Personal experience sharing on current work with little hope for a better future :v
Disclaimer: This is my personal experience based on my point-of-view only. Some occurrences might or might not similar to other case scenarios in other companies, countries, or products. Would appreciate any sharing or discussion 😉
For a while that I worked in this in-house project as a UX Designer. Most of the work is to collaborate with POs (Don’t forget that s — yes, we have many POs in this project) to come up with the design for each story they created. If I’m lucky enough, we’d have some time to do the research to leverage their ideas. But if that happened, maybe this article won’t exist 😂
So, what are my challenges working in this project?
You are not your user, and never will be
A big common, most frequently, and classic problem I’d say. We all are not our users: me — the designer, POs — the owner, all of us, we’re just people who came up with ideas and hope to make it help our users and reach our goal at the same time.
The challenge is that users are not the main key point in our project. For other B2C products or startup companies, sometimes users are the main key point that we need to keep them stay with us. Unless they‘ll just leave and go to our competitors. Thus, for our corporate in-house product, users usually have a lower role compare to the PO, they’re forced to use the system as a part of the process to achieve the high-level’s goal.
And that’s when the big UX challenge encountered, we can’t just follow the POs’ guide and hope our users will understand and adapt themselves to what we created. Users are important to us, as much as the project’s goal, the POs’ visions, and all stakeholder’s opinions. We need to stay strong in our position and try our best to balance those things together. And that never be an easy task.
Too. Many. People.
Another common problem for corporate companies lol. We’re a big team, we need many people to help us achieve our gigantic goal. Thus, more people leads to more problems. Collaboration is a key to accomplish our task but it also takes time, especially when there are sooo many people to talk to.
There’s once I talked with 1 PO who takes care of a specific story that I need to redesign the page. We’re not sure about displaying one specific field so we decided to go out and ask users whether they use it or not. I ask 1 team in my location and that PO asks some representatives of few teams in their location (yes, this is a global project with many users from all over the world). Both of us got the same result that we can remove the field so we continue with that. The week after, I talked with another PO who‘s mainly responsible for my country. Since she has more experienced than me, she insisted that this field is important to many users, maybe the team I interviewed last time due to limited constraints isn’t cover that case. So, almost 2 weeks spent clarifying whether we should keep of discard that little field. Not to mentioned collaboration with developers for more complicated case scenarios.
Even though talking back-and-forth is exhausting and takes lots of time. I’d still suggest discussing among team as much as possible. No matter how much time you need to talk with many people in the team for alignment before the design or the implementation. It’s still worth the value and less cost compared to the time you need to follow up and fix after the false design or implementation is rolled out.
Writing up until now, I don’t think all challenges I explained are limited to the ‘Corporate in-house product’ as I stated in this blog’s title. They're all common problems that occur in every project and every organization. Just the use case that I brought to you is referred to that particular project I worked on.
Agile / Whirlpool
The last challenge I’d like to talk to is the agile system. Another common problem applying agile to the team is not enough understanding leads to using agile for a time limitation for the implementation. We divided tasks into a sprint, define the task’s detail and hope everything works out after sprint ends. It’s not a real iteration that we do a quick version, test it, collect feedback, and adapt to the next sprint. Just a whirlpool that we keep rolling, rolling in the same place believing it’ll bring us the bright fortune someday.
It’s not an easy task applying ‘real’ agile to a big company, especially when our corporation existed for too long and not yet 100% ready to adapt to the new era. Yet, we’re trying, for a while, and it’s gonna be better 🙏
Also, applying UX research in the agile framework is another tough task. Sprint system forced us to finish the design before the development while doing research takes time and seems impossible when the story is defined only 1 sprint ahead with no plan in mind.
Some suggestion is to prior book slot every month or couple months as ‘research phase’ to guarantee that we have time for it. Another suggestion is to involve all stakeholders in the research so they can see and understand the importance of research and allow us to perform more. Another suggestion is to show our value to the stakeholders e.g. how much we’ll lose for a feature that we didn’t do enough research, so they might understand us and give us more time for the research. The common idea is to prove the importance and value gained from the research so that everyone allows us to do it. Guys, it’s really important! 😱
And that’s all the challenges I encounter for a couple of months already. Our team is aware of these problems and still in progress in solving them. I don’t know how long it’ll take to overcome these challenges, but we believe in the little glimpse we all see at the end of the tunnel. So we’ll keep walking! Hope someday I can come back to this blog and share with you how we can solve it, hopefully 😂
That’s it for this blog! Thank you for reading up until here and feel free to share any thoughts, pains, or suggestions. Would love to hear it all 😃
Happy UXing, everyone 😉
