UX Concepts and Practices That We Wish Would Just Go Away!

Focus Groups and Preconceived Notions

“Although focus groups are not necessarily a UX practice, people often use them to gather information from users,” responds Michael. “I wish focus groups would go away. Oftentimes, focus groups stifle innovation and collect opinions that users would never normally have. Finding a facilitator who does not lead participants and finding participants who don’t suffer from group-think are rare. Focus groups may be okay for driving small incremental changes, but innovation happens in leaps. I have seen many great ideas and innovations killed in a focus group.”

“I don’t consider focus groups to be part of the UX toolkit,” adds Carol. “But many initial inquiries from prospective clients show that they are erroneously thinking that they need a focus group to understand their product’s user experience. Whenever clients pose the question to me, ‘Do you do focus groups?’ I respond by asking what it is that they want to understand about their users. That always leads to a discussion of the difference between focus-group studies and usability studies. Then, the next question invariably is: ‘So, how many people do you schedule for a session?’ That question invariably leads to a deeper discussion about the value of usability testing in uncovering the experiences of a single, targeted user during an hour-long session; then seeing how the experience works for a second user, a third user, and so on. Finally, that conversation invariably leads to the question, ‘But how can you get valid results from five or six—or eight or ten—participants?’ which invariably leads to the research by Nielsen and others on why five is enough.

“When prospective clients don’t approach user experience with the preconceived notion of doing focus groups, this indicates a maturity of understanding about the role and the value of UX research in the marketplace. To this day, the large number of prospective clients with whom I talk who have never done any user research other than market research continues to indicate that we are still a young discipline. Nevertheless, the fact that they want to do user research is an encouraging sign that more and more are understanding that they need to know about their users and understand user experience. Since I always anticipate the question about focus groups, I’m prepared to educate clients on the differences between market research and user research. But I will celebrate the day that this question goes away.”

“One UX practice that I wish would disappear is product design that is based on specific feature requests from users and clients,” replies Drew. “One of the most common expectations that prospective clients have is that their UX design agency will ask customers and internal stakeholders what they want and will then build out those feature requests. Many times, clients even have a feature list that they’ve gathered before beginning a project, and they expect the firm to design from that alone.

“Unfortunately, many UX firms will actually go ahead and do just that, so they fail to discover and solve the root problems that a new or evolving product should address. At best, that approach forces additional, incremental improvements; at worst, it causes feature bloat. ÄKTA’s approach is to observe, discover, and understand user behavior rather than simply ask users what they want. By doing this, we’re really able to identify the core challenges that users will encounter with a product—either now or in the future—and that knowledge allows us to architect and design solutions that overcome those challenges. We strongly believe that this approach leads to better, more efficient products that fulfill customer needs at a level much deeper than one can articulate in a quick feature request survey.”

Return on Investment (ROI)

“I wish that people would stop asking about the return on investment for user experience or usability,” answers Jim. “While, over the last several years, it seemed that requests for us to prove ROI had gone away, lately I’ve seen this question returning with some clients. In the early 2000s, when I was working on internal applications for a large corporation, we spent a lot of time trying to convince people of the ROI for usability. In theory, it was easy to demonstrate that an organization saves money if usability improvements save seconds or minutes of employees’ time, and you multiply that time by the number of employees using an application and the value of their time. But it was nearly impossible to get the actual figures because we never had accurate before and after measurements of performance. The irony was that it would have required a great deal of extra work and money to gather the metrics to show that usability improvements saved money. And no matter what we came up with, a skeptic could easily poke holes in it.

“I used to wonder, ‘Couldn’t people just stop asking for ROI and accept the common-sense notion that improving usability is worthwhile?’ Well, eventually they did. Usability and, later, user experience became widely known practices that are respected and valued in the business world. It wasn’t necessary to prove ROI anymore. People just accepted that a good user experience was valuable and essential. But lately, I’ve seen this concern creep back into our larger projects, so I wish that ROI would just go away.”

Roles and Politics

“Rather than look at any specific technique, tool, or vocabulary,” responds Leo, “I would prefer to look at what we could start, continue, and stop in terms of behaviors and politics. For those of us captured within organizations, opportunities to take the lead are growing every day. It’s time to step up to these leadership positions and take responsibility for all that such a shift implies: confidence, forward thinking, inclusiveness, and responding to the push-back that such leadership always invites. We need to continue to model a way of thinking that is often rare in engineering-driven—and even marketing-driven—organizations, using lateral, synthetic, and abductive reasoning. We need to stop playing the victim card—how the world doesn’t listen to us, marginalizes us, and fails to appreciate the value that we can bring.”

“I am an opponent of delegating user experience to one person or role,” responds Jordan. “I believe that each team member should bring his or her own flavor of user experience to the table—and organizations should encourage them to do so. In some recent meetings, I’ve been introduced as ‘the UX’ on the project. I’m the user experience? What a big responsibility. We need to stop obfuscating our roles, start evangelizing user-centric design, apply HCI principles throughout our projects, and stop trying to own user experience.”

“I wish the use of the term user experience as a catch-all for all of the skills that are required for product design and development would go away,” says Shane. “Organizations wanting to staff a product design and development team with a single UX specialist to cut product development costs are exploiting this catch-all term. Formerly, a product design and development team might have included product managers, business analysts, information architects, usability analysts, usability testing specialists, user interface developers, creative directors, and graphic artists—as well as brand managers and many other marketing specialists. Each of these is a specialized role—in many cases, having its own four-year degree.

“Now, more often than not, I see openings at organizations for a single UX Architect, requiring all of these skills and many years of experience in each of them—though perhaps requiring only a four-year computer science degree—but priced as a mid-career graphic designer. These are the organizations that publicly lament the shortage of ‘qualified candidates’ in the marketplace due to their failure to find a ‘purple squirrel.’ In my experience, this trend is the single most detrimental side effect of using the term user experience, because of the resulting schedule overruns, budget overruns, and unmarketable products that stem from this failed ‘lean’ approach to product development.”

Terminology and Semantics

“The UX practice that I think should go away is a consequence of two interrelated conditions—our insatiable love of UX jargon and our zeal to overpopulate an already littered field with redundant terminology,” replies Ronnie. “We are not doing ourselves any favors by talking in terms that our companies and clients struggle to understand.

“We—and I very much include myself here—suffer from a disease I call Heuristica Jargonistica—the seeming inability of a UX person to get out of his or her our own way in communicating our value and what we actually do. Having suffered from this affliction for years, I do think that I’m finally starting to get more control of this audible unpleasantness. For example, I’ll use the term heuristic these days only when someone else uses it—typically either a self-congratulatory ‘I read a UX book!’ jargon-dropper or someone who was a bit bewildered when the last UX person tried to explain or sell a heuristic evaluation—which of course, in most cases, was actually an expert review—another favorite. I do think lean UX—which is RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation), which is discount usability—does a much better job of humanizing language. I prefer ‘get out of the building and talk to people or watch what they do’ to ethnographic research or contextual inquiry. I don’t think I’ve mentioned bipolar emotional response testing in at least four years.

“Consider journey mapping—well, okay, not journey mapping, experience mapping—which is really about holistic—or is it omnichannel?—customer experience. But really, it’s for customers, so it’s customer experience mapping, or wait, no, it’s a customer journey map. So, hold on, come to think of it, it’s more like customer experience journey mapping. And we’re designing this, right? For employees, too? So, okay, what we’re doing in that case is employee experience journey mapping design. Isn’t this really service design though? Experience design?

“As a serial neologist and lover of acronyms, this is like crack. Or perhaps crack should be replaced with lean. Not the lean that seems to be in any business process that people want to simplify—for example, UX, manufacturing, learning, startups—I mean the drug made of cough syrup, soda, and jolly ranchers. I actually prefer its other name, Purple Drank, as it’s apparently purple and you can drink it.

“This is getting far too complicated. Perhaps we should start over. With journey mapping in mind, I hereby suggest a new name—the acronym for which helps explain, in human terms, what we really know about such naming conventions: Journey Alignment Customer Kinetics of Strategic Holistic Interactive Touchpoints, or JACKSHIT.”

This conversation reminds me of a frequent discussion on the IxDA discussion board in the early days of the organization: “What should we call our discipline?” Discussion was heated and—notably—the rate at which new members joined the group slowed down during these times. Companies need our skills to help them reach their goals—regardless of what we call our profession. Getting stuck in semantics helps nobody.

Lorem Ipsum—Huh?

“This is an easy one for me,” replies Caroline. “I hate lorem ipsum text and placeholder images. Participants in usability studies don’t understand them, which undermines the value of early testing. And they distort the design.”

Fewer Clicks

“I wish the idea that fewer clicks equals a better experience would just go away,” says Jordan. “This is another example of people trying to dictate a solution before properly understanding the problem. We should understand that optimizing user workflows involves several things, including how difficult it is for the user to click. Consider whether it would be better for a user to be able to make five clicks without thinking or make just one click after expending copious amounts of mental energy skimming the page and mulling the available options. Typically, users prefer to make quick, satisfactory decisions rather than mull over the consequences of each decision.”

This problem is reminiscent of a phenomenon in Graph Drawing (GD) Visualization—which had grown from the field of VLSI circuit design where:

1. It was necessary to draw a circuit as small as possible for manufacturing reasons.
2. Users typically did not need to view the circuit in use.

Thus, many GD algorithms focused on producing visualizations that were optimized for small size. However, in practical applications, having a bit of extra space actually improved visualizations. So, be sure that your UX methods serve their true purpose. Do not optimize methods in a particular way just because something has always been done a certain way. 

Reference

Bowles, Cennydd, and James Box. Undercover User Experience Design: Learn How to Do Great UX Work with Tiny Budgets, No Time, and Limited Support. Berkeley: New Riders, 2011.