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“If you don’t want to work within constraints, become an artist.” That is what one of my design lecturers told me when I was at university back when the web wasn’t even a thing.
That has turned out to be one of the most useful pieces of advice I ever received in my career and has led me to embrace and even enjoy working within constraints, which probably explains why I tend to specialize in highly regulated sectors with enormous amounts of stakeholders and legacy.
So, if you find working within constraints challenging, this is the post for you. In it, I hope to change your attitude towards constraints and provide practical ways of dealing with even the most frustrating barriers.
But let’s begin by looking at the kind of constraints you could find yourself facing.
Constraints On Every SideThe constraints we face come in all shapes and sizes, from technical constraints due to legacy technology or backwards compatibility to legal constraints relating to compliance requirements or accessibility.
Then there can be inadequate availability of images, video, and text or simply a lack of access to stakeholders.
However, the biggest two, without a doubt, are a lack of time and a lack of resources (either money or people). In fact, it is rare to encounter a project where somebody is not in a hurry, and you have enough resources to do the job properly!
It is easy to let all of these obstacles demoralize you, but I would encourage you to embrace, rather than resist, their constraints.
Why You Should Embrace Your ConstraintsConstraints are not a set of necessary evils we have to endure. Instead, they are the core of what shapes the work we do.
I have done some of my best work over the years precisely because of the constraints placed upon me, not despite them.
Also, some constraints are a good idea. Ensuring a site is accessible just makes sense, as does limiting the time and money an organization is willing to invest.
Not that you should blindly accept every constraint placed upon you.
Know When To Push Back Against ConstraintsUnsurprisingly, I would encourage you to challenge constraints that are based on incorrect assumptions or outdated information. However, you won’t come across those that frequently.
More common are constraints that make sense from “a certain point of view.” However, these kinds of constraints are not always right within the context of the project and its long-term objectives.
For example, attempting to deliver a project within a strict budget and on an aggressive schedule may reduce the cost to the organization. But it will substantially increase the risk of the project failing, and so ultimately, the money and time that were spent will be wasted.
Another common example is compliance constraints. These constraints exist to protect the organization from possible risk, but many larger organizations become so risk-averse that they undermine their competitiveness in the market. They swap one type of risk for another.
The key in these situations is to demonstrate the cost of any constraint placed upon you.
Demonstrating The Cost Of An Unhealthy ConstraintOften, those who impose constraints upon you do not see the problems these constraints create. This is usually because they are only thinking in terms of their own area of responsibility. For example, a compliance officer is only going to be thinking about compliance and not the broader user experience. Equally, the IT department is going to be more focused on security and privacy than conversion or usability.
Ultimately the decision of whether to enforce a constraint or not comes down to balancing multiple factors. Therefore, what you need to do is
Demonstrate the cost associated with a constraint so that senior management (who take a more holistic view) has all of the facts to make a final decision.
You can demonstrate the cost in one of three ways. You can either focus on the damage that a constraint causes, the cost of not taking an action the constraint prevents, or the lost opportunities imposed by the constraint.
Let’s look at each to help you see more clearly how this can work.
I once worked for a consumer electronics company. One of their biggest sellers was a kettle that included a water filter which prevented limescale build-up (I know, I work on the most exciting projects!)
The company insisted that when somebody added the kettle to their shopping cart, we should automatically add a set of water filters as well.
This is a well-known dark pattern that damages the user experience, but I also knew that it was increasing the average order value, a key metric the e-commerce team tracked.
To combat this constraint, I knew I had to demonstrate that it was causing damage that the e-commerce team and leadership were unaware of. So, I took the following steps:
Sure enough, I found substantial evidence that this was a major issue among consumers. But I didn’t stop there. I wanted to associate a financial cost with the decision, so I made some estimates:
Now, let me be clear, these were nothing more than guesses on my part. My figures were not accurate, and people in the company were quick to challenge them. But associating a dollar value with the problem got their attention!
I agreed that my figures were probably wildly off and suggested we did some proper research to find out the real cost.
You don’t need hard data to demonstrate there is a problem. An educated guess is good enough to start a discussion.
Of course, not all constraints are actively causing damage. Some are merely preventing some better action from being taken. In these cases, you need a different approach.
Over time, an organization establishes processes and procedures that have been proven to work for them. The bigger the organization, the more standard operating procedures they have, and the more constraints you encounter.
Well-established companies become so afraid of losing their position that they become extremely risk-averse, and so place considerable constraints on any project.
People succeed in organizations like this by doing what has been done before. This can be problematic for those of us who work in digital because most of what we are trying to do is new.
To combat this bias towards the status quo, we need to demonstrate the cost of inaction. Put another way, we need to show management that if they do not do things differently, it will threaten the market position the organization has established.
In most cases, the best approach is to focus on the competition. Do a bit of research and show that the competition is less risk-averse and gaining market share as a result. Keep mentioning how they are doing things differently and how that threatens your organization’s market position.
Another tactic is to demonstrate how customer expectations have changed and that if the company does not act, they will begin to lose market share.
This is particularly easy to do because users’ expectations regarding digital have skyrocketed in recent years.
“The last best experience that anyone has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experiences they want everywhere.”
— Bridget van Kranlingen, Senior Vice President of IBM Global Markets
Put another way, users are comparing your organization’s subpar digital experience to the very best of what they are interacting with online, even when that comparison is not fair.
A bit of user research goes a long way in this regard. For example, consider running a system usability scale survey to compare your digital platforms to this industry benchmark. Alternatively, run a survey asking how important the digital experience is to customers.
While fear of losing market share is a big motivator to well-established businesses, younger, hungrier businesses tend to be more motivated by lost opportunities.
Your management, stakeholders, and colleagues often do not realize what they are missing out on because of the constraints they place upon you. It, therefore, falls to you to demonstrate those opportunities.
Sometimes, you can make this case with analytics. For example, recently, I was working with a client who insisted on having a pricing page on their website, despite the fact the page showed no pricing! Instead, the page had a request pricing form.
They wanted to keep the page because they were afraid to lose the handful of leads that came via the page. However, I was able to convince them otherwise by pointing out that the page was actively alienating the majority of users who visited it, effectively losing them leads.
I did this by demonstrating the page had a higher bounce rate than any other page on the site, was the most common exit page, and had the lowest dwell time.
But analytics is not my favorite approach for demonstrating lost opportunities. Instead, I typically turn to prototyping.
Prototyping is a great way of demonstrating exactly what an organization will miss out on if they insist on unreasonable constraints, presuming, that is, that you create a prototype that is free from those constraints.
I use this approach all the time. Imagine, for example, that you have been told that a particular technology stack imposes a set of restrictive constraints on how an interface is designed. By prototyping what the interface could be if you were free from those constraints, you can make a powerful case for changing the technology stack.
Having a prototype gives you something to test against. You can use usability testing to provide hard evidence of how much it improves the user experience, findability, and even conversion.
Even more significantly, a prototype will excite internal stakeholders. If your prototype is compelling enough, they will want that solution, and that changes the conversation.
Instead of you having to justify why the IT stack needs to be changed, now the IT team has to justify why their IT stack cannot accommodate your solution. Stakeholders and management will want to know why they cannot have what they have fallen in love with.
Of course, people will not always fall in love with your prototype, and ultimately, many of your attempts to overcome constraints will fail despite your best efforts, and you need to accept that.
Conceding Defeat With GraceLet’s be clear. It is your job to demonstrate to management or clients that a constraint placed upon you is unhealthy. They cannot be expected to know instinctively. They do not have your perspective on the project and so cannot see what you see.
This means that if they fail to remove the constraint you consider unhealthy, it is your failing to demonstrate the problem, not their fault.
Sure, you might consider them shortsighted or naive. But ultimately, you failed to make your case.
Also, it is important to note that you don’t always have the whole picture. A decision may be bad from a user experience perspective, for example, but it may be the right thing for the business. There will always be other factors at play that you are unaware of.
So when you fail to make your case, accept that with grace and do your best to work within the constraints given to you.
Ultimately your working relationship with management, colleagues, and clients is more important than your professional pride and getting your way.
Web apps and e-commerce sites may get all the love these days, but the majority of the web is still informational, and most websites are still content-led. Whether it’s a marketing website trying to convince you to buy a product or an informational site seeking to educate and answer your questions, the web is still dominated by words. But unfortunately, these sites face two substantial challenges:
In an ideal world, professionals would write our website copy, but that rarely happens, especially in larger organizations. Instead, we have an eclectic mix of people from all parts of the organization posting content online, which is why content quality is often poor.
Of course, complaining about this fact fixes nothing. So, what can we do to improve the copy on our websites when we potentially have dozens of inexperienced people posting the copy online?
Unsurprisingly, there’s no single magic answer that will fix the quality of our site content. However, there are four techniques we can use that together can get us where we want to be. When implemented correctly, these techniques can have a transformational impact.
Technique #1: Provide Content Creators TrainingIn my experience, most of the training that content creators receive focuses on how to use the content management system, not how to write good web copy. Even when they do receive training on how to write online, this is often in the form of live training.
Live training has its place, but it comes with its drawbacks. It is hard to arrange and needs to be repeated every time there is a new member of staff. However, the biggest problem with live training is that unless the person goes out of that training session and starts using what they learned immediately and on an ongoing basis, they quickly forget what they have learned and fall back into old patterns of writing.
What content creators really need is training material they can easily reference when they sit down to create content for the website. The material should be broken down into modules that are directly related to things they might want to do, like the following:
And so on.
Each module should be small, self-contained, and take only a few minutes to digest. Ideally, it should also be supported by video walkthroughs and include specific actions people can take.
There should also be checklists that ensure they have thought of all the things that need doing when writing, all as quickly accessible as possible.
Technique #2: Make Content Creators AccountableIf content creators are not made accountable for the content they create, they will not put the effort in to ensure its quality.
To address this issue, we can assign every page on a website to a specific individual and potentially even add their contact details to the page in case users have questions. Doing this motivates content creators to ensure the page answers as many user questions as possible and is up-to-date.
You may meet resistance to this idea because people change roles, and so responsibilities change. However, that is why pages should have a specific owner. Too often, pages do not get handed over when people move on, and these orphan pages are abandoned, leading to content ROT (redundant, out of date or trivial content).
Ensuring content remains relevant and up-to-date is essential, which leads me to my third technique.
Technique #3: Establish Governance Around Website ContentThe only way content will remain up-to-date is if it is reviewed regularly. And to achieve that, we need some governance that motivates content creators to do exactly that with the pages for which they are responsible.
You can create this motivation by establishing a policy stating that if certain conditions are not met, the content will be archived.
What these conditions are is entirely up to you. You could require a page to meet a certain threshold of page views or engagement (encouraging content creators to ensure page titles are relevant and clear.) You could even flag pages that perform poorly in search engine rankings.
However, as an absolute minimum, you should require pages to be reviewed regularly — how regularly will depend on your content and situation.
For instance, I work on many public sector and higher education websites where change is slow. In such cases, an annual review of pages is usually sufficient, except for certain time-sensitive pages.
If the condition is not met (such as the page not being reviewed by a required date), the page could be removed from navigation and search, effectively orphaning it. Whatever you decide, it should also have a banner added to the page saying that the content may not be up-to-date and to contact the page owner for the latest information. This will motivate the content creator to update the page to avoid a lot of emails!
Another condition I often use is poor user feedback on a page, which brings me to my final technique for ensuring quality content.
Technique #4: Provide Content Creators with Good FeedbackOne way to gather user feedback for content creators is through surveys. Surveys can be added to the bottom of a page or integrated into the site experience, asking users how they found the content and if there is anything missing that they would like to see.
Another way to gather feedback is through social media listening. Monitoring social media channels can help you understand how users are engaging with your content and what they are saying about it. This can be valuable in identifying areas of your site that may need improvement or in identifying content that resonates with your audience.
In addition, it’s important to regularly review your site’s analytics to see which pages are performing well and which are not. Special attention should be given to dwell time, traffic levels, and search engine rankings.
By analyzing this data, you can better understand which pages may need improvement or which topics are of most interest to your audience.
Whatever the case, all of this feedback needs to be made available to content creators because if the page rates poorly, it will encourage content creators to act.
You can also take this technique even further by celebrating the most successful content creators or the most improved pages by giving out awards and prizes (much like employee of the month).
Bringing It All TogetherTo bring these techniques together, we can create a content creator’s dashboard that shows each content creator all the pages they are responsible for. This dashboard will display how well pages are performing and highlight pages that are doing well or poorly.
At the top of the dashboard, we can flag pages that need the content creator’s particular attention — pages that are in danger of being archived because they need reviewing or have been rated poorly.
Finally, we can integrate training directly into the dashboard in the form of quick tips (like the Hemingway App example) and more detailed advice on how to address questions content creators may have at that point.
Of course, the approach I have laid out in this post is not a comprehensive solution to poor quality, but it does at least put in place a framework for improvement. One that works well for large sites that have a significant number of content creators who are not web copy specialists.
By using these four techniques together, we can ensure that the copy on our websites is of high quality and that our users find the content they are looking for.
We don’t live in an ideal world. Most of us have too much work, too little time, and too small a budget. When it comes to digital projects, it seems like our clients or bosses always prioritize speed over quality.
To make matters worse, we read countless articles telling us how we should do things. These articles emphasize research and testing but do nothing more than leave us disillusioned and add to our imposter syndrome.
In this article, I want to try a different approach. Instead of telling you what the best practice is, I’ll explore some practical approaches to user research that we might be able to fit into our existing projects.
I know what you’re thinking:
“I won’t be allowed to do research. I’ll be told there’s no time.”
So let’s start there.
Lean User Research Saves Time Rather Than Costs ItThe notion that all user research must take away from the available time for a project is flawed. Lean user research has the potential to save you time, especially on projects with multiple stakeholders.
Consider how much time is wasted on calls debating the best approach or in Figma endlessly revising the design because the client can’t make up their mind. Then there is the time of the other stakeholders, all of whom have to attend those meetings and provide feedback.
A small amount of user research can solve much of that. It can replace endless opinions, discussions, and revisions with data.
We don’t need to ask for extra time for research. Instead, we can replace some of those meetings with a quick survey or test and cut through all the discussion.
But what about the discovery you are supposed to do upfront? What about the research into your audience before you begin? Isn’t that best practice, and shouldn’t you be doing that?
Well, yes and no.
What About Upfront Research?Yes, a discovery phase is best practice. It is our chance to challenge our assumptions about the users and their needs. However, we don’t always get to do what we should, and not every discovery phase needs to take a lot of work.
If you’re not careful, discovery phases can be a little wasteful. General research into your audience and needs may not always provide applicable insights. That’s because it’s only once we start work that we learn what questions to ask upfront. Of course, by that point, you have already used time on the discovery phase, and stakeholders may be reluctant to do any more research.
Simply carrying out exercises like customer journey mapping because you’ve read that you should do it upfront is not a good enough reason when time and money are tight.
So, if time is tight, don’t feel like you have to do a full-blown discovery phase just because articles like this tell you to. Instead, start by collating what the organization already knows about the user and their needs. Most organizations know more than you think about their audience. Whether it’s personas produced by marketing, surveys run in the past, or analytics data, it can often just be a matter of gathering together what already exists.
Once you have done that, you will have a clearer picture of what is missing. If there are some significant and obvious gaps in your knowledge, then some upfront research is worthwhile. However, it might be that you have enough to start, leaving more time for user research as issues arise.
Either way,
Your focus should be on answering specific questions, not improving your general understanding of the user.
Focus On Answering Specific QuestionsUser research can quickly become a time sink if not managed carefully. Adding more and more questions to surveys because “it would be interesting to know” will slow down the surveying process. Equally, you can waste hours simply watching user sessions back. While this context is helpful, it is better to conduct user research only when there is a specific question that needs answering.
For example, if you want to know why people aren’t buying on your website, run a one-question survey that asks why when people go to leave the site. Or, if stakeholders are concerned that users will miss a critical call to action, do a quick 5-second test to reassure them.
Focusing user research on answering these kinds of questions not only ensures a better result but also ensures that user research saves time. Without user research, discussions and debates around these topics can drag out and slow momentum. Additionally, by focusing user research on addressing a single question, it keeps it small and easy to incorporate into an existing project.
Many little bits of user research are easier to insert than a single significant discovery phase.
Of course, this is only true if the types of user research you do are lightweight.
Keep Your User Research LightweightWhen trying to keep our user research lean, tough decisions must be made. One of these is to move away from facilitated research, such as user interviews or usability testing, as they are too time-consuming.
Instead, we should focus on research that can be set up in minutes, provides results quickly, and can be understood at a glance. This leaves us primarily with surveys and unfacilitated testing.
Personally, I love quick surveys to resolve areas of disagreement or uncertainty. If in doubt, I argue, it’s best to ask the user. Just a few examples of surveys I have run recently include:
I could go on, but you get the idea. Short, focused surveys can help answer questions quickly.
Surveys are easy to create and depending on how you approach them, you can get results quickly. If time is more of a barrier than money, you can use an app like Pollfish to recruit the exact demographic of people you need for a few dollars per submission. You can usually get results in less than a day with only a few minutes of work to set up the survey.
If money is an obstacle, consider sharing your survey on social media, a mailing list, or your website. You could even share it with random people who aren’t involved in the project if you’re desperate. At least you’d get an outside perspective.
When your questions are about a design approach you’ve produced, you can turn to unfacilitated testing.
Stakeholders often spend days debating and revising design concepts when quick tests could provide the answers they need. Generally, these design discussions revolve around four questions:
Fortunately, there are quick tests that can help answer each of these questions.
If stakeholders are concerned that someone might miss a call to action or critical messaging, you can run a 5-Second Test. This test presents users with a digital product, such as a website or app, for five seconds before asking what they saw. Tools like Usability Hub and Maze provide a URL for the test that you can share with participants, similar to how you would distribute a survey. If users recall seeing the element in question, you know everything is good.
A slight variation of the test can also be used to answer the second question: did users understand it? Show the user your design for 5 seconds, then ask them to describe what they saw in their own words. If they accurately describe the concept, you can be sure of your approach.
When it comes to the “can people use it?” question, you have two options.
If you have a prototype, you can run unfacilitated usability testing with a tool like Maze:
Maze will give you aggregated data on how long it took people to complete the task and the number of mistakes they made.
If you don’t have a prototype, the alternative is to do a first-click test:
According to a usability study by Bob Bailey and Cari Wolfson, if the first click is correct, users have an 87% chance of completing the action correctly, compared to just 46% if the first click is wrong. So, if people get their first-click correct, you can be reasonably confident they can successfully complete the task.
Usability Hub can help you run your first-click test. They will provide a heat map showing the aggregated results of where everyone clicked, so you don’t need to analyze the results manually. This allows you to get answers almost immediately.
The final question is, “Will people like it?” This is not easy to answer, as different stakeholders may have different opinions about what works.
To resolve this, I usually conduct a preference test or, ideally, a semantic differential survey.
First, I agree with stakeholders on the associations we want users to have with the design. These may include words like professional, friendly, inspiring, or serious.
In a semantic differential survey, users can then rate the design against those words. If the design scores well, we can be confident it will generate the desired response.
I know this post will make user researchers uncomfortable, and I can fully understand why. The results you get back will be far from perfect and could possibly lead to false conclusions. However, it is better than the alternative. Resolving design decisions through internal discussion is always going to be inferior to getting user feedback.
This kind of lean user research can also be a great starting point for bigger things. If you can add even some user research to the process, stakeholders can start to see its benefits, and it can lead to bigger things.
Some may choose to pick holes in your approach, suggesting that you aren’t testing with the right people or with a big enough audience. They are, of course, correct. However, this provides you with an opportunity to point out you would happily do more research if only the time and budget were made available!
This article is a sponsored by Gong.io
Perhaps this is a controversial statement, but I hate it when UI and UX designers are referred to interchangeably. To my mind, at least, they are different roles, with the clue being in the names.
User Interface designers design the interface, while User Experience designers are concerned with the entirety of the user’s experience.
In most cases, that experience extends beyond a single interface, encompassing many touchpoints, both online and off. Nowhere is this more evident than in a business-to-business experience.
In this article, I want to explore some of the unique characteristics of a B2B sales experience and, hopefully, highlight how a UX designer would consider the entirety of the experience, not just the interface elements.
Let’s begin by exploring what makes B2B sales experiences an interesting challenge for us as UX designers.
Why B2B Is An Interesting UX ChallengeAlthough we must be wary of generalizing, in many cases, B2B experiences are more complicated than B2C.
This complexity is born out of the nature of B2B. Transactions between businesses tend to be:
Take, for example, one of my enterprise clients. It is not uncommon for months to pass from them initially getting in touch about a project to me starting work.
Over that time, they may have:
Each of the above works together to shape the client’s experience, not to mention everything I do once work on their project begins.
While a UI designer may work on some of the above touchpoints, a UX designer cares about all of them and how they work collectively together to shape the experience.
With so many potential interactions in a B2B sales journey over an extended period, it is vital to have a clear picture of how they fit together. That is why journey mapping is so popular among UX designers.
Even if a client commissions me to address a part of a B2B experience, I still favor starting with journey mapping (if they haven’t done so already). Understanding where a particular touchpoint fits into the bigger picture is essential for success.
For example, I work a lot on optimizing the conversion rate of landing pages. Where users have come from is a significant factor in ensuring the success of that landing page. For example, traffic that comes from ads will have different expectations from those that come from organic search.
I care equally about what the user will do next. Any landing page has to prepare the user for that experience. For example, if salespeople contact every lead and users are not expecting that call, this will lower their conversion rate on those calls.
Understanding where in their journey a user also helps me to tailor appropriate messaging and calls to action. Get this wrong, and the experience falls apart. Mapping a journey is an excellent way of designing a sales funnel that gently nudges the user through the process without undermining the experience.
Decide On Calls To Action And Relevant TouchpointsHave you ever visited a website that immediately displays an overlay when you arrive for the first time? Typically, they offer you a discount in return for signing up for their mailing list. The problem is that you haven’t seen their products yet, so you don’t know if you want the discount. This results in a poor conversion rate and a bad experience that alienates users.
If they displayed the overlay for returning visitors or showed it after they had time to look around the site, it would fit better into the journey. Doing so would increase conversion and leave the user feeling more positive about the experience.
A journey map doesn’t just show where to place a call to action. It also helps you shape the journey itself. For example, a typical B2B sales journey might be:
Once you understand that journey, you can start shaping the experience so that each stage is optimized, helping the user progress to the next stage. Knowing the stages in the funnel helps you identify the appropriate touchpoints, messaging, and calls to action.
For example, I use posts like this one, speaking slots, and organic search to reach prospective clients who are just discovering they might need help. This is not the moment for a hard sell but rather a chance to help them discover potential solutions to their need.
Often, my call to action at this early stage is to encourage them to subscribe to my mailing list to get more help. That allows me to nurture the relationship until they start looking for potential suppliers.
This is because there can often be a long gap between first discovering a need and securing a budget to find a supplier. It would be easy for them to forget me, and that lead would be lost.
This brings me to another crucial area that a UX designer needs to consider in the user journey: the gaps in the experience.
Mind The GapThe user experience is not just about the touchpoints (website, email, etc.), but also about the gaps between these interactions. Gaps can be caused by time passing, switching channels, changing devices, or moving between business silos. These are dangerous moments when customers can easily be “dropped,” their experience undermined, and a sale lost. That’s why companies such as Gong.io use sales pipeline software and customer relationship management apps to ensure leads are not lost but instead nurtured over time.
But you still see examples of customers falling between these gaps all the time. Every time you’re put on hold while being transferred to another department, you have fallen into a gap. Or when you switch from a mobile device to your laptop to complete filling in a form, only to discover that all of your data has been lost and you have to start again.
A great UX designer will constantly be looking for these gaps to plug. For example, my banking app recently updated so that I no longer need to go through security to identify myself when I call them from the app. After all, I had already identified myself when I logged into the app, so why do I need to do so again on the call? That was a gap between systems that they had successfully plugged.
But while we strive as UX designers to plug gaps and design effortless digital experiences, there is one area we often overlook: human interactions.
Don’t Forget The Human FactorAt this point, you could argue we are straying into the realm of Customer Experience Design rather than User Experience, but it is still worth mentioning.
Throughout a customer journey (particularly in B2B), there will be interactions that are primarily between two people rather than a human and an interface. These interactions may use digital technology (such as webinars, Zoom meetings, emails, or chat) but are essentially one person speaking to another.
The B2B sales journey beautifully demonstrates these issues, as it has many digital communications between people.
As UX designers, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring these interactions, as they are crucial in shaping the user’s experience and the chance of a lead converting. For example, we have all had a frustrating experience with customer support teams who have emailed or messaged us a stock answer that fails to really address our question. Equally, we have encountered salespeople who have pushed too hard for a sale too early in our buying journey. And, of course, we have all read messages from organizations that have come across as impersonal, rude, or insensitive.
Technology makes these interactions feel worse, as we often cannot see or hear the person we are communicating with. Therefore, it falls to those of us seeking to improve the user experience to do at least something to try and mitigate these problems. That might be as simple as suggesting their sales team downloads a sales coaching plan template or something more ambitious, like running a workshop on how to communicate online better.
At this point, you might think all of this is way outside of your job description. But is it really?
Is This Outside Your Job Description?We come full circle to where I started this article by saying that the role of UX designer is often mistaken for simply a more senior UI designer. It is not, and in fact, to suggest so is insulting to those who choose to specialize in UI.
If you have been hired as a UX designer and yet spend all of your time creating wireframes for websites, apps, and other interfaces, I would suggest your organization or clients are failing to utilize you to the full.
I would encourage you to break out of the box into which they have put you and start to look at the entire end-to-end user experience. Only then will you be fulfilling the role for which you have been hired.
It won’t happen overnight, and there will be some who would prefer to limit your role, but you cannot improve the user experience without considering the entirety of the journey.
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