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How to Choose your Battles in UX

Which UX battles do you wage to achieve the best user outcomes? 

Contributed article by Scott Varho, Chief Evangelist and SVP, Global Head of Craft and Communities at 3Pillar Global 

It seems simple: If you want to positively affect your company’s bottom line, build products your customers need or want. But balancing what’s best for your customer and company can be tricky.

At face value, you want to create a user experience that benefits your customers and connects them to your business. Businesses know that the cost to acquire customers is high. The cost to re-acquire customers is incalculable. Poor user experience (UX) can chase away 90% of online shoppers forever. And good UX is great for business, realizing ROIs of up to 9,900%.

Given these numbers, it stands to reason that a company would want the best UX it can possibly build. But UX, like everything, is still beholden to time and cost restrictions. Those restrictions sometimes lead to product designs (and, yes, launches) with sub-optimal UX. In cases where designs change, you face three possible responses:  

• Agree and advocate.
• Move on.
• Push back and coach.  

Which response is best? It depends, but each option comes with general principles you can follow to reach the best possible outcome for you, your users and your company.

Option 1: Agree with and advocate for the design change

If a change benefits the business and your users, it’s easy to agree with it. Maybe your understanding of the technical, financial or other constraints to your initial design evolved. Or the change unlocks more value for the user than before.

Your company wants to save time and money or improve morale among the engineering team through new designs or features. So long as the change meets users’ needs as well, you should both accept and advocate for that change. But be sure it’s truly a win-win: change by itself inflicts costs on your most loyal users, so ensure they see value in the exchange.

Option 2: Be pragmatic and move on

When designing products, your goal isn’t actually to create the “best” product; instead, you want to build a product that optimizes serving your customers and your business. This pragmatic approach relies on a leader’s “product wisdom,” meaning your awareness of your emotional response to a change and the ability to return yourself to the optimal product calculus.

Sometimes, that calculus will lead to you accepting a “worse” design if it generally benefits your users. A Ferrari is a much better-designed car than a Ford Taurus, but most people calculate that the sacrifices to own the Ferrari far outweigh the benefits of its design. Similarly, a feature or design that sends the product price beyond your typical user’s perceived product value undermines your value proposition. This doesn’t help your users — they can’t realize benefits from a product that costs too much to do the job they “hire” it to do.

Of course, your more expensive product might still capture half the users, reducing overall support costs while gaining a foothold in the premium side of a market. A better bottom line makes for happy investors. So the most important consideration is your business thesis supporting your strategy — weigh your overarching goal in your decision calculus.

Option 3: Hold firm and coach

Some changes show no real promise of user benefits or even potentially negative outcomes for all or a subset of users. It’s your job to optimize return-on-investment, but it’s not a burden you should carry alone.  Pushing back requires time and energy while inviting friction, professionally and personally, into your team. Relational capital that you spend fighting a change can’t go anywhere else, so use them wisely.  To get the most out of this moment, turn it into a teachable moment and win an ally.
The wisest approach to pushing back is to raise your concerns as questions and clearly explain your thinking about the potential negative impacts of the proposed change.  Where you see risks to the users or buyers (if B2B) or both.  Greater context leads to better products. 

However, you should also be open to learning something you hadn’t considered.  Give your teammates the benefit of the doubt when they’re seeking adjustments to a design. They have their own reasons and opinions; hear them out. Effectively pushing back requires building and maintaining earned and mutual trust with your teammates, too. You can’t wage war on your first day.

And it’s okay to wave the white flag and surrender in the face of fierce opposition.  If you get there, all is not lost.  Suggest monitoring what happens in production and collaborate on a way to determine if the change had the desired impact.  Being right isn’t nearly as valuable as building a shared sense of ownership and accountability for your product’s results.   You won’t win every battle, even if you’re right — strategically choosing what’s worth fighting for is key. In the long run, showing your colleagues that you’re more committed to getting it right than being right will pay dividends.

Only after you consider your options and understand the risks should you start countering the design proposal. A healthy company will encourage these debates if they lead to a better solution. Listen to your colleagues and respect their points of view — curiosity and humility will win out over lonely brilliance.

Regardless of which option you choose when faced with design changes, limit emotion’s role in your decision-making. It’s great to be proud of your design, but pride can’t come at the expense of your users’ best interests. Keep user advocacy and business strategy as your guiding principles, and you’ll succeed in building the optimal product.

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About the Author

Scott Varho, Chief Evangelist and SVP, Global Head of Craft and Communities at 3Pillar Global, has spent close to 20 years working in or leading fast-paced delivery teams accountable for building products that support core business objectives. At Pearson Education (a Fortune 500 education services company), he served as Executive Product Manager for Identity and Access Management, serving business units responsible for over $3 billion in annual revenue. As Vice President of Platform for EverFi, Scott led the initiative to merge the K12 and Higher Ed platforms, while simultaneously launching a new business model and accomplishing new levels of scale. Most recently, Scott was tapped by the CEO at Interfolio to organize the product, user experience, and engineering teams. He oversaw the rapid maturation of the team and business culture, a 3x increase in revenue, and played a significant role in the acquisition diligence and integration of the Data180 employees and technology.