How To Build Confidence In Your UX Work

When I start any UX project, typically there is very little confidence in the successful outcome of my UX initiatives. In fact, there is quite a lot of reluctance and hesitation, especially from teams that have been burnt by empty promises and poor delivery in the past.

Good UX has a huge impact on business. But often we need to build up confidence in our upcoming UX projects. For me, an effective way to do that is to address critical bottlenecks and uncover hidden deficiencies — the ones that affect the people I’ll be working with.

Let’s take a closer look at what this can look like.

UX Doesn’t Disrupt, It Solves Problems #

Bottlenecks are usually the most disruptive part of any company. Almost every team, every unit, and every department has one. It’s often well-known by employees as they complain about it, but it rarely finds its way to senior management as they are detached from daily operations.

The bottleneck can be the only senior developer on the team, or a broken legacy tool, or a confusing flow that throws errors left and right — there’s always a bottleneck, and it’s usually the reason for long waiting times, delayed delivery, and cutting corners in all the wrong places.

We might not be able to fix the bottleneck. But for a smooth flow of work, we need to ensure that non-constraint resources don’t produce more than the constraint can handle. All processes and initiatives must be aligned to support and maximize the efficiency of the constraint.

So before doing any UX work, look out for things that slow down the organization. Show that it’s not UX work that disrupts work, but it’s internal disruptions that UX can help with. And once you’ve delivered even a tiny bit of value, you might be surprised how quickly people will want to see more of what you have in store for them.

The Work Is Never Just “The Work” #

Meetings, reviews, experimentation, pitching, deployment, support, updates, fixes — unplanned work blocks other work from being completed. Exposing the root causes of unplanned work and finding critical bottlenecks that slow down delivery is not only the first step we need to take when we want to improve existing workflows but it is also a good starting point for showing the value of UX.

To learn more about the points that create friction in people’s day-to-day work, set up 1:1s with the team and ask them what slows them down. Find a problem that affects everyone. Perhaps there is too much work in progress that results in late delivery and low quality? Or lengthy meetings stealing precious time?

One frequently overlooked detail is that we can’t manage work that is invisible. That’s why it is so important that we visualize the work first. Once we know the bottleneck, we can suggest ways to improve it. It could be to introduce 20% idle times if the workload is too high, for example, or to make meetings slightly shorter to make room for other work.

The Theory Of Constraints #

The idea that the work is never just “the work,” is deeply connected to the Theory of Constraints discovered by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt. It showed that any improvements made anywhere beside the bottleneck are an illusion.

Any improvement after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck results in more work piling up at the bottleneck.

Wait Time = Busy ÷ Idle #

To improve flow, sometimes we need to freeze the work and bring focus to one single project. Just as important as throttling the release of work is managing the handoffs. The wait time for a given resource is the percentage that resource is busy, divided by the percentage it’s idle. If a resource is 50% utilized, the wait time is 50/50, or 1 unit.

If the resource is 90% utilized, the wait time is 90/10, or 9 times longer. And if it’s 99% of time utilized, it’s 99/1, so 99 times longer than if that resource is 50% utilized. The critical part is to make wait times visible, so you know when your work spends days sitting in someone’s queue.

The exact times don’t matter, but if a resource is busy 99% of the time, the wait time will explode.

Avoid 100% Occupation #

Our goal is to maximize flow: that means exploiting the constraint but creating idle times for non-constraint to optimize system performance.

One surprising finding for me was that any attempt to maximize the utilization of all resources — 100% occupation across all departments — can actually be counterproductive. As Goldratt noted, “An hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour out of the entire system. An hour saved at a non-bottleneck is worthless.”

Recommended Read: “The Phoenix Project” #

I can only wholeheartedly recommend The Phoenix Project, an absolutely incredible book that goes into all the fine details of the Theory of Constraints described above.

It’s not a design book, but a great book for designers who want to be more strategic about their work. It’s a delightful and very real read about the struggles of shipping (albeit on a more technical side).

Wrapping Up #

People don’t like sudden changes and uncertainty, and UX work often disrupts their usual ways of working. Unsurprisingly, most people tend to block it by default. So before we introduce big changes, we need to get their support for our UX initiatives.

We need to build confidence and show them the value that UX work can have — for their day-to-day work. To achieve that, we can work together with them. Listening to the pain points they encounter in their workflows, to the things that slow them down.

Once we’ve uncovered internal disruptions, we can tackle these critical bottlenecks and suggest steps to make existing workflows more efficient. That’s the foundation to gaining their trust and showing them that UX work doesn’t disrupt but that it’s here to solve problems.