I · Meaning

Not in a Lab

Everything in this part is how I plan a system when I'm allowed to. Market research. Interviews with the people who'll use it. Their journeys, drawn and redrawn. Wireframes, and a long argument with them, before a single screen is designed.

We are not in a lab. If you're designing your own product you have more freedom than most, and this is how I'd use it. But business needs and business limits overpower the perfect design more often than they don't, and not every employer can afford the process above. Not every process should be this thorough from day one; sometimes it's unnecessary, and sometimes done is better than perfect. We can study how to do it properly. Reality is that the conditions aren't always there.

Here's the version of that I lived.

A software studio hired me to do the UX and wireframes for a product: a signature manager for companies on Microsoft Exchange, the kind that adds the signature and the campaign banner to every email on its way out of the server. I did what this part describes. I asked who would use it and how, I drew the journeys, I built the wireframes for the system those journeys needed. Then the developers estimated it. Three hundred hours.

The customer had already signed for a hundred and twenty.

I was scolded, and not for the design. I was scolded because the customer had seen it and now believed that this was what their quote bought. The business had to walk it back: Niko's a bit of an over-achiever. And I scolded them back: how do you quote a system before you know what it is? If you hire me to plan the system, how can you have already priced it?

I lost that argument more often than I won it. What I wanted was for the planning to be sold as its own service, before the build was priced. The customers didn't want to pay for something that wasn't the system. The studio didn't want to hand a customer a complete design they could take to any other developer. I thought that last part was exactly the point, and I still sell it that way. They weren't wrong about their business. I wasn't wrong about the system. Those two were both true in the same room, and the method in this part doesn't make the first one go away.

So take what follows as sharpening, not as rules. If I can make the questions you ask a little sharper, or change the instinct that reaches for a layout before it's asked what the layout is for, that helps, whatever your resources are. The hundred and twenty hours are still a hundred and twenty. The questions make them worth more.