5 funny metaphors to explain why UX professionals are needed

Let experts shape the user experience.

This article tells five fun stories to explain why you need (UX) experts to design interfaces. The intended audience for these stories is all people involved in product development processes. The people who can use these metaphors are meant to be designers.

Why is UX sometimes misunderstood?

UX designers are not always responsible for creating interfaces. Recently, some examples came to my attention in my personal network where people told me that interfaces of a product or software were created without the proper support from (UX) designers. I also remember some past projects of my own where designers were left over from feature development, where the UX people were not involved in creating the concept of the interface, the wireframes or the designs.

This harms the user experience. The effect is that interfaces, features, and solutions lack ease of use, perform worse than best practices show, integrate unusual patterns that cause pain for the user, and require significant effort to fix. This is measurable with user research tools and documented in numerous studies.

And it’s expensive. Depending on the progress of the project, different scenarios may arise. It may happen that the product has so little success that the entire development is money down the drain. It can happen that bad interfaces are identified and repaired afterwards – one study shows that 96% less rework is required through integrated design (Rhodes, 2000), another study states that development is 40% faster with proper usability engineering (Bossert, 2021). The time-to-market of teams with design insight is 2x faster than without design (PAGE Magazine 10.2023, page 26). The annual growth of companies with a high level of design knowledge is 10%, the growth of companies without design knowledge is 3 to 6% (McKinsey, The Business Value of Design, 2018). These and more statistics are well known, for example 200% ROI with UX (source), 30% happier employees (source), 80% less customer support (source).

There are many reasons behind it. Some examples of why this can happen: time pressure for development, lack of trust among designers, fear of criticism from designers, unfamiliarity with designers, missing knowledge about the designer’s way of working, expecting shortages of UX resources, missing design work packages in project planning, overestimation of own skills, etc. In most cases, people are not really against design, but the constraints they find themselves in, the conditions in which the developments take place, the printing teams: this leads to this unfortunate situation.

Using UX designers is not a luxury, it is a necessary obligation to conduct successful research and development efforts.

How can UX facilitation be improved?

The basic answer is: advocate for user experience. This is hands-on, ad hoc. To do this, there are several possible strategies to overcome this error, each with its pros and cons:

Advertise UX to the people

•explain the benefits of good UX design (e.g. better usability, sales figures, avoiding developing unnecessary features)

storytelling (e.g. working with analogies, metaphors, examples)
convincing with business figures (e.g. benefits through design, KPIs such as ROI with UX)
talking about the success of completed (internal) UX projects to motivate other groups that they want it

Educate people about UX

teaching the design 1×1 (e.g. user-oriented design, interaction principles)
allow team members to participate in design activities (e.g. research activities, with the design studio, design sprint methods)
train team members on design methods and materials (e.g. with internal or external training, education, certifications)

Soft activated UX design

offering general assistance to the team respectively to the designers (e.g. user research activities, conception methods)
offering concrete supporting tasks, based on what the team members do (e.g. co-creation, UX writing, concepts at an appropriate level of detail)
discuss with the engineering manager who does what (e.g. scope definition, requirements definition, stakeholder involvement)
measuring the application of research and design methods (e.g. are users involved, are designers involved)

Hard activate UX design

make it mandatory to assign designers to development processes (e.g. through certain resources, assigned team members)
integration of design methods into key development processes (e.g. scoping, quality assurance)
allocate design resources to development processes (e.g. as FTE percentage, assigned designer)

The second answer is: increasing a company’s UX maturity. The organizational structure, processes and people’s mindset are addressed. This approach is of course aimed at the long term and requires time, money and resources.

The content of this article mainly builds on the first group (Advertise UX for the people). telling stories using metaphors.

Metaphors to create deeper understanding

Metaphors explain things with examples from other domains. They are small cheerful stories that create a connection in people’s minds.

They work best with well-known topics or everyday examples. They are intended to be entertaining and use a tongue-in-cheek explanation to explain a situation, relationships, or cause and effect. Metaphors work with a powerful ‘image’, here in this article executed with images and text. They must move a recipient emotionally, create a mental model of the example, and transfer this model to the intended domain. People transfer their knowledge from everyday examples to a field where they are not experts.

Below are five examples to explain to others why UX activities should be carried out by experts (UX designers, interaction designers, user researchers, usability engineers, UI designers, etc.).

To cook

With a bit of luck, your mother is a good cook. But your father? Or your brother or sister? Of course, anyone can microwave a pizza. That meets your basic needs. But do you still want to experience a pleasant taste experience? This requires a chef in the kitchen.

Do the same for your product. If you want more than just microwave functions, hire an expert. Let them determine the layout, colors, typography and interaction in your interface.

Playing instruments

Remember that kid who practiced the trumpet? Or that school band from music class? Playing an instrument requires talent, training and practice. For a song to work on the radio, it requires a good melody and good musicians.

Don’t let design children play with your development. Let experts talk to users, create the wireframes and use that Figma. They know what to do and are waiting for you with open arms.

Cut hair

You even send your children to the hairdresser. And for special occasions, such as a family party or your wedding, you spend more time and money on the hairdresser.

Do the same with UX. Don’t let your facial features look like you’re having a bad hair day. Let the user research, information architecture, concepts and designs be done by professionals.

Telling stories

Have your parents read books with you? What was the last speech you heard at a wedding like? To be a good storyteller you need talent, craft and practice. Whether as an actor, orator or moderator.

And your product? Don’t develop products like a child tells a joke. Likewise, it needs skills, expertise and experience to build the interaction, figure out user needs and translate them into solutions.

Play football

Do you play in a senior sports team? Or with your children at the weekend? This is fun, isn’t it!? But when you watch a game, you’re watching the big leagues, not your neighbors.

How is your product developed? Say no to backyard features. You want to have features ready for the big screens.

Uitro

Have fun sharing the metaphors. If you have more or better ideas for other metaphors, let me know. Perhaps they can be added here.

If you experience the same (design tasks performed by non-designers), please share your experiences in the comments.

If you have any other successful approaches to integrating UX into teams and increasing UX maturity, please share your experiences in the comments as well.

There are good further readings on this topic, from UX Maturity to Design Capabilities in Companies.

All images copyright Jens Mühlstedt.

5 Funny Metaphors to Explain Why It’s Necessary UX Professionals was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and commenting on this story.