Inputs and Outputs

Over the past several years, the UX community has developed dozens of activities designed to engage the organization in the research, analysis, and design of the user experience. While many of these activities are valuable (some are not), too often they are completed, forgotten, and ignored as the product development lifecycle moves forward. Even field research notes are filed away, never to be seen again.

That’s not going to happen in Navigating the Politics of UX, Volume 2: Operations, coming this October.

The activities in this book will progressively refine our understanding of the product we’re designing, ensuring that the output of each activity serves as input to the next. The output of the research we conduct will be input to the analysis we perform. The output of our analysis will be input to our designs. The designs we create and refine will be input to development. The developed product that we ship will be input to subsequent rounds of research.

And so it goes. This does not mean that research, analysis, design, and development are linear. They are continuous. Analysis can reveal the need for additional research. Preliminary designs must be analyzed. Development constraints may require revision to designs. And, of course, we must accommodate “Ah-ha!” revelations that occur anywhere in the lifecycle whether we include them in the current release or the next.

Our goal is to ensure we do not fall into the trap of performing activities without achievement, mindlessly wasting our time executing steps in some prescribed process, checking them off, and forgetting about them. Throughout my career, I have been tethered to such processes-of-the-month: Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Process Reengineering, Waterfall/Phase-Gate, Six Sigma, Design Thinking, and the latest entry—all the flavors of Agile. Religions spring up around them, consultancies preach them, and high priests are anointed to ensure compliance to them. But inevitably they fall out of favor, replaced by the next cool-sounding process that someone dreams up.

Inputs to outputs to inputs will prevent us from traveling down this same path as we pursue the quintessence of UX.