Evangelizing UX Across an Entire Organization

Several UX professionals offer their advice on Evangelizing UX Across an Entire Organization in the latest edition of Ask UX Matters.

Greg [Nudelman] shares this from his personal experience: “Not one company I have ever worked for was truly customer-centric. While some companies might say they are in their mission statement and even hire lots of designers and UX people, companies are only truly committed to one single thing: making money for their shareholders. However, the one clear finding that has come out of the entire UX movement is that focusing on your customers is the surest, most direct way for any company to make money.”

John Ferrara agrees, “The best way to get people invested in UX is to get them involved in it. Wireframe reviews are a great place to start. Since a wireframe is a fundamentally visual document, it serves as a great basis for generating group discussion.

Invite people from across the organization—engineering, editorial, marketing, legal—to meetings where you’ll walk them through an early wireframe page by page and solicit their feedback. You’ll find they can bring perspectives to the design that you hadn’t considered yourself.

“Usability testing is another great opportunity to get other departments involved. Before bringing in representative users, invite internal people in to participate in a dry run. This is a great opportunity to find flaws in the test script, while putting people from other disciplines, quite literally, in the user’s seat. As we all know, seeing the world through a user’s eyes can transform your thinking very suddenly. When full testing gets underway, invite them to observe and debrief with them afterward.”

Demonstrate the relationship between UX and making money. Use industry cases like Staples making 20 million a year by removing ads and extra links from their ZIP code page—example courtesy of HFI, Inc. This will introduce the topic of UX and its possibilities into the minds of decision makers.