I found myself in an odd predicament during the middle of a multi-million dollar B2B website redesign project I was working on earlier this spring. One half of the UX team I was working with left the project and I found myself alone practicing my craft. This was not intentional, but a matter of life — she was having a baby and had important things to tend to at the time. I understood completely, but was nonetheless left alone as a UX team of one. I was more than up to the challenge of having my UI under a microscope and fully back all decisions made in the process. What I found was that understanding the various underpinnings of any e-commerce website is paramount to delivering an exceptional experience.
As a result of her departure, I had to learn about the guts of the site because I could no longer rely on her seven years of experience to walk me through it each time I had a question. So moving on from top-level UI design to the undercarriage of how it worked was eye opening. This thing is a series of multiple systems: databases, data warehouses, inventorying systems all married to decade old code. It is honestly a wonder it works, but I digress. The thing is, I can design an interface, understand visual hierarchy and ultimately delivered a balanced design with high usability. But what I learned is that you can design the prettiest interface in the world but if you’re working in enterprise UX — you best understand the parallels between the front end of the site and how it works on the back end.
As someone who has read all the great interface authors out there, I understand that we all want to design from the perspective of the user and create glorious simple interfaces. But I implore UX people (where appropriate) to dive deep into the workings of each site you work on to understand how your design will be affected by the limitations already in place. Not only that, question conventional lore, surface the facts, tap out-of-play resources in order to truly understand the platform(s) you are working with and their capabilities. Supporting your choices as a designer is so much easier when you have knowledge from multiple avenues informing your design.
Leverage your understanding of design and marry it to your technical acumen to turn fiction into reality with minimal internal friction.
