Rigor is not a sexy word, but it’s a game changer when designing for extreme environments
Accountability, standardization, commercial process excellence…these words were the dominant themes emerging from the World Usability Congress this year. In safety-critical industries where process rigor can literally be a matter of life and death, what are UX professionals doing to raise their standards?
Words like “discipline” “accountability” and “standardization” are kind of touchy in a design world that likes to move fast and break things.
But at the World Usability Congress in Austria last October, they were dominating the conversation – and with good reason. For the first time ever, the Congress included a track dedicated to industrial design. And if there's one constant when designing in safety-critical sectors where, as the speakers graphically showed us, people can and do get drilled and sucked into pipes, it's that lives are at risk when you get it wrong.
Which means? The pressure is on us all to develop more detailed and rigorous standards by which we practice our profession. And it starts with reframing those unsexy words as the backbone on which we build as we help some of the most restrictive industries on their path towards digital innovation.
A doctor and a designer walk into a bar...
There's a tendency to associate the profession of User Experience with consumer-facing apps and websites. And why not? There's a high demand for fun and pretty consumer experiences, which, in turn, draws attention from the UX community. It explains why numbers are rising rapidly for those who identify themselves as UX professionals and why, thanks to online boot camps and YouTube tutorials that promise to get you job-ready in six months, it's easier to become a UX professional than ever before.
The problem? These courses are designed for mainstreams, not extremes.
Now, I'm not devaluing these programs or discrediting the value that newbies bring to the profession – everyone has to start somewhere. But they’re symptomatic of a shift away from in-person, immersive, and rigorous experiential training towards something more self-directed and remote. A lot of the time, that’s okay. Designers on a consumer track are surrounded by enough design systems, user research and competitor products to mean that they often don’t need the deep contextual understanding that is mission-critical when designing for dangerous environments. You can get away with a lot of cookie-cutter approaches when you're designing for the fun and games of social media.
However, what works in one context doesn’t necessarily work in another. Analysts predict that by 2025 there will be over 40 billion connected IoT devices in the world. Every aspect of society is being rapidly saturated with digital technology, from huge behind-the-scenes urban infrastructures that regulate traffic flow to real-time process optimization integrated across every single energy production, distribution, supply and consumption phase. Would you trust a recent Coursera graduate to design a nuclear power plant control system? Or a self-driving car? Probably not.
Let's take a step back for a second and think about how other professions are regulated. We wouldn't dream of letting someone who hasn't undergone a multi-year surgical residency and obtained state licensure perform surgery on us. But when it comes to something as important as the UX of industrial products where safety is paramount, anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can dip their toes into the water. And that's a big problem.
Especially when you consider that industrial UX teams may be handling bigger budgets with greater ROI potential, are assuming more risk and responsibility for the safety of more people, and are tasked with transforming industries and societies and entire futures in ways that your average doctor never will.
Towards a new accreditation standard
Luckily, the industry is taking its first forthright steps towards addressing the accountability issue with the launch of a new Global UX Accreditation Standard. The program is anchored to a set of international standards relevant to UX and is being launched in collaboration with the UX Professionals Association, the world’s largest membership association for UX professionals with members in more than 60 countries. UXPA already operates a set of voluntary guidelines for how to conduct ethical user research, among other things.
That combination is really powerful. As a reminder, international standards are drafted by experts who share their standards for feedback and improvement. They are then published as objective, third-party technical specifications that everyone can use to ensure the safety, consistency, accessibility and usability of their products and systems. We use ISOs all the time when we buy food, plug in a hairdryer or put gas in a tank. So the fact that there is now an accreditation program for UX professionals linked to both the UXPA and the relevant ISO standards is a powerful signal that the profession is starting to get serious about what it means to be a competent, qualified, accountable UX professional.
Much like board certification for physicians, going forward accreditation is going to be a way for organizations to identify designers who have the experience of actually launching products and applying UX research techniques rigorously in the field – rigor in this context being an approach that is designed to be effective, rather than to look effective.
Extreme UX demands radical process rigor
Accreditation is one way to standardize the industry. But, in my view, nothing can replace a designer's hands-on experience gained across multiple projects and supported by the scaffold of a robust design methodology.
Highly regulated environments have many pitfalls – radiation, fires, explosions, chemical exposures and more. Designing for and in these extremes challenges the ‘move fast and break things’ approach that dominates traditional UX thinking, which I’ve written about before. It demands that we move slowly and fix things, frontloading the time that’s needed to understand the business challenges and the context, checking and rechecking our framing biases, conducting deep user research and discovery, and proving the concept long before we get into build.
One thing that became very clear at the World Usability Congress is there are a lot of frameworks for innovation out there. All have good points and weaker points. But really, it's by sharing and continuously improving these frameworks that we create the feedback loop for success.
That's why, over the coming weeks, we’ll be creating a downloadable pdf with more insight into the specific process Daito uses to ensure rigor, discipline and accountability when designing in the extremes.
That inevitably means "process" and “standardization.” But instead of being unsexy, our methodology creates reliability and resilience in your projects. For innovation managers who are triaging multiple applications and transformation initiatives; who are trying to figure out where to spend their budgets and where to apply resources, a robust methodology is the only way to make sure that the very best ideas with measurable business returns make it through the development funnel – with 100% project success (and zero loss to life and limb.)
Process rigor, when done right, will not slow you down or create rigidity. But it will give you the scaffold you need to avoid disaster and grow in times of rapid change.