Why we should stop talking UX to our stakeholders
A lot of UX people complain that they don’t have support from those higher up the chain. Actually, I was one of them for a decidedly long time. Then I realized something very important.
We just keep gibbering about users, information architecture, heuristic evaluation or ethnographic research. We UX-ers have a bunch of fancy words. And we like them. These complicated words kind of show others that our job can be complex and important. Right?
Reality check
How many of your friends or family members know the term “user experience”, or even “UX”? Why should your stakeholder be any different? How many of your stakeholders actually know what you do in your day job? How many have a better explanation than ‘they are improving the user experience of our page’?
We should embrace the truth. Our stakeholders often don’t speak UX. And this isn’t a bad thing. The human mind has a limited capacity. Our stakeholders don’t need to know “UX vocabulary” in order to execute their jobs successfully.
Let’s look at it from another angle. How much do YOU know about the daily tasks of people from your marketing department? How much do you know about the agenda of your CEO? Do you know all the tools your developers use? Or analytics? Do you know all about the processes behind their work? And the last question, the hard one. How much do you really care?
We make a huge effort to learn the language of our users, so our product can use it to speak to them and thus create a feeling of closeness. But when we talk with stakeholders, we tend to forget all that we’ve learned from talking with users. We all know that users don’t understand our vocabulary. That is the main reason why we try to understand theirs. But for some unknown reason, we often talk with stakeholders using our fancy UX vocabulary.
Tower of Babel
Recently, I discovered a secret which is not a secret at all. Every department has its own language. It’s not so different from that of our users. If you think about it, stakeholders are OUR users too. Yes, they are inside our company but this doesn’t change things a bit.
We should make the effort and learn how to speak with our stakeholders. We should learn a few words from their vocabulary and use them when communicating with them. We should learn what they care about and what they value most. Stop talking about information architecture or card sorting. Start talking about the outcomes of these activities.
We sound academic more often than is intended. We should stop with this. We will quickly find that it works so much better.
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