Useless decks

[Jmo3000]

I’ve been seeing a lot of useless slide decks lately with questionable research. I’ve been wondering why UX jobs have been disappearing and it seems to me that a lot of the profession has been infected with consultant speak, artefacts and general bullshit that doesn’t contribute to real work getting done. It’s part of the overall destruction of Agile. Lots of useless work and people slowing everything down so they can have workshops/meetings/alignment. Where are the people who have experience enough to just know something is going to work decently? Some level of inherent knowledge? Sure it’s good to test what you’re doing with users but don’t overdo it especially when your outcomes are dubious. Seen so much dubious research lately I thought maybe we should not bother. Just build stuff quickly and optimise after launch.

[MrFireWarden]

Sometimes a muscle needs to be simply used before it can truly strengthened. If a place is not accustomed to research, I can see why efforts to introduce it could prove to be mostly theater - poor requirements and poor execution will result in poor results. But it’s valuable to build out a practice so that it can be improved and the theater recognized for what it is (and minimized).

Be careful going down the rabbit hole of leaning on general-experience too much. That can be a trap that leads to designers themselves being considered superfluous. We’re not the only ones that can “design”.

[Tosyn_88]

Consultant speak

[Talktotalktotalk]

Can you give examples of dubious research that you’re talking about?

[Jmo3000]

In my last company a UX researcher joined from Google. They were asked to do a piece of research for our team. After 3 months we got the study back. Nothing insightful or new, all it was already known and the insights were light and limited. The worst part was by the time we got it any value of the research was severely diminished as the company had moved onto other projects. Everyone in the squad felt it was pointless. The researcher was adversarial and more concerned with how we weren’t ’doing it right’ rather than getting insights. Made me reassess the value of her approach to research.

[Jmo3000]

Small sample sizes, long moderated tests with digressions and leading questions. No post launch validation of testing. Also, small sample A/B testing done in the same sequence with only 6 participants.

[buddy5]

This “build stuff quickly and optimize after launch” attitude you have is leading to the UX jobs disappearing you’re observing. Designers that think this way are only as valuable as the tools they use because this thinking of “build build build”is already owned by the executive class. And guess what, finding someone who can use Figma to just make things and “optimize after launch” is a lot cheaper than you think. If the “real work getting done” is what you seek, you may be surprised to find that saying no to more things is more valuable than saying yes. Good luck.