How do you persuade your organisation to invest in UX?

Last Thursday’s (20.10.16) instalment of Ladies that UX focused on the theme ‘How do you persuade your organisation to invest in UX?’. The friendly people at Red Bubble generously hosted the event and represented in the talks and panel also.

Gemma Sherwood, Intrepid Group

First to speak was LTUX co-organiser Gemma Sherwood. Gemma shared how she began her design career in print media in 2005, designing health, fitness and bridal magazines for a number of different publishers. After 5 years, she was keen for a change and decided her new role had to be in an area she felt passionate about. Enter Intrepid Group — a graphic design role at this adventure travel company came up, an opportunity to combine her passions of travel and design. She went to their website to find out more…

While the business immediately resonated with her, the website did not — it was difficult to navigate and didn’t convey the ethos of the company (mental note made). Luckily she persisted, landed the job and learned about the company and its origins from the founders who still run the business today. While her role was initially very print focused, she gradually moved in to digital and in 2011 had her ‘Aha’ moment when she discovered UX.

Gemma developed her understanding of UX in her own time and gradually brought these practices in to her design work in an unofficial way. She started teaching herself code and began attending meet-ups. In 2013 Intrepid merged with several other adventure travel companies and the business developed a strategy focused on digital. Remember the bad experience she had on the website? She knew this was her chance to influence the business and articulate and demonstrate the value of UX. In 2014, she became UX Lead at Intrepid Group. Her achievements so far?

• 4 responsive websites — overall, 32% increase in online sales and 5% increase in conversion rate.
• ‘Was this page helpful’ form — 25K responses, a core decision making tool on the health of the website and used as a benchmark to justify all UX improvements.
• A UX team of two!
• Search improvements — users of the new search are 24% more likely to book online and according to ‘was this page helpful’, also much happier with search results.

Gemma’s tips:

• Demonstrate your passion for UX.
• Find mentors (but actually do it).
• Be patient — her experience shows that it pays off.

Abla Hamilton, Red Bubble

Red Bubble’s Lead User Researcher and Designer, Abla Hamilton is a recent transplant to Melbourne from the creative community’s San Francisco office. Having been predominantly focused on research over her 15 years in the industry, she is very familiar with the reasons companies give for not investing in it: Time+money.

Abla shared some small but powerful ideas to tackle this ever-present challenge:

1) Start small

• Have short conversations with just a few users — In her experience this often invalidates ideas that the team has had internally.
• Involve the team — share the information you collect. It doesn’t have to be in person, but meet regularly to keep colleagues up to date and familiar with your projects and research objectives.

2) Small experiments

• Make small changes in the website, or small changes in process and measure any differences.
• Keep the user visible! In reports and recommendations, Abla found that including photos of users brought them to life for other parts of the business.
• Let the team provide suggestions for research ideas. Even if they are wacky, be open to different perspectives. 🍍🍍🍍

3) Share small things

• Doing research is great, coming up with findings is awesome but there is no point doing any of this unless it’s shared. The Red Bubble research team put this in to practice in a team meeting by sharing a video of a user struggling with a product search — the video prompted immediate action from the COO.

In summary, small things add up!

Panel discussion

Jasmine Kaul (Senior Digital Content Producer, Victorian Department of Health and Human Services), Jane Nguyen (Delivery Manager, Redbubble), and Sarah Pan (Senior UX Designer, IE Digital)

The panellists discussed their collective experience in making the case for UX in government, e-commerce, start-ups and agencies.

In summary, to make an impact as UX practitioners we have to:

• Understand and speak the language of business.
• Measure and demonstrate improvements and opportunities.
• Build up trust in your stakeholder relationships — this is required to take on the harder sell of time+money required for discovery which is so important in our work.
• Always remember to make the case that …. It’s easy to make the wrong thing fast!

Thanks to LTUX for another great meetup!