5 Questions People Most Frequently Ask Me About User Experience
This year, I’ve been to Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia for the purpose of business to represent UXTesting hosting InsightX conferences. Attending big tech conferences such as Techsauce, UX Vietnam Festival, and a few local UX meet-ups as a speaker has been nothing, but a privilege.
The more events I attended, the more insights I got from the attendees. This expanded my knowledge about the market in different countries.
Before I talk about the 5 questions people mostly ask me, I want to talk about the key to growing in the industry.
1. Communication
I have worked for User Experience for several years, but I don’t use the term UX at business meetings. Why? This is because we have to think of speaking the language people will understand. Now, there is still a gap between UX practitioners and businesses. You all know that if we provide better UX, we will get happier users. But how can we explain to people what UX is?.
2. Be a Bridge
User experience is a human-centric concept. We are good at figuring out the problem but don’t forget that the solution is the key to make organizations successful. Being a bridge to connect different stakeholders is very important for people who want to take up UX as a career. How can we be a good UX practitioner or strategist? In my opinion, it should be by having multi-backgrounds. People are biased because of their backgrounds such as culture, family, and education. Having multi-backgrounds is very good for you to objectively think of solutions.
3. Community
The most popular industry has a stronger community. That is a fact. If we want to make the industry better, we need to help each other and let people know about us. We need to make our voices heard. Our voices not just between the UX community, but make people from different backgrounds aware of why we are here, why we can help and how we can support.
4. Be humble
Some people may know the key to user experience is to understand users. But don’t forget that there is no success without teamwork. This doesn’t mean that understanding the value of UX and being a UX practitioner is being more talented than others. We can be proud of ourselves, but please keep in mind that being humble for providing solutions is key to working in this human-centric industry.
So, as a CEO of UXTesting, what are the top 5 questions audiences like to ask me the most?
1. Why is user experience very important now?
Living in this digital century, people are impatient and have many options to choose from. If we cannot use insights quickly or know what they want, the cost of gaining new users will be pretty high and it will be easier to lose them.
Why we not focus on user experience before? In my personal opinion, user experience is not a new thing, it is just that people now have easy to access the internet, have mobile devices, and on the internet and online services more than before. So we can look for more customization and options as I mentioned.
2. How we can integrate UX into a company or organization?
This is a very good question. Firstly, I will say ”be patient and show something”. Making stakeholders aware is not a small task, it takes time. By criticizing and feeling disappointed is not going to help the organization become better. Now we can easily access many articles and theories to learn what is UX is, but the most important thing is that you have to apply the skill to run real projects to show how a problem can be solved. This is also the issue I observe now, I review 100+ resumes every year and some of new beginners put theories and UX knowledge on it to convince me that they have UX skills. UX skills are not from what you write, it is all about what you do and how you use the knowledge to solve problem.
3. How do I convince my boss or supervisor for investing in UX?
This is also what my job is. Firstly, I don’t really like to say convince. It means there are rejections before acceptance. What we need to do is understand the language our boss speaks and what he/she cares about. In my personal opinion, revenue and any good numbers are the most common decision maker an authority will care about. Hence, I usually use survey results with some academic research to coach them the value of UX, and seldom mention UX terms in business meetings. I fully understand the key to coach customers is using simple words. Using technical or academic terms cannot make you a professional. So, the first step I recommend is giving objective data to your boss or invite him/her to the UX conference to learn. Awareness is always a good start.
4. How to define UX metric
As I mentioned several times, UX Metric is the goal we want to reach. It can be KPI or OKR. Understanding quantitative data to define what the key problem is. It means to know WHAT HAPPENED and doing qualitative research to get to know WHY it happened. UX Metric is not only defined by data, but also the cost including budget and time. Deciding the UX level is the first step. Let me give you an example, if you just want to test the icons of an app you built, the metric can be click rate or conversion rate. It is easy to set up the right UX metrics. Otherwise, if you want to know the meaning of the app for users and get insights from 5 different users — It will take time and you will need more budget to conduct the UX research. Also, UX metrics can be NPS score.
It is hard to give the exact answer for this question, it all depends on the different companies/organizations, budget and time. Even the UX issue is urgent to solve or not. That is why I always ask for UX practitioners to understand the business goals first.
5. How to evaluate the better UX?
From questions 4, we understand that we can define the right UX level and metrics for each project. If you set up the right UX metric such as conversion rate, click rate and the reduction in the number of complaints from phone calls from the customer service center.
This way it becomes easy to evaluate whether UX becomes better or not. One thing I want to remind everyone is that the key of UX is how people feel. Here, people are not only users or customers but also the stakeholders in the organization. SUS and NPS are the 2 most popular evaluation scores to understand whether we improve or not.
For example, if you have many complaints from your user, you can try to reach them and get the first SUS score. After you getting the insights and redesign of the product, we can invite the users to test your product again to see if the SUS score got better or not. This is just a simple way to evaluate UX better. Did you get the insight from what I said here? the key to evaluate better UX is objective data.
After these 5 questions people mostly like to ask me some interesting questions such as “If my boss is my father, how I make him understand the value of UX”, “If my boss is stupid, is it possible to educate him?”, and “If my boss is happy, I’m happy too. Why do I need to do more for improving UX?”.
I would say I never interfere in family matters of anyone, but it is another prospect of UX definitely. And, your boss is not stupid just because you don’t speak his/her language to make them know and if you can provide more value to the company, don’t you think you can get more salary to make yourself happier? — think about it!
Please feel free to contact me personally if you need any feedback, helps from my side. :)
