We try to elevate UX sometimes to make it more appealing or more elaborate than it needs to be. Having a sound understanding of the context of what you are doing in UX is useful in helping to keep your eyes on the target; constrain how you talk about these so that you don’t end up off-piste. Avoid starting to make recommendations that could jeopardise the funding that you’ve been given or your team’s ability to deliver on that promise.
New, untested
This is the one that every one strives for. Creating a brand new experience, from stratch. The irony is that the actual opportunities to do this is slightly less rare than finding unicorn poo (which, is only slight rarer than finding a UX unicorn, sorry!).
Mostly these are either found in true start-up organisations, or part of academic projects where the reality of delivering these as profitable solutions is de-risked.
Evolution or upgrade
This is the one sphere that we mostly work in. One that requires quiet and persistent attention to deliver. This is not a bad thing. It also covers work that requires a certain amount of evolution from its current state and it can be extended to mean a replacement for an existing experience or system.
It is much more about what we can learn from what currently works that is important. Another word for this is brownfield; where a development has already existed but that a change of direction (or use) is needed. This has no relation to muck spreading for fertilisation. What it means is that something existed on the physical site and has been assigned to perform, re-focused or be re-used differently.
Optimisation
Optimisation is a whole industry in itself. We can make (valuable or fictional) recommendations which are usually hypothetical in inception and lean in execution. It helps us to squeeze the juice and roll-back quickly if it isn’t working.
The difference between evolutionary upgrade or modification is slight. But for the purposes of this article let’s assume that an upgrade is a significant step forward with a larger return, where as a small modification is a small incremental change that solves a more specific issue.
Communicating what your expected outcomes are clearly and succinctly helps others to understand what you have been seeking to achieve and why. Maybe keeping this in mind and talking about your designs in this simple way may help you to find more engaged stakeholders in your organisation than you might think. If they become engaged they become easier to reach out to; if they are easier to reach out to they won’t close their ears when you try to take about the bigger, more expensive problems that you might be trying to solve.
Frazer Cooper 