The Future of UX and Scaling Design Culture

I was lucky enough to get a chance to have a conversation with Jose Coronado. Jose is the Principal at ITX Digital a User Experience (UX) and design management consulting firm. He helps organizations design and implement UX and digital transformation programs. His clients include Accenture, Bain Capital, and AIG among others. Some of his thought leadership articles have been translated into multiple languages. We spoke on the role of design now, the challenges and what to look forward to in the future.

What are some of the challenges that you’ve seen when scaling design across remote teams?

I’ve lead projects where our team was on the other side of the world. Even in a waterfall process we had daily design sprints, trying to push as hard as possible. Two of the biggest challenges of creating an agile process with global remote teams that we’ve found was effective communication and tracking progress, what has been completed, who is responsible. We needed the right tools for collaboration and project tracking. More importantly, we had to ensure that they would scale with the size of the project and the team.

How is the role of UX changing?

Designers are playing multiple roles in the organizations. By driving product vision and definition, in collaboration with, business analysts, designers, and product managers together, we are able to increase the speed of requirement definitions by a mile in a short period of time. In addition, the UX conversation is changing by the need to scale out across disciplines.

UX is no longer the gate-keeper to the UI design process. You have to collaborate with technologists, analyst and product owners. More important, we have to scale the reach towards the leadership levels of the organizations where we need to exert influence and demonstrate how UX creates value and supports growth.

Are designers ready to advocate for themselves?

Absolutely. Design is earning a seat at the executive table. We are shaping the leadership and organizational culture conversation. These are important elements when it comes to scaling a design centric culture. The growth and maturity of UX is lightyears ahead of where it was 10 years ago. We used to have to ask for permission or inclusion in projects to let us do a UX test, or we were asked to design a feature.

Now we are working up the ladder, by aligning the UX strategy with the organization strategy so we can demonstrate how we’re providing value. However, the move from the tactical UX conversation to the strategic UX level requires a set of skills including empathy, intellectual curiosity and business understanding. Design teams need UX leaders who can clearly articulate the strategic value of UX to the organization.

Is the design strategic shift an organizational imperative?

It is both, an organizational imperative as well as a culture transformation driver. If the culture incentivizes and values deliverables you’re going to get what you pay for. Deliverables. Customers may get features that they don’t even care for or need. On the other hand, if the organizational culture values experimentation, learning and risk taking, the rewards will lead towards breakthroughs, innovation, and a better customer experience. Organizations need to have strong leadership support, the right people and process enablers to cultivate and derive the benefits of a design-driven culture.

What companies are doing really interesting things in terms of design?

Take a look at Nasdaq for example. Chris Avore, head of Nasdaq Design, recently wrote “achieving a design-led work culture is often a problem of scale: the design team must increase influence, increase its responsibility, and increase its reach throughout the organization, all while still continuing its day job of designing products or services that meet customer and business goals.” The design transformation he has been leading over the last few years is very impressive.

The U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and 18F, GSA digital agency, are pushing the boundaries by improving the citizen experience in government services. I recently saw a talk in New York with Dana Chisnell. She is “the person election officials call on when they need to do something about ballot usability and design.” Before she got into USDS, Dana spent a substantial amount of time researching the issues around voting and the impact ballot design could have on outcome. Since the 2000 Florida debacle, she has worked with election officials across the US evaluating, testing and providing recommendations on various projects relating to ballot design. Now, with the USDS she is tackling complex problems with the objective of improving the citizen experience.

On the industrial front?

On the industrial perspective two companies are doing great stuff, GE and Honeywell. For GE with the creation of GE Digital, the challenges and opportunities are fantastic. GE is undergoing a digital transformation and creating the platform for the Industrial Internet of Things. Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s CEO, said recently that his goal for GE Digital is to become a top 10 software company in the world by 2020.

The other example, Honeywell is going through a design transformation. David Cote, Chairman and CEO outlined the Five-year plan. He said that one of the main pillars of their corporate strategy over the next 5 years was to become a design-driven organization. He said, “we want to be the Apple of the Industrial World.” The plan is well underway, and they have created design labs across the world. They are also using design-thinking to improve their internal processes and services, in HR, in IT. It is impressive and encouraging to see that organization are incorporating design as a strategic objective and corporate driver.

What are the implications of this design transformation?

Considering the scale and size of projects they are involved with, experience improvements and efficiencies translate into million of dollars in savings. The impact of design is huge in these types of industrial organizations.

For enterprise organizations in general, the ROI of great customer experience (CX) and the terrible cost of a negative experience is pretty significant. From a Net Promoter Score (NPS) perspective the CX equation would look like this:

1 happy customer = 9 referrals < 1 angry customer = 16 anti-referrals

According to the Design Value Index by the Design Management Institute (DMI), “Design-driven companies outperform the S&P 500 by 219%.”

In a similar manner, Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CXi) indicates that “better experience = higher revenue.” In their research, they quantify the impact of yearly revenue ranges between $177M to $311M for repurchase, retention and recommendation when the customer experience is positive.

What are your predictions for the future of enterprise organizations trying to move in a more design focused direction?

Organizations will continue to establish Design Studios and Innovation labs. They provide a micro-culture within an organization that can be more design-driven, leaner and more agile. Many organizations see this as an opportunity to minimize risk and reduce the impact that a huge culture transformation would take. The concept of these separate entities is like having a fully funded startups with the organization support that can provide the new culture needed to succeed. As a startup they would not have the large corporate culture antibodies imposed upon them. This is very conducive for transformation within these large companies that often times cannot move with the speed that the competition and the market is expecting.

This is an exciting time to be a designer.

You can find Jose in LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter @jcoronado1

Breck Walter works at Mural, a digital multi-media whiteboard that enables companies such as IBM, Autodesk and Intuit to scale remote collaboration. MURAL is a graduate of IDEO’s startup in residence program.