What is one unconventional truth about UX Design?

My most startling insight, which took me years to accept, was how much the quality of the product is hostage to internal politics. It became painfully clear that the obstacles we faced weren’t solely due to a lack of design competence, user research, or experience. More often than not, the challenge was to persuade decision-makers who fixated on some idea or design solution they’d come up with based on gut feel. They’d misinterpret a hastily read article in Wired or Twitter or simply see something on some site. This is the “I like how Amazon does…” syndrome.

When this happens, fact-based arguments do not work. Design choices come down to who has the most political pull. This hasconfused me again and again.

Why, when an executive has gotten it in his mind that Excel is a great model for a Web app’s navigation, do all our arguments based on experience, best practices, and research fall flat?

Why, if you straight up tell someone this will cost you conversions, that it’ll cost you customer satisfaction, and that you’ll have a much higher rate of abandoned accounts, does someone ignore that in favor of their shiny object? For the longest time, I could not accept this reality.

The truth is, that’s human nature. It’s ego and the confluence of cognitive biases. People have all sorts of incentives that aren’t relevant to the product itself; insecurity, protecting turf, advancing their social and hierarchical standing, a need to exert control. Emotional motivation is very difficult to counter with reason-based arguments. The human brain excels at rationalizing, and that’s just what people do.

The irony is that UX design requires you to understand that people’s decisions aren’t always, or even most of the time, rational. Until I started grokking that decision-making, as well as exploring and understanding new tools and information sources, is an emotional process just as much as it is rational, I thought I was doing UX design, but I really wasn’t.