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Disconnect between UX department and engineering department can cause this too. Business object can grow out of nothing. UX designers might feel creative and

by valand 6y ago

Disconnect between UX department and engineering department can cause this too. Business object can grow out of nothing. UX designers might feel creative and introduce some unintended features, dynamic colors, even complex structure data. If the design is not validated regularly, these non essential items get worked on by the engineers not knowing that these are not in anybody's interest other than the UX designer. This is not solely UX designer's fault. This is also the team workflow's fault to not accommodate time for validating design. At the other spectrum, from engineering side it can be from the underlying mechanism, such as request of huge data should be made stateful because one http call can't handle it, multiple points of hardware failures in a seemingly single operation, etc. These can sometimes change the game and UX design need to be changed so that user information. If these are not well communicated, the initial UX design may not suffice to honestly picture the actual underlying process of the product, causing the users to miss one or two options they should have, e.g. missing retry button where user is supposed to be able to retry an action. Again there should be a period where UX design is validated again and again in the middle of development. A department or a role in the development team that takes care of the big picture of UX design (information architect and interaction design), the big picture of system architecture, and the big picture of project management (to determine which developer works when) might be ideal for it.

myth2018 6y ago
Those are good points. And that's why I'm such a big fan of simple, as-much-text-based-as-possible interfaces. By self-imposing a decrease in her degrees of freedom, one gets fewer things compounding the probably already high project burdens.
- valand 6y ago
  Yeah, and the so-called abstraction, either in the UX world or engineering world, should be a mere default of how the underlying mechanism works, but everybody should still have access to the nitty gritty details.
emilsedgh 6y ago
> This is not solely UX designer's fault. This is also the team workflow's fault to not accommodate time for validating design. We suffer from this greatly. Our app is complicated by nature. The designs that come from our product team turn a blind eye on the complexity and try to "make it simple". As a result, the product doesn't really work (in some aspects). Every time we try to "validate" those designs, we're shut down "because simplicity". Honestly I think product designers should go through a database course or something to understand that if there's a one-to-many relationship between to entities in real life, you cannot force it into a one-to-one relationship and ignore all potential corner cases. Suddenly 40% of cases are "corner cases" and the app doesn't work.
- myth2018 6y ago
  Indeed. And they should listen to the actual users and product managers as well (assuming product managers know the use cases very well). Instead, so many UX designers behave like "they knew better". That perfectly describes what happened to the software provided by my stock broker. They changed the interface so that tools stay on fixed positions, with fixed sizes. Now the interface looks nice but it also makes some sorts of operations simply impossible. They completely fail to realize that the "mess" of the old platform was actually obeying to customers ongoing needs for monitoring a specific set of assets, and we didn't f.. care about how the interface looked like, we just cared about numbers and that was all. It's so depressing how fast even conservative sectors like finance are forgetting some decades-old stuff which could just be taken for granted until some years ago.
  - valand 6y ago
    Then, the said UX designer is not a true UX designer. User experience involves stuffs other than visual appearances. They must also take care of interaction, information architecture, usability. Decreased usability is a symptom of failure of misdesign.
    - emilsedgh 6y ago
      I'm pretty much sure a good chunk of people being hired as UX designers are clueless about this whole topic, which to me, is the most important one.
rhn_mk1 6y ago
What does "validate" mean in this context? It doesn't mean "compare using testers", because that requires engineering work, which was rejected in the next sentence. So what is it?
- valand 6y ago
  In this context, validating the design means ensuring it is portraying the business object as correct as possible to relative to the business requirement. Like, "validating implementation against specification", but replace implementation with design and specification with business requirement

by valand 6y ago

myth2018 6y ago

Those are good points. And that's why I'm such a big fan of simple, as-much-text-based-as-possible interfaces. By self-imposing a decrease in her degrees of freedom, one gets fewer things compounding the probably already high project burdens.

valand 6y ago
Yeah, and the so-called abstraction, either in the UX world or engineering world, should be a mere default of how the underlying mechanism works, but everybody should still have access to the nitty gritty details.

emilsedgh 6y ago

> This is not solely UX designer's fault. This is also the team workflow's fault to not accommodate time for validating design. We suffer from this greatly. Our app is complicated by nature. The designs that come from our product team turn a blind eye on the complexity and try to "make it simple". As a result, the product doesn't really work (in some aspects). Every time we try to "validate" those designs, we're shut down "because simplicity". Honestly I think product designers should go through a database course or something to understand that if there's a one-to-many relationship between to entities in real life, you cannot force it into a one-to-one relationship and ignore all potential corner cases. Suddenly 40% of cases are "corner cases" and the app doesn't work.

myth2018 6y ago
Indeed. And they should listen to the actual users and product managers as well (assuming product managers know the use cases very well). Instead, so many UX designers behave like "they knew better". That perfectly describes what happened to the software provided by my stock broker. They changed the interface so that tools stay on fixed positions, with fixed sizes. Now the interface looks nice but it also makes some sorts of operations simply impossible. They completely fail to realize that the "mess" of the old platform was actually obeying to customers ongoing needs for monitoring a specific set of assets, and we didn't f.. care about how the interface looked like, we just cared about numbers and that was all. It's so depressing how fast even conservative sectors like finance are forgetting some decades-old stuff which could just be taken for granted until some years ago.
- valand 6y ago
  Then, the said UX designer is not a true UX designer. User experience involves stuffs other than visual appearances. They must also take care of interaction, information architecture, usability. Decreased usability is a symptom of failure of misdesign.
  - emilsedgh 6y ago
    I'm pretty much sure a good chunk of people being hired as UX designers are clueless about this whole topic, which to me, is the most important one.

rhn_mk1 6y ago

What does "validate" mean in this context? It doesn't mean "compare using testers", because that requires engineering work, which was rejected in the next sentence. So what is it?

valand 6y ago
In this context, validating the design means ensuring it is portraying the business object as correct as possible to relative to the business requirement. Like, "validating implementation against specification", but replace implementation with design and specification with business requirement