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Proactive UX Design: A Big Leap Requiring Baby Steps
These days, we’re seeing more teams successfully bring more proactive user experience design into their projects. It’s not easy, but the results are worth it.
When teams engage in proactive user experience design, they deliver better products. Proactive UX design tackles the bigger challenges faced by the product’s users. By delivering a better design, the team contributes more to the organization’s overall success.
Reactive UX design is where most design teams start. 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. These already-made decisions are about what the product will do, how it will work, and what its underlying architecture will be.
By the time the design team is brought in, these already-made decisions are cemented into place. They present the design team with huge, often challenging constraints to work under. The design’s problems need solving, but the options for solving those problems are very constrained.
