Don’t let the HiPPOs ruin your motivation

Each week I answer a question from my mentee around the subject of UX.
Question:
Your research suggests you shouldn’t do something, but the HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) tells you to do it anyway. How to stay motivated in situations like this?
Answer:
To start with I’ll address the way in which your question is framed. When you say ‘stay motivated’ it implies that matters are out of your control and that you must get on with the hand you have been dealt. I would suggest a change in phrasing from one of maintaining motivation to a situation that you can affect and have impact on. My reworded question would be:
Your research suggests you shouldn’t do something, but the HIPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) tells you to do it anyway. How do I manage the situation and ensure a beneficial outcome for the business and the user?
No need to stay motivated
I could tell you about multiple ways to stay motivated in many work situations:
- Surround yourself with good colleagues that make the day go faster.
- Dive into the aspects of the project that excite you and can further your skillset and career
- Go for long walks at lunch getting plenty of air so that you’re fresh to face the afternoon
However none of these tackle the root cause of your problem. They would just plaster over the cracks and almost certainly wouldn’t help prevent the same situation occurring in the future.
Understand
Lets take the stance that no one, not even the HIPPOs, want to make a decision that is inherently bad for you, them, the business, or the user. I’ve never, in a work environment, encountered someone making malicious decisions just for the sake of it. What actually ends up happening is that they make, what they believe to be, the best decision they can at that moment in time with the circumstances, knowledge and facts that they have available and sometimes that will piss people off.
Its likely they have many factors affecting them that you have no sight or understanding of. Thats not to say you cant or shouldn’t have sight or understanding of them. Its just a reality in most organisations that any given employee will have many factors pushing and pulling them in multiple, often conflicting, directions.
Empathise
Now that you have come to terms with the fact they are not just out to make malicious or bad decisions its about understanding what is driving them to make the decision they have.
What is it that is driving them to ignore the research and move forward regardless?
It is our jobs as UX designers to not only empathise and fight for the user but to also empathise with and fight for our colleagues and the business. A great user experience is not just one that solves a users need, it is also one that delivers a viable business solution. Without users the business has no audience but equally without the business the users have no product or service. Both must be feasible and work together in order to exist. It is a careful balancing act that both sides must give and receive in order for this to work.
You should also recognise that the HIPPOs that is raining on your parade has their own HIPPOs to deal with. You are almost never working with the final decision maker, if such a person even exists.
You must understand what factors are driving this person to make the decision that they have. Presumably its not to drive customers away or to build something nobody wants. Some of my past experiences of research being ignored in of similar situations are:
- The belief that customers don’t know what they want until we give it to them
- A desire to make sure developers are ‘busy’
- To please a particular customer or stakeholder
There are many many more these are just ones I have experienced personally.
Meet it head on
Now that you recognise they are trying to do the best they can and have empathised with their situation you need to take the time to speak with them and understand what is driving their decision making. It is time to tackle the problem head on.
This doesn’t need to be confrontational but you do need to lay it out on the table and be upfront about the situation and the resolution you are aiming to achieve.
You have been employed by the company to undertake a particular job and now that is being undermined or ignored. Why is that?
- Is is that you have conducted the research in a way that they personally don’t believe in or trust the outcomes
- Have you presented the research in a way that is hard to comprehend or that hasn’t matched their expectations
- Have business priorities changed since this research was carried out
- Are they just ignoring it because they have another agenda
- Have decisions already been made that you have no control or impact over
I would put the types of answers you may receive into two categories. Those you can affect and those you can’t affect. Regardless of which category you are in you must identify your situation so that you can prevent it happening again in the future.
I would encourage you to dig here. Find out what their real motivators are. Make it clear that you’re not here to fight them but to work with them. That the best way for you to help them is to fully understand the situation and the constraints of which you are working. That you can then help them to meet their objectives.
Situations you can affect
Hopefully you’ve identified the areas that have led to the research being dismissed. You now need to work with the stakeholder, and probably the rest of the team, to outline a new plan of action. How can you take what you have learnt and build it into your outcomes. How can you reach a mutually beneficial conclusion?
Don’t take this personally or as a criticism of you, this is an opportunity to learn and improve next time. Its also great that you’ve identified the issue now and have the opportunity to rectify the situation.
You want to reach a point where you have both understood what led to this situation and to establish ways in which you can prevent a similar situation occurring in the future. They need to be confident that you understand the situation and can help in furthering their goals, targets and ambitions whilst still delivering a great user experience.
Situations you can’t affect:
Give up and go home. No I’m just joking. Theres always a way to move forward.
Situations where I’ve experienced this in the past are when the decision to move forward in a particular direction has already been made, prior to the research even starting. This could be for many reasons but the ones I have seen are:
- Those making the decision to move forward regardless are detached from the project and were unaware of the time and resources being spent on research and validation
- The stakeholder was looking for validation. If the research had come back in favour of the decision then great all the more validation but if it had not then it doesn’t really matter much as its getting done anyway.
Situations like this could have been dealt with at the outset of the project by better defining what success looked like for this part of the project and by identifying key stakeholders or influencers up front. Whilst this is not much use to you right now it can be a crucial lesson learnt and enable you to take actions in the future to avoid being in a similar situation again.
My suggestion would be to use a project kick off canvas (https://clearleft.com/posts/317) these are great for identifying key stakeholders and metrics as well as giving your project a good grounding in general. If you feel this is a little heavy for the small feature you are doing then make your own light weight version. These are key questions you should be able to easily articulate for both your own sanity and the teams understanding. Putting them down makes common sense and good practice. In every project I work on, no matter how big or small, I will do some form of kick off canvas. It may just be an evernote document or a scribble on a piece of paper but I always look to understand the what, who, how and why.
Actions you can you take now
We’ ve talked about what you can do to prevent a similar the situation occuring again in the future but what practical steps can you take right now.
Are you able to add value to the project even if it may be heading in a direction that you do not necessarily agree with? Are there areas where you can have a positive impact and use your research findings to influence smaller parts of the user journey. Take all the knowledge you have gained from your previous conversations and see if there are ways you can help have a positive impact on the project. Be careful here that it doesn’t look like you are just trying to undermine people and work your research findings into the project. This will create a hostile working environment and generate distrust which will be ultimately far more devastating to your research and projects. I would be open and honest with the stakeholder about what role you would like to have and how you would like to bring your research into the work to have a positive impact. Being open will show that you are not trying to just shoehorn your research in and enable the stakeholder to have visibility on your intentions. They can then decide to work with you or voice their objections. Its vital that you take your learnings so far and ensure you have outlined on some form of project canvas what the new goals are, how you will measure this and you have outlined what success will look like. So that you don’t end up in the same situation a couple of weeks down the road.
Final option
Assuming you have done all of the above and looked at what it is the stakeholder is trying to achieve, have approached these problems and looked at ways to reasonably and realistically work together and they are still adamant that they are going ahead regardless of the research. I would suggest you be blunt with what they want from you on this project going forward. If they just want you to validate what they are doing and will ignore anything to the contrary then I would have the conversation about whether you need to be on the project and if there is a better way in which you can spend your time.
Be professional and courteous but highlight the fact they are not using your skill set or your outcomes and that you aren’t really having input or impact on the project. Again its vital that you understand why you are in this situation so that you can take preventative steps in the future.
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