I just read over Jared Spool’s article titled Deriving Design Strategy from Market Maturity, and something he mentions is something that I have to deal with every day as a UX designer. In my position as a Human Factors Engineer for a company that produces web enabled applications,  I have to choose my battles on a daily basis. In order to be successful, there must be collaborative relationships with the business, development and customers.

In this economy everyone is trying to re-use code as much as possible, so it’s pretty rare that you would get the opportunity to create a UI completely from scratch. There are front-end frameworks to be leveraged (Adobe Flex for example), there is back-end code reuse, and there are branding standards to be adhered to. This means that there is never 100% flexibility. Even in situations as small as what terminology to use, the decisions can be shaped by localization costs. Expense will always been a major factor in UI design even if it may not be obvious, and it’s something that all designers must live with.

I would say that I have designed 50% more interfaces than what are actually going to be leveraged in the application that is being delivered. But I always have to keep in mind that we are designing iteratively, and each of the pieces that aren’t going to be in this months release, may get slated to be in the next future release. This also gives me time to revisit the design based on customer feedback on existing functionality, and when I iteratively get back to these features I can see if I can improve them before they finally get included.

One of the important aspects of my role is not to dictate the way things are going to look or work, I have to show flexibility to the development teams and to the business, and my role is to gather customer data to hone my designs to their needs.  Based on customer data, I present suggested designs to the business and development and get their feedback before any development work is started. As the developers begin to work, if there are any holes in the design they know that I am the centralized point of contact for getting their questions answered–hopefully by customers.

Being in a Human Factors position will often times require social stills between many different groups. You want to have a great relationship with the business (Product Management), the developers and the customers if you expect to make a difference and get your designs approved and implimented.