Whenever I read an article about UX design, tips, tools, personal experiences, I feel like I and they are not doing the same job. Almost anything about UX design start from two postulates :
- You design from scratch
- Your work is made before engineers job
These pieces of advice, tips, or a new tool to use are all good, only if you have _carte blanche _to do what you want.
I might be cursed and only find inappropriate jobs but, in my experience UX design is less about creating and more about crafting.
Let’s talk about the ugly reality of UX design.
1. Nobody is waiting for you
Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash
Designing an app or a website from scratch is a luxury that very few people understand. There are only two possibilities to have this opportunity: you are a freelancer that design websites for non-existing company or your company asked you to create something new, be it a whole app or a new page or a new service.
Most of the time, things are already made. UX designers are called to make things better, increase usability, harmonize colors, and such.
In ergonomics, there are three types of work :
- Prospective is thinking about future product and what they would need
- **Conceiving **is making based on an idea
- **Correcting **is making adjustments to something already finished and used
This last one is where you will start, by having a software ugly, with poor usability, counter-intuitive, and this abomination will be the proud baby of its creators.
In this case, the new trends in UX design won’t be useful, you won’t get to revamp the page’s core. Your job, if you accept it, will be to negotiate with engineers to move little things, change a command, redirect a link.
Of course, I’m a bit salty here. You also might be asked to work on a pretty good software, my point is that if things are already done, the way YOU would have addressed the problem, organized each page and the features doesn’t matter. Your role is to take what already exists, and find little modifications that would help future users to understand it intuitively.
#software-development #engineer #ux-collective #ux-design #collaboration