UX Team Of One: We Never Need To Feel Alone

It’s tough being the UX Team of One. We’re a solitary user experience person in a sea of co-workers who aren’t sure what delivering a great user experience is all about.

We’ve talked to folks about what it’s like to be a UX Team of One in their organization. We heard some fantastic tips for building UX awareness and capability when we’re in that situation. Here’s what we learned:

Discovering hidden champions inside our organization

When we feel supported and appreciated every day, we do better work. Having a highly-placed champion to support our work is key to having those feelings.

Often, our best champions are hidden from us inside our organization. We won’t find them in our group or directly in our management chain-of-command. Yet, these champions find that their key objectives are highly influenced by the user experience of our products and services.

Our champion could be the head of sales, who is losing sales because our product’s UX isn’t as good as it could be. Or they could be the head of support, whose team deals with hundreds or thousands of UX-related support problems every day. Or even the person in charge of development, who is frustrated their team wastes effort re-coding work that doesn’t meet our user’s needs.