem.
Solution we adopted
To navigate around these challenges we adapted ourselves in the following way…
- At the start we organized a 2 day workshop with key stakeholders to identify and dissect all problems and bring a consensus around problem space.
Clarity of Intent is must and needs to be revisited periodically through out the project. Alignment of intent within the teams and stakeholders helps in synchronizing the effort. - Build a process framework which enforced close collaboration within Design, PM & Development on a regular basis.
Creating Design awareness is a tough nut to crack since it involves work on multiple layers. With the process framework we forced collaboration with all stakeholders, this in turn helped them get a close view of what design is all about. Apart from this we strive to create…
An environment which nudges people to discover nuances about design.
A process which easy to follow, is modular, and replicable.
Set of Tools that optimize and generate high quality work, and the list goes on… - As an ongoing effort we are trying to imbibe a culture to fuel Empathy.
In every session we reiterate where we started from, key identified problems and then the subset of problems which we have agreed to solve and why. This is being done everytime we get our designs shared in small or large forums. This resulted in keeping the context in everybody's mind fresh.
But we are not even close on this one…
Fueling Empathy in an organization will take a lot of time since it is about changing outlook of each individual at a time.
Thanks for spending time on reading through this article. You feedback and thoughts are most welcome.

