Designing Changes — We have to become Stakeholders

Teemu Paananen — Unsplash.com

We are at a point where design has never been as important as it is today and it’s due to companies like Apple. It’s these companies that have put design at the core of their products and philosophies and really changed the influence and understand of what design is.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs

This wasn’t always the case and only during the 19th and 20th century, when the phrase ‘form follows function’ was coined by Horatio Greenough and later Henry Louis Sullivan, did the philosophy of design start to change. The essence of the phrase being that the aesthetics should transport the function of the object. This was first applied by architects, then by product designers and today design enhances functions, especially in UX design.

You could say that the UX industry was born this way and it is still a very young industry. An estimated two thirds of UX designers are self-taught (UX Pin industry report), meaning that the majority of us did not study human interaction design at university the way it’s possible nowadays. All the skills required of us in our every-day work, we taught ourselves. Every area of design requires different skillsets and with UX it’s no different: Storytelling, conceptual thinking, visual communication and business understanding, just to name a few. And still, because the industry is so young and the second part of our job description reads ‘designer’, to many people we look like this:

A wild UX designer in his natural habitat

As we all know, UX designers do so much more than just picking colors and coloring buttons, we design experiences. Success is measured in good experiences that tie customers to your product or service in the long-term. The importance of creating standout experiences cannot be emphasized enough and one area where it’s even more important because of strong competition and a huge user base is the mobile app landscape. As smartphone users, we interact with our devices around 2.600 times a day on average, with heavy users this number can rise up to almot 6.000 times a day. For us UX designers that means that we have 2.000–5.000 opportunities a day to leave a good impression on our users because if we don’t the chance an app will be deleted due to ‘bad UX’ increases to a whopping 90%.

On the other hand great turning bad or average experiences is known to increase revenue by up to 37%. There’s an ongoing talk on the difficulty of measuring the ROI of UX and whether it can be measured at all but these statistics show just how big of an impact UX design has. Yet there’s a big discrepancy between the business impact of UX and how important it is within organizations today:

UX only has a moderate value in most companies.

This is something we have to change and each and every one of us can and has to contribute. How do we do this? By becoming stakeholders ourselves. We have to become invested in the business side of our companies, care about the technical aspects and our developer co-workers and also talk to our external stakeholders, the customers, much more than we are doing today. The goal is to integrate ourselves into the entire process, being involved in the conversation from the second a product is being defined, to the second it is released on the market. We have a place at the table but what is that place worth if we are only listening? We have to take action and be the designers of these changes!

Here are five steps to help us reach our goal:

1. Stop making assumptions; Know your facts!
   Crunch the numbers, read up on usage statistics and don’t be too cool to ask your analytics department for the numbers. There’s no truer reflection of the way real users interact with your app than the real numbers. If you don’t have numbers, do usability tests — there are a lot of ways to know your audience because if you don’t, you will rely on assumptions, start down the wrong path and wonder why you’re getting back feedback from customers.
2. Don’t just talk and listen; Communicate and understand!
   When a stakeholder comes to you with a problem, saying that conversion has dropped by 20% and the size of the call to action has to be increased by 80%, what he’s trying to tell you is that there is a problem and he’s turning to you for help. Understand the situation and communicate clearly that how you are going to solve the problem ahead, taking into account all necessary perspectives and possible solutions.
3. Fixing the symptoms won’t solve the problem!
   Don’t just paint over the cracks because the cracks will still be there. Get down to the root cause of a problem and only if you have identified it, work on a solution. Often we get excited by the first idea we have but keep in mind that this might not always be the best one. Time is limited but take your time to analyze the situation as thoroughly as possible. This is the only way to solve problems for the long-term. Good solutions = Good design = Good experiences, the math is simple. Stick to it!
4. Instead of just selling the solution, create excitement and be passionate!
   You’ve come up with a great solution to a difficult problem and you are about to present it to the stakeholder that came to you with the initial problem. Don’t just stand there and try to sell it, create a story (people love stories), explain to the audience why your solution is the way to go forward and how it will help the customers, the stakeholders and the company achieve their respective goals. Do this and you will be acknowledged and respected for the passion you are showing for your own work.
5. It all comes down to this: Create memorable experiences!
   We are UX designers and we create experiences in all the different industries that we work in. Good design is what attracts users to your product or service but great UX is what makes them come back to you. This is the goal and in our daily jobs we should aim to create these memorable experiences because if we don’t someone else will and from that point on it will be extremely difficult to recapture the customer we just lost. Pay attention to the details, know your users and don’t forget to have fun and be creative when solving problems!

Honestly, we have the coolest job in the world and it’s a great time to be working in UX. We have the opportunity today to really make a change for the long-term and integrate ourselves into the overarching process of creating products and services, to become more important in the companies that we work in. Let’s make it happen!