Are you wasting your Design & UX Resources

Investment in design and UX can easily be wasted in large organization. It is common practice for business units to commission UX studies, designs and prototypes to help them think and pitch product and feature ideas to their peers. Ideas can the be slated for production in a near finished state in theory helping a development team get a product or feature to market quickly. Make a lot of sense Right?

The problem is lots of these ideas don't make the cut, roadmap prioritization reacts to the market, if you fighting a competitor or have discovered a new opportunity for you business ideas will be shelved or scraped. The time / budget spent on design & UX for the ideas that didn't make the cut is effectively lost.

Even the ideas that do make the cut the have UX & design that has been executed months in advance of development, this always has to be reworked to fit a changed market, product or environment..

The solution is quite straight forwards, execute the idea / design / dev part of your work together after roadmap prioritization. Have a backlog of problems that need solving and let your dev team solve them for you.

Do this and the only things that will be cut are problems.

Lean UX - Moving design & UX into the development life cycle

If your working at a medium or large organization your probably familiar with a departmental structure that splits "UI Design & UX" and "Software development".

If your business has moved to agile scrum style development you'll also have encountered the situation where the designs for a giving feature or product needs to be reworked during implementation.



This iteration on design/UX as part of implementation is a very healthy one, it addresses the unknowns that may have not been present at the time a given feature was designed and allow the development team to adapt and implement ideas quickly, but a process that requires developers to make Design and UX decisions on the fly can be problematic, poor judgment and assumptions can degrade the quality of a user interface and disrupt product vision and longterm development.

Involving your UI Design & UX department in the iteration in principle could solve this issue but anyone that is familiar with an organization of this structure will know that passing work back and forth from one department to another when a problem is encounter creates a very un-agile development environment. Design & UX resource become stretched and development team slow.

Lean UX to the rescue.

Among other things Lean UX practice advocated embedding designers and UX professionals in your development teams enabling the team to iterate quickly to solve problems outside departmental silos. In practice this mean less design & UX is done up front, moving the focus to the Design/UX that happens during implementation.



Read more about Lean UX here: http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2011/03/07/lean-ux-getting-out-of-the-deliverables-business/

I currently involved in implementing Lean UX in our development teams and business here at Marktplaats.nl.

Check my blog over the coming months for some insight and practical tips on how Lean UX can improve you product development life cycle.

I will also be presenting at The UCD 2014 conference on London: http://2014.ucduk.org/