How to run AWFUL & EXPENSIVE UX Discoveries

It’s no secret that UX is the new big thing in development and advertising, which means that half of Cape Town have already come up with new, creative titles and are furiously wireframing everything from their breakfast to the card they plan on sending their mom for her birthday. If you’ve developed an interest in the discipline, why not learn to do it terribly? After all, mediocrity is not the true millennial’s way. Be better. Try harder. Shine — with these quick and easy tips to create the worst Discovery experience you possibly can for your clients and team.
DON’TS
Don’t prepare anything or do any pre-discovery research before your workshops with clients. Who needs an agenda, structure or to have context on any project (from simple to complex)? Clients love it when you know nothing about their business and want to play everything by ear, so come unprepared, but in a cool sweatshirt!
Don’t establish which elements they’ve already planned or use any of their research documents as a point of reference. After all, if you really want to alienate yourself from your clients, a good way is to discard all of their hard work and let them know how useless their opinions and insights are about their own brand.
Don’t set any specific outcomes or plans for what they can expect to gain from the session. This goes for clients and your team members. Everyone hates doing something that has no clear purpose, so if you want to run a truly awful, expensive and derailed session — this is a good way to go about it. Make sure they receive no presentations and planning documentation, so that they go back to their bosses empty-handed and struggle to communicate what was discovered to their teams.
Don’t bother including your clients and team members in the initial story mapping or app flow creation. A much better way to mess up the initial structure planning of a site or application is to make assumptions, put something together you think might work and then show them many times so that they can come back and tell you what you’re missing, what doesn’t make sense and where you didn’t understand their needs.
DO
Do promise them that your way will work. After all, UX is largely experimental in the initial stages and by making promises you can’t keep, you’ll be sure to temporarily excite them, only to see them feel the sheer depths of real disappointment when things need to be changed.
Do let them know that user testing won’t be necessary. It’s better to think of all users as the same and not make extra work for anybody. By doing this, you are well on your way to ensuring that you’ve all been involved in a costly, time-consuming exercise based on educated guesses and assumptions. That’s already a better job than you should be doing if you really want to succeed at futility.
Do make sure clients go hungry, while they tell you about their business for 4 hours. Think of clients as not human. Expect that they will not need sustenance or a break at any point. This is a good way to ensure they can’t concentrate, hate every moment of being with your team and can’t be of any use in terms of brainstorming, offering insights or critically evaluating plans with you.
Do leave out all the difficult and/or awkward bits, like identifying risks, detailing stakeholder expectations, plotting out the user journeys within the context of a basic structure. Yes, you may feel like you’re succeeding when the sad realisation hits that there are going to be very specific and distinct challenges but it’s far worse to ignore them and move along for the sake of fun and engagement. Make the session a true failure by avoiding the more difficult, but useful, bits.
And there you have it. follow my advice and you’ll be well on your way to creating an awful and terrible and very bad session for your clients and teammates, that yields almost no results!
For more info, e-mail: Kerry@nonacreative.com

