Contrarian Design Truths of Startups
From ACM Interactions / May — June 2016
Startups are a fascinating, unique animal amid the dynamic landscape of high-tech business. They arise from a bold, risky bet to deliver something “game changing,” making them seductive to UX professionals dedicated to delivering maximum design and research impact for potentially revolutionary (and wildly lucrative) projects. Why not, right? UX is sexy now — I mean, founders get it! And hey, it sure beats working for a lethargic corporate dinosaur lumbering toward a gradual mediocre demise … snooze! From an early-stage band of rebels cranking on the raw kernel of an idea to the late-stage pre-IPO company ready for public rock-star status amid a confetti-strewn backdrop at NASDAQ (note: It’s all virtual trading floors today; this is simply a photo-op set, folks), startups offer incredible opportunities for high-impact rapid growth. It’s exhilarating and marvelous and overwhelming, too. In any capacity, startups represent a truly amazing arena for testing your personal limits while achieving great things.
Yet it’s also curious to note that startups are kind of like black holes in interstellar space — the closer you get to them, sucked in by the massive pull of hype and potential, the more your rational HCI-informed sensibilities (e.g., for a collaborative user-centered design process) somehow get wildly warped and distorted. Then, boom! You’re deeply absorbed into that emergency-driven dysfunction of daily chaos: the startup routine.
Startups by their very nature are pressure cookers of decision-making, moving fast and furious with passion and urgency to deliver, following the collective fears and hopes of anxiously confident investors and makers, armed with scrappy tools that are just as temperamental, all driven by maniacal pursuits of “making it big” (blithely unaware that 90 percent of businesses fail, of course).
So, what about those HCI-based best practices and UX principles we learned and evolved in more tempered contexts like the academy or corporate design departments — those so-called truths of design? They seem to be thrown on their heads, flipped around, and maybe no longer valid since you’re now operating within the extremely volatile conditions of a startup. Indeed, you run into certain contrarian truths of design that become the procedural norm due to an internally dramatic ethos. Let’s look at a few choice examples that often perplex designers:
- Bold aspirational statements, such as saying, “We care about solving a big human problem” — which is truly admirable — but then not actually speaking to users whose problems we’re seeking to solve, since everyone is caught up in shipping to customers ASAP! Oops.
- Exasperated declarations that “we don’t have time for user research!” — because of a self-imposed urgent need to ship tomorrow-but then later spending 50 percent of everyone’s time reworking problems that could have been caught (and validated) through research. Not very effective at all, for anyone on the team.
- Design is championed as a collaborative, participatory activity, yet you’re often compelled to be a forceful, unilateral dictator to have your UX judgments implemented — especially while functioning as a “team of one.” There’s scant room for true collaboration with product “owners” and scrum “masters” (hmm, rather curious terms!), each armed with their own strong, combative personalities. All that team-based project experience from prior places? Maybe not as useful in this context.
- Being thrown into the fire immediately — a.k.a. Day One — since critical product elements have already been decided and preliminary tech infrastructure built out, leaving no room for proper preparation around the users or their context of use. Thus, you must design and deliver assets ASAP-the front-end developer is waiting right now! It’s very much like fixing a plane that’s already mid-flight with early users.
- What I call low information design is an urgent routine — especially if creating high-resolution mockups for upcoming press expos, sales meetings, or rushed marketing collateral, which are essentially “vapor” concepts rendered in high fidelity to generate investor money or pre-sales, without any research or business context. Hey, gotta do it!
- The “T-shaped designer” is popularly celebrated as the ideal construct for UX professionals, as advocated by Tom Kelley of IDEO. However, to thrive in the frenzy of a startup, you must be more of an “X-shaped designer,” pulled in multiple competing directions simultaneously, stretching to support diverging features and disciplines, and wearing various hats of decision making. If you ever wanted to contribute to the pricing model for a product, here’s your chance!
OK wait. Hold on. Clearly, for any sensible UX designer aiming to join a startup, there’s a certain willingness to suspend disbelief when it comes to accomplishing what is considered normal and valuable from the conventional view of HCI-informed practices.
So how does one maintain a sense of design integrity amid these profound contradictions? How do you maintain a well-intentioned, impactful spirit of the good, pragmatic designer and not lose your sanity, if not your professional demeanor? First, recognize that such distortion of norms in a startup is quite natural and acknowledge that nothing is perfect — by the way, this is a coping strategy of everyone else too, from programmers to sales reps. It’s simply that as designers we are typically the more perfectionist-oriented of the bunch, and thus face the burden of that expectation.
Second, to help reframe the practical aims of design within a startup, I offer these reminders to keep designers on the proper path of doing their best under duress:
- You’re making imperfect choices in an imperfect situation with the lack of adequate data or resources. As former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said, you go to war with the army you have, not the one you wish you had. Relatedly, often the best choice is the least imperfect choice because of these conditions. Swallow the jagged pill and move forward. Make 10 percent progress every day, even with the smallest design choices.
- Obviously everyone has an opinion. Even data (which is either other people’s opinions, or is interpreted by someone with biases). That’s OK! Don’t fight opinions. Triage, focus, and decide, no matter how imperfectly.
- Similarly, consider what esteemed design theorist Herbert Simon said: apply decision-making models to achieve what is practical and realistic, rather than what is perfectly ideal. Learn how to “satisfice”: Do what’s necessary yet sufficient to make forward progress. And iterate!
- It’s not about following the canonical UCD process correctly; it’s about enabling a context and approach where everyone participates in an imperfect, iterative, compromise-heavy, constraint-driven decision-making model where there is no one right answer, but positive progress is made toward customer satisfaction — and we’re all learning along the way!
- Ultimately, keep striving to help your customers be successful. That means making tough, unpopular choices. Try to do so while you balance the system’s integrity with where it makes sense to break it. Weigh risks, difficulties, and problems in tandem accordingly, gathering inputs where possible.
Look, there’s no one right way to design within the frantic wilderness of a startup context, but it is possible to maintain your sanity and keep a realistic grip on things as they swirl around, creating distortions and confusions that defy conventional wisdom. After all, it’s a startup. That’s what you as a designer signed up for, in the hopes of making strong user-driven progress. It’s supposed to be contrary to any humane, rational way of doing things — particularly when it comes to UX practices. That’s how extraordinary products and services somehow get built. Yet along with that comes a great responsibility to deliver what is significant and useful for customers.
Copyright held by author. The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2016 ACM, Inc.
Originally published at https://interactions.acm.org.
