Fitting UX into a Pipeline. How Agile transformation won the war against UX Design.

The Agile Methodology might have killed the glory of UX.

No, I am not being dramatic. It is a sad realization, and hard to swallow. But in the fight of process vs quality, UX has lost the war.

I remember when I first got into User Experience. It was a buzz term back in the mid-2010s and, being curious as I was, I wanted to know all about it.

The mixture of research, analysis, and design was fascinating to me, and I soon shifted my career from Art Director to UI, eventually focusing on UX as well.

But what I learned back in the day has stayed most of the time in theory. In my career, it has been very few opportunities in which we have utilized all the available tools to provide the best experience for the end user.

What we hear time and time again is that this issue is concerning the budget. The client does not have enough for all the “fancy stuff”.

And while we all get puzzled by managers distancing themselves from something so valuable that can generate a lot of ROI, we just go with the flow. I am not the best person to articulate to a stakeholder why they should spend a bit more money and a bit more time to make things exponentially more valuable in the long run.

This failure comes with the cost of underperforming solutions. We know it's going to happen, but it's still hard to watch.

In reality, what truly happens is that most organizations, especially in the corporate world, are driven by the great force of steady mediocrity.

The slow, but constant movement of a train is predictable. Asking if we can hop off the train and take the time to find the nearest airport is like venturing into the unknown. It’s threatening.

Watching a brilliant insight die for the sake of keeping the process moving is much like watching Rose push Jack from the plank in Titanic. We all know that both could have fitted!

But as much as we can rely on a handful of tools and exercises, User Experience is not an exact science. Just like every client has a different need, we should take the time to evaluate what are those needs, and put in place the research to figure out what exactly is going on, way before committing to the final solution.

The truth is that most of the time UX has been involved in a very late stage. Stakeholders and managers have already signed off on what they consider to be the problem and the solution. And we’re supposed to implement these based on a contract, even if we judge those to be incorrect.

And because agencies have also relaxed to this business model of steady mediocrity, they will cram UX into a time/deliverables process that is so against learning and discoverability.

Learning that the contract has the wrong focus is threatening to managers and stakeholders. Companies have been habituated to certainty and admitting that one does not know the answers, or that we should do a “360” after finding out the issue has been completely misrepresented is threatening.

This constant certainty is very much the opposite of what UX represents. Learning the user, adapting, re-learning, and adapting can’t fit into an Agile methodology, where everything has been planned and execution is co-dependent on the previous sprint.

It is worth mentioning that this is not a criticism of Agile. But simply a realization that good UX cannot be assessed by how quickly it was implemented, but rather by its results. Trying to misuse a methodology only causes burnout and poor results.

Although not everything is lost, and most companies have at least claimed to understand the importance of UX (and adding a slide or two on their Powerpoint Decks about it), it is important to make these practices known to managers and clients.

Talking about what clients and users might will lose by rushing into production and delivery might be a solution. That requires managers also to question more, understand their motivations, and understand what is at stake for that project. Speaking the same language as stakeholders, in terms of financial missed opportunities, might help.

Good UX, when thought through and well implemented is always a win. A win for the company, client, and end-user. And a win for UX practitioners to implement what they know will improve the quality of the final product.

The UX utopia has failed to materialize but is never too late to try to save it.