Proactive UX design: A big leap requiring baby steps
An excellent article from Jared Spool on the difference between proactive design and reactive design — and the importance of making your work more proactive.
Reactive UX design is just what it sounds like: reacting to a problem in the moment. “Oh, can you fix this?” “Help! Users are complaining this is too hard! What can we do?”
Without also having proactive UX design efforts, the design team is only fixing problems caused by decisions the product team has already made.
Interestingly, he also makes the point that it is easy for design teams to get sucked into doing reactive design, because it becomes comfortable for teams to do:
They like the wireframes and usability tests.
They believe this is what design work looks like. They believe design work always happens at the end of the process.
Leave a Reply