Title: UX Is a Canary in a Coal Mine
Context: Happy designers = better products. So make sure your designers are happy dammit!
Synopsis: Are you happy? Not always an easy question to answer I know. Happiness comes and goes, sometimes on a minute by minute basis, but in general, are you happy with what you do, how you perform, and the outcomes you experience at your job? The variables that inform the answer to this deceptively simple question are interrelated and complex. But as designers, we tend to equate professional happiness with the outcomes of our efforts that are manifested in the products we create. Come up with a great design that leads to a superior product? Generally happy. Come up with a great design that gets chewed up in committee and spit out as a mere shadow of its former self? Definitely unhappy. The temperature of your company’s design team can tell you a lot about how successful you are going to be in the market. If your designers sneeze, your product most likely has already caught the flu. The reason is simple; few functions in your organization internalize your customers’ happiness (not merely satisfaction, but happiness) as emotionally as your user experience design team does. Sure customer escalations, defect counts, and purchase orders all tell a story, but regardless of their arcs, they don’t always tell a happy one.
Best Bit: “When it comes to assessing a company’s relationship to design, it really boils down to two things: (1) design team morale and (2) product quality.”
via medium.com
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