Do you feel it, too? It feels like time is speeding up. Almost every week, there is some new development, tool, or even trend emerging in our field that adds another thing to learn and master to our list.
As if we didn‘t have enough to cover the scope of UX work in general. And on top of it all, the only thing that seems to matter anymore is how fast we can crank out solutions and adapt to new technology and changing market conditions.
I might be having a boomer moment right now, but I still remember the „Iron Triangle“ that describes the dependencies between quality, speed, and cost.
If you‘re not familiar with it, here is the gist.
You cannot have all three qualities at the same time.
- You can have something that is fast and good, but that won‘t be cheap.
- You can have something that is cheap and good, but it‘s going to take time to develop.
- If you choose to go for fast and cheap, you‘ll have to accept that the quality will be low.
I see the current development of tech with such a high focus on saving time and expenses, leading directly to lower quality in products and services.
As UX professionals, we understand the dangers of that road. Both for individual users and society in general. Just look at what the lack of care and quality has caused in social media, which has either become an echo chamber for hate or a vanity show that promotes unhealthy and unattainable lifestyles that cause addiction and hurt our mental health. Think of self-driving cars causing accidents or the fact that many companies seem to only adopt accessibility features since there is a chance they may be fined for ignoring them.
All is fine as long as we are moving fast and breaking things, right?
I‘m not so sure anymore.
Now, I know this may have sounded like a grumpy old designer dude who has missed the trend and is now longing for the good old days. But actually, I think this could be an opportunity for UX professionals to refocus on what we bring to the teams we work with. Instead of falling into the trap of just more speed, we can work to uphold the quality of our products and services.
Isn‘t that what UX work has always been about?
We can work toward upholding or even creating balance in the Iron Triangle between speed, quality, and cost. Not against the business that wants and needs speed and cost savings (of course), but with it to ensure the quality we‘ll deliver will help us sustain for more than just the next quarter of a rocky economy.
Let‘s apply UX to ensure we cut costs by preventing fines. Let‘s question how and where to apply new technology to spare our teams from flaky investments that have to be rolled back. Let‘s examine what this immense speed of cranking out new features actually does to the adoption rates, overwhelm, and retention rates of our users. Let‘s use new tools and speed in execution to learn to build the right things faster rather than simply building more.
If we, as UX professionals, position ourselves in this way, we‘ll be able to continue serving both our teams and our users, even when the world is spinning around us.
What do you think? How can UXers adapt to the need for speed we are seeing in tech?
