Beware the Oversimplification and Promises of “5 Easy Steps”
By: Debbie Levitt
Tags: Self Improvement, Unicorns, UX, Learning, UX Design

UX seems to be in a loop where everybody wants to turn something incredibly complex into “5 easy steps.”

We have design thinking’s 5 easy steps: empathize, define the problem, ideate, prototype, and test. Some will tell you that this is the UX process or a UCD process, but it’s not. Design thinking would be a perfect synonym for HCD only if we define each step as having a pile of phases and tasks that must be done by qualified experts. And you’d have to remove step 1 since having empathy isn’t a step. If you can’t interrupt me doing it, it’s not a step.

For example, “ideate” would have to be expert and knowledgeable interaction design completely utilizing best practices, foundations and fundamentals of UX, and fantastic accessibility. It would be informed by expert qualitative research done with real or archetypal customers, which was then properly interpreted by those research experts. Our “ideation” would be informed by our information architecture work such as a user flow. And if it’s all not being done with skill, proficiency, science, depth, and technique, then it’s not being done well (which might make it not worth doing).

If it’s, “Hey everybody, just sketch some screens!” then we shouldn’t confuse it with deep and high quality UCD or HCD work. Design thinking is presented as 5 steps that are so easy, anybody can do them. This can be contrasted with UCD and HCD, the professional and specialized approaches that bring depth, breadth, and extensive details into what shouldn’t be oversimplified as a “design thinking step.”

[Relevant here: my podcast “Design Thinking Has Jumped The Shark” and my article “Design Thinking Isn’t User Experience.”]

Lean Six Sigma: 5 Easy Steps? Definitely Not.

The typical purpose of making things seem like they’re just a few easy steps is to give people the impression that anybody can do them. But for the opposite angle, let’s take a look at the 5 phases of Lean Six Sigma, which are define, measure, analyze, improve, and control. 5 easy steps? Definitely not, as my slide shows below:

5 steps or phases in Lean Six Sigma really represent a mountain of tasks, artifacts, and sub-processes.

Note that many of the bullet points on this slide represent research, reports, data analysis, and entire sub-processes. For example, bullet point “Voice of the Customer” isn’t a quick list we can put together. It is all of the deep qualitative and quantitative user and customer research that Lean Six Sigma demands. “Identify Root Causes” and later steps “Confirm Root Cause to Output Relationship” and “Estimate Impact of Root Causes on Key Outputs” aren’t simple tasks, and they’re just a small piece of the “analyze” phase.

Lean Six Sigma starts out looking like five easy steps or phases. But with a closer look at the details, we can start to understand the mountains of time, effort, intelligence, attention to detail, good detective work, unbiased interpretations, and more that go into these tasks.

5 Easy Steps to Being a UX Unicorn?

Jared Spool, someone I rarely agree with and frequently debunk, has a 2014 blog post (updated in 2019) that claims there are 5 easy steps to becoming a UX unicorn/Jack-of-All-Trades. I’m not paraphrasing. The blog post is called, “Becoming a UX Unicorn in 5 Easy Steps.”

My advice is to not be a unicorn because unicorns are rarely unicorns; they’re not fantastic at every skill, which means you might be not-so-great at mission critical work you’re given. But let’s discard my preference against Jacks-of-All-Trades here, and just look at how Spool expects you to gain all of this expertise in all of these areas, domains, and skills.

Spool’s 5 easy steps are (with my commentary):

Step 1: Learn Everything You Can About a New Skill. Spool recommends you immerse yourself with books, online courses, videos, attending conferences on the topic and more. This is less like “one easy step” and more like “walking from Rome to Barcelona.” And he assumes you will know where to start and which of these sources are reliable versus which are BS we should avoid. What about the amount of time and money this would take? Spool even suggests that if your job won’t pay for you to attend these conferences, pay for them yourself. With travel, registration, and taking off work, this might cost someone thousands out of pocket. Let’s also please note that step 1 of Spool’s steps to learning a new skill is: learn everything you can about that skill. I think Italian says it best when they say, “Grazie al cazzo,” (roughly “no s**t, Sherlock”). Step 2: Practice, Practice, Practice. Spool says just start doing what you learned and practice. The article makes it sound like you are doing this yourself without a mentor, coach, or someone who can check if you’re doing any of this right, efficiently, incorrectly, or other. Practice is important, but how will you know how well you are doing if there is nobody to check your work? Spool makes it sound like if you just keep practicing what you read about, watched, and heard, you will go from doing it poorly to doing it well. You’re not guaranteed that, so I suggest an expert mentor or coach who can check your work and guide you. Step 3: Deconstruct What Others Have Done. Spool suggests reverse engineering what others have done, and then see if you can do it how they did or come up with your own way. I did that when learning HTML since that’s fairly concrete; I can check people’s code, see what that code did on a web page, change it, and check again. But what about scientific and creative work? Can we reverse engineer someone’s UX research work? Can we deconstruct how someone created personas? Can you reverse engineer how I interpreted unmoderated usability testing? There is still a grand canyon between, “I see what you did here,” and, “I could have done that myself from scratch.” If Spool believes that reverse engineering other people’s UX work is an easy step, he should give some examples of exactly how to do that. We’ll wait. Step 4: Solicit Feedback (And Listen To It). This seems a little late in the game. I would suggest getting that feedback back in step 1 to make sure you’re pursuing the right learning sources. You need feedback in step 2 as you practice. Step 3 might need lots of coaching. Getting feedback seems less like a step and more like something you should be doing constantly along your path. Here’s an idea: sit with someone who did something you admire, and ask them how they did it versus guessing at reverse engineering it. Not everybody gives their secrets away for free, so you might hear, “No,” or you might hear, “I charge for my coaching time.” Based on Spool’s step 1, it sounds like you should pay for that answer to best learn this skill. Step 5: Teach the Skill To Someone Else. Spool’s post says, “You don’t really learn something until you teach it to someone else.” This is false. Teaching can sometimes make you realize additional things about something you’re pretty fluent in, but if you don’t fully understanding technique X, how would teaching it make you any better at X? I cannot teach plumbing to someone else because I don’t understand plumbing. Trying to teach plumbing to someone might not even reveal what I still need to learn because I don’t know what I don’t know. Also, if you just learned it, you might not be the best teacher. When you wanted to learn piano, tennis, or dance, did you pick the person who just learned how do to this? Or did you pick the expert who has done these things professionally or semi-professionally?

Problems with “5 easy steps” include:

Spool appears to believe that you have endless time and money to just dive 100% into this new skill. And that’s ONE skill…

If you really want to become a unicorn and might need to become strong at 10 new skills or techniques, would this then be 50 easy steps to becoming a unicorn? Sounds way less easy.

Remember that a job that wants a unicorn expects you to be great at every skill. They don’t expect you to be great at UX research, OK at interaction design and prototyping, so-so at visual design, and still starting out at front-end dev. How much time are you spending becoming truly great in each of these areas? Or will you stop somewhere along the way at mediocrity? Will your “I’m OK at this” level fool the job that expects you to be truly great at each of your unicorn elements? What are the possible outcomes of having fooled a job?

Spool’s steps assume that you have natural talent in all unicorn areas, making learning smooth sailing. Consider the tone deaf person with no rhythm who takes singing lessons. Lots of lessons and practice may still lead to a total inability to sing well.

“50 Long, Difficult, Time-Consuming, Brain-Crunching, Possibly Expensive Steps” is Honest but Lacks Marketing Pizzazz

I’m not saying these are bad ideas or you shouldn’t learn new skills. I’m saying I’m tired of the “5 easy steps” paradigm. If we want to do these steps with any depth or quality, they’re not easy. Why sell them as easy?

And if a “step” is really a long, expensive, complicated phase of working on a skills over weeks, months, or years, let’s not call it a “step.”

These are lies that you will quickly recognize with your critical thinking hat on. Never take that hat off.