Reading a recent interview with Ellen Langer on “Complexity in the Age of Mindfulness” in HBR, it got me to thinking about the importance of process in UX. Whenever we see a headline that someone has a new process for doing something, our ears perk up. Why? I would argue that it is because not unlike technology, we believe that processes will allow us to automate work in way that provides consistent outputs.
The problem with process, however, is that when you create one, you can also create a sense of emotional disengagement from what you are doing. After all, once you habituate into a way of doing something — especially if that habit provides consistently desirable results — we no longer really need to be “present” to do that anymore. It becomes a series of steps with inputs and outputs, as one leads into the other. The outcomes become expected and often predictable and in a very anti-zen kind of way, we close ourselves off to opportunist that may arise, because after all, we’re just doing things that way we have always done them.
This is not to say that we should not have process at all. I am suggesting that a little entropy can be a good thing in process, and it may yield unexpected improvements along the way. What is important from process, after all, is the outputs that we gather as a result, and that they be comparable to other processes or implementations that use the same or similar variables. This, in turn allows for monitoring and reporting, and strategizing on ways to optimize the system for desired outcomes. So, if a process can be seen less as a series of sequential steps, but a framework for capturing consistent data points to enable the production of more consistent outputs, then we can still provide that sequence of events and actions for understanding, but then provide the templates to people to give them the latitude to execute on that framework, with the understanding that it is the data points and outcomes that we are really after.
The key is to manage expectations of outputs, rather than expectations of following a process. In this way, as we iterate in small ways, we still get what we need out of the exercise, but we open ourselves up to opportunities that may arise from varying the way we do them.
