Investing in UX is one thing, doing it right is another story, part 1

How you can avoid a massive slap fight by learning to love your customers.

Over the last six years, I’ve worked on a variety of enterprise UX teams, each with their own distinct way of working with one another as well as with development teams, product managers, and stakeholders across the business. Sometimes it was great and other times I often wondered how our team survived, and still other times I wondered how anyone who we collaborated with survived.

Why is it sometimes so difficult for UX groups to be effective, especially when businesses are really starting to understand the importance of design thinking? Why can working with other teams make you want to beat each other over the heads with whiffle bats? After attending a variety of conferences and training seminars focused increasing the effectiveness of UX and years of struggling with implementing the best, real-world solutions, I thought it was time to throw in my two cents.

UX = Graphic Production. The Most Common Misconception.
Time and time again, the most common mistake many organizations often make is when they view and treat their UX teams as if they were a graphic production team. When this happens, strategic decisions are often made by business leaders, project managers and senior development members. By the time the UX team gets involved, they are handed business requirements based on pre-determined solutions with little to no skin in the game from a strategic standpoint.

By focusing solely on execution, the UX team not only misses the opportunity to be a strategic partner in initiatives, they’re often left too busy to ever weigh in on strategy as they scramble to keep pace with ever-changing deliverables. To make matters worse, the team structure can further exacerbate the problem, either by creating central teams that are understaffed and have to jump from project to project, or ones that are separated into disparate business silos with limited visibility into only a piece of the puzzle rather than a holistic view. Either way, the team is left feeling out of control, frustrated and unable to execute the level of work they know they are capable of doing (We’ll discuss UX team structures more in part 2).

While many companies are putting time, money and human resources into placing user experience at the core of their organizations’ go-to-market strategy, they’re not necessarily setting their UX teams up for success. To deliver winning user experiences, effective teams don’t just need to get the design the right way, they need to work further upstream so they can be part of the upfront business decision making to help get the strategy right from the start (1). This means shifting the conversation from technically driven product features to customer needs that drive the market.

Douglas Englebart — “Technology should not aim to replace humans, rather amplify human capabilities.”

Know Your Stuff
Getting out of the office routine and beginning to think like a product owner is the first step. Show the value of user research and creative thinking. Sam Yen stated that “Innovation = creativity x execution” (2). If execution is problem solving, then creativity is problem finding, and organizations need to do both in order to reach their goals for innovation. While tech companies are very good at finding problem solvers, they often overlook the value of problem finders (which often have backgrounds outside of tech — like, gasp — the humanities!). If you follow good UX methodologies for user research and combine that with a realistic view of market conditions, you can offer real value rather than a subjective opinion.

Participate
Get a seat at the table. I highly recommend taking the foundation course in Pragmatic Marketing. Even if the term “marketing” makes you cringe and reach for the bug spray, we have to acknowledge that we work for businesses that sell to market segments. In order for UX to have a logical relationship to the broader strategy of the organization, we need to demonstrate the value of an outside-in approach based on understanding our customers and their problems. Leah Buley suggests looking for the groups in your organization that “think” they are doing UX (3). While they might perceive you as just another person trying to do their job, customer experience groups (and anyone with “strategy” in their job title) have information that is very valuable to good UX research, so do not dismiss them as “them,” but engage them as potential team members across business units.

Communicate
Be able to speak the language and articulate the value of design. While UX professionals are well versed in the processes of user research, persona development, user scenarios, etc., to business stakeholders these activities can seem like a lot of navel-gazing unless we are able to speak in terms they understand. Be able to synthesize your discoveries into human stories that can drive empathy while also backing them up with real data which they can translate into business decisions (aka “a value proposition”). A smart business should only be tackling solutions for problems that are urgent, pervasive and that the market will pay to solve. (4)

If these three steps have been done right, in turn, the UX team can find executive level sponsors. While this isn’t everything, it is critical in getting invited back to a seat at the table again and again. This takes time, but with persistence, the value of focusing on the customer will become clear to higher level management; the insights that UX can provide through qualitative and quantitative user research can help shift the perception of UX from just UI production to a key player in defining product design.

In part 2, we’ll look at how to organize UX teams to be more effective and have a greater impact across other teams (and avoid those pesky slap fights).

(1) — Peter Merholz, “Customer-Centered Design Organizations”, Enterprise UX 2017. https://rosenfeldmedia.com/eux2017/program/

(2) — Sam Yen, “Driving Organizational Change Through Design? Do more of this and less of that.”, Enterprise UX 2017. https://rosenfeldmedia.com/eux2017/program/

(3) — Leah Buley, Interaction15 2015. https://vimeo.com/121037431

(4) — Pragmatic Marketing, Foundation course.