Make the Best Trade-Offs in Deployment
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- List the most common types of trade-offs in the deployment phase.
- Define design debt and how it affects the user experience.
The Final Push
The product deployment phase introduces a new set of challenges. It’s crunch time, and more people involved means more opinions, more requests, and more chances for derailment. Though the product manager manages the roadmap, you as the strategy designer can lend your expertise to keep the product build moving forward.
Let’s take a look.
Key Trade-Off Considerations During Deployment
Trade-offs can (and probably will) happen at any phase of a project. As the strategy designer, no doubt you will experience them throughout the initial design phase. But most of those trade-offs are usually hidden behind the shroud of day-to-day activities and involve a limited number of people who all have (hopefully) aligned with the vision for the product.
The stakes rise once you hit the deployment phase, as multiple departments work together to get the product into the hands of customers, each with their own requests and agenda for success.
Trade-offs are interdependent—spending more time and effort on one thing often comes at the expense of another. Let’s look at some of the most common trade-off decisions during the deployment phase.
- Effort vs. value: At their most basic, most deployment trade-off decisions come down to bandwidth, especially when there are numerous key stakeholders involved. What will get the most value for the effort involved? A prioritization matrix can help you identify the most important problems and achieve collaborative consensus while satisfying the various user and business needs.
- Time vs. cost: One of the most common trade-offs pits the amount of time available to complete a project against the budgeted amount available for the project.
- Compromise vs. sacrifice: Let’s say you have two features that you’re incorporating, and you can’t achieve the optimal states for both of them. If feature A is the priority, instead of cutting feature B completely, compromise and see how you can do the best for B within the constraints of A.
- Clarity vs. consistency: If making something slightly inconsistent can make the message extra clear, sacrificing consistency for clarity can be a viable option.
- Aesthetics vs. usability: Generally, usability tops aesthetics. But a 2017 NNG study found that users can still finish a task and will overlook usability issues if they approve of the product’s look and feel. And depending on the concept you’re deploying, aesthetics may have a disproportionate impact on success.
The best-case scenario is when everyone is on the same page and trying to get to the same place, vision-wise. That’s when successful trade-off conversations can take place, and where the strategy designer can be particularly helpful.
For instance, if the developers say they have to sacrifice five features (or 20 points, depending on their process) from the product to launch on time, as the strategy designer you might offer a compromise of cutting three features because you know it will be less of an impact on the user. Or if leadership demands that the product is built in a certain way that doesn’t align with the vision, you can have conversations and find solutions that lead to the outcomes that may have been agreed to months ago.
As a designer, at some point you’re bound to ask for something that is more difficult to build than you realize. When you get push-back, discuss what you need out of that feature, and find a different path to the same or similar outcome.
What Is Design Debt?
Design debt results from all the good design concepts or solutions that were set aside to achieve short-term goals. In other words, the decisions you made yesterday impact today and can hold you back. Design debt is a natural and unavoidable result of moving quickly and having parallel work streams. The result affects the overall user experience.
Some symptoms of design debt include:
- Slow growth: Introducing changes requires a disproportionate amount of work, and the user experience is falling behind.
- Reduced adoption and customer satisfaction: New solutions are clunky, and users have difficulty learning and using the product.
- Low team velocity: Each new change means additional work.
- Difficulties in accommodating new features: Solutions developed so far were meant for a simpler and smaller product.
Some design debt inevitably happens, and you may take on some of it intentionally. However, much like financial debt (we’re looking at you, student loans!), the longer you postpone dealing with design debt, the harder it will be to fix. Your customers will get used to the current implementation, and changing anything can potentially ruin their workflows. But if you perform regular audits and handle the issues as they arise, you can keep your debt to a minimum.
Cloud Kicks Trade-Offs
Cloud Kicks faced a number of trade-offs in the deployment of its new features. The strategy designer helped the UX designers and developers figure out which features were necessary to provide the best user experience for customers at launch. You already heard about Cloud Kicks’s move to prioritize the delivery tracker, which necessitated the postponement of the Digital Head Start, and its plan to put supply chain photos and sustainability content into future releases. In addition, the team had to eliminate text and email notifications, which proved too cumbersome to build with the time constraints involved.
But even with those changes, the tracker still incurred a healthy dose of design debt post-launch. More and more bells and whistles were added, and the feature became bloated and unwieldy. Customers complained to customer support and on social media. When the UX designers scaled back the tracker to an earlier, simpler design, users praised it for its color combinations and ease of use.
Launch
Bringing an idea to market successfully requires buy-in from everyone involved with the product. As the strategy designer, you have an essential role on the project from the beginning. And when it comes time to share your product with the world, you can help shape the sales narrative for all the marketing efforts across all your channels. You’ll continue to advocate the vision of why the team built this product, why now, and how it affects the lives of your customers. It’s the last piece of the process, so share your vision—and those of your team—with the world.