The UX Process is Confusing, Even to Most Designers

Version 2.1 re-publication: October 8, 2020

In the beginning there was Donald A. Norman, and he created the idea of user experience design.

I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual. Since then the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose its meaning.

— Donald Norman

By 2016, Don Norman was pretty vocal about how badly misunderstood the term had become. He talks about it in this short YouTube video. These days he says he’s a people designer (apologies, I’ve misplaced the interview link), sort of, but he’s non-committal about the title.

I can’t think of a better place to start unraveling the weird and confusing world of modern UX Design than this: Not even the originator of our field knows what to call himself anymore.

De-obfuscating modern UX requires understanding the history of both design and development since the 1990s. They’re intrinsically linked, so it helps to start just a few years after it all began.

Classic User Experience Design

In its purest form, UX Design is waterfall based.

Image courtesy of Swipecubes

A product team working through the waterfall methodology sets out to learn everything they possibly can before building even the simplest prototype. Research can take months, or even years to complete; and the results dictate a design team’s execution. The requirements lock before design kicks off, and design locks before development kicks off. There’s no going back, not until version 2.0. That’s just how waterfall operates.

A classic UX process is usually taught to college students. It goes like this:

1. Do research to discover what the problem is
2. Categorize the problems you uncover
3. Create personas and journey maps
4. Run ideation exercises to generate ideas
5. Build and test a prototype
6. Send the final prototype out the door to development
7. Launch the product
8. Return to step 1 based on user feedback

That’s basically a waterfall. The classic elements of UX (Jesse James Garrett) also follow a waterfall schema, building an execution from the bottom up based on well articulated requirements.

The problem is that classic UX is fundamentally incompatible with agile.

Along Came Agile

For a long time innovation in the Silicon Valley was driven by Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Superimpose a waterfall process and you’ll notice that it fits nicely into a 24 month cadence. Business, design, and development cycles worked like a Swiss timepiece; perfectly attuned to the release of a new Intel chipset.

Then one day Sony, Toshiba, and IBM (The STI Alliance) decided that Moore’s Law was too slow.

STI created the first cell chip, which stacked 8 microprocessor cores on a single wafer, and the damn thing actually worked (it powered the Playstation 2). Multi-core architecture changed everything.

Moore’s law didn’t break, it got life-hacked. What did break was waterfall.

Almost overnight speed and flexibility replaced precision and predictability as competitive advantages. Companies turned en masse to another well established but underutilized development methodology: Agile.

Agile focuses on rapid iteration. It releases a new set of shippable increments (features) every 2-4 weeks, evolving a product over time instead of all at once. It’s based on hypothesis, experimentation, rapid release, and real-time measurement. In Agile there is no editing stage, there is no perfection. As Bre Pettis put it in 2009… done is the engine of more.

Waterfall’s painstaking “measure twice, cut once” approach went out of style faster than a StarTAC in a room full of iPhones.

There Was Just This One Small Problem Though

Classic UX operated on a waterfall cadence.

With feature releases happening once or twice a month there wasn’t time to wait for UX Designers to execute their process. In Agile nomenclature UX became a blocker and it was a bad one.

Faced with an immovable block most teams simply abandoned UX. In its place they hired young graphic designers who were capable of turning out assets on a two-week cadence. Those designers weren’t real UXers, not in the classic sense, but they knew just enough about user centered design to avoid making the worst types of mistakes.

That was okay with product development teams. The details, they figured, would work themselves out through iteration.

Care to take a guess at what the Agile title for that type of designer was?

If you answered “UI/UX Designer” give yourself a cookie.

UI/UX Designers were at the heart of the storm when Apple proved that a design-led business could become the most valuable brand in the world. They carried the torch of UX when UX itself couldn’t sharpen a pencil inside of a two-week sprint, let alone design a feature. They made UX a household name.

It came at a cost though.

The UI/UX bias towards digital and graphic design badly skewed the business world’s perception what an experience designer does. To this day far too many businesses still think of UX as a visual discipline. As Don Norman has been trying to explain, that’s incorrect.

Things didn’t start to get better until 2013.

Lean UX

Lean UX was Jeff Gothelf’s game changing answer to the problem of practicing UX in an agile environment. In his seminal masterwork, Jeff turned the entire field of UX on its head. The book introduces a series of strategy and alignment activities, which allow UX to operate inside of agile’s cone of uncertainty and rapidly update designs based on user feedback.

Whereas classic UX is requirements based, Lean UX is outcome based. If you need a quick primer on how that works, O’Reilly has a free chapter available online that breaks things down in no-nonsense terms.

Lean UX within an Agile environment, by Dave Landis

Lean UX wasn’t perfect though. While UX was now able to harmonize with an agile cadence, the lean model broke down if a product was vaguely defined –basically anything un-launched – and quickly devolved back into engineers doing design and designers fixing it.

Under agile designers also found themselves under immense pressure to fill a sprint backlog before they really understood what they were building. As a result a lot of development cycles got burned on features that never made it into the final product. In project management circles, the Lean UX / Agile pairing was known for a high volume of waste and rework when attempted under less than ideal conditions.

In a mature product there is lots of user feedback coming in, which does wonderful job of driving the iterative cycle that powers Lean UX. That’s why Lean UX is the industry standard on almost any established product team. Nobody in their right mind would change a thing.

On establishing teams, however, the user feedback cycle has yet to ignite itself. The waste and rework problem in those circumstances was serious enough that it often crippled the adoption of Lean UX. This presented a real conundrum for startups and skunkworks units that wanted to ensure a strong UX component without reverting back to a waterfall cadence.

And then it happened. The thing that would make UX work for the fast generation came out of the sky like a bolt of lightning and solved the agile process problem with the design sprint. Despite having roots in the work of Stanford, the d.school, and McKinsey nobody saw it coming until Jake Knapp and Google Ventures named it and put it to work at scale.

Just like that the long dark night of UX was finally over.

The Google Ventures Design Sprint

If you were to look at a design sprint and say “wait, that’s just really fast classic UX” you wouldn’t be far off the mark. The difference (and genius) is that it’s classic UX at an incredibly low fidelity. It’s the difference between an artistic masterpiece and a napkin sketch — but it works.

The goal of a design sprint is to take all of the existing research about a problem, unpack its essence to a diverse group, then ideate like crazy. The ideations are then funneled through the lenses of human centered design and those that survive are voted on by the team. Designers then build a low-fidelity prototype (often in just one day) that is just barely good enough to test on potential users. The results of the test, if positive, create a target for designers to hit in high-fidelity; thus fueling the Lean UX/Agile cycle.

Magic.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke

Dual Track Design

So now we come to the point of modern day UX methodology.

As you might expect, dual track design has two tracks (a Sherlock Holmes level deduction, I know, don’t everybody gasp at once):

1. The design thinking/research track powers a design sprint
2. The Lean UX/Agile track powers iterative experimentation

A product team is typically running on track two unless the backlog becomes poorly defined. If that happens, the problem is assessed and the team runs a design sprint. Problem solved.

But where does that assessment come from if the production team is busy practicing Lean UX?

The most obvious answer is that a proper iterative feedback cycle, which includes strong analytics, tells a team what to tune. That works well for sprint-to-sprint planning but it doesn’t always see the big picture of what could be. It doesn’t power what was popularly called disruption for the better part of a generation.

Where does the breakthrough thinking come from?

The most effective answer is to put a dedicated team on it. While design & development pumps out iterations, a research team investigates the results much more comprehensively in the background. Because that research team isn’t bound to an Agile sprint cadence they still have the luxury of taking 3 months to reach a conclusion.

Every few months a fresh infusion of new insight will hit the production teams, filling their backlog with new ideas for experimentation. Most enterprises now have a data science team and a qualitative research team (affectionately known as test & learn) feeding knowledge to multiple creative units. The insight is infrequent, as researchers have much longer delivery cycles, but when it comes down the line it’s eye opening.

Sometimes the insight is big enough to be evolutionary, at which point it triggers a major design sprint. Most of the time, however, it just adds additional kindling to the fire of Lean UX experimentation.

So yes, dual track works best when a dedicated research team is working outside the scope of the active product group. You’ve probably surmised that it’s an expensive undertaking. You’re not wrong.

What I can tell you is that it’s less expensive than the alternatives: operating without UX or dealing with the waste and rework problem of pure lean.

Fund it out of your savings.

Wrapping Up

1. In the beginning there was Don Norman, and Don invented UX.
2. Other innovators like Jesse James Garrett fleshed out Don Norman’s ideas and the classic UX process was born.
3. Classic UX worked well with the standard waterfall development cadence and everybody was happy. UX was still a niche practice though.
4. Moore’s Law was bypassed by innovation and Waterfall no longer worked.
5. Classic UX was therefore incompatible with modern (Agile) development.
6. UI/UX Designers took up the mantle of user-centered design. They were crucial to the growth of UX in the design field but limited in scope. Their bias towards digital and graphic design badly skewed the business world’s perception as to the role of UX. That remains a problem today.
7. Lean UX was conceived by Jeff Gothelf in 2013 and brought true user experience design back into harmony with product development. Suddenly researchers, interaction designers, information designers, and all manner of specialized UX professionals were in demand.
8. Unfortunately Lean UX was inefficient when a product plan wasn’t well defined, resulting in significant waste and rework.
9. Google Ventures conceived the design sprint, which allowed teams to rapidly define and test a low-fidelity prototypes. This jump-started the Lean UX cycle on emerging product teams and effectively eliminated the waste and rework problem.
10. Dual Track Design fused the Google Ventures design sprint model with Jeff Gothelf’s Lean UX methodology.

So what is a UX Designer in a dual-track world?

A UX Designer is a leader, a process evangelist, a generator of insight, a purveyor of context, and a creative ideation machine. UX Design, as I’ve said elsewhere, doesn’t really have any deliverables other than value. It has come to encompass dozens of job titles that have hundreds of their own deliverables though.

Most of us aren’t actually UX Designers unless we lead a team, rather, we work in the field of UX Design.

It’s enough to confuse anyone.

It’s enough to exasperate even Donald A. Norman.

2020 Addendum

Since 2018 the design sprint model has matured to a point where they’re ubiquitous with UX Design. There are models that pack everything into a single day, though the three day model is most common. I’ve seen them used to refine features and I’ve seen them used to restructure marketing departments. They’re a remarkable tool and every one of you reading this article knows that now. This is no longer news.

But there has been another innovation, which existed at the time of writing but hadn’t yet had its full impact. Designers, educators, marketers; all of you reading this article–The Design System changed everything.

Again.

Design systems like Material Design (and its web equivalent), Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, Salesforce Lightning, and VMWare Clarity have been adopted by nearly every company in the world. Most major companies roll their own system, and most of those companies are basing their work on Material Design then using Zurb Foundation or Bootstrap as a starting point.

This means the design generalist, like the UI/UX designer before them, has risen to prominence.

The latest evolution of UX process hasn’t destroyed dual track design but it has made relationship the purview of senior/lead level roles in a design group. Everyone else needs to have a foundation in UX theory, training in visuals and layout, and the ability to follow a design system / styleguide with a high degree of fidelity. You’re not exactly a unicorn because the design system carries you. You are, however, sort of a jack-of-all-trades.

Rule of thumb: For every dual track design pair (Lead UX +Principal Graphic Design) at a large company there will be five generalists and maybe a single dedicated researcher. If you have less than 5–7 years of experience, you’re going to be one of the generalists.

The UI/UX designer is dead, long live the UI/UX designer

My advice under this system is exactly what it was when the UI/UX Designer ruled the craft, because the generalist is just a more UX-oriented version.

Know your neighbors. The circle of work is as follows:

(loop) ← Research ↔ Ideation & Wireframing ↔ Visual Design ↔ Interaction Design ↔ Prototype Coding ↔ Analytics → (loop)

Are you a UX Designer who has a love of classic UX? Look at your neighbors. You should be professionally competent in both research and visual design.

Are you a UX Designer who has specialized in interaction design? That’s really closely related to the actual code, so you should study it even if you aren’t the UX Engineer. It’s also going to require a lot of tweaks to finished visual designs so even if it’s not your favorite part of UX, you should be trained in graphic design.

These are the rules in 2020. I’ll update them again when things change.

Because they always do.

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At the time of this (re)publication, I am the Lead Designer for Dell Technologies Digital Events team. I learned HTML in 1997 and built my first commercial web experience in 1999. Professional designers and entrepreneurs can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Unless you are a designer, executive, writer, or founder; please leave a note when connecting on LinkedIn or I may not add you.