Why is UX so important during the digital transformation design phase?

Episode Transcript

Moderator:  Hi, welcome to One Question with UpTop Health. Today’s article is Successful Digital Transformation Depends On A Solid User Experience and after reading the article, the question I had was ‘Why is UX so important during the digital transformation design phase?’ and Craig, could you start off for us, please?

Craig: Yeah, thanks, that’s a great question. What a lot of people think of when they think of UX is the actual design. What I think of in terms of digital transformation is all the work that goes into eliciting the requirements thinking through the user flows, looking at where there’s opportunities for improvement and really mapping that back to the user, the technology, the business objectives and those requirements. That’s a deeper level of design thinking.

Why it’s so important during digital transformation is if you’re only looking at the problem from one lens, you’re going to solve it from that perspective. If you solve it from that perspective, you’re not really going to be able to transform, so thinking of it from a technology-only perspective and not taking into consideration the problems that the users are having. They may have sent a trouble ticket in but in terms of the flows and how they’re interacting with the tool or the product, then you really are not able to transform anything.

If you don’t understand the business objectives or longer term digital business goals, then from a design and a technology perspective, you might just be refreshing something rather than transforming it. So how I look at it is, there’s a business side to UX and the UX process: the mindset, the activities, etc. where you come in with curiosity and try to fix the problem from that perspective using exercises like “How Might We” to reframe, is really where the value of UX can be proven out in digital transformation Mike, how about yourself?

Michael: I agree with everything you said Craig and I have slightly different take on this topic. I think when UX is considered early on during the strategic stage, it has a greater impact on user and business outcomes than when UX is considered later on in the process. We’ve worked with some of the largest tech companies where they are often engineering-led, and in working with these companies, we’ve had many projects where they’ve come to us with a coded prototype and have asked us to, ‘improve the UX’ months before launching. It makes sense that this is the case because some of these organizations are moving really, really fast. They want to launch sooner rather than later, and they want to see instant results.

It also supports the concept of design thinking, which is embracing the mindset of bias towards action. What we are not seeing, in some cases, is the thoughtfulness of the users at the onset and this is what we call user-centered design, making sure to consider the needs and pain points of the users early on in the critical and strategic stages, which can ultimately save time, money and resources down the line.

Sometimes, when a project gets to us, what we see are engineers or product owners either loading up on features or missing huge opportunities to solve user needs. And because we are often involved so late in the process, when so much has already been invested already, we sometimes are limited with how much we can actually change. This begets the saying that it’s much more costly to change things in development, than during requirements gathering – just like what you were saying Craig. The bottom line is involve UX early, but also throughout a project. By doing so, you’ll start to see a shift in internal culture. This culture when scaled organization-wide will have transformational effects on how you innovate and impacts both your customers and your business.

Moderator: Thanks guys.

Craig/Michael: Thank you.