Is Your Product UX a Casualty of Design Drift?

You tested your design, communicated it to the engineering team, and got sign-off. Yet, the released product UX differed from the intended and specified design in several key areas. It has drifted away from what was known to work. What happened? It’s almost always not a single problem but a series of challenges the engineering team has dealt with, and they made their best guess.

Here are some ways to deal with it better:

Recognize that this is going to happen. Engineering teams are under time pressure too and can’t anticipate every challenge they will face as they get closer to launch.
Keep the UX designers and researchers actively engaged leading up to product release/launch.
Include design, not just functionality, as a backlog item. If a short-term trade-off must be made, plan an update later to address it.
Do regular field research. You’ll catch unintended changes, plus things that simply aren’t working great.
Spend time to understand what the engineering team is dealing with; it is a team sport all the way through the design process.

Scott Plewes

Chief Strategy Officer

Over the past twenty-five years, Scott has worked in the areas of business strategy, product design and development in the high tech sector with a specialization in experience design. He has extensive cross-sector expertise and experience working with clients in complex regulated industries such as aviation, telecom, health, and finance. His primary area of focus over the last several years has been in product and service strategy and the integration of multi-disciplinary teams and methods. Scott has a master's degree in Theoretical Physics from Queen's University.