uxstudio

Risk mitigation is one of the many benefits that a well run User Experience practice brings to technology development companies. There are several dimensions to be considered:

Effectiveness: Understand Users
Does your company talk with and observe the end users of your products as part of its design research program? If not, it could be introducing serious risk into the business. Neglecting end users in design introduces a number of potential problems:

• Building the wrong product
• Under-specifying the product
• Creating tasks and features that are difficult to navigate and use
• Creating the product for the wrong users

Any one of the above can cause your company to lose sales, or even go out of business. This is particularly true in a market where your competitors do take the time to understand the real-world usage scenarios of their customers and then design their products to meet those needs.

Efficiency: Specifications & Development
Imagine trying to build a house, a car, or any other object of moderate to high complexity without a detailed set of blueprints and specifications. It’s just not done. Well you could certainly try it, but I guarantee you’d be in for a rough ride.

Software is often developed with anemic or minimalist requirements and specification documents. Without these artifacts, it’s difficult to scope out the level of effort that will be required to build the solution. Worse yet, the development team won’t even have a clear picture of what it is they are supposed to be building. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, the development team will have to spend inordinate amounts of time discussing and arguing about what the design ought to be. Since most developers have very little contact with end users, you end up building the wrong product (as I discussed above). This is a very vicious circle indeed.

Demo or Die…Or Die in Demo
Imagine someone is trying to sell you a solution that will address some of your pressing business needs. They show you screen after complicated screen. The demo drags on as you try to map the task that’s been described to the complexity of the UI. It just looks difficult. You think about all the people on your team who will have to struggle with learning and using this product.

Now contrast this with a demo where the logic of the solution is clearly illustrated by what is happening on screen. The layouts and flows are clear. Everything just makes sense.

All things being relatively equal, which solution would you buy? Even if the better design solution costs a bit more, you’d make the difference up in faster training times and better worker productivity. We already know that people will pay for good design. They do it all the time for all the rest of the products & services they purchase.