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Why companies don’t care about your UX design process!
This is based on my personal experience.
I’ve been a designer for 14 years now and with confidence I can say that majority of the time I wasn’t allowed to apply the design process.
UX UI bootcamps and universities/colleges teach you how to create a design process and its importance of it. Unfortunately, most companies believe it’s a waste of time and money.
Being a designer for such a long period of time I can say that I’ve applied it once and that was while working at a startup. Sure I had to fight for it but it was because of my ex-boss (Director of Product) who was one of the UX lead at Shopify. That means! He believed in the process as much as I do and because he’s a “director”, upper management will fucking believe him over a Senior Product Designer with 14 years of experience. That’s why it's hard! It’s really hard if you don’t have a boss who was/is a designer.
What companies care about is the end product. On top of that, if you’re the only designer, my friend-good luck! You won’t have time to do a sitemap, card sorting or user breakdown. It’ll mainly be the discovery stage, competitive research, interface design, and prototype. Don’t even bother with quantitative/qualitative analysis. Just hope that your design will increase the products’ revenue.
Here’s a real-life example.
Back in 2012, I was part of one of the biggest projects of my life. I was working for an advertising company and their client in the automotive industry was looking to redesign their website from the ground up with a mobile experience. I got hired because I was one of the few designers at the time that had mobile design experience (perks of educating yourself on your own).
This client was one of the luxury sides of the automotive industry and one of my favourites. I was happy, a matter of fact extremely happy to be part of the project. I couldn’t sleep! Here I was thinking, I’ll apply the full design process. From the discovery stage to hypothesis, user breakdown, sitemap, card sorting, competitive analysis, interface design, and interactive prototype.
