UXR...
have you ever done skilled, moderated usability testing of a design ... exposed major problems in the design ... had the fixes shot down (maybe someone wanted to be *bold*, or "just ship it")
...shipped it as is
...and it actually turned out fine?
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I guess it depends what you mean by “fine”.
I’ve definitely seen teams ignore the results of usability tests. The issues they identified still happened. However the bulk of users managed to struggle through. They ended up slightly more annoyed, but task completion remained high.
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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.
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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.
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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"
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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.
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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
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Jiminy Cricket syndrome.
I think designers often see themselves as the conscience of a project. Sometimes the rest of us go against what they want simply because nobody likes being constantly sermonized at.
Maintain enough profanity in the process to keep designers in check 😆
Now I want to see every process diagram include steps for profanity being injected
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