UX's Untapped Potential: Navigating Threats and Seizing Opportunities
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This document discusses the untapped potential of UX and how it can be realized. It outlines some challenges facing UX, including stakeholders not understanding UX's full capabilities, competition from product management, and resistance to changing UX's traditional role. Some responses are presented, such as using case studies to demonstrate value, speaking the language of senior colleagues, and practicing patience. The document advocates that UX professionals become coaches who help calibrate ambition across teams in order to help UX unlock its potential to influence strategy beyond just wireframes.
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UX's Untapped Potential: Navigating Threats and Seizing Opportunities
- 1. UX’s Untapped Potential Navigating threats to UX and seizing on the opportunities Presented at: Markus Smet 20th November 2012 VP Product at Spreadshirt
- 2. Who do I work for? 2016 = €250 million 2013 = €100 million 2008 = €26 million
- 3. My experience Markus Smet • Global Experience Director, Tyche (large gaming co.) • Head of UX, Sky Broadcasting • Client and agency side: Yell, Tesco, RBS, Microsoft
- 4. I graduated in 1994
- 5. I trained in this… what is it?
- 6. Yes, I trained as a Marketer
- 7. But this is what I signed up for
- 8. Being the people other people turned to about customer took time
- 9. UX need some serious overtaking maneuvers to change that!
- 10. It’s do-able though… UX
- 11. I saw the light in 2003. Yes, Jason again.
- 12. Future is hard to, UX is well suited to this kind of challenge
- 14. Innovation is a big opportunity for UX McKinsey Global Survey (2010)
- 15. UX is perfectly suited to driving and calibrating ambition
- 16. UX is more than wireframes
- 17. UX can make this go away
- 18. All good until now…
- 19. But UX dials up ambition too quickly…
- 20. Which can leave stakeholders behind
- 21. Too much ambition, too fast = risk for stakeholders
- 22. And out come the defensive UX umbrellas: “Stakeholders don’t understand UX…”
- 23. Yet UX is perfect to calibrate ambition beyond wireframes into strategy – right?
- 24. So why hasn’t UX shimmied up the greasy pole into the boardroom?
- 25. Challenge 1
- 26. The people that matter don’t know what we’re capable of
- 27. Challenge 2
- 28. We have some major competition
- 29. Challenge 3
- 30. Product Management is boxing us in Product Management
- 31. Product Managers lack the tools to do this alone
- 32. So how does UX make it more like this?
- 33. Challenge 4
- 34. Changing UX’s role is a huge problem
- 35. Response 1
- 36. A great case study
- 37. So where can UX go to worship?
- 38. UX industry bodies need to emulate the CIM and get into the IoD
- 39. Response 2
- 40. UX need to talk the language of our senior colleagues
- 41. Response 3
- 42. Patience
- 43. So what can we do, now?
- 44. This is a real job! UX Designer UX Coach
- 45. Starts to break free of the wireframe box!
- 46. Consultancy isn’t the right tool for this Coach, not consult
- 47. Consultants are great idea magpies
- 48. But coaches should be there for ever a while Coach, not consult
- 49. UX Coaches specialise in calibrating ambition across teams and departments…
- 50. UX Coaches shouldn’t be heros…
- 51. More a trusted partner… (free hugs anyone?)
- 52. You need to get past difficult product managers
- 53. Some UX Coaching tips
- 54. Know what your colleagues know about customers
- 55. Bring customer and developer together Points of pain Customers Developers Moments of uplift
- 56. Understand where colleagues are and the journey you want to take them on
- 57. Mirror feedback – it’s a good sales technique; you’re selling their idea back to them
- 58. Turn everything into a question and use “five why’s?”
- 59. Embrace the learning experience and be prepared to change as well…
- 60. Become an excellent workshop facilitator, it’s crucial to decoding complexity
- 61. You do the fun stuff that creates an environment without fear of failure…
- 62. Push these 3 things ahead to help UX unlock its untapped potential. Good luck! Church Coach Calibrate
- 63. Thanks. Markus Smet @behumanshaped msmet at spreadshirt dot net
Editor's Notes
- UX very critical of itselfIt is a skillset, a very important one
- We empower people to create clothes for their tribe. This can be anything from hip-hop, music, goats to sushi… and it’s big business as we’re going to hit €100 million in 2013.
- So let’s start with a bit about who I am. In my last job I was Global Director of Experience Design at a gambling company, and before that I was Head of UX at Sky. But let’s step back beyond these grand sounding job titles and take you back to where it all began…
- It’s 1994 and the first thing we’d notice is there’s no internet or email in my University and no one I know has a mobile phone. That meant there was also no User Experience, so I did the next best thing at the time – Marketing.
- Marketing was customer focused and that resonated with me.And the first thing Marketers are taught is that market orientation, the idea that fundamentally building a company around customer leads to greater profitability. That idea took until the 1990s for the concept of customer as the core focus of the organisation to be fully embraced.1954 until early 1990s…
- So, we can safely say that when it comes to customer orientated thinking: Marketing got there first Marketing have had since 1954 to convince the rest of an organization they’re the right people to talk to when it comes to customer.
- Yet for me, Marketing never seemed to get close enough to the customer. But UX did…
- Jason Mesut in 2003 introduced me to UX.Sold UX into c-suite execs, senior marketers and technology teams at Yell and Sky. Instant convert. I am innately user, or I would say ‘customer’, focused.UX built on what I loved about good Marketing; that you could give customers something that was better than what they had… you could give them a better customer experience.
- Of course delivering a better customer experience is hard. UX manage the complexity of ‘future’. UX literally calibrated the ambition of a group of people,This dramatically reduced politics and increased team confidence to innovate.
- That word innovation is so important. It’s a simple concept - the act of doing something knew. It’s also a magic word for Execs; they see innovation as the lifeblood of growth.
- According to a McKinsey Global Survey (2010) 84 percent of executives say innovation is extremely, or very important, to their companies’ growth strategy.
- Innovation takes the leap forwardAmbition is what gets us thereCalibrating ambition is the hard bit – and it’s what UX does so wellSo why isn’t UX at the centre of the innovation agenda?
- UX gets muddled up with wireframesUX is not really about wireframes, it’s how you energise a group of people to deliver an amazing User Experience. UX the method of calibrating a team or dept, perhaps even a company, to deliver for the customer.
- You can’t play bullshit bingo at eCommerce and digital businesses like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Zappos – the dialogue is generally healthy, without waste.Yet the majority of organisations aren’t like this. They contain lots of crappy conversations around customer.UX can see that with a clarity other teams do not.
- When you put evidence in front of stakeholders you must take into account that the opposite of ambition is today’s reality. Often the people you’re trying to convince to see the opportunity will be thinking about managing up, side-ways into cross-departmental politics as well as budget constraints, profits and headcount issues that UX people tend to miss.
- Calibrate ambition too highly and UX becomes a risk, rather than an opportunity.
- By putting up our defenses…We start to alienate the stakeholders who would agree that what’s needed is a cross-channel discipline that can calibrate everyone’s ambition to the same level. They lose their trust in us, and they fallinto believing they’re the only ones capable. But they can’t because their silos are well established and hard to see out of.
- Yet our colleagues in other departments need our help. UX can calibrate across departments right? UX is not old wine in new bottles, trying to make UX the next silo to own the customer.
- So why isn’t UX at the heart of every business from boardroom to Marketing and Product Management?
- Our UX brand is not working. UX is not just about “users”, it’s about customers. And by confusing this our message is DOA in the board room. The Executive needus more than ever. It’s often the only place where a cross silo view of the business comes together, but they are usually preoccupied with delivering shareholder value. EXECS NEED YOU, BUT YOU’RE SHITTING ON YOUR OWN DOORSTEP
- The Exec delegates the customer experience challenges to the CMO.Marketers and Product Managers are the well-established point people in organisations for “what should we do next to improve our customer experience”, not UX.
- Product Marketing is giving UX a defined role where User Research can be run by an Administrator and interface design is driven by creative Engineers. Google, Amazon and even the leading Chinese Twitter and Facebook emulators are turning to this model where UX’s role is primarily to design and facilitate the customer conversation - a worthy task but one that’s really digital, rather than experiential.
- I see UX’s role as running customer driven innovation across channels to marketCalibrating efforts across departments to deliver a great customer experience across call centres, face to face, online and via mobile devices.
- Therefore we must appeal to the Executive, the Marketers and the Product people so they see how we can help them address the big innovation issues through our talent for calibrating ambition in a big way - that’s what UX strategy is about.
- This is ambitious for UX. It’s a 10 ton problem that can’t be resolved by another cool presentation.So what the hell is UX going to do?
- Let me briefly return to my University days where this talk started. Throughout my final year the Chartered Institute of Marketing started to target me, and every other business student, with a package of courses and qualifications that would help increase my value. They were diligent, they were relentless. They were tied into every university and commercial organization across the UK, and still are.The CIM understand their value, to the student and commercial organisatons, and they represent, through their membership, Marketing’s best interests. They provide an alter for Marketers to worship at, donate to, and learn from.
- So where’s our church? I think the Design Council, DBA and DMI are doing good stuff… but they’re focused on Design in a wider context. And in my experience Execs don’t take design seriously, at least not yet, and UX specifically has a stronger case for customer driven innovation than the wider design discourse so we shouldn’t actually tangle ourselves up in all that.So that leaves us with BIMA, UXPA… but are they talking to Directors and key decision makers about UX? Are they lobbying our cousins in the Customer Experience industry on our behalf?When I compare the amount of targeted, relevant and interesting mail I’ve had in the last 20 years from the CIM to the amount I’ve received from our own industry, I’m inclined to say UX doesn’t really have an effective industry body. These bodies reflect the UX industry’s introspective, naval gazing approach.
- The first thing I’d suggest is that you must expect the Industry Bodies, Agencies and UX Consultancies to build a church. These organisations will need to create alliances with other industries, such as customer experience, and in particular the IoD because directors need to grasp that UX is well equipped to solve the big innovation challenge they face – converting innovative ideas into real customer experiences.
- The next thing is sort out the brand, in fact we need to ask ourselves whether we are talking a language that reflects our ambition and our audience? Are we really eating our own dogfood, and liking the taste?It’d be easier if UX started to use the same language everyone else already understands.
- As mentioned before, we know the Marketers had to wait 40 years to get traction so we need to accept that evolving our brand and building new industry bodies will not happen quickly. So what can we do in the meantime with the UX role today?
- If you don’t see yourself primarily as an interaction designer or information architect, and you still do UX work, you’ll find yourself doing a coaching role. A UX Coach isn’t specialised in a particular design skill, She’s an all-rounder and uses personas, patterns, design principles, research findings, wireframes, mental models, customer journeys and so on to describe the problem space. Then she coaches her colleagues to constantly consider and think about the customer view. You mustn’t perfect things, the goal is to be communicating with your toolkit and getting feedback.
- Many of you will be working Agile, and whatever your working method we have to get UX out of the wireframing box at ground level. So having a clearly described job title will help for starters.
- I’ve used Accenture and “rock star” consultants like Marty Cagan, they’re great idea magpies - good for inspiration but their role is not to see it through, it’s to get things started.
- The coach is there for the long haul. They help colleagues uncover their own ideas, by adopting a coaching style you will help structure the way in which ideas are discovered and implemented as a group, making this a long-haul role that’s at least a couple of years long.
- The primary aim for a UX coach is calibrating ambition across your team, whatever size.This will include calibrating ambition UPWARDS over time. Bear in mind that you’ve got to be careful you don’t jump in too fast with ambition that’s calibrated way higher than your colleagues. Only push the dial up once you have the trust of your colleagues and a solid base of problems everyone agrees on solving.
- Of course you also need to work well with Product Management. They need to deal with the business and politics, you are there to make sure the team game-plan is scoring goals against competitors and defending customers from poor experiences! Remember there’s no room for heros…
- You need to be a close and trusted partner in particular to Product Management
- If you struggle to get in front of the Product Manager’s stakeholder group use the workshops within the Agile team to demonstrate your ability, and ask your product manager to invite stakeholders into the team workshops you’re running – this is good PR for the team. Your product manager will see they benefit from better quality information that you’ve coached out of stakeholders, whilst you’ll gain a better view of the wider business challenges.
- Understand what your colleagues understand about customers, especially the developers... if engineers see the pain things often happen more quickly.
- Facilitate so that the Engineers see the points of pain and moments of uplift themselves… there’s no quicker way to see an improvement in what gets built
- Understand where someone is and where you want to take them in terms of their customer know-how.
- Mirror feedback from them to them to ensure you both understand, so you can see where the gaps are.
- Turn everything into a question. A simple technique is the 5 whys? Don’t take the first answer for granted, always dig deeper.
- Embrace the learning experience, by understanding business and technology challenges you’ll become a better team member and you’ll be able to maintain ambition.
- Become an excellent workshop facilitator, you’ll be a key weapon in your managers toolkit making it more likely you’ll get in front of stakeholders.
- This is what’s best about being a UX Coach, encouraging people to let go of inhibitions and enjoy the creative process of working in nimble, multi-disciplinary teams. UX will become more than an umbrella term for a bunch of disciplines no one outside understands... being a UX Coach means something that’s describable and valuable. With time the UX industry will hopefully deliver a fully integrated vision for how it can support a kind of innovation that’ll revolutionise business the way marketing did in the latter half of the last century.
- UX is the future. For me it’s clear: I think we need to build a church, take a coaching approach and remember to calibrate ambition carefully. Good luck in making it so!
- UX is the future. For me it’s clear: I think we need to build a church, take a coaching approach and remember to calibrate ambition carefully. Good luck in making it so!