Comments on We Tried To Warn You, Part 1

Joe Lamantia — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:45:30 GMT

Great writeup of the ideas you brought out in the failure panel at the 2007 IA Summit. I think it’s no accident that ecology is emerging as one frame to help us understand these complex dynamics at the organizational level. One natural – but not often explored – growth path for those with roots in UX / IA is toward the fields of organizational culture and development. Once you set aside the specifics of method (such as usability, information architecture), UX is essentially a perspective that provides practitioners with broad ways of approaching situations and problems. The mindset behind UX perspective is largely portable, and it can be fruitfully applied to domains such as organizational structure and planning. This is a pathway to traditionally business oriented disciplines like management consulting and business strategy. We may not all want to follow such a path, but it is a ready and well-trod road to more influence over, and involvement in, the bigger decisions we often see but cannot directly affect in a timely manner. The consulting boutique MIG (Management Innovation Group) made steps toward this a few years ago; some of their alums are still active in the UX community, and putting these things into practice daily.

Marianna Samara — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:44:11 GMT

Hi again,

Thank you very much for the explanation. It makes better sense if I see this figure only as a case study for a specific type of organisation. I work for a smaller company and as a result, I am directly connected to the clients, users, designers and software developers; so I am closer to the product progress (which is mainly web sites) and I see that my decisions and advices can influence directly the development of the product. Furthermore, I absolutely agree with your comment that “Keeping a product healthy in the marketplace is everyone’s job”.

Marianna

Peter Jones — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:20:58 GMT

I’d like to post a couple of responses to the most recent comments. Thanks all for really reading the article – I was concerned of its length for B&A, and its more of an organizational studies article than a trad IA piece. Part II is up already now thanks to your responses! Marianna had contested the poisition of UX in the figure – I should clarify that the org processes indicated there are part of a real company in the case study, and are not in any way recommended for any other organization. But this is a traditional position for a large development company – and in this firm a weak position from which to promote organizational and product change. And, even as a small group without much authority, UX was able to assert real changes in the overall process across product lines through this organizational interaction style (not a method or process) we call socialization.

This also helps address Praveen’s comment. I guess it depends where you work and whether you take your job as defined in the organization, or are willing to take responsibility for helping push some of the changes that allow IA and UX to influence product strategy, marketing, and development. At this point, design decisions can be seen as not just user-centered, but as commitments from your firm to your users. Keeping a product healthy in the marketplace is everyone’s job, and as part of an organizational ecology, it takes a healthy organization to sustain a healthy product line in a competitive marketplace. Just like “innovation” is something everyone can do, standing up for the right decisions is part of our everyday jobs. There are also decisions that only we can see when they are happening, and they can reveal a lot. I’m just pointing out these types of organizational interactions from a real case to share some of how large-scale failure is a wicked problem that has no single cause, but we all have a part to play in detecting and raising the issues from our understanding as a situation emerges.

Praveen Kumar Verma — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:47:55 GMT

It is too early to comment on the article as I am still waiting for the second part. However, I feel that preventing the failure of a product or organization is not our job.

As an IA our job responsibility is to bring in creative inputs for the product from user’s perspective. We must ensure timely addition of our inputs to the product development and fight for our cause when it comes to defend UXD process. But the success of a product or organization depends on many factors that are beyond the purview of IA. To try to address these factors is not a good idea as an IA as we are not trained for that. Let CEOs, Salesmen, and MBAs do their job and not encroach their territories.

In our language it’s like allowing a developer to do Information Architecture though he is not trained to do it. He is likely going to falter even if he tried to.

Our contribution for the success of the organization is to deliver our best and to fight for the users till the last drop of blood instead of starting doing something else.

However, it is a nice topic to debate about which is really evident from the comments that this article has attracted.

Marianna Samara — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:21:49 GMT

Nice article. I enjoyed reading it. Really informative, gathering organisational with user experience issues.
I particularly liked the approach of organisation architecture in realation to information architecture. Failure of major organisational projects is a situation nobody wants to experience but sometimes is inevitable.
Nevertheless I disagree with the figure 1 as it indicates IA / UX /UI as part of software development only, whether I believe IA / UX should be direct linked with people and product as well.
As already stated I am looking forward for Part II.

Marianna

Adam Polansky — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:09:29 GMT

Nice preface. There’s the particularly juicy bit about organizations seeing pesky UX observations as a threat because of the common practice of time-boxing projects before an effort has been qualified across technology and customer experience.

One nagging reality that we deal with is accountability. A business stakeholder is usually on the hook for some sort of measurable performance indication specific to generating revenue or saving costs where the UX professional is not. As a result, the stakeholders relegate the UXers to the wrongly percieved role of “touchy-feely, non-business-savvy, navel-gazing designer-type”, or “clip-board carrying, out-of-touch-with-the-real-world intellectual” (See: Max Mayfield) making it easy to marginalize their input. “This isn’t your money we’re spending so it’s easy for you to say we need to re-think this!”

Because we don’t own the P&L statement for a business unit, we often find ourselves in an uphill struggle when it becomes clear (to us) that an application is on the wrong track.

This may be jumping ahead to Part II but I hope you have some ideas on how to increase the UX voice within the enterprise.

-AP

Patrick C. Walsh — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:27:42 GMT

Peter,
Excellent article. As someone who has spent many years at the sharp end of automotive quality it is nice to hear a good word said for the quality approach in organisations. I go back a long way and can still remember some of the incredible foul ups that used to occur before Quality was taken seriously.
Quality is still a very high priority in the automotive sector due to lean manufacturing and JIT (just in time) practices that must be adopted if automotive companies are to stay competitive. A failure in supplying any one of the 1000s of parts that make up a modern car could prove catastrophic. To that end the large automotive companies have tended to work very closely and supportively with their suppliers but have also insisted on suppliers using tools such as Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) at every stage, Quality Function Deployment (QFD), capacity analysis, rigorous protyping and proving of all production processes before a single production part can be made. In other words the majority of the activity for any project is very much in the early stages and, in most cases in my experience, by the time you get to the first off production part its quite a straight forward process.
Do you think that this approach would have any value in the world of web design?

Looking forward to Part 2

Patrick

Peter Jones — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:11:08 GMT

Yes, Sam – I am suggesting that things are particularly bad, from my perspective. And there is distortion when people have something to gain. I’ve watched (and studied) North American organizational culture over a career that’s longer than I care to mention. And large organizations dealt with change and failure better in the early 90’s, for example, when the quality movement still ruled in many firms and “associates” were given lots of training, development, and respect. Team development, process improvement – these management trends, while pooh-poohed by many, helped create a more collegial environment than I observe in those same firms now.

Where is HR? Seriously downsized in many places, and lacking authority in most others. But the large-scale failures I’m pointing to are more ecological, and happen over time. They are wicked problems in that each mini-failure is just a symptom of another, and nobody has line-of-sight over the whole system. Decisions made in one domain (e.g., marketing) affect another (say, product development) with such a duration gap that there may be no opportunity to challenge the decisions once the impact starts showing up.

Why UX (rather than IA, really) can have an impact is that product design decisions can be tied to customer experience and real customer data. We can take a stand, over and over again, until other stakeholders realize the customer-centered stand makes good business sense. We don’t need our own C-levels to accomplish this – I’ve done this through a kind of socialization of UX practices through significant projects that build new routines in the organization. It takes time, but it builds highly resilient lateral decision networks. Some of this is in Part II.

sam ladner — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:12:39 GMT

An excellent summary of the interaction (ahem!) between communication, organization and design. I find it a bold statement to suggest that IA can be the vanguard of organizational change. Not that I necessarily disagree but I have to wonder, where are the organization’s leaders? Where is the CEO or senior managers? And WHERE is the human resources department?

I think systematic distortion is part of the issue. Are we training our organizational leaders to distort information rather than shine sunlight onto problems? One could argue that this has always been the case, but is Peter suggesting that it is particularly bad “these days” and the IAs have a better eye or training to spot this?

sam ladner — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:08:18 GMT

sam ladner — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:32:18 GMT

Peter Jones — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 13:20:38 GMT

David – I totally agree with your expression of organizations as ecologies rather than problems, in terms of dynamics. In terms of failures, organizations are wired up for self-defense, and their ecological network turns inward to defend itself from internal breakdown. A full ecological description is very hard to render as well, within a case study.

This is an attempt at an ecological description, while keeping it simple. That’s the point of the timeline figure, to illustrate interactions that occur between processes and projects. And it is still a fairly long, 2-part article at that! The second part may shed some more light on the inter-system interactions, by continuing with a case study.

Yes on your point about planning as well. The very act of planning helps the organization create artifacts that aid distributed cognition and maintain a series of anchors (in time and location) that inform participants about expectations and agreements. Like Eisenhower said “The plan is nothing. Planning is everything.” Creating insightful planning aids can lead to powerful consensus and commitment to action, perhaps to back up Christina’s point, an effective contribution we can make to organizational IA.

David More — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 13:19:42 GMT

Great choice of topic – and some excellent insights into it. In particular, the magnifying effects of ‘organisational defenses’ are well-explained.
I do wonder about the ‘problem’ perspective, though, because it seems to me that (as with Bush and Iraq) often the tragedy is the result of ill-advised action in a complex situation. In a dynamic, reactive world perhaps we need to think of ecologies rather than problems.
Similarly, Peter’s observation that ‘good planning keeps organizations from failing’ seems based on an assumption that is worth examining. Maybe the success of ‘planning’ has more to do with informing the judgement of the actors than somehow controlling the situation?

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:44:30 GMT

Too often designers stand aside when they see organizational problems, preferring to stay within the safety of the user needs/content venn diagram. But copanies are ecosystems, and sickness moves quickly from one part of the process to another; it’s dangerous to stand idly by. I’m happy to see this article so that more folks in the previously sheltered roles of designer/IA/IxD can learn what to watch for and how to speak up.

Max Lord — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:32:59 GMT

I don’t have anything meaningful to contribute to this article, but as a Bostonian, I am excited by any use of the “wicked problem” terminology.