Your Design Process Cost
Being more strategical by considering your design process.
Recently, I’ve been learning to be a designer who is more strategic. In a sense, once I get a brief from PM, I will not execute it right away.
I’ll start by asking:
Is the problem valid?
Is it important?
Any supporting data?
Any previous research?
What is the consequence if I don’t execute it?
What is the impact if I execute it?
In a nutshell, is it worth the effort to execute?
I just received a brief to improve a page. The main objective is to increase its adoption rate.
Based on the data, only ~10% of users adopt the functionality of that page. No previous research has been conducted, and the problem is not yet fully understood. However, I was asked to fix the page by adding and removing some features.
I understand, from the product’s perspective, they’re aiming for at least having an improvement. my inner overthinker voice chimed in:
Do you even know what is the real problem is? Are you sure that you’re gonna make a real impact on this?
So, I said two letters that are seldom spoken by any designers all over the world — “NO”.
I advise the PM to find clarity on this issue and conduct research first. Ask the rest 90% of the users who are hesitant to adopt the function:
“What are their reason to not adopt?”
But on second thought, I knew conducting research was time-consuming. It’s not just about the cost, but more about the time investment. It might take a month for the whole process, from planning to execution, might span a month. We cannot ask random users because the product user is very segmented.
Eventually, I asked myself again:
What is the consequence if there’s no previous research?
What is the impact if we research first?
Is it worth the effort to prioritize research on this single issue?
After a thoughtful consideration, turns out it’s not worth it. The research-first approach is not always the best approach. It depends on your project and approach’s “cost”.
But that doesn’t mean you don’t need research. Use your own discretion to determine whether the “price” is worth the result.
In this case, I chose to take notes on several hypotheses that might be the root cause. I explored some solutions and tested the results. In the meantime, I also submit the reflection from this project to the research queue to be executed with other questions.
What if my design has a bad test result?
It means, that within my one week of work, I spared the developer team a whole month’s work on a feature that would fail.
What if my design has a good test result?
It means, that within my one week of work, I have helped the product team to take an opportunity that could have been delayed by one month of research.
As long as the intention and mindset are right, UX design works never failed