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Most businesses know something is off with their user experience. They just don't know what. And without a clear problem definition, solving it effectively is pretty much impossible.
Charles Kettering put it well: "A problem well-defined is a problem half-solved."
That's exactly why some of the highest-value work Drawbackwards does happens before a single pixel gets pushed. Our pre-engagement discovery process relies on curiosity, exploration, and asking the right questions. After more than 20 years and hundreds of UX engagements, we've gotten good at helping businesses name their actual problem so we can get to work solving it together.
In this post, we pull back the curtain on our thinking. Here are the four UX needs most organizations have, and the six ways Drawbackwards works to solve them.
What Are the Four Common UX Needs Most Organizations Have?
Most companies we work with fall into one of four need categories: resource, innovation, knowledge, or deliverable. Over two decades of engagements, these four have come up again and again, whether the company already knew their problem or was still trying to name it.
What Is a Resource UX Need?
A resource need means you don't have enough design talent to get the work done.
A few years ago, there were 20,000 open UX design positions in the U.S. alone. Only about 500 design students were graduating from major universities each year. (Worth noting: most universities have hundreds of design students in lower division, but only 15 or 20 make it to upper division and actually graduate with a design degree.)
The gap is real. Companies need talented UX designers. The supply just isn't there.
When this happens, companies try one of two things: they recruit (which is slow, and draws from a very small pool), or they outsource to a seasoned UX design partner with an experienced team ready to lead the way.
That's where we come in. We augment our customers' teams by bringing our years of experience and expertise to the table. If you already have an internal design team but are frustrated with their pace or output, we can also provide training to help them level up.
Does your company have a resource UX need? Here's how to tell:
| | Summary | Concern | Specific Deliverables | Outcomes | |---|---|---|---|---| | Known | You need designers | "I need to augment my team" | Any Drawbackwards services | More gets done, faster | | Unknown | You're frustrated with your team's pace and/or quality | "I just can't get what I want done internally" | Drawbackwards consulting and any other services | More gets done, faster |
Case study: Learn how we helped Choice Hotels, a major online travel industry leader, when they knew their existing design staff wasn't operating as a high-performance team. Read the case study.
Question for you: Does your company have a resource, team, or design leadership need? If so, do you need to add to your design team, or uplevel the team you already have?
What Is an Innovation UX Need?
An innovation need means your company is managing bets in an innovation portfolio and needs Design Thinking capabilities to do it well.
Most companies manage innovation across four axes: (1) innovation for existing customers, (2) innovation that attracts new customers, (3) innovation of existing product lines, and (4) innovation into new product lines.
We're well versed in both Design Thinking (Tim Brown's approach) and Clayton Christensen's ways of managing innovation and the "Jobs to Be Done" (JTBD) framework. We use both MFA and MBA thinking to tackle innovation challenges.
Does your company have an innovation UX need? Here's how to tell:
| | Summary | Concern | Specific Deliverables | Outcomes | |---|---|---|---|---| | Known | You want a fresh approach | "I want unconstrained ideas and new kinds of data" | Research. Design. Development. | Lightbulb moment of change | | Unknown | You're struggling in the market | "We're at risk of falling behind in the market" | Drawbackwards consulting. Research. Design. Development. | Lightbulb moment of change |
Case study: We helped First Solar, an industry-leading solar company, develop innovative solar prediction software for significantly improved accuracy and production time. Read more here.
Question for you: Does your company have an innovation portfolio or approach? Do you need to augment your innovation efforts with Design Thinking, or do you want to give your team approaches to innovation based on Design Thinking?
What Is a Knowledge UX Need?
A knowledge need means your company has invested in a design team but lacks the senior design leadership to guide that investment.
Leaders and managers at most companies say they'd like their staff to embrace lifelong learning. Many seem to think it'll happen magically, perhaps when staff seek out new knowledge on nights and weekends. Spoiler alert: that doesn't happen often.
Here's what we've found. Over the last five to ten years, just about every company we know has invested in building internal design teams. Yet, with the exception of a few companies like USAA, Apple, and Logitech, very few have hired a Chief Design Officer to guide the maturation of that investment.
The result? Companies paying high salaries to design teams without senior design leadership to guide them. In these cases, we step in to train design staff. Our job is to be a value multiplier to the existing design team investment, in a way that empowers and energizes the existing staff rather than threatening or overwhelming them.
Does your company have a knowledge UX need? Here's how to tell:
| | Summary | Concern | Specific Deliverables | Outcomes | |---|---|---|---|---| | Known | You need training | "My team needs to learn your approach" | Training for ANY Drawbackwards service | Efficiency, tribal knowledge kept in-house | | Unknown | You're not able to assess your team's maturity level | "Just give us XYZ, we can take it from there" | Drawbackwards Consulting, then training | Efficiency, tribal knowledge kept in-house |
Case study: We helped the internal team at Sophos "reskin" one of their mobile apps in about half the time they originally estimated it would take, while also making the app significantly more user friendly. Read more about how we did it.
Question for you: Is your company getting the most from your existing investment into your design team?
What Is a Deliverable UX Need?
A deliverable need means your design organization is mature, but a specific gap in skills or staffing is blocking you from completing a discrete piece of work.
Companies with mature design practices usually know exactly where bottlenecks occur in their software and product development lifecycle. Sometimes they simply don't have enough design staff on hand and can't hire more. Sometimes the work requires a specific skill set they don't have internally.
Either way, Drawbackwards stands ready to fill in the gaps.
Does your company have a deliverable UX need? Here's how to tell:
| | Summary | Voice of the Customer | Specific Deliverables | Outcomes | |---|---|---|---|---| | Known | You need a specific deliverable | "I need X by Y date" | Any Drawbackwards services | Time to market | | Unknown | You know there's a need for a certain delivery channel but don't know what deliverable is needed | "We need better app UX, but are unsure how to fix it" | Drawbackwards consulting and any other services | Faster time to market, reduction of costs, UX leadership |
Case study: Tuft and Needle, pioneers in the mattress industry, wanted to solve a complex customer support problem, quickly. So they turned to Drawbackwards to help with a faster turnaround than they could do on their own. Read the case study.
Question for you: Do you have a mature design organization, but are facing a discrete deliverable that can't be completed in-house due to skill or staffing constraints?
How Does Drawbackwards Solve These Four UX Needs?
Now that we've covered the four types of design needs companies like yours have, let's look at the six categories of services Drawbackwards offers to solve for them.
And remember: even if you never contact or hire Drawbackwards, these four need areas and six solution categories can still help you arrive at what Charles Kettering would call "a problem well-defined."
1. Consulting Services
| Consulting Service | Summary | Problem This Solves | |---|---|---| | Rapid prototyping for risk reduction | Rapid prototyping helps validate product market fit and reduce the time and costs to develop new innovation. | "We're building this new XYZ..." (but without first validating they're building what the market will actually want.) | | Design Thinking | Design Thinking is a codified and cross-disciplinary approach to innovation that's worked for decades. | "We need new ways to frame opportunities and new ways to solve them. We need to strengthen our innovation portfolio." | | Design org design | Design your design org to better return the most from your existing investment in design staff. | "Over the last 5 years we've hired great designers, but we're certain we're not getting the most from the team." | | Design ops design | Design your design operations to increase the ROI of your design lifecycle and design contributions to product, engineering, and marketing functions. | "We have great designers but I don't think they've ever had to work with this volume of different projects and such a diverse group of teams." | | Design team training | Use design team training to get the most from your new or tried-and-true design teams. | "Over the last 5 years we've hired great designers, but we're certain we're not getting the most from the team." | | Design Studio | Design studios align cross-functional teams with a re-usable approach to collaboration, ideation, and innovation. | "We've tried collaboration between teams before but often end up in more meetings with less ownership and outcomes. A few people shine in these meetings and the rest are frustrated they can't use the time to get back to work." | | Design sprint | Design sprints embrace constraints to take a problem through the design thinking lifecycle in quick, time-boxed, low risk, high yield process with hard outcomes like prototypes or shippable production-ready design assets that go straight to engineering. | "We need faster ways to test new ideas with real end customers. We just don't feel like we're getting the most from our design team." |
2. Strategy Services
We use strategic thinking based on decades of experience and understanding the business case and how it is deployed for customer and employee needs.
| Strategy Service | Summary | Problem This Solves | |---|---|---| | Usability research | Usability research discovers where friction exists throughout your offering in a way that makes it obvious how to resolve it. | "We hear too often from customers that our products aren't very easy to use. But we're not sure why and how to methodically fix the issues in a way that aligns with our corporate KPIs." | | Customer journey mapping | Through the customer's eyes, uncover where your business excels and where you fall short. | "Our NPS (or CSAT) has flatlined and despite efforts, we can't get it to budge." | | CX research | Customer experience research connects where your internal processes help or hurt your external customer experience. | "We have a fair amount of CX resources these days, but don't do a great job measuring their work. That's a lot of capital invested into the CX program without solid benchmarks." | | Envisioning | Design envisioning jolts unconstrained new life into your current people, process, and products. | "It's strategically important that we bring fresh product and service ideas this quarter." And... "Our board would like us to paint a picture of our future products and services, 2 to 5 years out." | | Persona development | Personas allow product and marketing teams to better meet the unique needs of your customers by learning what different groups of customers and buyers think, feel, see, say, and do. | When companies only talk about a single customer type, we know they haven't created personas and thus have an opportunity to better meet the needs of the market. | | "Design system" creation | Design systems dramatically increase design efficiency across your organization. If you don't have a design system you're not doing design right. | "We often have a bottleneck at the design team." And... "We have developers, sales, and marketing people creating assets and experiences that are off-brand." | | Design ROI analysis | Yes, the efficacy of design can be quantified. Run design ROI analysis to determine where
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know which type of UX need my company has if we can't even agree internally on what the problem is? Start by listening to how frustration gets expressed in meetings. Language like "we just can't move fast enough" typically points to a resource need, while "we keep losing ground to competitors" often signals an innovation need. If your team can't self-diagnose, that difficulty itself is useful data and usually warrants a discovery conversation before any work begins.
Can a company have more than one of these four UX needs at the same time? Yes, and it is common. A company might have a deliverable need blocking a product launch while also having a knowledge need holding their internal team back from growing. Identifying which need is most urgent helps prioritize where outside help will have the fastest impact.
What is the difference between a knowledge need and a resource need, since both seem to involve not having enough design capability? A resource need means you simply do not have enough designers to handle the volume of work. A knowledge need means you have designers on staff but lack the senior leadership to guide their growth and output. The fix for each is different: one calls for additional talent, the other calls for training and design leadership.
How mature does our internal design team need to be before working with a UX partner actually pays off? Maturity level affects the type of engagement, not whether partnering is worthwhile. Early-stage teams benefit most from training and consulting, while mature organizations tend to get the most value from targeted deliverable support or design ops work. The gap between where your team is and where it needs to be is usually where the highest return on investment lives.
What should we have ready before reaching out to a UX design partner for the first time? It helps to document the specific symptoms you are experiencing, even if you cannot name the root cause yet. Examples of past work, a rough sense of timeline and budget, and an honest assessment of what your internal team can and cannot handle will make an initial discovery conversation significantly more productive.
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