Crafting a UX Philosophy

This is every bit as hard to do as it sounds

I do a lot of thinking and writing on the field of user experience design and, for some reason, a bunch of you have decided you like to spend your precious spare minutes reading it. That discovery has been one of the most gratifying and humbling experiences of my career.

Most of what I write down never leaves my drafts folder. As it turns out, some of you have noticed this in the year since my last article.

Right, my bad. Sorry about that.

Can you keep a secret? Logging into over 1000 notifications every time I opened Medium was pretty intimidating. I had to go through my own Campbellian Hero’s Journey of refusing the call before deciding to accept that such an overwhelming number of people care what I have to say on the subject. 3000 reads is an ego boost. 100,000 reads is an awakening.

As I dust off my drafts and optimize a few of them for publication, I’m also thinking a lot about how I present myself as a designer. Various incarnations of my website have been woefully at odds with my writing. If I’m going to have the temerity to write a 100,000+ view article (this is still a trip) on the evolution of UX process I should aim to at least be consistent in my professional and thought leadership presentation.

Also, I should probably share my thoughts since y’all are crazy enough to want to hear them. So here it goes:

As we progress in our careers, we all develop a creative philosophy. Some of us are better at articulating it than others, though all of us should strive for clarity. We talk about our creative philosophy when we evangelize UX to stakeholders, when we interview for jobs, when mentor less advanced designers, and when we present or defend our work. We revel in it when things go well and we agonize over it when they don’t. As we mature, so does our position on what makes design meaningful, and why we should be well paid for it.

What follows is a bit of recent work I’ve done on crafting my own UX philosophy, and it echoes a lot of what my readers have become familiar with in a concise format.

May it help speed you on your own path to greater eloquence.

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“UX is Process” — Ian Armstrong

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” — Pablo Picasso (attribution)

“Everyone is kind of an idiot.” — Adam J. Kurtz

With that in mind, let’s talk about my UX process.

I am Agile

That’s inherently tricky because the entire field of UX relies on a deeply waterfall premise: learn everything you can possibly know about the user before executing a design because you only get one chance at a first impression. The whole idea of Lean UX, at first blush, is a masterclass in cognitive dissonance.

An agile process relies on two important things: a sense of direction and a compelling hypothesis. Without either one, it flounders. The goal of research is to improve the quality of the average hypothesis but all the research under the stars can’t tell a team what they’re supposed to build. That’s the creative leap that makes design work, which leads me to the next thing…

I Practice Dual-Track Design

Dual track design is a phrase that I coined to represent the heartbeat of a design sprint (ideative) and Lean UX (iterative). Through the design sprint, we align on an opportunity, reframe it as a challenge, then draft a blue sky target. Once the target has been validated, Lean UX fleshes out the details over time. The idea behind this concept is something I go into during the back half of my article on The Evolution of UX Process. If you’ve ever heard a designer say to their product owner “if I could write that story I would already have done the design” then you’ve seen the moment when I like to switch tracks.

I Am a Proponent of Pair Design

A traditional UX designer’s job is to tirelessly challenge and reframe assumptions, lending perspective to a team of detail-oriented doers. A classic visual designer’s job is to achieve what managers often call “pixel perfection”. It is all but impossible to hold perspective and perfection in the same mind; the dominant aspiration will always assimilate its reflection. For this reason, I prefer to pair a researcher/wireframer (IxD) with a digital artist (VizD). Fresh creative takes fewer cycles to reach peak effectiveness, negating any perceived loss of efficiency when the two designers are no longer working on two mission critical tasks in their own swim lanes. A/B test this for six months before you argue with me.

I Believe in a Ruthless Pursuit of Value

There are five things I need to know in order to start a design project: the market opportunity, the business goals that work in pursuit of that opportunity, the user behaviors that will quantify our success, the nature of that user, and the value they seek. Value is what connects the user to the opportunity in the form of a choice. “This is a solution, there are many like it but this one is mine.” The pursuit and delivery of value is at the core of what drives a successful business outcome.

Alignment is Our Launchpad

Without alignment, critique and optimization are impossible. In order to drive the creation of breakthrough products we need to be aligned on the five core ideas in the previous section: opportunity, goals, behaviors, personas, and desired value. Without that alignment, every single product decision will devolve into conflict and ineffective compromise.

Process is the Vehicle

A consistent process allows us to understand what has been accomplished, what our next steps are, where we expect to be in the future, and how our work will be measured. Creativity is inherently chaotic and artists are prone to crippling self doubt in a negative workspace. A team’s creative process should be flexible enough to allow for chaos but also firm enough to prevent a team from getting stuck in a rut or lost in the woods.

Insight is the Fuel

Creativity abhors a vacuum. While it is true that design is often a benevolent dictatorship (and not a democracy), every single person from the product owner to the engineers should feel welcome to present design hypotheses. There are no wrong ideas, just differently informed points of view. A designer needs to be emotionally bulletproof when a team member’s ideas contradict their own because a design-lead organization needs to foster a culture of creativity. In that culture the best feedback is often inquisitive, not prescriptive: as in “yes, and how about this?” Anxiety, fear, and self-consciousness are the enemies of insight. Surprise is the engine of innovation. As a consequence, I aim to find something surprising in every day.

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At the time of this publication, I am a Principal UX Designer at Dell Technologies Digital Marketing Studio in San Francisco. 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.

Leave a note when connecting on LinkedIn, especially if you have a weird title.