What is the expected scope of the UX design for customers?

Question

I think in UX design, sometimes you have to think about the end-users as being the person who we are ultimately solving the problem for. So if you deliver a product that the company likes but their customer doesn't like, then the company is going to think that you didn't design the right product. It is important to understand where the usability issues lie, especially in a more complex interaction network.

I am wondering if it is standard practice to incorporate the primary users as well as the secondary (the company's customers/clients) or even tertiary relationships that exist, which might also provide some critical insight into how the product/service should be designed. It this common practice to include these details in things like personas or other UX assets/deliverables?

The question is, do we need to consider what the clients' clients (and their clients) in the design, or do we assume that they also know what's best for their client? Consider the situation of designing a software interface for a call centre. The client is the call centre and they also have their own clients.

Answer 1

I think this part of the work is usually included in the personas, where each persona is an archetype of your customers and on which you can add some specific traits, goals, motivations, etc.

At the end of the day, I don't think a company can blame solely the UX designer for not building the right product. Feature sets, product launch and releases are complex processes which go way outside the scope of UX.

Answer 2

Ultimately, everything revolves around ROI on your client's product, so you should always factor the product's UX into your research.

• If said product falls within the scope of the project, by all means, suggest alteration of the product.
• If the product is out of scope, it's your job to find alternative ways to deal with a solution.

For example, while working for Apple's iTunes you might not be able to get artists to submit a wider gammut of music genres (out of scope) but you can divide the current genres into sub-genres to make it look like there's more to be had.

This doesn't really answer the question in the heading of your post, but I think it covers the question you had in the body of it.

Answer 3

I work with ISV's where I do UX for products ISVs build. My first step is to find who are the real end users of the product and create persons for those end user groups. Then I can take it from there.

Aligning goals of ISV's with what end users prefer to see is really where creativity comes in. What you need to make sure is that creativity is driven by research data you collect in user researches.

What makes a product success in terms of UX is if you can deliver great experience to it's end users. Not to people who want to build the product. So what's impotent is to find out who are the real end users. It could be your direct customer or a client of your customer. You should be able to identify these different user groups and create a persona for each group.

Having said that you can't totally neglect ideas of people who want to build the product, because they know about their target market more than you do.

Best option which has worked for me is to talk to ISV's with numbers you collected via user research. Then your design is based on a logical reasoning, not just wild creativity ;)