Why Does Design Fail?

UX and agility are key priorities in modern business, so why is the internet still littered with complicated web interfaces?

Design fails due to a lack of data. While agile and lean development have come on in leaps and bounds, improvements to data and design processes have been left behind.

Many UX designers focus on gathering data before designing a product or service. By researching customer pain points prior to design, UX designers have a full understanding of the issues before building a solution.

This approach brings value to the design process and helps create solutions that will appeal to your target audience. But as soon as a product or service goes live, submitting UX feedback becomes difficult. This lack of data means poor UX design is never addressed.

Gather Data Through Ongoing User Feedback

One simple way to fix this is to include a feedback mechanism for every project. This allows you to collate ongoing data which is reflective of changing customer preferences and needs.

Consider the Google search engine. Early search engines like Ask Jeeves and Yahoo were cluttered with links, so the websites were difficult to navigate. It was time-consuming for users to find what they were looking for, but it wasn’t easy to relay this feedback to the design team.

Google identified the pain point and developed a solution – a clean interface that made finding information quick and easy. If the other sites had offered a feedback mechanism, they could have made necessary changes before Google became the search engine of choice.

Conclusion

Carrying out UX research prior to site design is important, but it does not end there. Continuous user feedback is vital, and including this facility in your UX design will drive ongoing improvements.

Inviting users to provide feedback at any stage of the customer journey means that you can keep track of changing customer preferences and needs and make the changes required to improve UX.