The level of design effort needed between quadrants detemines:
- Level of fidelity needed
- Leveraging existing patterns vs creating new patterns
- Amount of iteration required
- What stages of UX work are needed (modeling/mapping, wireframes, mockups, prototypes, etc)
The intention here isn’t to restrict the designer to a particular deliverable, but instead to communicate to partners the type and amount of work needed depending on risk vs complexity.
CONSULT ONLY
Not every project needs direct UX “hands-on” work. When the risk and complexity are low, it is 100% acceptable for UX to be consulted rather than assigned work (mockups) to do. This will enable the design team to spend their time on work where they can have the most impact.
Doing more consultations when risk is low, complexity is low, and we are leveraging existing design patterns is a key to unlocking UX’s potential to contribute more strategically to building the business. Too many designers spend far too much time being mockup monkeys for pre-determined solutions.
In those cases, it is extremely helpful to set the expectation with your product team that you’d love to just have a quick connect to align on the right component to use, flow, etc but that then the engineeering team should be empowered to do that work. This is one of the biggest benefits of having a design system in place.
I’ve even worked places where a front end engineer would spin something up quickly with a mocked up back end and then just show it to me. We’d discuss a minor tweak or two and then it would be ready to connect to the real back end and be released.
Letting go of needing to do a mockup on every little UI change is a key tactic in being able to spend more of your time on the more complex and risky (and impactful) work for which you are uniquely suited.
DESIGN LIGHT
Even if the complexity is high, if the change you’re contemplating would be easy to undue if it went awry, there’s often no need for a high level of iteration, low fidelity pre-work, etc. Just get it out there and test in the wild.
This is work where due to the complexity, we’re not comfortable just consulting, but we also don’t need a month of design work. Another key component here is where the cost to the business or user experience would be low if you’re wrong.
HINT: work related to personal info, financial transactions, government regulations, or mission critical systems should never fall within “Design Light”.
One of the biggest mistakes I see teams make is wanting designers to do UX Light work on every project. One of the big value-adds of using a framework like this is to help illustrate that we absolutely can do UX Light work, but only when Risk is low.
DESIGN MEDIUM
When Risk is high, it’s important to do more iteration and start problem solving at a lower fidelity. If the complexity is low not as much of this is needed, but it still makes sense to spend some time iterating to avoid costly rework and negative business impact.
Another common reason for Design Medium rather than Design Light has to do with situations where a new pattern / component needs to be introduced. Extra validation and testing are needed and it’s important to allow capacity for that.
DESIGN HEAVY
Finally, we arrive at Design Heavy. These are complex, risky projects where getting it right is essential. Often Design Heavy is paired with Research Medium or Heavy as well unless extensive prior research has been done.
This level is what many designers think of when they talk about the “Full UX Process”. Modeling, Information Architecture work, Low Fidelity, Mockups, etc. Although deep functional prototyping is not always needed, it is important here.
The work needs to be more thorough because the cost of getting it wrong would be significant to the customer and/or business.