5 User Experience (Customer Journey) lies, damn lies and absolute myths
Karl Smith
Exponential Growth Consulting | Catalyst Consulting | Customer Agility | CIO | CXO | C2C Only | Working in UK, EU and USA
1. Anyone can do user experience, nope!
I meet a lot of people claiming to do user experience, process and deliverables aside, they don’t have a usability background so they cannot do user experience.
User experience is a solution capability based upon usability principles and research findings not design aspirations
User experience is a solution capability (not all usability people can do user experience) based upon the experience of conducting usability testing and user research. Usability testing and user research provides the standards and experience of the user that is needed to understand their perspective, elicit the correct (there are wrong ones) requirements in workshops or testing and represent them in projects.
I met (in 2006) a UX expert, I’m always worried when I meet UX experts, because I am a UX expert. Anyway she was moving from Razorfish into the freelance world for the big bucks and working a large project for Honda cars through a digital agency. Unfortunately she did not know how to use any software apart from word, so I checked her out sure enough she was a PA at Razorfish not a UX architect as claimed.
This happens so often it’s shocking, my favourite one has to be the PHd student I met working as an accessibility consultant repackaging W3C guidelines as work for several agencies. What I love about this guy is he does public speaking and has even done UX London and people wonder why I’m not interested in these conferences!
There are loads more fakes some of them milking huge daily rates from major companies, as these companies don’t do any checking it’s their own fault, but it makes me quite sad that clients and employment agencies can’t tell the quality from the junk.
Not only is the user experience world full of fakes, I’d go as far to say that of the people I’ve met in the last 13 years involved in UX;
80% (8 in 10) of UX people are fakes and have no idea what they are doing
These fakes can certainly sell themselves and get work (now in some very senior positions) because the clients did not then and still don’t know what they should be getting out of a user experience professional.
2. User experience can be learned from reading books, nope!
Absolutely read books, but read lots of them, but don’t quote them like the Bible that’s a bit odd. But reading about someone else’s experience does not mean you have any or in fact really understand the context or scope of those experiences.
Do some testing and research, I’m seeing a great deal of roles advertised for UX researcher or UX workshopping this is a great concern as the priority of discovered requirements and their interrelation is almost impossible to communicate in written documents. This critical project information should always be available.
Separating UX research from the UX solution activity may make sense for IT activity but for User Experience Professionals it does not
I assume this was a bright idea of someone who doesn’t actually know anything about UX regardless of their job title.
3. User experience is an IT activity, nope!
User Experience is not an IT process, it starts in the business area before IT is involved
I know a lot of company IT departments have tried to subsume User Experience into their IT process; user experience is considerably less effective this way.
User Experience leads the projects speaking for the End User Stakeholders (customers) as the Business Stakeholders speak for the Business
User Experience fits better into Agile DevOps, Change Management, Operations or as separate Standards Authority within organizations.
4. User experience is a design activity, nope!
Not exactly no, it sets the project brief and requirements then latterly gets involved in research first before creating solution concepts, user testing concepts then defining the final solution.
If there is no research, user experience solutions are not possible
5. The cost of user experience is going down, nope!
Perhaps a better understanding is that the market is flooded with willing bodies, the quality goes down and so does the price because people find it difficult to sell invisible clothing (the kings new cloths) even to people who like the colour and the cut, so accept a reduced price.
So the value of the job title is going down.
User experience should provide major cost benefits and advancements to companies who wish to stand out from the crowd, provided they find people who know how to do UX correctly.
This is the same problem that Agile is going through, people have picked up the language and use one or two of the activities incorrectly but don’t exceed the current status quo because they don’t know how to.
Great Agile is fast and accurate, flexible and delivers usable software and change, just as Great User Experience should provide the experience that customers want and allow them to interact with the client, accurately and often.
Great User Experience delivers increased transactions, interactions and communications towards relationship building.
Lead Service Designer | Product Design | UX | Strategy | Leadership | AI | UI | Design Systems | South East - London based
7yMy favourite is when people 'look at a design' and make assumptions about it based on their personal bias. You have to test. Results trump opinions. You have to do the research up front. You have to understand usability, accessibility and concepts like affordance. I worked with a guy who was head of a UX lab and he didn't believe that anything had to be accessible or any usability work was needed because the 'client who signs off on it is responsible' , 'the client will tell us if there are things they want changed', 'we only do what the client asks us to do (explicit requirements)' and 'if the client says its good enough its good enough'. I asked him what value he thought his team brings - we keep costs down by doing it faster so we can fail faster. Well in that case he team is probably doing a great job at failing fast. Met up with a colleague recently on a design that did fail and failed quite big and she said the design was then changed to remove the error. Her assumption being that it was down to one. They never tested and had no customer insight and no way of knowing if the fix is enough. On yet another project I was asked to do a heuristic review (yes it should have been user testing) and after the fixes conversion went up by 75%. Again they saw this a win for 'iterative design'. I asked them why they thought having poor conversion for 6 months and an unknown number of customers going someplace else was worth going down the route to bad design? How do they know that my heuristic evaluation spotted everything and what the real opportunity could be? In all these things there seems to be a pattern of 'doing it fast and cheap'. Use experts sparingly if at all. Ignore the voice of the consumer. When in doubt do it over.