Over the last five years working alongside product and design teams, I’ve seen a pattern: The most impactful designers and researchers aren’t just skilled in UX, they’re skilled in how they think, listen, and align others.
Here are the first 3 applications that come to mind:
Stop Jumping to a Solution Space: You will miss the boat, I guarantee it. Instead:
- Hone in on what the problem is you’re trying to solve. For who? And why?
- Get real user feedback on the problem to inform you. We do this quickly by applying attitudinal and behavioral metrics to our feedback loops.
Business Goals Don’t Always Equate to User Needs: Yup, that’s right! Your bosses goal of increasing account sign ups by 30% might not actually make sense. While you’re racing to hit that theoretical business metic, you increase frustration and confusion in the user flow, by proxy. Now what?
If you really want to rock the boat:
- Dive into why your HIPPO might not know what they’re talking about.
Raw Logic Alone Won’t Cut It People don’t rally behind wireframes, they rally behind impact. Here’s what I mean:
- Align your work to revenue, retention, or strategy.
- Translate Design into Outcomes. Example: "We simplified the settings page, reducing time to task completion by 40%, which supports our goal of increasing self-service adoption.” BANG!
- End every story with a strategic action and next steps. Example: “After simplifying the onboarding flow based on usability insights, we saw an 18% increase in completion and a 12% lift in activation. Our next steps are: We’d like to apply the same approach to the billing flow next.”
The real tools of UX? Are the practitioners who know how to frame the problem, tell the story, and bring others with them.
