DANNY VIGIL
I build products and lead teams for scrappy startups and global corporations: implementing corporate user experience strategies, fostering a culture of exploration, and delivering sustaining business value through the wider lens of systems thinking. I am currently collaborating on all this with the product and engineering teams at Travelport - where we are creating products that power world-wide travel commerce.
We all want to deliver fantastic products, but on the outset the climb to a great user experience can seem quite daunting. The trailhead may start with quantifiable product features that are useful, functional and usable. However, very few companies progress past usable to a product that is convenient, desirable and even meaningful. Those companies that deliver truly delightful products have certainly taken the time to understand the qualitative subtleties of their users.
The ideas coming out of the product backlog are problems to be solved; but without time travel how can we be sure we'll ship the right solution? To be clear, the user experience is paramount but there is another major advantage to the design process: cost savings. When the alternative is potentially shipping an unproven feature that customers fail to embrace, design is comparatively cheap. What the design process provides is an early glimpse into multiple potential futures (time travel if you will), giving product teams the data needed to confidently move products into the very costly stages of development, sales, training and support. Failing isn’t a bad outcome. In fact, it may just saved a company from directing massive budgets into a feature destined for failure. In some ways a design teams job is to fail (and recover) while it’s still cheap to do so.
While User Experience is no doubt gaining a foothold in corporations, it is still an emerging field — and many enterprise companies struggle with how to best integrate design specialist into the product life-cycle.
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The design process is actually quite collaborative. When empowered to do so, your design team should seek to involve stakeholders across the organization and actively engage customers at every stage to deliver truly innovative solutions.
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“Agile” allows for on-the-fly changes; but is a still a rigid construct designed to maximize output - meanwhile Design often seems like meandering explorations. However, there is a systematic process for delivering delightful UX within an agile framework.
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