Recently we were presented with a project where the product team was essentially asking for UX "sign-off". They had already brainstormed through the design and put the wheels in motion to get a new application developed. "Checking in" with UX was a mere formality in their mind.
Why they felt this was acceptable is still beyond us, but needless to say that the lessons they learned should ensure that UX is considered much earlier in their decision making moving forward.
What the product team proposed...
This will work, right? The product team went so far as to produce their own wireframes and shared them with the UX Team.
UX's first question was "Have you talked to the people who are supposed to use this tool?"
Unfortunately the answer was "No." They had "designed" a new product based on requests from a single client without ever considering the end users and what they actually need to accomplish.
This could have be an extremely costly mistake, and one that we see far too often, but luckily UX was able to intervene in time.
Fixing the problem with research...
Anytime you're creating something new it's imperative to have a clear focus on the people who actually need the thing that you're building. So our first course of action was to find actual end users and have a conversation with them.
What are their goals? What do they need to accomplish for their job in order to be successful?
What are their limitations? What will and won't they have when they'd be using this new tool?
What are their timelines? How can we ensure that this tool allows them to efficiently and effectively complete their tasks?
All-in-all we spent a little over 12 hours between interviewing and summarizing their responses. But what we learned was SO much more valuable than that.
Given the proposed design from the product team, users literally wouldn't have been able to complete their tasks in the time they had to do so. We essentially would have built a tool and it would have been unusable, and the product team wouldn't have known that until it was already built.
The proposed design would have required that our clients add weeks of work to an annual process simply so they can approve who gets to use this tool. They had hoped that we'd build something that would save them time, not create more work for them.
The proposed design included features that were completely unnecessary. Had we built them we would have wasted time and energy in their creation and would have been left supporting features that receive little to no use.
When we finally tallied up the amount of time saved from 12 hours of research we realized that it would have been over 5,000 hours of work with the end result being an unusable application.
Lesson learned by the product team: Do the research. It'll save you time, money, and result in a much better product.