Interview with Donal O’Mahony, Head of UX and Design at Fleetmatics — Understanding UX in Larger Organizations.
In this Interview, Donal O’Mahony shares the challenges of building a great UX team, what it takes to start a career in UX and the direction the discipline itself is taking.
Hi, Donal. Tell us about Fleetmatics and what you do there?
Donal: Fleetmatics is a worldwide leader in something called telematics — which is providing visibility on tracking vehicles and fleets, giving huge insights to fleet owners. It ranges from small to very large fleets, for enterprise users all the way down to what’s called “mom and pop” shops.
Fleetmatics has been very successful in the past 10 years, even during the recession! In fact, my own belief is that there’s nothing better than a recession to make the world look a bit at costs. Fleetmatics is all about savings for operators and managers or owners of businesses that deal with fleets and mobile vehicles.
We’re now really looking at the mobile worker. We have a suite of apps that are constantly improving to take those insights and that usability from web-based into mobile devices.
We’re renowned for ease of use, and my job is to take that further in the broader area of user experience.
And your team?
Donal: We were recently acquired by Verizon, for a couple of billion dollars, which is amazing for this little Irish company, that’s branched out into America and now the world.
It’s really an exciting new chapter. Before there were a couple of thousand people at Fleetmatics, but now it’s hundreds of thousands of people because we’re part of Verizon. So now on the engineering side, the UX side and on the product side, our team is in the hundreds.
On the UX and design side, only six months ago, it was only a team of three, three and a half, and that’s why I’m here.
Fleetmatics are taking design and the user experience very, very seriously now, and that’s only right, because it’s a really important area. It’s becoming a differentiator actually, especially in the larger company space.
No longer are people willing to tolerate or forgive big companies for bad software, bad experience, bad apps. People don’t see any difference between a company with hundreds of thousands of staff and a young cool startup.
No longer are people willing to tolerate or forgive big companies for bad software, bad experience, bad apps. People don’t see any difference between a company with hundreds of thousands of staff and a young cool startup.
— Donal O’Mahony, @DonalOMahony
What sort of challenges do you face?
Donal: For myself, it’s a combination of not only education in my team, but also educating the company in the areas of user research, and the importance of where it overlaps with the customer experience.
I’m very keen to develop a small but perfectly formed research team for customer insights. I have a great person on my team doing this already. Her team is quite small, but my goal is that eventually be able to lead, educate and motivate our wider company about the importance of user research. This is something I’m really passionate about.
Companies need to accelerate with UX on a large scale, so that we can accelerate ourselves as UX teams. Otherwise, we’d just be classic designers designing for ourselves, and I have no interest in that anymore, I might have had it in my 20s, but certainly not in my 40s.
What would be your advice to the younger version of yourself starting out, or anyone who’s thinking they want to build a successful career in UX?
Donal: If I talked to myself 20 years ago, I’d probably have a lot of advice. I’d say “you’re doing the right thing!”, because I eventually got to where I am now, but it can be frustrating.
Firstly, you can’t just run into this, you have to grow into this. There’s nothing worse than dealing with someone who’s young and enthusiastic, but also arrogant. You can only do user experience if you are mature, regardless of your age. You have to be confident. You have to be diplomatic. You have to be social. Even if you’re an introvert, you still have to be social. There’s a lot of “soft skills,” as they’re called.
And why? A lot designers or researchers might be reading this and asking why. It’s because user experience is at the center of the conversation. If you’re not at the center of the conversation, you’re in the wrong company, you’re in the wrong team. You ought to be in the conversation, and that requires diplomatic and social skills.
It’s very hard to get those things, so don’t panic. They come with age, and then you can specialize in some of them. You might find you are the best workshop facilitator because you’re really social or you’re really driven. However, don’t be the kind of workshop facilitator who turns up with their vision, after being up all night sketching an idea secretly to railroad the meeting down that track. That’s not what user experience design is about. User experience is a very social job, It can also be a classic “put your head down, work on your own and be kind of lonely for a couple of days” job as well.
I also would say to anyone starting out is, obviously, pick the area for the right reasons, not for some sort of gold rush of money, because money comes and goes.
Pick it for the right reasons — that you really want to improve people’s lives, not the company and the shareholders needs necessarily, but the users. Be really interested in your user before you’re interested in the design.
Be really interested in your user before you’re interested in the design.
— Donal O’Mahony @DonalOMahony
Our users are the bosses of the plumbing companies, they’re working in security, they’re the entire postal service in Ireland. You have to go and drive with them, you have to talk to them, listen to them, study them, and observe them. If you’re not interested in that, doing the dirty work, then you’re going to be a really bad user experience designer.
Where is UX as a discipline going in the next five years?
Donal: I would say the trend of acquiring and purchasing experience design agencies will continue. Facebook are doing it, Google are doing it, Accenture are doing it, IBM are doing it. That will continue — the industry is a little like advertising in that sense, where the advertising industry ignored digital for probably 10 years too long, and now they are catching up as a result.
I watched Google closely in the early years, and it was always sad to me how little they respected design in the early years. The design in their core product was astounding from the start, and it was perfect as a plotting case study of an amazingly targeted and optimized product for the user. The wider story however was really blurry and messy, and clearly, there were divisions, fighting and competing. And then what happened was material design. They became very focused, as a company, on design. I think that sort of consistency that Google have created is going to continue.
A lot of companies are really following that kind of material design. Apple would have been the example of why other companies like IBM are pulling up their socks and realizing, that design is actually quite important from the enterprise level right down to the person using their terminal or their classic kind of software. I would have credited Apple with that up until a few years ago, but I lectured on a masters in UX and design at Trinity College, and nearly every person in the class put up their hand saying that Google was better at design than Apple, just across the board! That made me both sad as a designer who grew up with Apple, and really excited because things are really changing, where now there is this lurch towards good design and not just the sheen or the “lipstick on a pig” design, but the actual intelligence of design, thinking of user experience design, and a tiny part of that is the visual design.
I think it’s going to continue going that way. You’re going to see more design-thinkers moving to senior management and C-level roles. They will continue to progress and become part of the strategy of the company, and if it’s not in the organization, it will either be acquired or hired.
So I think that’s enough to be getting on with in the next five years, but we’re only starting this incredible journey of data and the internet and the user experience, and the role of the UX designer will become complete normality.
Would you ever have a project without a software engineer who’s technically capable? No. But for decades, there were projects and products released without any design at all, and that will be completely laughable in five years’ time.
For a UX professional today who has mostly been working for small startups and suddenly feels that they want to join a much larger organization, what would you tell that person? What are the biggest challenges and differences around that transition?
Donal: They’re kind of similar for the reasons I said earlier about the social aspects and collaboration. If it’s a small group, a small startup, a small company, do not go into your box or your area. Don’t go back to barging into meetings either, be somewhere between. Don’t sit with your headphones in, tied to your desk, that has to stop. Get up and chat with people.
When I worked in an investment bank in visual design and flash design years ago, I started moving into interaction design. Any of the stuff that I wanted to do was completely dependent on the engineer, there were only two, and there was only one of me, which is crazy to think about a big investment bank with two front-end engineers and one designer, but that’s what it was! Then I started to chat more and go for coffees with the engineers, and eventually planned things with them. That got me all the experience that I needed for seeing the other person’s perspective.
But now as you go into a larger organization, you’re going to have to see the perspective of not just a set of under-pressure engineers, but the product owner, the product manager, the head of a department. Doing this gets you a great currency. You gain a great currency and respect by working in this way, and if you do, you’ll often find that you get it in return, it’s a two-way street.
So start to trial out these relationships in a smaller group environment, because you’ll need it for many, many more groups, from your QA’s to your marketing to your whatever. You have to meet your peers above, and below as well, to start earning that currency.
Remember to work on your portfolio for yourself. In an interview, it’s all about what you do there and then. But you should work on the portfolio, the story, and how you sell yourself to make it is all about about solving problems — not just solving problems for small organizations or startups, but solving problems full-stop. Change the tone from small to universal problem-solving.
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About Fleetmatics: Fleetmatics helps businesses operate more efficiently. Their fleet management tools serves approximately 42,000 customers & approximately 826,000 subscribed vehicles worldwide
About Donal O’Mahony: Donal is the head of UX and Design at Fleetmatics. You can learn more about Donal here.
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