UX Design Is Not the Cherry On Top
Admittedly I'm a sucker for the most beautiful and elegant user experiences. Poetically timed animations, great color palettes, emotion evoking brand elements, minimalistic and clean UI components are all various aspects of a great user experience.
Unfortunately my experience has been that there is a large spread misconception within product teams related to how these amazing user experiences are created and the necessary steps taken to achieve these best in class results. Time and time again I'll step into a new product team and as I'm being given a tour of the various customer facing products there is always a sort of bashful explanation as to why things look the way they do and that they are working on sorting things out. This is all fine and dandy and it is completely understandable that there are things that need to be improved within the application. Hell, I'm thankful that there are things that need to be improved or there wouldn't be much need for my skills. The challenge in these situations typically arises when we discuss how a better user experience can be achieved.
What these product teams don’t realize is that I can look at these disjointed customer facing user experiences and peer directly into the product teams disjointed product development processes. When given these tours I might hear something like “we are revamping some of our product management processes” or “we are ironing out some issues with our roadmap” or “we are still working on defining our north star”. I always think to myself, I know I can see it clear as day in your customer facing product.
The big misconception here I believe is that design is often looked at in these types of product organizations as the fixer, as the person or team that comes in and cleans up the UI and puts a cherry on top. And to a certain extent that can be true but it doesn't do any good to put a cherry on top if customers want vanilla cake and we baked a chocolate one. A good designer can definitely compensate for some of the shortcomings of a misaligned product team but it will be short-lived and with sporadic results. The best and most experienced design and product leaders understand that great UX design is achieved systematically and requires an entire product team.
The vast majority of best in class user experiences are not achieved by isolated mid or senior level designers that receive design directives with little context on user needs and business goals related to the specific design request and are just following generic orders like “make it pop” or “make it look and feel better”. Great user experiences are achieved by well synchronized product teams big or small, that continuously and systematically discover what their users want and deliver it to them while measuring the impact of their efforts along the way.