But here’s an obvious question: shouldn’t the benchmark of a UX professional be happy users? Shouldn’t some metric of positive user experience be our benchmark instead of following some process exactly? What if we start optimizing for happy users over everything else? (we must make sure that happy users = happy business…but let’s for a moment assume that our business model is correct).
No process guarantees success. If there were a process that guaranteed happy users everyone would be using it. Nobody gets it right every time. Design doesn’t work like that. It’s iterative, responsive, ever-changing. You have to react as much as plan. You have to change your process on the fly to react to the marketplace. That’s why we need to optimize for what’s most important, a happy user, and do whatever it takes to make it happen, process be damned.