AITA? Need a check on my design team
To start; I’m not a UX designer, I’m a PM that has runs UX agency before.
I want to hear your thoughts on this. The last two companies I’ve worked for, UX design IMO had been nothing more than rearranging some UI elements around.
Currently I’m at fortune 100 company and what we’re doing is creating a new front end and backend for legacy software that has been around for a couple of decades. The designers give me high fidelity prototypes as their deliverable. Which is great but when I ask how has the experience improved; did we reduce complexity click-to-task etc. what did we change and why? The silence I get is deafening. I’m told that ‘we don’t have access to old flows and software’ which is BS. They don’t user test nor understand the user. It appears like they churn out UI.
My expectation from UX and especially sr/principle UX is to understand the current (legacy) flow and pain points. Iterate on and test ideas and understand the flow end-to-end and then show me wireframes prototypes.
I had similar issues at my previous company. Designers gave me designs that had no thought or research or so it seemed put into it.
When I ran a UX agency everything was different. We researched and tried to understand customer needs, iterated, and were genuinely curious about the user.
Am I missing? And what can I do to change the culture?