Member-only story
What happens when you don’t design for the problem
If you don’t know the problem you are trying to solve for how did you even come to the solution?
Our jobs as User Experience Designers is to provide a great User Experience, yeah, hence the name of our job title. But it’s not only to provide great user experiences but experiences that people will actually use, love, need, and consistently return to because it either gives them joy or helps them better accomplish a task.
The most eye-opening moment that helped me realize how important it is to design for the problem is when I heard someone say:
“Why would I use this?”
Those words are super hard to hear as a User Experience Designer. I tried everything I could to justify any and all reasoning but at the end of the day, there was no arguing the number of times I heard those words in regards to that particular design.
Sometimes direction can come from a place that is almost unavoidable to divert no matter the data and information you have on the request. This was something that in and of itself was a great idea but the implementation and context of it just did not make sense.
The experience I’m referring to was intended to make users’ lives more fast and convenient when accomplishing certain daily tasks but feedback and research actually proved it to be quite uncomfortable because of the context. The Users wanted access to this application from anywhere rather than only on desktop, so much so that they were willing to look to different applications to meet their needs.
I could go on and on about this particular situation but that’s really beside the point and this is just one example out of many I could give. Let’s talk about what really happens when you don’t design for the problem.
1. You end up with a product that your users won’t use
Those words above say it all, Not only were there users who were asking me this question but colleagues as well. Some of them…
