Traditional User Experience Is at a Crossroads, Part 2

Institute a Multidisciplinary Decision-Making Framework—The Triad

Experience-led companies that exceed the financial performance of their competition leverage User Experience at a strategic level. Engineering, Product Management, and User Experience need to engage in a joint decision-making framework. Other teams may contribute at different points, but differentiating on the experience requires including only these three groups in decision making about product direction. The intended experience outcome defines the standard that Product Managers must uphold. This decision must be made at the outset of a product’s development.

On the other hand, executives often say they want one person accountable for the product. This is fine. However, being experience led means, once teams have defined an experience outcome, they stick with it. From a Product Management standpoint, they agree to release only those capabilities that meet the intended experience and push others out. This requires the UX team to participate in envisioning the experience outcome, advocating for the experience, and aligning the team around that vision. If the vision does not differentiate on the experience, the UX team should have veto power over launching the ultimate solution.

People frequently ask how Apple releases such great products. Let’s look at an example: When Apple first released the iPhone, texting, or SMS (Short Message Service), was not yet the great experience they’d initially defined. So they shipped the first iPhone without SMS, then added it later, once the capability met standard of the experience outcome. Internally, some product managers said the iPhone would fail without SMS. They were wrong. Getting SMS right was critical. Customers loved the original iPhone and loved it more when Apple added SMS in a way that delighted them.

In experience-led companies, UX has a strategic voice as part of the triad, just as Engineering and Product Management do.

Focus on the Total Customer Journey, Not Just a Single User Interface

Focusing on the total customer journey and designing the user experience across that customer journey is crucial to driving significant financial return. Typically, though, in-house, corporate UX teams are asked to design just a single application. An application’s user interface is just one touchpoint in the total experience a user or customer has with your company. The total user experience includes every touchpoint. It includes a user’s first introduction to the company through marketing materials or a friend, their first and subsequent visits to the corporate Web site, evaluating or trying out the product or service, the purchase process, first-time use, ongoing use, service and support, the upgrade process, and so on. When a UX team focuses on just one aspect of an application and other UX teams focus on other parts of the application, and yet another team focuses on marketing, it usually creates a confusing and inconsistent experience. Why would you want the marketing message to differ from the actual product? Why would you want to make it easy to use a product, but make it difficult to decide which product to purchase? If a customer solution comprises several components, why would you make some components easy, but not others?

Forrester conducted research in mid-2014 that identified customer-journey maps as one of the hottest new design artifacts and found that a majority of CEOs find them extremely useful. Their main value comes from the fact that they help knock down silos across companies. A customer-journey map highlights all the different touchpoints a user has with a brand, from acquisition through purchase, usage, and support. They enable executives to bring teams together who would typically never work together with the goal of jointly solving problems for the customer.

Discover Emotional Drivers through Lean Ethnography

Great design leaders recognize that they need user researchers who can work within the framework of Lean processes, doing rapid contextual user research and engaging in Lean ethnography. During the Planning Phase, such researchers rapidly identify unmet user needs and users’ key emotional connectors to a product or service. They ensure the product is intuitive, satisfying, and delightful, just as Uber and Lyft did.

4. Institute the Right Organizational and Engagement Model

A successful, emerging organizational structure is the Centralized-Studio / Business-Unit Partnership model. Numerous companies, including IBM, GE, Honeywell, Visa, and Airbnb, are leveraging versions of this model. Groupon has implemented a similar model. These companies recognize the need for a central UX team, residing in a UX Studio, but understand that they must also have a responsible UX presence in each business unit. The UX Studio creates a space for the creativity and collaboration that drives differentiated experiences. At the same time, the members of a UX team in a business unit are able to understand and align with business objectives and challenges, advocate for the needs of the business, and identify the funding the business unit requires. Members of the UX team within the business unit are accountable for the success of its UX initiatives and are measured against their success or failure.

Include Front-End Development in the UX Studio

In practice, if a front-end development team sits with the design team and works collaboratively on the presentation-layer code, it can save up to 50% of the total time it takes to build the presentation layer. Here’s how this works: The UX Design team produces a set of screens and user-interface (UI) specifications to help the front-end development team understand the exact colors, fonts, colors, shading, padding, types of controls, and gestures and ensure the elements fit on the page in a pixel-perfect representation of the design. Once they’ve produced a limited subset of UI specs, designers can then produce and hand over just sketches.

If UX designers work directly with front-end developers who are highly skilled in translating designs into reality, the developers can take sketches and produce pixel-perfect, front-end code. This approach helps significantly in compressing schedules. UX designers and front-end developers must work together, in person, to create high-quality visualizations fast, then iterate them fast. The UX team cannot throw designs over the wall to another group and hope to have them build it with pixel perfection and smooth gestures. Achieving both speed and quality requires that they be collocated, at least during the Design Phase of a project, so they can function as a single unit.

Front-end developers in companies that currently differentiate on the experience feel a deep need to constantly optimize the experience using the latest technologies. They fall more into the design camp than the development camp. Of course, the task of connecting the presentation layer to the business logic and services, then to the backend belongs to developers who sit in the Engineering organization.

UX teams need the technical skills of a Front-End Development team, working closely with designers and providing insights on both what is currently possible and what could be possible if the team pushed the technological boundaries. This helps improve individual designs and makes them more likely to succeed at a technical level. It also helps the designers become better at predicting what the Development team can build and what ideas they should abandon in favor of alternate approaches.

5. Take Lessons from Creative Studios

Companies reinventing themselves around the experience—typically, through digital UX design and industrial design—are today taking core lessons from design firms and creative agencies. Recently, dozens of large companies—from Facebook and Google to Accenture, Capitol One and PwC—have spent billions of dollars acquiring design agencies, in the hope of reinventing themselves as experience-led organizations. But, because they are not changing from the inside out, most of these companies will not successfully reinvent themselves to be experience led. Other companies that are reorienting themselves to become experience led—including IBM, Honeywell, and Visa—are implementing the most valuable practices from design studios within their companies.

UX leaders have the opportunity to understand what best practices from creative studios are helpful and leave limiting practices from poor agencies behind. Creative studios do a few things very well, including

• leveraging a complete design team
• hiring brilliant Creative Directors
• building physical Design Studios
• consistently producing inspiring designs
• conducting collaboration workshops
• creating a strategic ecosystem of industry partnerships

Leverage a Complete Design Team

A creative studio would never consider assigning a single designer to a project. In contrast, most corporations expect individual designers to own the user experience for entire business units, with multiple products—all of which they’re responsible for designing. Unfortunately, a single designer’s voice gets lost in a project team of dozens and maybe hundreds of cross-functional team members. By assembling a complete team of user researchers, interaction designers, visual designers, prototypers, and creative directors, teams can rapidly produce highly creative and deeply engaging experiences.

Hire Brilliant Creative Directors

The best creative directors are not just great designers in their own right. Great creative directors excel in the art of facilitation and constructive criticism. They stimulate creative dialogue, so everybody contributes, and they articulate the underlying problem they are trying to solve through their ideas. They never shut down dialogue or bring the attitude that they must protect the group from bad ideas. Such creative directors simply have a wealth of creative successes that enable them to inspire and lead design efforts in which the best ideas can be born and thrive. They make sure designs are inspiring and engaging for everybody.

Build Physical Design Studios

All companies undergoing a transformation to become experience led should build physical design studios. These studios facilitate concentrated creativity and enable teams to focus on core design objectives, which raises the resulting products’ level of usability and delightfulness. This is common practice these days for companies differentiating on the experience. We all know of companies with such studios.

Consistently Produce Inspiring Designs

Creative studios know they must never compromise on the quality of their design output. If a product team wants something to get done too quickly, the creative studio will help them find someone else who can help them rather than compromise the quality of their work. They know that their brand depends on their producing great experiences. Likewise, the brand of any internal UX team depends on their always producing exceptional results. If a product team insists on your producing less than stellar results, let the team do the design themselves. Otherwise, you’ll get blamed for the poor quality of the design solution, and they’ll expect you to compromise on quality in the future. You can create a sustainable engagement model only by following this practice.

Conduct Collaboration Workshops

All creative design studios conduct collaboration workshops or design labs. I facilitate what I call Rapid Design Labs, which bring a collaborative, cross-functional approach to design and innovation that rapidly aligns organizations around a powerful vision. They foster ideation, collaboration, trust, and free expression. In these labs, cross-functional teams of designers, researchers, product managers, engineers, marketing, sales, and other key organizations work together to solve major business challenges. They engage in intensive brainstorming, purposeful play, design, usability testing, and rapid prototyping, which foster trust and teamwork better than any team-building offsite can.

Create a Strategic Ecosystem of Industry Partnerships

All design teams eventually have problems scaling as companies grow. Internal teams should not try to do all of the work. Rather, they should partner with high-quality design firms. Such design firms not only augment a team’s resources, they infuse creativity, challenge the internal team to attain greater heights, and make the team aware of the most modern design trends. Of course, at times, you’ll need to produce something of high quality very fast. So don’t start the process of finding a partner when you’re under the gun to deliver rapidly. You should already have one or more partners in your pocket.

If you are the leader of a UX team, don’t push away design firms. Embrace them and work with them strategically to increase your effectiveness and your ability to deliver experiences that delight users and differentiate your company.

What other benefits do creative agencies bring to the table? I’m sure I’m missing some things here, but these are the benefits I’ve realized by working with creative studios. Too many UX leaders criticize creative agencies. While the motivations of creative agencies can sometimes be self-serving, I find that, at the right time, I need to leverage their skills and their energy to help my team produce high-quality output rapidly when my team members are already fully engaged in other projects.

Summary

Most executives would say they want to differentiate their products, yet when it comes to differentiating on the experience, few understand what it takes. Many executives think they can acquire a design firm, and they’ll get great design throughout the company. Unfortunately, that is like wanting to lose weight, but not being willing to change one’s diet or exercise. Transforming a company to become experience led takes dedication, focus, and investment, just as it does to differentiate on technology or any other area of business. Once the CEO and executive staff provide the necessary support, they need a UX leader who knows how to inspire executives, their team, and customers. A UX leader who can engage them both emotionally and logically can facilitate a transformation that gives their company a competitive advantage and deliver products that delight their customers.