UX is Process: How to Intake a New Project
By: Ian Armstrong
Tags: Creative Process, User Experience, Design Thinking, Design, UX

UX is Process: How to Intake a New Project

Creating consistent and repeatable intake process for your team

In This Series:

How to Intake a New Project (you are here) Actionable User Insight Design from a Creative Brief The Design Sprint that works for you (forthcoming)

Article updated on January 14, 2018 to include two different assumption worksheet formats.

Introduction

Stop me if this sounds familiar. There’s a wall a lot of aspiring and establishing designers hit. You want to practice UX the way it was taught in school and on the blogs but neither source taught you how to deal with multiple up-line authorities that don’t fully agree with one another.

The misalignment leads to waste, rework, and frustration. Eventually someone pulls the plug and either a businessperson or engineering team decides on a design, leaving you (the designer) to push pixels in Sketch or Photoshop. You know you’re polishing a turd but you’re doing it under orders from the person who pays your bills.

It’s not what you leaned in class, and it’s not how things are supposed to be — but what to do?

This article series is written primarily for the benefit of a community of designers who got into UX to make the world a better place but don’t know how to structure a project for success. It’s also written for students who are, with good reason, terrified about their first/next steps. For the veteran readers, it’s a nice review of techniques I’ve accumulated over the years. Perhaps you’ll find some process notes that are worthy of emulation.

Alright then. Let’s get started.

First: the most important thing you can understand right now is that UX isn’t a job, it’s a process that contains a series of jobs. You may be in one or more of those roles as the UX lead on your team (UX Researcher + Interaction Designer is a classic hybrid) yet as the saying goes “You can do anything but you can’t do everything.” (yes, I’m looking at you… unicorns)

UX Design is not just about software. Service and event design are huge upcoming fields and product design (better known as industrial design) predates software and the web by decades.

UX Design is, in a lot of ways, about creative and strategic process more than it is deliverables. The biggest procedural challenge faced by growing professionals usually starts with learning how to intake a new project, articulate a design challenge, align a group of stakeholders, then decide what a team is going to build. The rest, as they say, is just details.

The first step in this process may look familiar to anyone who has ever worked in a startup because, in a lot of ways, a UX Design challenge mirrors a startup design challenge. In both cases, we need to know several things before we can start to ideate or evaluate design concepts:

What is the high-level opportunity? What assumptions are the design and business teams making? How can we validate those assumptions, aligning knowledge and expectations with real data, to form a strong partnership for ideation?

Why this stuff matters

As a kid, did you ever play a version of a game called telephone?

It’s a game with a simple premise, and it’s often presented as a way to understand how rumors and misunderstandings get started when a group doesn’t communicate directly.

Put a bunch of people in a circle, the more the better (within reason). Hand a piece of paper with a statement written on it to the first person in the chain and have them read it silently to themselves. That person whispers what they read in the ear of the next person in the circle, who whispers what they were told to the next on down the line.

By the time the statement reaches the other end, hilarity ensues. It’s often nearly unrecognizable. You then jump to a few spots back along the line to see how it changed over time.

This happens all the time with the collective vision for product design, where the results are decidedly less hilarious. If you’re not 100% sure you agree, try an experiment. Go ask a few different people at your business the same question about your product or service. Make it something simple like “what our product does for people” or “who is this product is for?” 99 out of 100 times, you’re going to get some pretty divergent answers.

Now apply that trend to the vision for a new product, one that doesn’t exist yet. Viewpoints abound and all of them have some measure of value. Not all of the value statements are exactly the same though, which creates some real headaches when a designer tries to get their work approved for production.

In the end the highest ranking leader dictates design based on their gut, and the result is exactly what you would expect.

Spoiler warning: it’s not the decision maker who gets the blame when the product goes sideways after launch. In the Silicon Valley, this produces what we call a “resume generating event”.

Our journey begins with a single step: the clear articulation of an opportunity.