Comments on We Tried To Warn You, Part 2

Peg Griffith — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:59:57 GMT

Fantastic article! Dead on.

But how to sell the notion of integrated UX throughout large corporations? I once was asked to figure out why customer satisfaction ratings were dropping for a particular product. What became clear was that 2 things were happening: 1) there was inconsistent support for various user personas (the client could fix that pretty easily by developing new tools and processes. 2) Users viewed the full company (not just her division) as “those guys”. So even if she fixed her tools, if there was a billing error or a customer service error (things she didn’t control) customer sat would go down. She needed to share the personas and the findings of the research across the full customer experience life cycle, and get her management peers to buy into the notion that customer satisfaction is a shared responsibility. She did not. She hoarded the research findings, and ultimately she failed, and customer sat continued to fall.

Any suggestions on how, as a consultant to one division, take findings across divisions and share them with others?

Tracy Dusters — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:16:44 GMT

if only i had listened. lol!

Marianna Samara — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:30:46 GMT

Peter,
Thanks for a nice article once again (as part I).
This article reveals a great combination of various sources of information and comments that form a frame of UX. Is clear for the reader what is UX, in which steps of product development UX is involved, where it should better fit and the importance of UX to avoid future failures. Again this article clearly refers to bigger organisation models but sometimes user experience can meet barriers in smaller organisations as well, despite the fact that product development members work more closely.
I totally agree with following statement, as it is usually one of the most common reasons why a product fails to meet the users’ expectations.
“The product team’s enthusiasm for the new and innovative may prevent listening to the users’ authentic preferences. And when taking a conventional approach to usability, such fundamental disconnects with the user domain may not even be observable.”

Joe thanks for the ’ organizational architecture’ slide share group , I have already joined.

Joe Lamantia — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:57:48 GMT

I’ve just started a slideshare group open to people interested in exploring ‘organizational architecture’ and the connections to user experience: please join!

http://www.slideshare.net/group/organizational-architectu…

Patrick C. Walsh — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:54:52 GMT

Looking at Jim’s comments above one of the tools that the Japanese car makers used was Quality Function Deployment (QFD). QFD was developed as long ago as the 60s by Dr. Akao as one method of ensuring that user requirements (‘voice of the customer’) were considered and transmuted into system requirements.
Because it has a long history of success and, although simple in concept, looks quite fancy on paper I wonder if UX could use this as a selling point to clients and the like thus ensuring that user research is built into the requirements at an early stage in the project (I guess JJG’s Scope plane).
Dr. Akao also has some interesting thoughs and aproaches involved with the spoken and unspoken needs of customers and ‘expected’ and ‘exciting’ quality. Well worth a look if nothing else.

http://www.qfdi.org/

Jim Dustin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:55:12 GMT

Spot on article! Like walking down the street and stepping in a puddle- only to discover it’s 20 feet deep!

You’ve so accurately found all the usual suspects of failure and pointed out that UX is often tacked on to major product efforts like some kind of optional shiny coating (the often implied premise that after all, something can still WORK if it doesn’t shine)!

The management behavior of hiding from accountability for bad decisions is at a chronic level in most large organizations and I think this is due to the popular practice of managing upward, also known as CYA and kissing up. After all, this is where bonuses and promotions come from. There is no incentive to find and stave off failure. There is no appetite to hear about problems and attack them ruthlessly. For this to really work, it has to be part of the process.

One statement stood out for me… “Complete alignment to strategy is expected across the entire team. Late-arriving user experience “findings” that could conflict with internal strategy will be treated as threatening, not helpful.”

I think we’ve all seen this, which drives to the real point. UX must be part of the strategy. If it’s treated on an equal footing with “requirements” which are functional, it would not be ignored, so therefore it would not be optional or threatening.

You had mentioned in one of your responses a reference to the Total Quality Management movement in the early 90’s, which I remember also. Part of the tenets of continuous improvement was to look for mistakes and reward for it. They often pointed to Japanese car makers and the Demming principles that actually celebrated mistakes and defects. Institutionalizing this across processes brought Japan out of the lowest quality of product, to eventually compete on the world stage as arguably the highest mark of quality over a couple of decades.

I guess what I’m saying is until that kind of upper management buy-in about quality comes back into favor and those goals become part of a strategy, UX will remain in a “nice to have” but not critical place. If we look at a customer-favored product like the iPhone, it’s very clear that user experience was a core strategy for the product. It could not have hoped for success under the Apple brand without the disciplined philosophy of UX that Apple demands. Failure to get the user experience nailed, would have sunk the product.

So to be on equal footing or integrated with requirements, UX must be present much further upstream at the concept stage of any project—and must be written into the strategy brief along with everything else strategic to success criteria.

You’ve actually framed this up by saying: “Because we are closest to the end user throughout the entire product development lifecycle, UX plays a vital early warning role for product requirements and adoption issues. But since that is not an explicit role, we can only serve that function implicitly, through credibility, influence and well-timed communications.”

I would suggest that along with the early warning of failure, that UX has to be in an explicit role. The implicit role feels familiar and is very prevalent out there, however it feels like a victim role. It’s true that through communications, credibility and influence we remain productive, but for success we have to be at the table with executive sanction from the top of the house. I also agree with Masood, that THE most powerful tool we possess—to cross all of these organizational barriers, is the ability to prototype and show a vision of end state. Thanks again for the great article Peter!

Peter Jones — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:59:22 GMT

James, Masood – Thanks for your comments. There’s a lot more to tell, but we were unsure about an article as long as this in the first place. And as you’ve intuited, creating an organic demand for UX is the key thing in a socialization approach. You know It’s working when – you find others around the organization are seeking you out and trying to work it out with your boss to get you on their team! I am familiar with a number of large organizations, and the socialization takes off when UX people are given the organizational support to diffuse the practice and your value to other product lines and new projects in their planning phases. Even giving informal presentations outside of your reporting line helps spread the value of UX practices. But in practical terms, we need to find ways to be advocates and part-time advisors to other projects, which will create demand back to the UX organization. I’ve seen this work with only 2 UX people in a large organization. Gotta go now, I’ll try to say some more later!

Masood Nasser — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:55:37 GMT

James, as an attempt to answer your question, methinks that we can go the roundabout::-) way. What I have tried succesfully in the past is to get a buy in from the most passionate of your dev/ UX guys and prototype. In the usual waste of time meetings, show the concept and get interest. This will tremendously increase our chances of demand

Cheers
Masood
http://masoodnasser.blogspot.com

Masood Nasser — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:13:21 GMT

Brilliant. Agree with James that it is one of the best in BA, ever. This is the same struggle that I faced while working for most organizations. The need of the hour is an avalanche of User experience leadership, a transition from the doer’s, to the thinkers and the doers, and as you rightly said being the influencers.

Once again, thank you and this is an article that the team has to read, read, read and internalize

Cheers
Masood
http://masoodnasser.blogspot.com

James Kalbach — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:39:08 GMT

Peter,

Thanks for a great article. Really brilliant stuff. For me, this is one of the most significant stories ever written for B&A to date. That may just be my personal reaction because it felt like you were talking about my organization directly. (Maybe you were, in part: I work for LexisNexis).

Many UX practicioners in large companies are indeed at the bottom of the food chain, with little or no prospect of changing anything outside of his or her immediate project. So, I was hoping for even more practical advice on how to get the message out. I understand the difference between socialization and institutionalization, but some of your recommendations are still high level. Take #6, for instance: Build an organic demand for UX. Can you be more specific? How? With what activities?

Anyway, great story, and I appreciate your taking the time to share experience and knowledge in this area with the UX community at large.

Cheers,
James