Published on <a href="http://ift.tt/2mrg5zm">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Amelia Schmidt 
<h4>UXers might not seem like business consultants, but that’s often what they are.</h4>
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2lTeap7">Businesses are like Rube Goldberg machines — the tiniest decision is part of the bigger contraption
“User Experience designer” is what I call myself, but I’m struggling with the term. For anyone who identifies as a UXer, it’s generally clear to us what “user experience” means. But the problem comes from the broader misunderstanding of UX from outside of the industry — which is ultimately where the label matters the most. And more often then not, UXers are put in boxes that are far too small for our liking.
<h3>Get back to work</h3>
I frequently come up against an attitude that UXers shouldn’t be involved in business discussions. Comments like “Yes, but when I was in business school I learnt…” or “Hmm, it feels like this is no longer a design discussion” tend to indicate that the stakeholders have become uncomfortable with the scope of the assumptions being tested. Translation: go back to Photoshop and stop asking hard questions.
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2mrx5VV">Get back to the keyboard, Photoshop monkey!
But these conversations are inevitable. The discipline of UX (or what I think is really just design) fundamentally can be described as the intersection of user needs and business goals and technical constraints. But more often than not, UXers get sent off to handle the user needs and are expected to not touch the business goals side of the equation at all. And more often than not, it’s never provided to them at all.
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2lT9LCE">
<h3>The truth is: nobody actually knows what’s going on</h3>
I came to be a UXer because I kept asking why. I had this niggling sense that something was being hidden from me — and if I could get my hands on that information, I’d be able to make better decisions. Even when those decisions were aesthetic or relatively small scale, I couldn’t help wondering, how can I decided if I don’t understand the bigger goal?
So even when I was interviewing users and doing usability testing, that sense of confusion was there. Sure, it’s great to talk to users — and being an engineer, I do understand the technical constraints — but what about that last circle? I could still make entirely the wrong decisions without that information.
The more I dug around, the more I found that people couldn’t give me answers. Now, as a senior UXer with years of experience, I frequently sit with business owners and co-founders. And what I’ve found is that it’s not that things are being hidden from me — it’s that there is no greater purpose.
<blockquote>Most businesses I’ve worked with either don’t have goals or can’t effectively articulate their goals.</blockquote>
To be fair, not every business needs an inspirational manifesto and quarterly, monthly and weekly goals that inspire by starting with why. A laundromat doesn’t need that driving force — it’s fine to just run the business in a way that makes money, and the goal can just be “don’t run out of money”.
Many businesses succeed without higher purposes. Maybe yours does. Kudos to you, just keep on trucking — your kids should have food on the table and everyone you employ should feel like their job is safe. But you probably don’t need a UXer, either.
<h3>UX is a goal-based discipline</h3>
The subtle difference is that if you have employed a UXer or a UX team, they can’t really do their job unless there is some kind of mission. Even if that mission is “make enough money that we don’t have to fire people” that’s enough. It just needs to be defined so we can measure success.
The reason why they need a mission is that everything depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
You can ask a UX team to design you a solution, and you might assume that essentially what they will do is draw on centuries’ worth of accumulated design expertise via all their personal learning and the research available and present to you the obvious solution that all good designers would eventually come to.
The reality is vastly different. Any problem has thousands of possible solutions. UX designers are creative and innovation doesn’t come from the cliched, already-been-done solution — it comes from taking risks and trying new things. If all we were doing was just presenting back the obvious choice, our souls would probably leave our bodies. Creativity and innovation come from going wide, then narrowing down.
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2mrkXnZ">
So it’s fairly unsurprising then that UX hits a wall when:
<ul>
<li>The company doesn’t know its goals</li>
<li>The company refuses to share its goals</li>
<li>The company just doesn’t have goals</li>
<li>Or the UX team have failed to take the goals into account.</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>It’s impossible to actually do design if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve.</blockquote>
<h3>Cross-functional thinking</h3>
Better still: the best thing for good design is to combine different people from diverse ways of thinking. Business teams working with UX is helpful because people with business backgrounds think about problems differently to people with design or technical backgrounds.
UX is just the worst when it’s done in a little bubble. UX designers solving problems on their own is a disaster. Many methodologies like <a href="http://ift.tt/1A7qWC5">Design Sprints</a>, <a href="http://ift.tt/1LCSTIE">Design Studio</a>, and even Lean fundamentally exist to avoid confirmation bias. The best way for teams to actually innovate is to work together and bring together different ways of solving problems. That’s where good ideas come from.
<iframe src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FNugRZGDbPFU%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DNugRZGDbPFU&#038;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FNugRZGDbPFU%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=d04bfffea46d4aeda930ec88cc64b87c&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="854" height="480" frameborder="0"><a href="http://ift.tt/2lT11MS">http://ift.tt/2lT11MS</a></iframe>
<h3>Business leaders: include UX in your strategic vision</h3>
Even if your UX team are trying their hardest to get involved with the business goals, it’s up to the business to be able to be open and prepared to share.
If you find that you don’t want your UX team having access to your business strategy, then you might have accidentally hired UX when you need visual designers. That’s a shame, but at least now you know.
One thing to be prepared for is that UX’s job is to challenge assumptions and constantly validate them, which means that you might find including UX in higher level discussions makes you question some potentially very fundamental assumptions that drive your company. That’s probably going to feel scary, intimidating and even at times, kind of ridiculous.
Try getting a little more vulnerable than you are used to. The reason why you started your business is the ultimate goal that UX needs access to do a good job. Your reason might not be that exciting — maybe you were just financially stable enough to go out and try something new, and this was always something that you thought would be fun. Just be honest. The least helpful thing is feeding your UX team goals that are just made up. You’ll end up with some weird results.
<h3>UXers: address business goals along with user needs and technical considerations</h3>
It’s hard, I know. You’ve probably spent years skilling up in graphic and visual design, you have half a psych degree’s worth of people skills and research techniques, you understand data and analysis and you might even know how to code. And now you gotta learn business stuff?
That’s why UX is such a valuable profession. It requires you to take a step back and look at the big picture. When you are making a decision about how something should look or flow, you need to come back to what the user wants, what’s technically feasible and also what the company is trying to achieve.
In practice, this means spending time with internal stakeholders, which is often much harder than spending time with users. Users (mostly) love being asked what they want — they are rarely in a position of so much power. In strongly design-driven environments internal stakeholders will be more than happy to explain to you what drives the business, but it’s not always the case.
So next time you get into that situation where your choice of font ends up in a discussion with the founder about why they started the business, don’t worry. This is literally your job.
<img src="http://ift.tt/2mrdCog" width="1" height="1" alt="stat?event=post.clientViewed&amp;referrerSou">
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<a href="http://ift.tt/2lTdn7A">UX is deciding which font to use based on the business model and company mission</a> was originally published in <a href="http://ift.tt/2cAqCpx">Prototyping: From UX to Front End</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

UX is deciding which font to use based on the business model and company mission

UXers might not seem like business consultants, but that’s often what they are.

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