Hello Indiana, As I transitioned from UI design to UX, one of the lessons that took me too long to learn in my career was the need for balance. As a UI designer, your job is well-defined; you must make the interface as straightforward and engaging as possible. However, things are more complex when looking at the entire user experience. Suddenly, many different factors need to be carefully balanced.
Listen to this newsletter or subscribe to the audio versions via my website.
Balancing Competing Factors
For example, for the longest time, I used to get frustrated at how SEO would undermine a website's user experience with overly verbose, keyword-heavy copy. However, that was naive on my part because SEO (for better or worse) is a part of the user experience. It dictates how easily a user will find your content. You can create the best on-site experience in the world, but you have failed if nobody can find it. It is necessary to balance findability with usability, so you must balance SEO with UI.
Let's take a simple feature on many websites, like a header with a video background. These are great from an engagement perspective as they grab users' attention upon landing on the page. They also work well from a branding perspective, allowing you to communicate what the organization is about visually.
However, these pros must be balanced against a video background's negative impact on site performance (which will impact dwell time and ranking). Then, there is the fact that video backgrounds increase cognitive load, harming accessibility, usability, and retention of information.
Specialists lack Balance
Which side of the fence you fall over this choice will depend on your role. If you are responsible for branding, you are more likely to want a video background, while if you focus on accessibility, you will be more likely to avoid them.
Much of the friction we experience in digital projects comes down to this simple fact. Your stakeholders are not being difficult or stupid; they merely look at things differently.
A UX Designer Should Bring Balance
So, how do you resolve these problems? Well, this is where a UX designer comes in. UX designers are generalists who look at the user experience holistically; I care as much about branding and SEO as accessibility and performance. I have to be knowledgeable in all of these areas.
My job is to balance the differing perspectives of the various specialists, ensuring that the website provides the best experience in all of these different areas. It falls to me to ensure the specialists see the need to compromise and understand the direction I decide upon. And yes, it should fall to the UX designer to make these decisions.
Organizational Requirements Need to Be Balanced
But, even I do not see the whole picture. Websites exist primarily to serve an organization, so those organizational requirements must also be considered. I have to work with organizational stakeholders to ensure their requirements are represented. This means establishing a clear set of prioritized objectives for the website that can inform my decision-making. For example, should I prioritize customer acquisition over customer retention or compliance over the user experience?
Why Projects Fail
Projects regularly fail because they lack this kind of prioritized list of objectives. But that is not the only reason. Key performance indicators that are too heavily weighted towards one metric can equally be a problem, throwing the project out of balance. Equally, an organization that pays too much attention to a single discipline (SEO consultants, compliance teams, IT, etc.) can once again throw off the balance.
The Role of UX Designer Needs to Be Redefined
In many ways, I see this role of maintaining balance as the most important part of a UX designer's job. However, I don't feel organizations or UX designers widely understand that. There is a perception that a UX designer is another specialist, another musician in the orchestra. However, a UX designer should be the conductor who ensures all specialists play harmoniously. It is this definition of the role we need to nurture in our organizations.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.