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The true mission of user experience teams
I spoke to a friend the other day about her new job heading up user experience at a non-technology company. She told me about the processes she is rolling out - card-sorting, personas, and so on - the standard methods one would expect today.
What struck me was the point of all her methods. "It's tough to get in front of the decisionmakers," she said. "This isn't a company that is accustomed to thinking about the user."
In other words, her desired outcome - the entire point of all the methods she's rolling out - is simply to GET THE ORGANIZATION INVOLVED in thinking about the experience, something they haven't done before. And she's absolutely right to do so.
This is in contrast to the commonly perceived point of these methods. Some people think that personas are there to better define different kinds of customers. Or that card-sorting is supposed to organize the links on an intranet.
Well, yes, sort of. BUT...
• Personas are mostly useful in getting people other than the user experience team - decisionmakers - to think about customers.
• Card-sorting is mostly useful in getting people other than the UX team to think about designing things from a user's perspective.
• User research - especially my preferred method, listening labs - is great at getting customer feedback, but it's even more important in getting people other than the UX team to sit and watch real-live customers, face-to-face, and discuss what they saw.
These methods are about GETTING THE ORGANIZATION INVOLVED. If they have some other benefit as well, so much the better.
Good practitioners know what their job really is: to spread customer-centered thinking throughout the organization. If you can get decisionmakers to sit in a listening lab for a day, you've hit a home run: they'll start to "get it" within the first two 45-minute sessions.
But if labs aren't possible, then sure, run a meeting to discuss personas. It's a way to get people around a table, starting to think and talk about a new way of doing business: focusing on how to benefit the customer.
Do you get what I'm saying? Changing the organization is the brass ring. Once the organization changes, everything follows: from the strategy ("let's provide world-class service to our customers, and measure our progress") down to the tactics on the site ("let's stop naming links with our internal jargon").
And the only way the organization changes is if people other than the user experience team start living and breathing this perspective. Simply giving the answers in a well-formatted report doesn't change the DNA of the organization. Decisionmakers need to get involved. And if the user experience team doesn't make that happen, who will?
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See also: The most important user experience method
"Good practitioners know what their job really is: to spread customer-centered thinking throughout the organization." Yup and like it!
We also wrote about some of this here - "Selling User Experience" - http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2008/10/selling-ux.php and here - http://www.slideshare.net/dszuc/selling-usability-in-organizations-presentation
rgds,
Dan
Great article! I forwarded this to my UXD team. User experience designers are the campion of the user for the whole organization!
I completely agree that, at this stage in the game, there is still a great deal of inter-departmental education, but calling the it "true mission" may be a bit of an overstatement.
Ultimately, we *do* advocate for the people who use our products, but that said, we're to balance business goals with user needs. (i just cringed when I used the word "user.") That's why user-centric design is kind of a misnomer. We have to consider the organizations goals and sometimes that is to persuade the people who use our products. Perhaps part of educating our organizations is promoting this fact: Focus is always about the customer and the organization getting to a win-win.
Great article, though. Certainly relevant.
Great article Mark, Thanks! I think what you say can be applied to not only UXD but to the broader customer/user experience in general. We all have users (customers) and their experience with our goods and services is what drives the success (or lack thereof) of our business. Call it user experience, customer service, client liasion: it is all about viewing the business from your customer/client/user's perspective, and making their experience with your business as positive as possible. Getting the organization to see and support this focus at every level is the key.
Thanks so much for this. As the digital strategy and ux lead at a very traditional ad agency, I can very much relate. Traditional ad folks think about the user only in very broad strokes-they are male or female, 25 or 50. It's much more brand focused. But digital is about the user experience, it changes the focus, and it is much more complex.
I passed this article along to my Twitter friends, in hopes that more people will read this article and pass it along. Companies could stop wasting precious cash resources if they would walk the walk when it comes to understanding the user. As a marketer, I've spent far more money trying to reach the buyer -- only to see the costly and painful affect of ignoring the user in the prospecting and sales processes. User Experience should be the #1 driving force in decision-making throughout any organization.
Mark...another thought provoking article!
Think of changing organization behavior (and leaders' as well) as a play within a play.
What would be a terrific experience for any target audience that would convey the "getting the entire organization involved" message?
When we focus on bringing others into our experience of experience we can easily miss connecting with their experience.
How? Start by identifying people that the person you're trying to influence respects, perhaps even defers to. This might be a peer in a larger firm. A GM to GM dialog is a different experience than an internal manager to the same executive.
Next, make it intriguing. Frame it in a way that taps their curiosity about some dissonance between their world view and what others experience. Make it a puzzle but focus on adoption. It has to become their puzzle to drive new behavior. What experience would make it theirs?
Last, make it easy. If they're not prone to read, give them a pre-loaded iPod with some customer interviews on it for the next plane trip. If they're a movie fan, make a quick video of some ethnographic insight. Make ingestion and thinking of new, perhaps uncomfortable information a good experience
Bottom line: a positive new experience is the seed of changing behavior. Remember to focus on the experience of those you're trying to influence.
Nice article, Mark.
We've had lots of success with this approach to our internal program, thanks to your generosity. I act not as a usability policeman, or a best practice cop, but rather an evangelist for the good way. And, it's lot more fun to be a spiritual leader.
Mark, good insights.
I would even take it a step further and suggest that the organization's strategy (itself) should be the customer experience. In other words, all aspects of the organization should be designed in support of the desired experience for the customer / user / patient / etc. While that is not an easy road by any means, it will ultimately separate those being meaningfully distinct in the industry from those incrementally improving along with the rest of the pack.
Christopher has a terrific point about immersing the leader in an experience themselves—one built on the same principles underlying the desired customer experience at the organization.
Heh; heh.
We had a client recently ask that we use their developers as participants in usability tests (in addition to the ones we recruited) to "make them suffer."
While I don't necessarily approve of the language; the way it was described, we did it -- to ensure that they could identify with the users. In your language, to get people *other* than the UX team to think about designing things from a user's perspective.
We have a lot of methods in our toolbox, but sometimes we need to create empathy for the user more than anything else.
Agree 100%.
I've been working as a Service Design consultant with non-tech and manufacturing organisations that 'traditionally' are not focused on the user. What I've learned over the years, is that I not only need to deliver the results at the end of the project, but also take the client through a journey, helping them to realise how important it is to listen to customers and understand what they really want. This is usually a long process, and will not happen over 1 meeting or presentation. But after a few weeks working closely with a client, I can often hear the words 'user-centric' or 'being empathic' coming from their mouths. It's all about educating the client and changing the corporate culture, and this takes a bit of time.
I agree that direct hands-on involvement is key. I've personally seen highly engineering centric organizations sold on user centered design through participation. Reading about it, watching a presentation, even the organization benefiting from measurable results don't make the impression that participation will.
I actually had the VP of engineering at one company I was with be a participant in paper prototype testing of a design. What a difference that made. Similarly I've used internal domain experts in brainstorming & card-sorting sessions. This gets others inside the organization interested, and they start to really see & care about the results of UCD in the final product.
Transparency and openness of the design process is a must. Everyone needs to feel they can play a role in defining & refining user experience. Designers should be seen essentially as the custodians of the process that results in a design rather than the sole creator of it.