But it’s a fair point: you can almost always find usability issues, and you’re almost always going to have to launch with some, and it’s not always obvious which are truly critical.
On top of that, some issues are very time consuming or complex to fully solve.
Experience helps.
Conversation
Every discipline has their own lens.
E.g. Folks working in fraud tend to assume every failed conversion was a fraudster who got cold feet.
It’s blind men feeling an elephant.
As put it, all are “right” but one of the blind men is the HiPPO - their truth runs the show.
1
8
True. Also "Shot down" is highly emotive language. An alternate framing is "weighed up the potential problems against the opportunity cost, and decided that even if there are inherent usability issues, it made business sense to launch anyway"
1
6
Designers seem to spend an awful lot of time framing business decision in a way that paints them as the victim and everybody else as uncaring idiots.
3
2
16
So true!
It’s classic Fundamental Attribution Error
First: if you saw the facts, you’d agree with me.
Then: oh you see the facts but don’t agree? You must be too stupid to understand
Then: oh you understand fully but don’t agree? You must be evil.
Pure tribal thinking
1
3
15
There are two things entangled here which too many designers have a hard time disentangling:
Is the problem that colleagues fail to prioritize UX issues as highly as we do, or that they refuse to accept our assessment that the issues are there?
2
6
When designers gripe that our colleagues refuse to prioritize UX issues as highly as we think they should, we need to update our beliefs.
When they refuse to accept our assessment that the issues exist at all, they are burdening us with persuasion we should not have to do.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @andybudd @johncutlefish and @vgr
And a lot of design rhetoric goes towards, “how can I persuade others to see it my way?”
Much less goes towards, “hang on, what if it’s ME that needs to update my beliefs?”
Ironically, it’s when you come in truly open to you being wrong that you start to be able to influence
3
1
7
Not sure why I’m tagged here but I’ve nearly always been on the opposite side of this issue and in my experience it’s usually fine to ignore designers and ship because there are usually bigger risks/uncertainties baked into the release that overwhelm design considerations.
3
5
IME designers tend to resist thinking in terms of probabilities and risks if they are sensitive to them at all. Design is a binary to most of you — it either has integrity or is somehow philosophically compromised.
1
7
PMs and engineers more naturally think in terms of probability that something will matter and the costs if it does. Designers and infosec people tend to be on the other side. Everything is either perfect or a showstopper.
PMs own risk so typically have their way.
The best designers I’ve met tend to act like lawyers. They lay out risk comps rather than design comps, and understand that they don’t own the risk.
2
3
18
Show replies
Agreed on that as well!
Quote Tweet
As a UXD, I may think any number of decisions that compromise users' experience in the name of technical convenience, marketing advantage, or whatever are wrong, but okay, balancing those competing priorities is not my job.
(It IS product management's job, BTW)
3
Show this thread
2



