From Chaos to Concept

CH 6MAKE IT BETTER

“Design is art optimized to meet objectives.”

—Shimon Shmueli

Planning Your Iterations

For me, one of the most exciting parts of the entire UX life cycle is that moment when the work is live and data starts pouring in about how it's being used. I can think of times when everything went storybook well and the results were almost immediate and better than the team would have expected. I would love to tell you that's the end of the story, but unfortunately, things don't always go as planned. As I've previously mentioned, when your numbers come back and show that things aren't working as planned, it can be frustrating. It is also surprisingly frustrating when the numbers come back and show no change at all.

Whatever your numbers show, you'll be using that information to plan your next iteration. If things went well you'll be working on a plan to beat your new benchmark, and your job going forward will be mostly focused on continuing the positive trend and identifying new opportunities. If things went poorly, your job will become more complex because you are going to be fighting battles on more than one front at the same time.

You'll have to work with your team to understand what has happened in order to be able to report back to other teams in your organization. You'll then need to be able to discuss what happened with the teams most closely related to the work so they have the insight and understanding required to move on to the next step of dealing with ...