As UX recruitment specialists, we often find ourselves discussing the challenges faced when client side businesses begin to build out their UX team. To highlight some of the key insights, we thought it would be best to speak with someone from the industry.
We took time out to have coffee with Gil Kahana – Gil is the Co-Founder of the quirky brand ChattyFeet, and has been working in UX over the past eight years. We discussed some of the key challenges of establishing a user-centred design (UCD) culture in-house and how to overcome them. Gil has kindly agreed to let us share:
Communicating the value of UX is a UCD challenge:
It’s vital for in-house UX teams to quickly build trust and demonstrate value with key stakeholders. Gil’s advice is to think about your stakeholders as personas. Don’t assume they know why user research and testing are important, prove it by giving examples from real projects, and describe the impact in a simple language they can understand.
When you plan user research or a testing session, dedicate some of your resources to creating an executive summary of the results. This will get you the buy-in to continue your activities.
Everyone wants to be a designer
It’s very common to see team members who are not designers giving design input.
The reason is that design is fun, and everyone wants to say how things should work.
Sometimes your client will come up with an idea that you know is wrong, but you can’t say why – it’s your designer’s instinct. What has saved the day in this type of situation in the past, was actually creating a quick prototype, testing it and reporting back the results.
Companies with a UX culture are not afraid to say no to their clients. If your main goal is to keep your client happy, you are probably following ‘Client Centred Design’ instead of User Centred Design, which can compromise the quality of the product.
UX and commercial awareness:
Running your own business teaches you just how important commercial awareness is, but it’s not something that is easy to gain exposure to early in your career. Before embracing a new UX activity, always ask yourself whether your stakeholders understand why you are doing this, or in their language, what is the return on investment? You might have mastered a technique that could help the project, but UX is also about communicating in a simple language about why it’s valuable- call it UXing the UX!
Selling user research:
Securing budget and resources for user research is notoriously difficult. This is partly because you can’t guarantee that it will always bring exciting results. If you don’t spend enough time interviewing your stakeholder about what they already know, some of your research insights could get described as ‘old news’ or ‘irrelevant’.
User research is great for exposing a dissonance between how you think something could work and how it actually works in reality. To sell user research, you need to be in a working culture that understands the concept of iterations, and knows that some design solutions will fail on the first attempt. There are some product owners who think that they know their customers best, and user research will be a waste of time. According to the Chaos Report by the Standish Group, 50% of digital product features are hardly ever or never used. What a waste! User research can reduce the percentage of waste significantly by validating design assumptions.
The team:
If you are hiring a UX ‘big gun’ you have to make sure that they are realizing their full potential by letting them define the necessary UX activities for the project. Sometimes User Experience designers find themselves spending 50% of their time preaching about the value of UX instead of actually doing it.
It is important to acknowledge that each project team might have a different motivation. Many UX Designers get excited about helping people solve problems; much like a doctor enjoys helping people to get well. For a businessperson, closing a deal that brings in money is uplifting. If you are hiring a UX team, they will want to know if you have a real problem to solve, and what the value of the product is beyond making money.
Quibbling over terminology:
The term UX is itself confusing because it binds so many disciplines together.
When you hire someone called a ‘UX Designer’ you need to dig deeper and understand what their real strengths are – Interaction design, User research, Visual Design, Strategy, Information Architecture? Oftentimes, people have more than one skill, but it’s concerning when someone has too many skills because you don’t want to hire a ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’.
A good UX team communicates frequently with the development team and gets their advice about how much effort it would take to implement their design solution.
Planning Poker, commonly used in agile software development, is a great tool to enable communication between different teams so they can share their estimated workload and timeline for a particular part of a project.
A good UX team will also make an effort to explain why an activity is needed in simple language, avoiding any patronising or confusing jargon. When the project teams are aligned and respect each other’s work, magic will happen and good products will be built.
We hope that these insights could be helpful food for thought for anyone who is moving, or has recently moved, in-house. If you’d like to continue the debate then we’d be keen to discuss in more detail.