If someone told you that UX design is about solving user problems, they lied.
Well, sort of.
In an ideal world, you would research your target audience, spot the most important problems, and solve them for users. But that is rarely the whole story. Often, there are other priorities, ad-hoc requests from product managers, and tasks that don’t seem fully aligned with the most pressing user needs.
Inexperienced designers tend to label these environments as “immature UX.” Only senior designers know the other side of the coin.
In this blog, I’ll share the lesser-known facts about solving UX problems to help you determine which ones need work and which ones don’t.
It’s all about business objectives
We build products to deliver business impact. But, solving problems and creating a great user experience are not enough.
Let’s look at it from a new perspective. You might have the noblest vision and win at solving the most significant user problems and delivering mesmerizing UX. But if you fail actually to monetize the solution or ensure sustainable growth, what’s good about that? You will help a handful of people before going bankrupt.
Assuming you are not an NGO with unlimited external funding for product development and paid marketing, you must consider growth and monetization. But these don’t always align perfectly with user problems.
What’s better — delivering a 7-out-of-10 UX and going bankrupt in a year or sustainably delivering a 6-out-of-10 UX and helping thousands solve a key problem?
Of course, your job as a UX designer still is and will be to advocate for proper user experience, and the voice that constantly reminds us of this aspect of product development is indispensable.
Pro tip — choose wisely what you advocate for. Invest your energy in user problems that also closely align with business problems, not just any user problem that comes your way.
Leaving serious user problems unsolved is OK
Let’s take a step further. There are problems that should never be solved, no matter how pressing they might be from users’ perspective.
Let me share an example.
A couple of years back, I managed a mobile app for a retail store chain. The app allowed users to collect points, get coupons, access discounts, localize shops, etc.
Whenever we did research or received inbound requests from users, one challenge surfaced frequently — digital receipts. Many users collect paper receipts after the purchase for various reasons, and they’d love to have these in digital form.
And solving this UX issue wasn’t even difficult. We would make users happy and probably attract more users to our app.
But the catch? Further research showed that one of the primary use cases of receipt collection was to compare prices between stores. People would simply look at old receipts when browsing items in other stores to see where they can get the better deal.
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Being one of the most expensive chains in the country, you can imagine how that one would backfire. It’s not really a sound idea to give our users a tool to see how expensive our chain was, right?
So even though it’s been the top-requested feature for the last couple of years, it’s still not implemented. The product team decided to pursue other user problems — ones that not only solve user pain points but also help the business grow.
UX focus won’t get you a seat at the table
UX designers often complain that they are not getting a “seat at the table” — that is, they are not included in the decision-making process and, instead, are often made to deliver tasks.
One of the core reasons for this is that they ignore the business side of things.
The truth is, “the table” doesn’t discuss what user problem to solve and how to make users happier. Instead, it tries to figure out how to drive business metrics. Solving user problems is only a medium that helps drive these metrics.
User experience is one of the tools companies use to drive results. You must stop thinking about UX as a goal in itself. Otherwise, you’ll rarely be treated seriously in the decision-making process.
The real role of a UX designer
In short, the job of a UX designer is not to create great user experience. The job is to drive business goals with great user experience.
Although it might sound like a subtle difference in definition, it enormously impacts the thinking process. UX as a goal itself or UX as a tool to achieve business goals are two completely different approaches.
Although focusing purely on improving the lives of our users is exciting and probably what drove you to this profession, we all like to get our paychecks. Whether you get your paycheck next month depends mainly on the business results the company can achieve, not necessarily the number of user problems it solves.
Ultimately, as a UX designer, you should still focus on solving user problems but stop treating it as a goal in itself and put it in the bigger picture. Your goal is to drive business results with user experience, not to deliver user experience for the sake of it.
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