When UX design isn’t sexy
I recently finished a project for a web application that the company I work for is releasing. This project was a tough one, requiring a lot of approvals, iterations and lots and lots of testing with a vastly diverse group of users. The end product is a solid, well researched, well tested series of interactions our team can be proud of. But, here’s the clincher, it’s not sexy.
I work for a company that built and maintains a license management software. We design, update and troubleshoot a series of web (and soon mobile) apps that our clients use to manage their license portfolios. For example, if a large liquor store chain needed to keep track of all its alcohol licenses for its various stores it would use our application to do so. It’s good work, it’s necessary work and, at times, extremely challenging work but it isn’t “cool” work. My team and I do a lot of data designing and work within the bounds of many of unique customer requirements and restrictions. These often lead to UX friendly but somewhat visually unspectacular designs. And there was a time in my career when that would have really bothered me. When I graduated from college I too wanted to work at a Brooklyn based startup, designing a new and innovative interface for the next killer app. Instead I wound up a junior designer at a large, well respected electronics ecommerce. And though my work wasn’t necessarily always Dribbble-worthy, I found myself working on challenging customer facing issues, working with an awesome and well-seasoned UX team and learning a TON on the job. It was at that job that I had a paradigm shift.
When leaving college it felt like the only way to “make it” was to work for Google or Uber, working on cutting edge products I could easily boast about at Creative South. My first job at that ecommerce (and my other jobs since then) have opened my eyes to a whole world of UX needs. There is a huge pool of highly used, important products out there that really need UX attention. Yes, maybe your primary demographic might comprise of middle aged women who remind you of your mom. Or busy doctors and nurses who depend on your application to appropriately chart and keep track of patient records. I’ve seen first hand how much a little UX magic can improve the lives and daily tasks of these users. Within a year of compiling a User Experience team the applications my company manages went from a 46% approval rating to an impressive 86%! We have hundreds of users, with an ever growing customer base, that interact with our application multiple times a day. The tasks they use our software for aren’t particularly exciting — tracking licenses, submitting renewals, contacting licensing agencies — but their jobs are a lot easier and more efficient because we put the time and effort into creating the most user friendly experience possible for them while using our application. At the rare moments I get to advise fresh faced, new UX grads I try to remind them that UX is all around us and everything we do should benefit from the touch of a UX designer. Designers don’t have to be working on the next, most innovative, unheard of product to be successful or change lives. Sometimes it’s the lesser known industries or the more “mundane” products that benefit most from the attention of a UX designer. And yeah, it isn’t often sexy, but it’s definitely rewarding.
