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Redefine the ROI of your UX team
What's inside: UX ROI, empathy over vision, ethical UX, marbla, email design trends, human-centered AI experiences, UX research falling, and more.
Newsletter • January 19, 2024 • 5 min read
Hey folks,
Here are the top 10 things I found worth sharing and your UX tip of the week.
UX tip of the week
Gather the team to (re)define the ROI of your UX team.
Capture common UX issues and how they impact ROI (e.g. lack of accessibility, poor aesthetics, poorly designed interfaces/flows)
Leverage relevant industry examples where UX has accelerated customer outcomes and company KPIs (e.g.revenue, loyalty, reduced costs, etc).
Top 10 things worth sharing this week
Scott Belsky explained why empathy has to come before your vision.
Deploying generative AI in SaaS UX requires tradeoffs between flexibility and ease of use. “The more clarity you have over the user’s goal, the more you should trade off flexibility for ease of use.”
Can UX be ethical? Beth J examined if UX design can actually be ethical given that we are designing products today for the users of tomorrow without knowing who they really are. Koos Looijesteijn explored if design ethics are useless.
If you want to pilot using AI to improve the steps of your workflow, try Microsoft Copilot with free GPT-4 for iOSor Android.
“However, when it comes to AI products, the traditional design thinking process falls short due to the new complexity of AI. This is due to 2 distinctive complexities: AI Capability Uncertainty, and AI Output Complexity.” Sarah Tan explains why these complexities matter and offers a step-by-step process to build a Human-Centered AI experience.
After re-reading the 3 approaches to designing for delight by Jared Spool, I found myself thinking more about the concepts of meaning and expectations in UX. Related: The Three Levels of Happy Design (2018) by Dana Chisnell.
Marbla is my new favorite experimental variable font.
The Plan on a Page and the Bets, Success Metrics, and Roadmapping product resources by John Cutler are solid, but come up short in terms of customer empathy, behavior, and outcomes. Here be dragons.
Dig into this comprehensive overview of email design trends for 2024.
Revisited Adam Nemeth’s article Why UX Research is falling. The highlights: less new traditional digital products and features are being built, product team achieving a definition of “good enough”, product companies rarely implement usability changes, user research by definition has an external focus, and validation is primarily an emotional need.
Thanks for reading!
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Sincerely,
Gerren