Modern-Day UX Design and its Effects on IT Architecture Design
Hi, I am an IT professional currently working as an architect, coming from the business analysis domain. I am writing my first blog story to share some of my experience. Hope you enjoy it; all your feedbacks are welcome and highly appreciated.
Introduction
Modern-day web applications in all industries want the UX of their applications to be compliant with the new world standards, in other words, they want a better and easier user experience. Also, users are getting used to using web apps with easier UXs with the developing technology.
However, this is easier said than done when it comes to implementation. Before going into details, we can examine the two parties that are involved in this story.
What is the aim of UX Team?
UX is the synonym for User Experience, according to founder of the term UX is:
“User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”
Don Norman and Jacob Nielsen *
UX plays a key role in the utility, ease of use and the efficiency of a product. It is becoming one the key concept that the industries are focusing on.
UX designers mainly focus on the users that are using the application, their goal is to increase the user’s joy when using the application.
“If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t work.”
What IT Architects do?
Before discussing what IT architects do, we need to mention the concept of architecture. This concept can be best answered by the TOGAF from the Open Group;
“The fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution.”
In most companies, Architects work in solution domain, they try to find a solution to problems and meet the business requirements. According to Leanix, solution architecture is;
Solution architecture provides the ground for software development projects by tailoring IT solutions to specific business needs and defining their functional requirements and stages of implementation. It is comprised of many sub-processes that draw guidance from various enterprise architecture viewpoints.
Architects mainly focus on building an application with solid fundamentals that can be used for a long period of time. The aim of the IT architects can be viewed as, to have rock-solid building like application that can endure a huge earthquake.
Conflicts Between Two Domains
However, for complex applications, the situation is not the same. There are a lot of information to be captured or validated from the screens. There are a lot of business rules that are to be respected. Which makes the screens far from simple and user-friendly, which builds a conflict between the UX and the solution providers.
Most of the time problems arose from an everyday situation like; there is a new functionality to be developed or an additional information to be displayed in the screen. UX design is not supported by the existing solution. In those cases, to meet the designed UX, the solution architects create a new customized solution as the existing solution is not adequate.
This is something that the architects try to avoid, because when you customize new solutions and do not reuse your existing methods to solve problems, the management of the application will become very challenging and making changes in the application gets harder and harder each day. The main idea emphasized behind the architectural frameworks like TOGAF is also; to reuse the architectural components like software components. Which enables the applications to be managed smoothly and adapting changes more easily.
Which one rules? The solution architects or the UX designers?
The answer to this question can depend on the topic at hand. However, when I think of my general experience in most cases UX ruled.
As, UX touches the user and the users of the application is what the customer centric businesses mostly focus on. UX get to have the last word on disagreements.
What Can We Do to Improve?
Some improvements in the process are recommended below, although it will not magically solve all the problems faced:
Building Standards
We need to build standards at the beginning and both teams need to have a grasp of the other’s vision. UX team is the creative team and they need space to perform their creativity. They can put some principles for general UX design. UX team can be directed by Architects according to areas of principles required to decide.
Following that, the architects need to design a flexible solution according to general UX principles that are decided in the initial phase. UX teams should follow the principles and the experience that is agreed.
Example:
Assume that you are working in a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) project and in the Web Self Care screens where customers see their information, assets and start interactions they wish to perform.
Places to start an interaction can be standardized. So, that customers do not click different buttons to start the same interactions in different pages and the overall structure of pages are more organized and easier to follow.
Thinking Outside of the Box — Say no to Prejudices
Every team tries to design using current habits and experience, but we need to be adaptive to new changes that is coming from other teams and try to find new solutions without having any biases.
Architects walk on thin ice here. They need to think for flexibility but of course try to avoid over-engineering that makes the interfaces very complex. Architects need to think and refactor the solution as much as possible.
UX teams can create new UXs following the advice from technical teams that can be beneficial for customer experience. Not every suggestion that is coming from the technical team is useless!
Thanks a lot!
Hope this story will point out a problem that we should all consider. Also, I would appreciate If you share any ideas about this topic.
