Calling it ‘Inspirational’ for the first time
I’ve been teaching for quite a long time now. I teach about how we should care for the users of our product, their needs, limitations and motivations. And I’m really passionate about it.
This time around, I was invited to do an Inspirational talk at Sonae’s BIT talk 2016 event.
Inspirational.. wow! I feel honoured. Scared but proud.
A brief introduction to Sonae
Sonae is a multinational company with presence in over 70 countries and with about 40,000 employees. Their portfolio includes retail, financial services, technology, shopping centres and telecommunications.
What are BIT Talks?
BIT is the Information Systems department of Sonae and they are the ones promoting Sonae’s BIT Talks.
These events are dedicated to BIT’s leadership team and the idea behind them is to raise awareness to some of the hottest topics and trends. This year’s edition kicked off with a User Experience session.
2016. A Year to add User Experience to the Agenda.
Margarida, BIT’s User Experience Specialist, invited me to talk about my experience working in an agile environment and how we, at NOW TV, fit UX in all our projects.
My talk was followed by a rapid product design session, where we focused on a Business problem and asked BIT’s leadership team to come up with solutions using a Lean UX approach.
I’ll tell you about the results later in the article but the outcome was very positive — and I’m not just talking about the solutions the team came up with :)
Fitting UX in a big organisation has a lot of challenges.
A big organisation comes with a very defined culture. Changing this culture is mostly the main obstacle to implement new processes.
I love this image by Henrik Kniberg!
You need support. Learning (failing) and iterating is part of the process and your organisation has to be ready to embrace it. There’s no such thing as a perfect product — the greatest companies in the world are constantly iterating to improve their products as they get to know their customers better.
We need the support of our leaders to 1. Find out about who our customers are 2. Get to deeply know them (what are their needs, limitations, motivations?) 3. Test our assumptions and learn, fail or succeed and improve.
And as a UXer and a customer advocate, you need to be willing to educate your organisation to accept these failures and accept them as a way to get to a greater product.
My talk
My talk was focused on the importance of having supporting leaders, a fantastic and collaborative team with multi-disciplinary skills and resources to help us get to know our customers and test our products as many times as we can before production.
Manager VS Leader
I was told a story not that long ago about a manager and a leader. They were both asked to put together a team, go to a specific forest and build a cabin.
The manager immediately grabs his team, takes them to the forest they’ve been told to go to and they build the perfect cabin.
The leader on the other hand, takes his team to the same forest but asks them to wait while he climbs up a tree. When he gets to the top, he looks around and comes back down..he looks at his team and says:
Let’s go…wrong forest!
We need leaders that challenge the requirements. We need leaders that encourage us to think about things and challenge them when need be.
Most of all, we need leaders that encourage us to ask questions and be creative.
Collaborative teams
If you’ve been to one of my workshops or talks, you should probably know by now how much I advocate for team collaboration.
Getting our stakeholders, Product Owners, Copywriters, UI designers and team of Developers in the same room from day one is a great way to have a shared understanding of the project and the problems we’re trying to solve.
Designing to fit the users’ life and routines
The key thing to designing a successful product is that it fits the users routines.
Habit-forming companies link their services to the users’ daily routines and emotions
Nir Eyal in HOOKED
Don’t expect your users to change their routine to use your product. Instead, get to know them as best as you can and help them improve their lives by designing products that solve their daily problems.
And forget features to begin with. Focus on solving problems.
Outcome of the session
Some great things came out of the UX talk and workshop:
- UX is now spread among some teams at BIT/Sonae
- The team will be running several internal workshops to help teams tackle and solve business and users’ problems
