{"id":2865,"date":"2019-12-02T12:53:27","date_gmt":"2019-12-02T17:53:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.daed.com\/?p=2865"},"modified":"2024-07-11T10:59:01","modified_gmt":"2024-07-11T14:59:01","slug":"the-road-to-ux-hell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.daed.com\/?p=2865","title":{"rendered":"The Road to UX Hell&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; color: #000000;\">Recently, I\u2019ve begun to see articles and blog posts suggesting that UX, as a discipline, should be retired.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/venturebeat.com\/2019\/11\/02\/its-time-to-do-away-with-the-ux-discipline\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Code and Theory CEO Dan Gardner<\/a><span style=\"color: #000000;\">, believes that UX has \u201cmoved from the domain of the few into the work practice of everyone\u201d and goes on to declare that \u201c[UX] may not be in every job title, but it\u2019s part of every job.\u201d Ernie Smith, social media journalist for Associations Now agrees, urging companies to not \u201c<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/associationsnow.com\/2019\/11\/four-strategies-for-improving-ux-focus-at-your-association\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">silo UX under a single department<\/a><span style=\"color: #000000;\">.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-heading\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; color: #000000;\"><span class=\"tadv-color\" style=\"color: #000000;\">Reading these articles, what came to my mind was: <em>here we go again<\/em>.<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; color: #000000;\">I\u2019ve been in the UX industry for over 20 years. Perhaps that\u2019s not long compared to some (I hope someday to have been in the field as long as Don Norman) but it\u2019s certainly long enough to have seen the cyclical pattern that has befallen UX design in the past.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; color: #000000;\">Take a company that has relied on its engineers to design and build everything, including the user\u2019s interaction points, for years. They realize that their UX is&#8230;less than optimal. Actually, it\u2019s often rather dreadful by the time a company is willing to recognize that they have a problem.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; color: #000000;\">The company leaders decide <em>we need to bring in experts to fix this<\/em>. So they build up a new team filled with skilled user experience and user interface designers, maybe even a few human factors experts as well. Over the next several years, that team diligently crafts elegant and user-friendly experiences, and they do it exceptionally well.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; color: #000000;\">Too well\u2014because they make UX design look <em>easy<\/em>. And therein lies their downfall.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; color: #000000;\">Those same company leaders conveniently forget the past, and they start to think <em>our engineers can do this<\/em>. And either through attrition or outright lay-offs, the UX team crumbles. A few years later, the UX is dreadful once again, and the company leaders start to think <em>we need to bring in experts to fix this<\/em>. And the cycle begins anew.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; color: #000000;\">It\u2019s not just UX that falls prey to this tendency. I\u2019ve seen it happen with Quality Assurance as well. \u201c<em>Hey, last year we asked everyone to focus on QA \u2026 why did our quality drop?<\/em>\u201d Perhaps because you laid off the entire QA team after you asked everyone else to focus on QA?<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<h2 class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-heading\"><span class=\"tadv-color\" style=\"color: #000000;\">When UX is everyone&#8217;s job, it is no one&#8217;s job<\/span><\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; color: #000000;\">My point is: when QA is everyone\u2019s job, it is no one\u2019s job. And when UX is everyone\u2019s job, it is <em>no one\u2019s<\/em> job.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; color: #000000;\">Employees will focus on the primary responsibilities of their job. If it\u2019s not in their job title, it\u2019s not going to be the focus of their work practice. If an employee\u2019s primary role is coding, she is probably going to draft amazing code\u2014but that won\u2019t necessarily translate into an amazing UX. If the employee\u2019s primary role is visual design, he will give you a truly beautiful user interface\u2014but that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean it will be usable or even useful.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; color: #000000;\">Despite the best of intentions, without a discipline whose primary role it is to focus on the user, <strong>your user will become a secondary concern<\/strong>. And when your user comes in second, so does your UX.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Given recent estimates that<\/span> <a href=\"https:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/coach-courses-us\/public\/theuxschool\/uploads\/The_Trillion_Dollar_UX_Problem.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bad UX may soon cost e-commerce companies over a trillion dollars in lost sales<\/a><span style=\"color: #000000;\">, is that a chance you really want to take?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\r\n\r\n\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">User at Desk Icons made by<\/span> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.freepik.com\">Freepik\u00a0<\/a><span style=\"color: #000000;\">from<\/span> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flaticon.com\/\">www.flaticon.com<\/a><\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, I\u2019ve begun to see articles and blog posts suggesting that UX, as a discipline, should be retired. Code and Theory CEO Dan Gardner, believes that UX has \u201cmoved from &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":3927,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,3],"tags":[163,66,175],"class_list":["post-2865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-thinking","category-ergonomics-cognition","category-product-development","tag-product-development","tag-user-experience","tag-ux-design"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.10 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Road to UX Hell... - daed.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.daed.com\/?p=2865\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Road to UX Hell... - daed.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Recently, I\u2019ve begun to see articles and blog posts suggesting that UX, as a discipline, should be retired. 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