paper & pencil

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.

Good Design Can Make You Happy

Stefan Sagmeister, renowned for the album covers he designed for Talking Heads and Rolling Stones, recounts some of the happy moments in his life. Many of these moments are related to good design.

One of these happy moments occurred on the NYC subway when Sagmeister came across a set of new Subway signs that were an art campaign by an artist named True. I could not find any articles about this campaign, nor the original images. But I did find a recreation of one of the graphics on the site of Chris Glass.

Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design

Joseph Selbie studied design teams and found a correlation between successful web applications and holistic understanding across team members.

The more each team member understood the business goals, the user needs, and the capabilities and limitations of the IT environment—a holistic view—the more successful the project. In contrast, the more each team member was “siloed” into knowing just their piece of the whole, the less successful the project.

The author describes 5 key ways to achieve holistic understanding:

1. All team members conduct at least some user research
2. Team members participate in work and task flow workshops
3. Team members share and discuss information as a team
4. Team members prioritize information as a team
5. Team members design together as a collaborative workshops

I disagree with the last one and would amend it to say Team members review and provide feedback on designs together as a team.

Selbie's company also created a Feature and Activity Matrix for prioritization, which ranks features across technical feasibility, business goals and user need.

John Cleese on Creativity

John Cleese outlines the key elements of creativity at the Creativity World Forum.

• Sleep on a problem
• Rewrite from memory
• Eliminate interruptions
• Create proper mood

When we need to be creative we must create a "tortoise enclosure" - an oasis, a safe place - and we must "create boundaries of space and time".

(Via polaine.com)

No designer is an island

Sarah Nelson of Adaptive Path recommends a collaborative design process to help navigate through office politics and other hidden stakeholder agendas that can kill a design project.

I advocate for a very specific type of collaboration; I call it structured collaboration. It’s not rocket science but it can be a powerful addition to your toolbox. Unlike simply going into a room and working together informally, structured collaboration consists of thoughtfully designed work sessions, using visually-based techniques, physical materials (stickies, paper, pens) and planned activities to move the design process forward. Structured collaboration is loosely based on Participatory Design techniques, where users are directly engaged in the design process. Since these users are typically not designers, games, activities, and other visual tools help them express their ideas in ways designers can interpret. Structured collaboration does not replace other design tools; it simply helps designers better understand and balance the needs of a diverse set of constituents.