Product development costs real money, and usability testing prototypes before building saves it. Test early, iterate based on feedback, then hand off to development. Building in buffer time for redesigns after testing costs less than shipping broken features and fixing them later.
Chapters
What I do want to talk about today is how much design costs and the cost of bad design. Now, in order to design something, there you have to think about a realistic cost, right? So even in your product itself is going to cost because you have employees at your business or people working at it, and you have how long it takes. So if you think about how much it costs to pay someone's salary for X amount of time you have X amount of people, right? So you have the designers, the developers, you have the product managers, you have all the people, right? So there is a cost associated with building features and products, and then you have an expected return of investment. So how much money that feature or that application or product is going to make, right? That's, that's like your trade-off here. Now, the goal of UX, or one of the goals of UX, is to mitigate risk. And, you know, the risk being you design something and it completely failing, or you building something that no one uses, right? Having a UX design team, you really try to make sure that it is usable, that it will be used, it aligns with your users' expectations and things like that. So there's a couple of ways of doing this. Let's talk about the, the way that may take longer, but may, may save you much more, much more money. Once you've done the design, assuming you've validated your market, assuming you have come up with an idea, you do the design, and then you usability test it and make sure it aligns with your users' expectations, as well as the functionality is usable by your, your user base. And then after you do this usability test, you evaluate and you say, we need to redesign this or fix some things, we saw some, some stuff from here, or this does make sense. And let's move it into development. You kind of have your checks and balances. There's the alternative where, and this is significantly more expensive, but you design something, you build something, you give it to users to test out and see how they interact with it. It does well or it doesn't do well, and then you iterate, right? That is saying that you are willing to design, design and develop 2 times instead of, uh, taking the time and testing it, testing a prototype or testing a less functionality version of your product. So obviously, I'm a big advocate of, you know, going through usability testing and ensuring that your design meets the expectations of the user. But this does become challenging for timelines and things like that, because you're, you're not quite sure of the outcome, right? You can schedule the design, schedule the usability testing, but what happens next is based on the results. So you can't just say, oh, we want to build it by X date. I mean, you can, you can, you can try to give yourself some buffer. You can— some things that I do is I'll give a design, a usability testing, and then give a final design sprint or time to update the design just in case, and/or finalize it or make sure that it's dev ready before going into development. And that's assuming that there will be minor changes from the usability test. But if there was ever really big really big changes and saying we need to go back to the drawing board, I would still bring it up during that time and push for more time. So these are, these are just some areas that you can save, save money by having a UX team, by investing in UX, taking your time, and how expensive it is to skip research or skip usability testing and not letting the design maturity flourish through your company.
