Category: Business Design

Trusting the Process

Three Ways We Get Clients Comfortable Working with Unknowns by:   |  Posted on

I am a firm believer that success starts with the statement of work (SOW). An appropriate and attainable SOW determines whether my team of UX designers and researchers get the time and activities we require to fully understand a client’s needs and fashion a suitable solution.

Regrettably, we often work within overly prescriptive SOWs that dictate a solution before we have a chance to understand the problem. One reason projects are poorly scoped is our clients’ discomfort with ambiguity. Clients understandably want to know what they are getting for their investment: Who will be on the team? What will they deliver? How will they deliver it? How long will it take?

But prematurely-fixed outputs confine the value of design strategy. Designers need flexibility to define the solution once they have complete information.

In design school, when a classmate was uncertain about an ambiguous direction, we urged them to trust the process. This platitude served us well as students, but it is not as persuasive in the boardroom. Our clients need more.

In this article, I’ll discuss three methods we use to reassure our clients when trust the process isn’t enough. Continue reading Trusting the Process

How Large and Boutique Consultancies Can Partner for Better Design

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Which is the better athlete: the marathoner or the sprinter? Both focus on hitting the finish line but possess far different skill sets. Yet any successful track and field team needs both types of athletes to win awards and recognition. Having a collection of overlapping and complementary skill sets makes any group better able to confidently achieve desirable outcomes.

This same principle holds true when contemplating partnerships between giant management consultancies like Accenture, McKinsey & Co., Bain & Co., or Boston Consulting Group, as well as boutique design consultants like my own, MU/DAI. Although both types of entities have their niches, they gain tremendous value from working in tandem to move projects forward.

Management consultancies often employ rapid design sprints, driving immense value for their clients. But these sprints can be more effective and less risky overall by partnering with a smaller design consultancy. Whether the major consultancy white-labels or acknowledges its smaller partner doesn’t matter; what matters is that both organizations, as well as the client, gain valuable benefits from the relationship.

Continue reading How Large and Boutique Consultancies Can Partner for Better Design

Ending the UX Designer Drought

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The first article in this series, “A New Apprenticeship Architecture,” laid out a high-level framework for using the ancient model of apprenticeship to solve the modern problem of the UX talent drought. In this article, I get into details. Specifically, I discuss how to make the business case for apprenticeship and what to look for in potential apprentices. Let’s get started!

Defining the business value of apprenticeship

Apprenticeship is an investment. It requires an outlay of cash upfront for a return at a later date. Apprenticeship requires the support of budget-approving levels of your organization. For you to get that support, you need to clearly show its return by demonstrating how it addresses some of your organization’s pain points. What follows is a discussion of common pain points and how apprenticeship assuages them.

Continue reading Ending the UX Designer Drought

UX Researcher: A User’s Manual

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This article is a guide on what to expect, and how to get the most from your UX researcher–a user manual, if you will.

You will invest a lot in your researcher and you deserve the greatest return. You should have high expectations for this critical component of your UX team, and following the recommendations presented in this article will help maximize your return.

A long and prosperous future

Congratulations on hiring a user experience design researcher!  When maintained correctly, a full time researcher will give you many years of strategic insight and validation, eliciting oohs and ahs from jealous shops that have chosen to forgo a researcher and cheers from your many satisfied clients. There are many benefits of having a researcher on staff, which include:

  • Making insights through on-site observation
  • Validating business hypotheses through customer research
  • Discovering usability issues through user testing
  • Initiating new projects in an effort to constantly expand their interests and skills

First, let’s spend a minute discussing the return component of return on investment. Incorporating user research into your product ensures its usability. According to Forrester (2009, pg. 2), product experience is what creates value and establishes power in the marketplace. Specifically, they found companies providing a superior user experience led to:

  • 14.4% more customers willing to purchase their product
  • 15.8% fewer customers willing to consider doing business with a competitor
  • 16.6% more customers likely to recommend their product or services

Investing in a UX researcher is a critical part of ensuring you provide your users with the superior experience Forrester notes as being such a critical differentiator. Everything covered in the following article applies to teams of researchers as well as those in a department of one.

Expectations

You should have high expectations for the quality and quantity of your researcher’s work. She should be a main contributor to your organization, a team player, and someone you look to for new ideas and fresh perspectives on long-standing issues. Your researcher’s unique background in asking questions and finding solutions, as well as the fact that she is likely spending ample time listening to your clients, provides her with insight she can provide your team on how to move forward with addressing various issues.

You might be saying anyone can accomplish the tasks in the paragraph above. You’re correct. I’m pointing out you should expect this from your researcher fresh out of the box, no questions asked.

You might have hired your researcher with specific duties in mind; however, you should expect her to want to know what others are working on, to be a part of the bigger picture, and to ask for feedback allowing her to become more proficient at what she does.

The following are some of the key expectations you should have for your researcher.

Asking questions

Asking the right questions is a basic expectation. Don’t laugh. This is harder than it looks. Asking questions involves the preliminary step of listening to understand what the issue actually is. Not everyone can do this.

Solving a problem isn’t as simple as asking the question you want answered.

For example, your overarching question might be “Does this website work well?” You could ask 1,000 people this question, and you wouldn’t know much after counting the “yes” and “no” responses.

What you need to know is “what about this site works, what doesn’t, and why?” Responses to these questions can be obtained in a variety of ways, allowing solutions to be identified. You can rely on your researcher to determine the most appropriate questions to ask in situations like this.

Researchers spend years listening to professors, clients, peers, and stakeholders to identify core issues to solve as well as what questions will provide data to find a solution. When meeting with project staff from a recent client, don’t assume your researcher isn’t engaged if she is quiet. It is likely she is observing verbal and physical interactions in the room as she designs a plan of attack.

Navigating relevant literature

Most likely, other researchers have published findings from studies related to what your researcher will examine. Your researcher should easily navigate and compile reports and studies from the body of knowledge in UX, HCI, and other relevant fields. The fact that someone else has explored questions similar to those of a project you’re asking your researcher to tackle helps shape their thinking on how to move forward, using existing resources to their fullest potential.

Literature can serve to inspire your researcher. For example, studies of ecommerce sites suggest trust is a key factor in determining users’ purchasing behavior. If you have a client developing a site meant to provide information, not selling a product, how might trust be developed? Your researcher can use findings from ecommerce studies to shape her questions and study design and then potentially publish a report contributing to the field, beyond the needs of your client.

Using the right method

Asking the right questions and reading up on relevant literature leads to the next critical expectation for your researcher: Using the right method.

UX research is more than usability testing. Your researcher knows methods shouldn’t dictate the questions asked, but the opposite: Your methods should be tailored to get relevant data for the questions to be asked.

Picking a method is hard work, this is why you need a researcher in the first place, they have the training and experience needed to select the right method for the question being asked. Use your researcher to do this. Your researcher carries a toolbox of methods. They might have preferences, or be more comfortable with certain methods, but they should not be a one-method pony. Some researchers are on a constant quest to define or refine new methods to answer questions. These can be exciting models to work with–the sports cars of UX researchers–willing to push the pedal to the metal to see where things go.

Regardless of the amount of planning, you often find yourself in a situation less than the ideal one written up in a methods textbook. Adapting to on-the-ground scenarios is something to expect from your researcher. Whether it’s using her smartphone to record an interview when her digital voice recorder dies, or adjusting on the fly when a busy client decides they only have 45 minutes to complete a 90-minute interview, your researcher should walk away from each scenario maximizing her ability to be flexible and still collect relevant data.

Translating findings

You’ve asked the right questions and selected the right method to collect data; now your researcher should serve as a translator for the application of research findings. Study results can be confusing if not interpreted appropriately. This includes verbal and written reports tailored to the experience and expectations of your audience. Your researcher should embrace the opportunity and challenge presented by making the results of her labor relevant to her peers.

Silo-busting

Researchers should come with the ability to break down silos, serving as ambassadors internally and externally, across teams and projects. Researchers are often deployed with surgical precision at specific intervals in a project timeline. This means your researcher might be actively involved in five or six projects simultaneously, giving her a breadth of insights. Few others within your organization are as able to communicate on the goals and achievements of multiple projects as she is. If findings from one study being conducted for client A would impact a recommendation for client G, your researcher should ensure everyone working with client G is aware of this.

Academia: A land far, far away

To make the best use of your researcher, it’s important to know where they come from. Especially if she is one of the PhD models, she was likely assembled in a far away land called “Academia.”

In Academia, your researcher gained or honed some of her most useful attributes: critical thinking; exposure to broad topics; research methods, both quantitative and qualitative; analyzing, interpreting, and presenting results; and connections with fellow researchers and academics.

Academia is the land of publish or perish. There are plenty of opportunities to give presentations to groups, write papers, teach courses, and create visual displays of data for various projects. This experience should leave your researcher well polished at speaking and presenting research in various formats well before they land at your front door. Although not all researchers are the best orators in the room, they should all be highly proficient at tailoring the message to their audience.

Additionally, your researcher has navigated an unbelievable amount of bureaucracy to escape Academia with a degree. She comes with the skills of diplomacy, patience, interpreting technical documents, and correctly filling out these documents under duress. This contributes to refining her ability to successfully reach the finish line and receive the prize. Your researcher is a doer and a finisher!

There are some things done in Academia, however, that don’t translate as well in the “real world.”

Academics have a unique language beyond the jargon typically found in professional fields. An example of research-ese is the statement, “I don’t think the items in this scale are valid at measuring the factor they purport to” translates to, “We might not be asking the right questions on this survey.”

Using obscure words–sometimes in different languages–becomes second nature to those moving through Academia. It is perfectly acceptable to tell your researcher she isn’t speaking your language. She should be able to translate for you; you just need to be clear when this is necessary.

Academia instills an unrealistic sense of time, as well. Your researcher may have spent one, two, or more years working on a single research project while earning her degree. Anyone that’s spent time in the real world knows you are lucky to have a timeline of one or two months to complete a study and, more realistically, about three weeks.

Adjusting the timeline for conducting a study is something you can expect your researcher to come to grips with rather quickly. You might see smoke coming out of her ears as gears that have been set to snail’s pace spin at hyper speed, but trust me, the adjustment will happen.

Be clear about your expectations for timelines at the beginning of a project, particularly if your researcher is fresh out of Academia.

The attributes instilled by Academia have become ingrained in your researcher. Enjoy them while you provide coaching to help her adapt to your business’s requirements. Experiences in Academia are part of what makes your researcher quirky, unique, and invaluable to your organization.

As time passes, she will become more polished, especially if you provide her with explicit feedback on what she is doing well and what she can do to improve. Patience is key when helping your researcher transition from Academia; if you exercise it, you will find the results quite rewarding.

Care and maintenance

Addressing the following will ensure your researcher stays running at optimal conditions.

Continuous learning opportunities

Researchers have an inherent love of learning. Why else would someone voluntarily go to 20th grade? Your researcher probably believes “everyone is a lifelong learner.”

It’s critical to offer educational opportunities and training. You must allot time and money for her to attend classes and seminars on topics ranging from research methods, to statistical analysis, to how to visualize data.

You should offer these opportunities to all of your staff; learning opportunities are key for ensuring a high level of morale throughout your organization. These opportunities aren’t always costly. Many organizations offer free or low cost webinars lasting the time of a reasonable lunch break.

Membership in professional organizations

Professional organizations allow your researcher opportunities to keep a pulse on the current state of their field. Professional organizations often host events and distribute publications promoting professional development and networking among professionals.

You should provide your researcher funds to join a professional organization; however, there are organizations that do not charge a fee to join. For example, I am a member and current Vice Chair for PhillyCHI the ACM chartered professional organization serving Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley region. There’s no charge to join, and monthly events are free for anyone to attend.

I suggest encouraging your researcher to attend meetings and allowing her time to serve as a volunteer or board member of professional organizations. There are numerous legitimate professional organizations at local, national, and international levels affiliated with ACM, IxDA, UXPA, and more.

Attending conferences and workshops

There’s a subconscious desire for researchers to congregate to drink beer and exchange ideas. Attending conferences allows researchers to meet peers from around the world and across topics, to learn the state of the art in their field.

Your researcher is most likely aware of the various local UX organizations such as ACM SIGCHI and UXPA sponsored groups, UX book clubs, and other UX meetups. Many of these groups offer workshops and one day events that are low or no cost (Thanks sponsors!). So, if you need convincing on the value of attending conferences, you can dip your toe in the water without blowing the budget. There’s also no shortage of national and international UX conferences that would satisfy your researcher’s needs. You can start with this list compiled by usertesting.com.

Besides getting a chance to feed off the ideas of others, interacting with professionals in her field, and allowing her to show off her work, there is another way of getting value from having your researcher attend conferences:

At Intuitive Company, staff give presentations on any conference they attend using company funds. This promotes the value of attending conferences to your staff, with the added benefit of allowing your researcher to present information to their peers, something most researchers already enjoy doing.

Reading

This was mentioned in expectations, but allowing your researcher time to read is your responsibility. She is one of those rare birds that actually recharge their batteries when reading, particularly when it relates to her research and practice interests.

Here’s a secret: You benefit from your researcher’s desire and ability to read! By allowing your researcher to read, you are actually allowing her to work, so long as you structure it correctly. For example, tell her you want her to conduct a literature review; therefore you are giving permission to read while at the same time setting up the expectation that there will be a usable product as the outcome of her reading. A literature review on a relevant topic can inform future research you engage in as well as design recommendations you make.

Win-win.

If you still can’t fathom giving your researcher time to read on the job, you should at least provide her with a book budget to purchase some of the must reads in UX.

Publishing and presenting

What good would research, professional development, conference attending, and reading do if your researcher couldn’t share her newfound knowledge with others?

Academia has hammered the need for dissemination into the fiber of your researcher’s being. Allowing time for writing and presenting is another area of maintenance that is your responsibility. You should encourage her to present at conferences and publish articles, blog posts, and white papers on relevant topics.

This is a way for her and your organization to build a strong brand in the communities you work in. For example, having your researcher cited as an expert on responsive design because she’s published on the topic is something you can include in future proposals and presentations you make to potential clients.

Conclusion

The success of your researcher is a two-way street. If you’ve already begun the journey with your researcher, this article might have highlighted expectations or maintenance that you’ve overlooked. If so, it isn’t too late to implement change; she can handle that as easily as a dead recorder, and you can enhance the relationship you have with her. If you haven’t started the journey, the advice provided can help ensure you get the most from your well maintained researcher for years to come.

What would you add or change to this manual based on your experience?

Additional resources

Forrester Report on best practices in UX (2009): https://www.adobe.com/enterprise/pdfs/Forrester_Best_Prac_In_User_Exp.pdf

Sandy Greene of Intuitive Company on evolving a creative workplace: http://boxesandarrows.wpengine.com/author/sgreene/

Reorgs: Rocky or Righteous?

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As designers, we grapple every day with challenging projects. This of course is part of what keeps us coming back. Some challenges, although not directly related to project work, can still be looked at through a UX lens. In this case, I’m talking about a phenomenon you’re likely familiar with: company reorganization.

If you’ve been through a reorg (that’s ‘reorganization’ in water cooler parlance), you’ve probably experienced your share of the whispers, closed-door meetings, and mixed messages that seem to be par for the course when an organization goes through major changes in size, scope, staffing, or management.

I’ve been through a number of these shuffled decks myself, across several companies, and for a variety of reasons. It’s fair to claim that each one is different, but there’s enough overlap to identify patterns and form some baseline recommendations.

If you’re in a role with decision-making authority, then you’re ideally positioned to ensure that the reorg will be designed as an intentional experience with its actual user base in mind.

However, if you’re like the majority of us who aren’t in a position to make decisions about the reorg, you’re probably still reasonably close to the folks who are. Why not take the initiative and lay out some scenarios and recommendations for how the reorg can be designed for optimal reception and impact on your organization?

The users

Whether it’s planned or not, the scope of the reorg will have an audience far larger than the group of people seemingly affected on paper. The experience of these groups throughout the reorg should be purposefully designed by whomever is running the change management show.

Let’s take a look at who your users are.

  1. The folks who are officially part of the reorg. Their status is changing in some way, be it their actual role, reporting structure, or the like.
  2. Coworkers/teams who have direct or dotted-line dependencies with anyone or any team directly involved in the change.
  3. Coworkers/teams whose only connection is physical or cultural proximity or who ultimately report to the same upper management.
  4. Third party vendors who communicate with or provide services to reorg-affected parties.

Here’s what you need to realize: These groups will be getting bits and pieces of news about the reorg whether or not you craft that message explicitly.

With that in mind, you should ensure the messaging supports the business strategy, is accurate, and speaks to each party’s specific concerns.

This is the difference between an unplanned, unpredictable experience and an intentional, designed experience. It’s a golden opportunity to show your stakeholders they are a valued part of the organization, and you’ve got your arms firmly around managing the changes. If the right preparation goes into the reorg, you can nip in the bud any misinformation and unnecessary stress, building confidence in your team’s leadership and capability as a whole.

The alternative is to risk spending what trust currency you’ve accrued to date.

The message

Now that you know who you’re talking to, what do you say? It’s idealistic to think that you’ll know all the details when you begin planning the reorganization–but you do need to initiate your communications plan as close to the start of planning as you can.

Start by crafting general messaging that indicates the why–the logic being the necessity and desired benefits of the reorg. This should be high level until more details are known. If you know enough about the how to paint a low-res picture, do it.

A little bit of information that’s transparent and honest will go a long way–but take care not to make promises you can’t keep. Things can and will change, so own up to the reality that dates and other details are very much in flux to help you avoid having to take back your words when deadlines shift down the road.

As you approach major milestones in the reorg process and as the details solidify, provide appropriate communications to your audience groups–and do so again once the changes have been rolled out. This may seem like a lot of effort, but rest assured your people are asking questions. It’s up to you to address them proactively.

If a milestone date changes–and it will–the audience who’s been paying attention will still be looking to that date unless you update your wayfinding (in the form of project timeline communications). Without this careful attention to detail, you’re sharing bad information–perhaps more damaging than no information at all.

When the rubber meets the road

Inevitably, one question that will come up repeatedly throughout a reorg is “When does all this actually happen?” In other words, when do we start following the new processes, change how we route requests, start doing this and stop doing that?

For both logistical and psychological reasons, knowing how and when transitions will take place is vital. Often the difference between a stakeholder being stressed out (perhaps becoming a vocal opponent of the changes) versus being calm and confident is the company’s honest commitment to consciously bridging the transition with trained, capable support.

This could be as simple as a window of time during which existing persons or processes can continue to be called upon for support or as complex as an official schedule that shows specifically how and when both the responsibilities AND expectations of the audience segments will change.

Usability research

It’s not like you can do A:B testing with a reorg. You can, however, do some polling when the initial reorg information is shared, then midstream, and again after the reorg is complete.

Why do this research? As with any project, from your first person perspective, reorg elements might seem obvious–or you may have overlooked some pretty big pieces. Talking with your ‘users’ can be illuminating and also sends the message that their input is desired and valued.

While some reorgs are expressly designed to reduce overhead/staff, reorgs are not always about cutting heads. Often-times it’s a shuffle of resources (people), and if the right discussions happen you can guide that process to a win win.

Using a handy list written by a gentleman you may know of, here are some dimensions coopted for our use. Employ these as you see fit to generate interview material and discover how well your company reorg experience has been crafted.

Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?

We can ask our participants what they took away from the reorg communications they were sent. This includes actual group or 1:1 meetings, formal documents, emails, etc.

Find out if the materials conveyed the message so the transition was easy to understand. Did they grasp both the high-level view and the granular details? (In other words, overall strategy and the specific impact to them.)

Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?

If the folks you’re polling have been assigned specific assignments in the reorg, ask early on if they fully understand their instructions and if they could have added any insight that might have decreased task costs or durations. Midstream or late in the game you can follow up to see if those instructions turned out to be clear and accurate enough for the tasks to have been carried out efficiently.

Did task instructions have the most time-saving sequence? Were there steps left out of the tasking communications that had to be discovered and completed?

Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?

Remember the telephone game? Someone makes up a story and then each player passes the story on to the next by whispering. When the story makes it back to the author, the details have changed–it’s a different story.

When those involved in a reorg talk with others, they’ll pass along what they know. The simpler the story and the more they’ve understood it, the less you’ll lose in translation.

Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?

A successful reorg requires a lot of work and collaboration between groups. Mistakes tend to be costly and have a ripple effect, becoming harder to correct as time goes on. The critical path of these big projects is placed at risk due to missteps due in large part to (wait for it) learnability and memorability, or due to errors introduced by people who have been put off by the lack of efficiency of the reorg process and attempt to forge their own path.

Another source of error is in failing to communicate enough timely information about role changes to employees and contractors. Major change breeds anxiety, and in a job market where workers have the power and employers are constantly on the prowl for good (and hard to find) talent, it’s a mistake to risk wholesale attrition.

Avoid this error by honestly and accurately communicating dates and the likelihood of roles continuing as is or with changes. If roles are going away, be transparent about that too. Better to maintain trust and respect with clear messaging about terminations than to leave folks in doubt and unable to plan for their future.

Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

If the reorg does NOT leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, and if the stated project goals have been met, you’re doing it right. Reorgs happen for a reason, typically because something’s suboptimal or simply broken. Ultimately, everyone should pull together and work towards a positive outcome resulting in better workflow, lowered cost of doing business, increased job satisfaction, and, of course, $$$.

Moving on

Regardless of your role in the company and the reorg, consider whether or not you can use your UX superpowers to make the entire process less painful, easier to understand, and more likely to succeed.

Good luck!