Design debacles: Inappropriate approaches to product design
Tales from the trenches.
Setting the Stage
Organizations come in all different shapes and sizes; finding the right one for you as a designer (UX and product design) to thrive in is super important; it can make or break your success. Organizations have unique ways of working, and some are more UX/design-friendly than others. The ways of working are governed by different processes, mindsets, and frameworks that define collaboration and decision-making, and designers need the right conditions to thrive. Let's take a fantastic journey through the debacles of inappropriate approaches to product design and the consequences of havoc on the product, the people, and customers.
Note: Throughout this article, I use the terms product design, UX, and design interchangeably. In the end, organizations usually don’t have product design teams and UX teams; they usually have one and regardless of the title, they are responsible for the same thing; user-centricity.
Operational and Organizational Challenges
Different functions (like engineering, product management, marketing, sales, and content) within organizations are interrelated and dependant on one another for success. Most SaaS organizations are governed by the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), with product management setting the expectations. Engineering and product are very entangled and how engineering operates is essential to design. It is how our designs become real, how designs get translated into code and published on the Web and in App Stores. Proper implementation of the Agile SAFe framework can be super beneficial; however, poor execution can be devastating. Imagine 20+ lanes of work all marching towards their own goals and priorities, oblivious to each other's goals, and ignorant to cross-functional dependencies, with no portfolio management whatsoever. An environment like this is not suitable for anyone, especially design. Every lane has its own goals and priorities; this creates competition between lanes and a siloed way of thinking. Cross-functional and cross-company collaboration breaks down. Product managers and engineers put on their blinders and sprint towards their lane's feature release creating an execution bias oblivious to user needs; or product vision. We as designers know that features do not classify users; instead, user needs should drive the feature definitions and platform design. A poor implementation of SAFe pigeonholes design to UI, ignoring the holistic product experience and research required. SAFe is a production level, development management framework, not a strategic framework.
Product management is also a critical factor that impacts design. The mini-CEO model of product management coupled with a poor implementation of SAFe creates a harsh environment for good design practices. Design can become hindered, especially when organizations fill the mini-CEO roles with subject matter experts (SMEs) instead of experienced practitioners of Pragmatic Product Management, Agile Methods, Design Thinking, and Project Management. This mini-CEO model forces design to be in service of product management, not a peer to product management resulting in UX becoming order-takers unable to drive user-centric product design and opportunity selection. John Cutler's infographic below illustrates the difference in product teams.
It is also common practice for organizations to hire bootcampers, both for engineering roles and design roles, which in essence isn't bad as long as you have strong leadership in those disciplines. When product design leadership is weak; and you only hire bootcamp graduate designers, the fate of the bounds of product design suffers. Many bootcamps focus only on the tactical work of design like user interface design and validation techniques; they do not focus on strategic UX or research, which can create skill gaps in an organization transitioning into a design-led organization. Engineering and Scrum teams experience the adverse effects of hiring only bootcampers too. Software engineering design patterns are not taught in bootcamps; if engineers are unaware of industry best practices, these design patterns are never implemented. Poor software architecture and code quality are the results. Technical debt begins to pile up, bugs surface, and basic usability becomes a massive issue. Usability issues impact the people engaging with your product, and user trust begins to erode, resulting in damaged brand perception.
Design-led Resistance
Organizational resistance against anything design-led-like can show up in many ways. It can quickly become evident through a visceral reaction to any change that could promote order, purpose, and user-centricity. This resistance can show up in response to proposed user research. If the level of effort and lobbying required to begin a research initiative is high, there is resistance. There is resistance if leadership declares Stop-Work orders to define and implement a cross-functional human-centered way of working. If you must provide ROI (Return on Investment) on your design and research efforts, there is resistance. If leadership pushes Venture Design as the way and design leadership sets the Design Sprint expectation, there is resistance. The design team will be pigeonholed to UI, stuck being order takers of the mini-CEOs and unable to see beyond the Program Increment cycles, further blocking UX progression towards maturity.
Venture Design
Many organizations possess a strong production/execution bias steamrolling the Strategic Design process for a more Venture-like process. Venture-like Design Sprints are great methods to use when the problem space is well defined and we have user empathy. The values and principles of Venture are not inherently evil, and when used appropriately, have a significant impact. However, if strategic UX is non-existent; Design Sprints are not suitable. Our job as designers is to explore problems and users, so the company doesn't waste resources invested in building the "wrong thing."
When the UX team is approached with the problem space "this product isn't making enough money, we need to make more money," jumping into Design Sprints will not be fruitful. The problem statement is not a problem fitted for Venture Designs' Design Sprint method. Instead, it is time to dig deeper, ask the five whys, kick off research initiatives, scour research repositories, empathize with users, pull from analytics, and begin framing the problem. The design team needs to translate the business-facing problem into a user-facing problem to hypothesize and experiment on solutions.
So what happens when Venture Design is forced?
What happens when you have weak design leadership, product managers who aren’t really product managers, dysfunctional SAFe engineering teams, and competing priorities across the feature team backlogs?
What happens when an inappropriate approach to product design is followed?
Outcomes
The "wrong thing" continuously gets built and released when design teams take the wrong approach to product design. It is way more expensive to build the "wrong thing" than investing in UX to de-risk the solution to build the "right thing." Companies that build the "wrong thing" risk losing their market window, introducing mistrust amongst their users and customers, and damaging their brand. With the wrong approach to product design, UX cannot conduct proper Discoveries, Problem Framing, Ideation, Experimentation, and Iterations, many times resulting in poor experiences. Poor user experiences usually manifest through the NPS (Net Promoter Score). The NPS is a good indicator that something is amiss, but is an inferior method of understanding why it is amiss. Usually, the NPS isn't owned by the design team, so further digging ends up in someone else's hands, like customer success. When that metric begins to trend downward, customer success asks why, and the answer is "Bad UX." The implementation of Venture Design never allowed UX to deploy a benchmark plan to measure the intricacies of the experience. NPS is one metric to measure an entire Platform's worth of experiences. No indicators from studies like the System Usability Scale (SUS), no Standardized User Experience Percentile Rank (SUPR-Q), no UX-lite, no Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task success (HEART), no analytics to measure user behavior, no data plan to measure the success of the experience; only NPS. As you can imagine, the UX team becomes the scapegoat for the "Bad UX." The organization begins to see UX as a "liability," team morale declines, culture begins to degrade, and burrs go up. Toxicity is the name, and getting out of there is the game.
The BIG question: How can we avoid this?
If you are already in a position and questioning your organization's commitment to UX and design, below are a few steps to take to help assess your situation.
- Conduct the NN/g Maturity Assessment and ask leadership of their strategy to elevate it. If it doesn't exist, see the next bullet point.
- Suppose your design leadership has no vision for where design is going. There is no plan if zero thought is devoted to the Design Organization (we are here but need to get here). You may want to reflect on what you are seeking in your career.
- If problem statements come to you as "We are not making enough money, we need to make more money," and you are not allowed to do the work to reframe, you may want to reflect on what you are seeking in your career.
- You may want to reflect on what you seek in your career if the design team doesn't have C- Suite backing; it is not a UX-friendly environment. It has to come from the top.
If you are in the interviewing process considering a new position in a new organization and want to gauge their commitment to design, below are a few questions to ask. Remember, interviews are a two-way street!
- In the interview process, ask questions about the organization's operations and working methods. How do teams work together? How are decisions made? What level of influence and decision-making does UX possess in the organization?
- Ask about hierarchy, is UX in service of product management or a peer to product management?
- Ask about continuous research practices. Do they exist in the company? How are they benchmarking and measuring the success of the experience?
- Ask about the ratio of designers to developers, designers to PMs, and the number of researchers; being understaffed causes severe bottlenecks.
Wrap up
If you are experiencing some of these pain points (or all of them) as a designer in your organization, I think it's time to reflect upon yourself and your professional goals to discover the right fit. Maturity levels, processes, ways of working, leadership support, and organizational culture are all the ways we as designers can gauge if organizations are the right fit for us. No organization is perfect, and many are embarking on the design-led transformation. An actionable plan to get you from here to there is a step in the right direction, but sometimes not enough. The decision is a personal one, and you may be completely content exactly where you are, and that's OK. However, you deserve to feel fulfilled in your work and supported in providing the best value for your users to drive the best results for your organization. I hope you found this article useful, and, as always, I wish all UX practitioners success in their endeavors!
