UX for Business

Design in Different Situations

Designing with No Budget

“No budget” can come in different flavors. You might be a big company with limited resources, a very small team (maybe one person!) with too much to do, or even a startup that literally has no money for anything!

Ultimately no budget means you can’t buy anything external and your internal resources are tight. That means time is the resource you should optimize, which means “value per hour” of effort is your priority. In other words, what is the most value you can create with your very limited time?

Research is a good use of time, and you should focus your research on identifying one new way to create value or very few big issues to solve. Then solve the ones that will actually deliver that value as soon as possible (optimize for time!).

The more value you can deliver sooner, the better your chances of generating a “budget” in the future!

Designing with a Huge Budget

With great budgets come great responsibilities. Although lots of junior designers dream of unlimited budgets to do wild and crazy things, in reality a big budget (or a lot of funding) can become an unexpected burden and a source of big, dumb mistakes.

Ironically, when people have no budget, they are careful about how they spend it. But with a huge budget, people start wasting their money (and time) much more than they should. Instead of doing a good job ...