Gandalf Hudlow
The value-destroying effect of arbitrary date pressure on code
An Article by Gandalf HudlowThe mandate from above is clear, just get it done! Avoid everything that's in the way: all advice, all expertise, all discovery efforts that detract from hitting the Date™!
What these organizations don't realize is that all software change can be modeled as three components: Value, Filler and Chaos. Chaos destroys Value and Filler is just functionality that nobody wants. When date pressure is applied to software projects, the work needed to remove Chaos is subtly placed on the chopping block. Work like error handling, clear logging, chaos & load testing and other quality work is quietly deferred in favor of hitting the Date™.
Software that nobody wants
An Article by Gandalf HudlowFinding value is the result of enabling individual and group-level discovery attempts. It's not the result of everyone following one leader's gut.
What just happened is a new software product/feature was created that no customer wanted. This happens way too often. In fact, most hyper important software projects that must be done by date certain or else, have deep flaws that cause some variation of this phenomenon, flaws that include:
- Not wanted - Company specified a solution to a problem that customers don't actually have
- No Rarity - Company is pursuing an iKnockoff of existing products. The market already has two scaled competitors with working solutions, customers naturally spend budget on products that are already successful to avoid risk
- Incorrect Packaging - Customers need a website, but the company created an iOS app instead
- Incorrect Pricing - Customers need SaaS pricing, but the company created a shrink wrapped, on-premise solution with CapEx and maintenance agreements instead
Skeleton, Organs, Circulation, Sinew, Skin
I’m concerned with how I witness the work of user experience practitioners getting treated: like it’s just a set of motions toward a product’s all-important implementation, and one that we try to compress, due to its ostensible superfluity. Once the implementation is finished, the UX work appears to usually get discarded.
Tracing the answer back
I submit that the materials that form the precursors to a product’s implementation have considerable value on their own.
My vision is that I will be able to ask a question as mundane as one about the wording of a single button, and trace the answer all the way back to the overarching business strategy to see that it makes sense.
The UX coral reef
It isn’t a site, or a service, or even an identifiable product at all, but rather a system for creating a skin around and connective tissue between things like:
Demographic studies
Contextual inquiries
Stakeholder and user interviews
Surveys
The business ecosystem
Personas
Scenarios
Sketches, storyboards, wireframes
Mockups, models and prototypes
Email and IM conversations
Meeting notes
Content inventories and audits
Concept schemes, taxonomies, thesauri
A UI style guide
A branding and visual identity guide
A voice and tone guide
A code style guide
...etcThe individual elements of such a corpus represent the work of half a dozen specialist sub-disciplines, and are useful for realizing a product’s implementation. But if you hook them all up together, they merge to become a strategic artifact that transcends products and operates as a critical control surface for the business. This is because what such an artifact represents is a coral reef of deeply-considered and hard-fought decisions, and a story of the process that yielded them.