Real stories about getting stakeholder buy in to fund UX

I recently did a talk at The User Experience London conference and thought I’d do a blog version for people who couldn’t make it.

Nothing too heavy, essentially my slides with a few notes to explain the stories behind them.

Before we get into specific examples I want to emphasise the importance of context when you are trying to get people on board. You are “selling a vision” and the way you pitch it will vary depending on context.

Some people love detail, others just want the headlines. You also need to understand the pressures you’re exec stakeholders are under to make sure you are solving the highest priority problems. Good UX can help solve many problems but you need the context to understand which problems they are most worried about and open to invest in.

It’s important to understand why stakeholders can be resistant. Simple answer is they have spent an entire career following a rigid approach to work.

What senior managers do with most of their time

So when you are pitching something that is unclear, might not work and needs a different delivery and governance approach then it is very hard for them to accept.

However, in my experience many people don’t like working like this but haven’t seen another option. You need to identify the right champion for your UX strategies to become reality. Commercial / Op’s people are very open, change / transformation less so, finance / risk definitely not.

About 4.5 years ago I was working in our insurance business and had an idea to help solve a problem related to customer retention and engagement. I called it Help & Rewards. I got really good at selling the idea, so much so that I got £50k to do some discovery work.

We even built a prototype app that tested well and pushed the idea into new areas around lists. The CEO loved it so much so that it went on a delivery plan that was presented to the Group board. Unfortunately the next wave of tests bombed and I also found some research from others that had failed to do similar things because consumers couldn’t be bothered to sign up.

It was hard to kill that idea as clearly quite a lot cash and political capital had been spent on it. A valuable lesson as it was clear that the focus of any UX has to be one solving problems and user needs, not predefined solutions.

I’ve put this into practice with Co-op Guardian (a new software product for our Funeral business) and it has been really successful understanding the problems. Being clear on the big outcomes gives you licence to find the best way to meet user needs and deliver benefits. These are on the wall and we don’t do anything that can’t be mapped back to one of these outcomes.

Even if your thing is only small scale, you can still define some outcomes to keep yourself honest.

Another massive lesson from Help & Rewards. Fail fast is a popular term but it is easier said than done if you are focusing on solutions not problems.

With Co-op Guardian we did some usability testing after adding some basic filters and this is how we thought people would use our shared calendar.

When we got them to use it for real we found it was useless. If we had stuck with the original hypothesis and done a big bang launch, we could have wasted lots of money and failed to achieve our outcome of helping the operation scale.

If you can demonstrate that you are being responsible with the investment then you become more credible and it helps build relationships.

Getting the cash is hard, keeping hold of it is even harder unless you have trust.

You need to find a champion who will give you the air cover you need to get on and deliver. Working in the top right quadrant has led to amazing results on Co-op Guardian but this is only possible if your sponsor has complete trust, which is hard earned.

Our trust journey during development of Co-op Guardian

This comes with experience but essentially you need to respect that the big chiefs know the business / industry better than you do and you need to say YES a lot to start with until you have proven yourself. So what lead to the big increase in trust?

Never felt right but our sponsor was adamant this was needed in order to “enforce” one way of working. So we gave it a go and it failed big time as the embalmer was off sick and no one else could access the information needed to cover her duties. Fortunately we actually built Guardian on capabilities so it was a quick fix. We did a 15 min video showing the problems and played it back to our sponsor. It was impossible to ignore and led to a big shift in the relationship.

A very important part of both developing the service and engaging with stakeholders. By being completely open and showing real code (what it will look like and how it will work) stakeholders become more engaged and more confident about delivery. However, people are busy so these sessions need to be punchy and entertaining to make sure they keep coming back. We also do recordings so people can catch up if they can’t make it.

Sounds counter intuitive but if you share mistakes, and then show how you have learned and done something even better, you get a lot more trust than sticking to the original plan.

We needed to digitise this form and were told it was designed based on “the process” but when we spoke to users we quickly learned there was no set way of doing a funeral arrangement. It is lead by the client and we learnt that there is no such thing as a typical funeral.

When we digitised the form and used it with a real client for the first time it was a spectacular failure and colleagues went nuts. Credibility was on the line and we had to act fast. So we stopped the bus on all work to fix the problem and went to see the problem first hand with colleagues doing the beta trial.

There are many ways to do this. Again context is really important to ensure you are focusing on the right things.

Hit them with the headline upfront and don’t waffle about methodologies. If they have questions and want more detail, have it to hand but don’t blind them with science. Hook them in and they will listen and buy into what you are saying a lot more.

We also used all the new data we were getting from Co-op Guardian to make sure things were working. We could even identify at colleague level anyone who was struggling and reach out to offer extra support.

You need to use qualitative as well as quantitative to measure success and the best way to bring quant to life is get users to tell the story

We’ve touched on quant and qual but there are other ways to measure success such as social media impact. Consumers talk and share opinions online but we found out with Co-op Guardian that colleagues do too.

Seeing this personally blew me away. Completely unprompted and showed people who were very resistant to change were now demanding it

It wasn’t all positive however other colleagues were answering and giving those who had concerns reassurance.

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