Top 5 Frustrations for in-house User Experience (UX) Practitioners

The Top 5 frustrations facing in-house UX Practitioners today!

The lot of a successful UX Practitioner can be a frustrating one, as you’re probably all too aware. Whether it’s lack of understanding for the service you provide, or interference at management level, we know it can sometimes be a lonely and thankless existence at the coalface of user experience.

Behold, the top 5 frustrations facing in-house UX practitioners today:

1. Lack of understanding

Management often doesn’t look beyond the design, development and marketing triumvirate where the user is concerned, believing the skills are already there to ensure the best experience. However, 97% of websites fail when it comes to UX, resulting in one unsightly pile of frustrated users and woeful conversions. As a user experience advocate, arguing for the resources to conduct research and testing can feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall.

2. Too many cooks

15% of IT projects are abandoned before, or shortly after delivery, because they’re dismally inadequate

It appears some executives, Business Unit Leaders, and developers are labouring under the misapprehension they know what makes a good user experience. Undermining your role as a UX practitioner from day one, solutions end up plucked from the ether – because the stakeholders want their input – without the necessary research, testing, and feedback to back them up.

3. Agency inefficiency

50% of a developer’s time is spent on avoidable rework

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are effective communication tools. Unfortunately, Business Unit Leaders often can’t see beyond the short-term, and outsource to agencies with no knowledge of the product, brand or existing methodologies. Resulting in processes that lack the consistency to influence a truly solid user experience.

4. Poor project management

As a UX practitioner, you know where energies will be best placed to deliver the best user experience possible. Better than anybody else, in fact. However, poor project management, and a breakdown in communication from agencies inexperienced in the UX field, can threaten to derail all your hard work, leaving no alternative but to run the project yourself. An unnecessary additional workload, when already overstretched and under-resourced.

5. Budget

“The rule of thumb […] is that the cost-benefit ratio for usability is $1:$10-$100. Once a system’s in development, correcting a problem costs 10x as much as fixing in design. If the system’s released, it costs 100x as much, relative to fixing in design.” – Tom Gilb, author of Principles of Software Engineering Management

Everything comes down to money in the end. Usually a lack of it. As if having to convince stakeholders of the value UX research provides isn’t enough, then you also have the uphill struggle of getting a decent budget and the right resources in place to conduct fieldwork, and, eventually, put your findings into practice.

To discover more about the usability testing, expert reviews and online user research we offer, from a network of accredited practitioners, contact UX24/7 today!