UX for Business

The Right Thing

How Do You Know You’re Designing the Right Thing?

Before we talk about designing the right things, have you ever considered that you might be designing the wrong thing? Not just something bad. Something wrong: something nobody wants or needs.

Many designers have never really thought about it, actually. Sometimes we are too focused on which design we like the most, and we just assume the users will feel the same. Or sometimes we assume that what worked for us before will work again, so we copy-paste it and move on.

In reality, those can be big, expensive mistakes. It happens all the time.

Wait, wait, wait. If our favorite design might be wrong and the right design can be different from project to project, how do we know what to make?! What is this lunacy?!

The missing piece here is UX theory: the reasons and principles that make your design choices good, whether they are trendy or not.

Let’s take this problem apart and see what it’s made of.

UX Is a Process: Humans Are the Constant

UX is not what you do in Figma or a ticket in agile planning or the contrast of your button labels.

UX is a general process of designing things for humans.

Maybe you have heard: humans haven’t changed much over the last hundred thousand years. Sure, most of us smell better now, but water, food, love, social groups, and high fives have always been important. Easy things are preferred over hard things; happy now is better than happy later.

We also think about our own needs more than those of others, because that is human nature. And that won’t change while you are alive.

That is why UX exists. The needs of other humans are the non-negotiable part of our work. If we ignore them, we are probably working on the wrong thing. But when we understand the part we don’t control—other humans—we can improve the part we do control: the business.

UX Is a Process: Business Is Always Different

Your second design priority (after the humans) is to understand the business. This is where a lot of UXers get lost, because they never think beyond the humans and the pixels.

Not only is every company different, but each company is changing all the time (some faster than others). Two companies that compete for the same customers will often have differences that matter. In fact, good business strategy tries to make your company different from competitors and change as competitors evolve.

That is partly why UX is a process, not a one-time task. If you aren’t constantly adapting, you will make something based on old information, and it will be wrong. Or a design that was right before will become wrong as the world changes around it. And you have to do that without breaking the solutions for the humans!

Now that we have that covered, let’s start identifying the right things.

The VDP Framework for UX in Real Life

This book started by complaining, as I do, about common UX models that are too vague to be useful in real life. We don’t need another one of those.

Instead, let me teach you a simple little framework that I use. It has emerged slowly from 20 years of experience on a wide variety of projects and works for marketing, product, and service design, whether you’re using agile, Lean, or whatever.

The VDP framework has three critical parts:

• Value is created when your design works. Working means it solves a real problem in real life.

• Diagnosis is how you identify the problems worth improving, after your design works.

• Probability is a guide for optimizing your designs to squeeze every last drop of value from them.

VDP.

As simple as that might look, my claim is this: if you focus on those three things, in that order, using the methods I describe next, you will work on the right things in every project you ever do and avoid the wrong things at the same time.

Let’s start with V for value.