Pre-Mortems in UX: A Futuristic Approach to Designing Today
Stepping into the Shoes of Failure to Foster Success
Picture yourself in the throes of a high-stakes UX project. Weeks into design, you hit an unexpected snag. The “perfect” user flow is turning out to be confusing for users during testing. Frustrating, isn't it?
Now, let's reimagine the scenario with a twist. You foresaw this issue before the project even began, using a tool we refer to as a pre-mortem.
This powerful approach allowed you to predict, plan, and preempt problems before they happened. Let's venture into the realm of pre-mortems and explore how they can elevate your designs from just successful to truly exceptional.
Time-Traveling to Problem Land
Imagine you're Marty McFly, but instead of preventing your parents' disastrous meeting, you're venturing back from a future where your UX project went haywire. Your mission is to avert that disaster before it happens. Now, your time machine is a simple but effective exercise: the pre-mortem.
Role-play a catastrophe: Gather your team and assume the project failed. In the future, you possess the wisdom of hindsight. List down all possible reasons behind this failure.
Inverted brainstorming: In a conventional brainstorming session, you'd gather ideas for success. But, you’re not here to play by the book, are you? Instead, you’ll be brainstorming all the possible factors that can lead to failure.
Embracing negativity: A pre-mortem allows us to embrace negative thinking, transforming it into a powerful, problem-solving, and future-proofing tool.
Let’s put this into action.
Project Lead: “Imagine, six months from now, our project failed miserably. Why?”
Product Designer: “The interface might be too complex for users to navigate.”
Content Strategist: “The language and tone might not resonate with the target audience.”
Front-end Developer: “It could be that the site is too slow to load.”
There you go, an array of issues that haven’t happened yet but very well could. Now, it's time to dig in and address them preemptively.
The Pre-Mortem Prescription
Now that you've collected many possible ailments, it's time to start prescribing the cure.
Flip the failure: Take every point of failure and flip it into a success criterion. Complex interface? You aim for simplicity and ease of navigation. Language not resonating? Ensure your tone is dialed into the target audience. Slow loading? Work towards optimizing site speed.
Prioritize and address: Not all failures hold the same weight. Some can be minor hiccups, others potential project derailing disasters. Rank these possible issues based on their potential impact and start addressing them from the top.
Incorporate into design strategy: The final step is to weave these pre-mortem insights into your design strategy. It's about steering clear of known obstacles by integrating solutions into your design roadmap.
Embracing Failure to Design Success
Now, this isn't an excuse to wrap yourself in a safety bubble and become risk-averse. It's about understanding the concept of 'Failing Forward.' Every failure, every hiccup, is a step towards success if it’s been learned from. By conducting a pre-mortem, you're merely bringing those lessons forward, learning from mistakes before making them.
Breaking Free from the Chains of Convention
Pre-mortems, while unconventional, have a psychological advantage. They allow teams to express doubts or concerns they might otherwise suppress for fear of being perceived as negative or unsupportive. A safe space for voicing out potential failures can often lead to a wealth of preventative measures and creative solutions.
Ready to orchestrate a pre-mortem? Here's how:
In a pre-mortem, the design team and all relevant stakeholders brainstorm all the possible points of friction and potential missteps. They then work in reverse to devise strategies that can help dodge these stumbling blocks.
👉 STEP 1: Dive Into the Future
A pre-mortem kicks off by asking participants to picture a future where the design hasn't lived up to expectations.
Let's say: "It's September 1st, our new product has launched, but users are disoriented, our drop-off rate is sky-high, and our main competitor, seizing the opportunity, has launched a more user-friendly update, leaving us in the dust."
👉 STEP 2: Spot the Landmines
With the scene set, the next step is a brainstorming session to identify potential missteps. These could range from a cluttered interface to issues in user journey mapping, from a flawed navigation structure to a lack of accessibility features.
To ensure diverse, bias-free insights, use silent brainstorming.
Let participants record their thoughts individually, and then group and share them. Silence during brainstorming not only curtails groupthink but also leads to a plethora of high-quality ideas.
👉 STEP 3: Create a UX Risk Matrix
After identifying and writing down all potential UX pitfalls, the next step is to sort and rank them. A 2x2 matrix, plotting 'probability' against 'impact', can be a handy tool.
Perhaps the x-axis represents the severity of the impact on user experience (low to high), and the y-axis represents the probability of that risk occurring (high to low).
Now you're ready to place your risks on the matrix.
👉 STEP 4: Craft Your Countermeasures
With your UX risks mapped out, it's time to devise appropriate mitigation strategies for each quadrant:
QUADRANT 1: High Probability + High Impact = Avoid At All Costs
If your product is designed to work on multiple platforms (web, Android, iOS, etc.), an example of a significant risk would be delivering an inconsistent UX across these platforms. This inconsistency can confuse users and detract from their overall experience. Plan to avoid this risk at all costs.
QUADRANT 2: Low Probability + High Impact = Reduce
These could be, for example, unforeseen technical limitations. There's always a slight possibility that a chosen design might hit unexpected technical constraints that prevent its full realization. To mitigate this risk, involve technical teams early in the design process and review designs against known technical boundaries. Reduce this risk by taking it as an opportunity to innovate within limitations and deliver an alternative design that works and is equally satisfying to the user.
QUADRANT 3: High Probability + Low Impact = Share or Transfer
There's a high likelihood that you might need to tweak the copy in your design after it goes live. It may be because of changing market conditions, user feedback, or branding updates. However, as long as the copy changes don't alter the functionality, the impact is typically low. You could transfer this task to a dedicated UX writer freeing up designers to focus on high-impact tasks.
QUADRANT 4: Low Probability + Low Impact = Monitor
Certain minor bugs or issues that won't severely impair the user experience can be monitored and resolved in updates after launch.
So, for your next project, step into your time machine and journey into a future where your project failed. There, in the ruins of your 'would-be' disaster, you’ll find the seeds of your actual success.
Don't just wait for post-mortem wisdom to tell you what you did wrong. Embrace the pre-mortem, let it guide your steps on the path to success, ensuring that your UX not only survives but thrives.
Taking Ownership of the Future Today
We're often taught to focus on the success of a project, but true innovation comes from considering failure as a valuable part of the process. As UX leaders and practitioners, we must adopt this future-facing mindset and empower our teams to do the same.
A pre-mortem may not be able to predict the future with absolute certainty, but it certainly can equip us with a shield of preparedness. It allows us to approach our designs with a fresh perspective, courage to tackle potential hurdles, and the ability to build more robust, resilient, and user-centric experiences.
To sum it up, a pre-mortem is not just a problem-solving tool, but a paradigm shift in how we perceive failure and success of the experience we are about to design. It's not about being pessimistic; it's about being proactive, learning from future mistakes before they've even been made. And that's the beauty of it: embracing the unknown, transforming potential failures into opportunities for growth, and continuously pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in UX design.
So, why wait for the end to learn and evolve when you can start right at the beginning? Here's to failing forward, innovating, and revolutionizing the world of UX design, one pre-mortem at a time!
—Marina
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