A trend I’m seeing lately is for teams to focus on new ideas rather than fixing existing ones—the age-old quantity over quality debate. And it bothers me. A lot. Of course, the world wouldn’t be where it is today without new vaccines, tech products, transportation, art, etc. Things evolve for the better every day. But as we progress, we need to keep in mind our priorities and resources, utilizing what we have as a first line of defense before reinventing the wheel.
In my story about hiring, I went into detail about how urgency (whether necessary or unwarranted) often clouds judgement, leading to costly mistakes. Unfortunately, I see urgency lead to patterns in organizations to focus on volume over quality. In my anecdote, the mindset was “hire, hire, hire!” regardless of the pace in which new clients came in. During the slow season, we’d hire as many new contractors as we did in the busy season. As you might imagine, this was costly in time, money, morale, and brand presence. Each new member had to be onboarded ($), introduced to the team (time), trained (time and $), and given a first case (time, $, morale, and client experience). If you read my story, you know that all of these tasks were often met with resistance from the employee, resulting in abandonment or “ghosting.” The team members who onboarded them and the clients they’d been assigned to had the rug pulled out from under them.
Taking an internal-first approach gets ahead of this. It gives us the opportunity to uplevel employees we already know and trust, boosting rapport between employees and management. It can also mean paying our existing employees better, as the cost of ghost employees could have been used to give meaningful raises to reliable, tenured individuals.
The main reason I highlight both of these stories is to highlight the importance of quality (versus quantity) in a company’s longevity. When I’m hiring, or creating a research proposal, or even redecorating my home, I think first about the resources I already have. Do I already have artwork in storage that I could put on that wall, or do I need to purchase a new piece? Do I need to add another flashy new program in our team’s offerings, or would stakeholders’ needs be met with reworking our existing program?
I often hear feedback like this from users. People aren’t necessarily resistant to new features (especially when it means better UX), they’re just comfortable with their habits. Just because we can reinvent the wheel and add it to our offerings doesn’t mean we should.
Often, change is inevitable in design. Technology evolves, culture shifts, ideas emerge. It’s why humans are now using laptops instead of writing on stone tablets. But when your user is reliant on a feature or process, forcing them into a new flow can feel like a breach of trust. Adding a new feature is a valid and sometimes necessary part of product growth. But if the user sees this as frivolous, if the cost of adoption is too high, or the change is too drastic, we’re going to see a marked decrease in KPI. I urge us as UXers to consider adjusting what has already been successful for our product and our users before adding a new or reimagined feature just for the sake of it.
The merits of innovation and forward movement are not lost on me. I’d implore you to not think of it as a one-or-the-other, but rather as two complementary sides of the same coin: growing an organization while effectively using the resources we’re given.
