How To Get To The Top Of The UX Pyramid
UX design has the potential to change people’s lives. It can change the way we behave, think, see, collaborate, organize ourselves, what we value, our motivation. Each application we use has a bias, a workflow, a mental model of the world, a vision of how we should to things, an opinion about what is important, an effect on our inner psychology. Whether you see it or not, it’s there. Applications might seem innocent, but they impact our inner world more than we think. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us. UX design can have a profound impact on our lives and with that the bottom line of organizations. But getting to that level of impact is more difficult than you might think. Getting there is not about crafting cool solutions but about uncovering the right problem to solve.
The UX pyramid
When we think about the levels of impact and meaning UX design can have, the UX pyramid is a useful mental model. It shows us that applications can not only be useful, but also convenient, pleasurable and meaningful. The base line is about reliability, functionality and usability.
Getting to the top of the UX pyramid is the ultimate goal, the ultimate competitive advantage in a world where the war on competitive advantage is waged on the battlefield of User Experience. If you get to the top of the UX pyramid, you no longer have users but ambassadors and fans. If you can solve a problem in a meaningful way, you have obtained the right to print money.
User research and finding the right questions
I believe there are two things that are absolutely necessary to get to the highest level: continuous user involvement and the ability to find the right questions.
The objective goals of functionality, reliability and usability are fairly straight forward to achieve. There is a ton of knowledge on best practices on how to build a reliable, functional and usable application. Any UX designer worth his salt is also able to apply the latest trends when it comes to intuitive use and the creation of pleasure and excitement. There is a ton of nifty tricks out there like animations, 3D, video etc. to create a thrilling experience.
The thing is that these things are all pretty universal. Most people on the web find the same things pleasurable. We have the data to support that. It can differ from target group to target group, but you don’t need deep dive user research to know what people like. Uncovering the functional specification is usually also not that hard. Project usually start of with functional specifications of sorts. We need an application that can do x. If you design and build something that fulfills the functional requirements in a way that is nice to use and has a little surprise somewhere, a killer feature, you are pretty much at the pleasurable level on the UX pyramid.
The biggest challenge and the most fulfilling step, the most valuable step, is the step from pleasurable to meaningful.
The road from pleasurable to meaningful is blocked by two things.
- One is failure to involve users. It is nearly impossible to create meaning for users, if you cannot interview them, observe them study them, analyze them. You might get lucky but other than that, user research and user validation is crucial. If you don’t talk to users, you can forget about getting to meaningful.
- But talking to users is not enough. The other blocker is failure to uncover their job to done. Your ability to create meaningful solutions relies heavily on your understanding of the problem space: how well you know your audience and how clear are the pain points and main blockers your users are facing on their way towards small and big successes.
Creative solutions nearly always come from an alternative definition of your problem. Solving the problem is not the problem. Uncovering the right problem is. What are they trying to do? What are they trying to accomplish? Why are they trying to accomplish this? What is preventing them from accomplishing it right now? What other ways are they using to accomplish this goal right now? What would enable them to accomplish their goal with more ease, faster, cheaper, better? What is the problem we are trying to solve here? If you find the core problem, the solution is relatively easy. If you find a better problem to solve, you will create a better, more meaningful solution. Most meaningful UX designs are not super complicated or technically advanced or have extraordinary UI designs. They are meaningful because they solve the right problem for the users and the business. Finding the right question is the key and user research is the way. If you find the right question and create an engaging way to solve that, priorities become clear, people get engaged, people come together, creativity is unlocked, projects become wonderful.
“Solving the problem is not the problem. Uncovering the right problem is.”
Risk and trust
One of the other things that is crucial in creating meaningful UX is the client’s ability to see or at least trust the solution. In most situations I have encountered, the client doesn’t have the skills and/or experience to uncover the right question and to find the right solution (that experience is backed up by research from by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg in this HBR article in which he found that 85% or organizations are bad at problem finding). That is why they consult a UX designer. It’s the job of the UX designer to find the right question and come up with a solution that solves that for the user and the business. More often than not, the UX designer will see what will work based on user research, that is his expertise, his job. But the client has to see it as well, or has to trust the UX designer that the solution he/she is paying for will work. If you have no users to validate the solution and the client doesn’t see the quality of the solution, it will not get built. The UX maturity level of the client is often a limiting factor. In my experience, the validation with users is super valuable when it comes to the business decision of the client to go for a solution. Especially if the solution is unique, innovative and without precedent, the risk is high. High risk means the chance to lose time and money. Business people want to reduce risk. So they either chose what they know or they need some kind of proof, validation. Usually they don’t know that much about UX, so very specific, explicit solutions will not get chosen and they will fall back on best practices or their own non-expert ideas. But these specific, ballsy solutions are exactly the solutions you need to create a competitive advantage. That is why user validation is so valuable. This reduces the risk and allows for more courageous, specific, explicit solutions and choices.
Insights and validation
So you need users for two reasons: insights and validation. You need to interview and observe and analyze their ideas and behaviors to uncover the insights you need to design solutions that solve their job to be done in an engaging way. And you need to validate each step of the way to ensure you reduce risk so you can design very specific, bold solutions. Insights produce the building blocks for the solution and validation reduces risk and builds trust.
Uncover the questions
The mindset and attitude for user research needs to be one of finding the right questions. It’s about the questions, not the answers. Design is much more powerful when you use it to find questions than if you use it just to provide solutions. A solution uncovers new questions. If you are driven to find that one question that cracks everything open, if that is the goal of user research, that will open the door to the top of the UX pyramid: meaningful solutions. And it’s not just about the users, it’s about all the stakeholders. All stakeholders have jobs to be done. To uncover the questions, you will have to ask stupid questions, design silly solutions, embarrass yourself, throw away super cool ideas. It helps to have a beginners mind, to look at things with fresh eyes, to not resort to best practices, to question everything. If you focus too much on convenient and pleasurable, you might miss the questions, the hooks, the user insights that give you access to the top of the UX pyramid. Getting to the top involves friction, difficult questions, sacrificing sacred cows, ruffling feathers.
In my experience, if you are able to uncover the core question, the jobs to be done and provide an engaging solution, this doesn’t need much explanation. If you really solved it, people will see. People will recognize a meaningful solution when they see it. Meaningful design speaks for itself. It will need to. Once it is out in the world, there is no opportunity to explain it.
If you don’t talk to users, you will never get to the top of the UX pyramid.
If you focus too much on pleasurable solutions and best practices, you might miss the opportunity to get to the top of the UX pyramid.
To get to the top of the UX pyramid, you have to want to find the fundamental questions and underlying goals of the jobs to be done.
Getting to the top of the UX pyramid is more about understanding the problem differently than coming up with a cool solution, more about solving the right problem than coming up with the right solution.
UX at the top of the pyramid has the power to change the way we see the world, the way we think and the way we behave.
If you operate at the top of the UX pyramid, projects will be better, stakeholders will be more engaged, priorities will be clearer, collaboration will be smoother, life will be better.
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, don’t forget to hit the clap button so I know I connected with you. Let me know what you think in the comments. I will dive deeper into the topics of Design Leadership in upcoming articles. If you follow me here on Medium, you will see them pop up on your Medium homepage. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn to see new articles in your timeline or talk to my bot at dennishambeukers.com :) You can also find me on Instagram.
