A meme has been following me around the last few weeks. Several times I’ve heard UX practitioners bemoan the fact that their project or corporate leaders have as much as said “we just don’t have the time to do the usability work right now, we’ll come back to that.”
As we all know this isn’t as effective as doing the iteration and design validation up-front. Taking the “we’ll add in the usability later” approach just yields nasty surprises down the line. But my question isn’t “why do people still think like this?” It’s part of human nature. Or project management nature, at any rate.
The real question is why our field doesn’t have better defenses against this. I mean, we know that in certain crunch times we’re going to get pushed on to shorten our processes and either go light on or skip our design iteration and validation. Yet it almost always leads to rework, lower user satisfaction, etc etc.
Are we just slaves to the “fast-good-cheap” iron triangle? How do others in the field push back on engineering and management in these situations?
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