Building a strategicuxteam-uxindia14

BUILDING A STRATEGIC UX TEAM
Insights from effective UX teams
Sarah Bloomer
UX India | 9 October 2014
SarahBloomer & Co | UXIndia 2014
1

Our goals for today
Part 1- Assessing your Team
•Your issues
Part 2 – Your world
•Company culture
•Business goals
Part 3 – High performing teams
•Team models
•The attributes of high performing team
Part 4 – UX leadership
•Leading vs managing
2

Who is Sarah?
•Usability Engineering
•User Centered Design
•User Experience Designer
•UX Director
•Coach & Mentor
•Mom
3

Who are you?
Stand up if:
•You are a UX team manager
•You are a UX team of one
•Your team is brand new (less than a year old)
•Your team is more than a year old
•Your team is global and spread across different countries
4

First let’s define organizations…
Software
Enterprise
Creative Agency
The software is the business
Software to support the business Website or webapps to deliver services
Work with software companies and enterprises to help them design user experiences
5

What you’re creating
•Commercial software
•GUI
•Web app
•Internal software
•GUI
•Web apps
•Enterprise apps
•Websites
•eCommerce
•Marketing
•Informational
Single platform Multi-platform
6

What is your biggest team challenge today?
Discuss with your table:
•Write down the top challenge you are trying to solve Tell your table:
•Your company
•The type of organisation: Software, Enterprise or Agency/Consulting
•Your team size
•How long your team has been set up Do you have a shared challenge or are they all different?
7

The Big Stumbling Blocks
•Wrong focus—no alignment to business goals
•Team lacks direction or cohesion
•Lack of communication
•No champion or stakeholder support
•Being unaware of your corporate culture
UX teams and UX strategies fail when….
8

Your team lives in a bigger world
People Methods Location Vision
Your UX Team
Your world
Culture UX Maturity Interaction
9

What is a UX Strategy?
UX Team Acceptance
Product Vision
Integrated CX strategy
Business Goals
Brand Strategy
Market Share
10
There are many different types of UX strategies

What makes a UX team “Strategic”?
11
IMPACT
EFFORT

Five tactics for teams big and small
Communicate
Share, knowledge share, integrate
Educate Enable others
Adapt Change, try it out, improve
Leverage Find allies and opportunities
Facilitate Help others, integrate
12

YOUR WORLD
How corporate culture impacts UX
13

Each situation is unique
Business goals / drivers
Product(s) & Team
Process
What
How
Who
When
and
and
Constraints
Company culture
The sum of the parts will help determine the best approach
14

Start with your company culture
"the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization."
Charles W. L. Hill, and Gareth R. Jones, Strategic Management. Houghton Mifflin 2001.
•Myths
•Values
•Barriers
•Opportunities
15
Culture drives the values and norms that drive actions
K. Goodwin: Leading UX UX London, April 2011

Identify barriers and opportunities
A barrier may prevent or undermine the adoption of UX
•UX is new to the organization
•No skilled people
•Design research is under valued
An opportunity may help with acceptance of user experience activities
•New senior manager with previous UX experience
•Initiative to reduce the calls to technical support
•Developers don’t have time to design and code
16

Identify myths and values
A myth is a belief held by your stakeholders
•UI design is subjective and cannot be measured or engineered
•If we design for ourselves, it’ll be fine
A value is a belief that defines the culture through actions
•Developers are rewarded for rescuing failing projects
•Pleasing senior management is good regardless of solution
•We’re a consensus driven organization—everyone gets a say in the design
17

Discussion
Small groups:
•Pick one barrier and one opportunity at your company from the list presented
•Tally the similar barriers and opportunities
•Discuss them with each other: why?
Together:
•What are the shared experiences?
18

Barriers
•UX is new to the organisation
•Not enough UX resources
•Difficult to hire skilled UX people
•Not enough time to do research or evaluation
•Product management “owns” the user interface design
•Big egos / lots of politics
•Limited access to users
•Lack of trust between Development and Product Management
•Short sprints cause Development to change design to meet deadlines
•Design research is under valued
•[your own]
19

Opportunities
•Well accepted user experience team
•Senior management willing to ‘champion’ usability
•Other staff are interested in user experience (eg QA, tech writers)
•Starting a new product
•A company reorganization
•New funding for more resources
•A huge product failure
•Initiative to reduce the calls to technical support
•Developers don’t have time to design and code
• [ your own ]
20

Another angle on culture
Design centric
Engineering centric
Paul Sherman. Changing Processes and Cultures. Nov ‘07
Creative approach to design
Tend to design for designers—visually oriented
Technology driven Have always owned the user interface
Believe they know their customers Features over usability or user experience
Sales & Marketing centric
Find ways to collaborate that match the values of the culture
21

Increase acceptance by meeting half way
•Engineers like:
•Rules, standards and patterns
•Deadlines
•Designers like:
•Wireframes with latitude to do their own thing
•Opportunities to be innovative
•Sales & Marketing like:
•Feature lists
•Research
22

Analyzing the culture
Engineering/ Development: Process: Design decisions: Performance: User Experience:
Formal or informal?
Requirements driven? Technology driven?
Deadline/budget driven?
Creates nice pictures? Critical to success?
Communication: User research and feedback UX Vision
Yes or no? Coordinated or fragmented? Shared and understood or not?
Product Definition:
Ownership:
Design decisions:
Product managers? Marketing? Engineering? User Experience Team? Feature driven? Competitor driven?
23

Be strategic by understanding culture
Barrier: Small UX team Design research is under valued
Myth:
If we design for ourselves, it’ll work fine
Value: We have to adopt Agile because everyone else is
Communicate: Start small design research activities focusing on strategic design issues Educate: Demonstrations of effective designs Usability testing Facilitate: Bring groups together, don’t work in isolation Provide tools and resources Leverage: Collect user experience data from customer facing groups Adapt: Embed yourself with key scrum teams
Opportunity:
Adopting a new approach
24

UX STRATEGY
Move into a position of influence
25

What is a UX Strategy?
UX Team Acceptance
Product Vision
Integrated CX strategy
Business Goals
Brand Strategy
Market Share
26

3 tips for creating a UX strategy
27
1.Align your strategy with business goals
2.Track your impact
3.Communicate
Be clear about what is driving your UX strategy Identify business goals you can impact Build your activities and UX goals to support the business goals
Create UX or Design Goals as a framework Determine success metrics NPS or Forrester’s CXi
Talk up the attributes of your vision
Create comics or storyboards
Present your designs or concepts

What are business goals?
A goal should be
•Action oriented
•Completed within a target time frame
•Specific and well defined
•Achievable yet challenging.
Business goals reflect the strategy of an organisation (how), how to accomplish the mission (what).
28

Corporate vision and goals
Samsung Electronics Vision 2020
http://www.samsung.com/sg/aboutsamsung/ samsungelectronics/vision2020.html
29

Discussion
Small groups or pairs:
•Review your one barrier and one opportunity
•Review your biggest challenge
•Write down one business goal from your company (that you are allowed to share) or make one up
•How can UX help achieve the business goal?
•Will the barrier or opportunity may impact your team’s ability to support the goal?
•Will your challenge be a barrier to helping achieve the business goal?
30

Be aware of other forces
Goals
Location
Approach
People
31
Company culture Business goals UX maturity

UX strategy drivers
What are you trying to achieve through your UX strategy?
Influence how we do things
Change the culture
Improve a product or service
Improve development efficiency
Get people to think differently
Better product design
What are yours?
32

A strategy looks to the future
An experience strategy:
1.Anticipates and accounts for future form factors, technology platforms, and user expectations
2.Promotes a perspective on the character of uniquely GE product experiences
3.Uses values and principles as guides to design and development.
Case study:
GE wanted to drive revenue and growth through user experience practices
•UX Framework
•UX Process
•UX Principles (tied to brand promise)
GE UX Center of Excellence
http://archive.mxconference.com/2012/videos/building-ux-and- design-culture-at-ge/
http://www.slideshare.net/UXSTRAT/ux-strat-2013-susan-rice
33

What is a UX Design Goal?
A UX Goal describes the experience you aim to deliver, using adjectives you’d like to hear when others review or describe your product. They define the goals of your product and drive design decisions. A design goal:
1.Helps distinguish your product from your competitors. (Jared Spool)
2.Is aligned with your unique value proposition and brand experience
3.Guides design decisions
4.Can be applied to multiple products to create a common, shared experience.
5.Is broad enough to be defined more narrowly, eg what is “speedy” on a desktop app vs a mobile app?
6.Is the way you want your customers to describe their experience
34
Align

Create UX Design Goals
Kronos
Innovative Our products are modern and unique in both visual appearance and behavior. We lead the industry in leveraging the latest advances in technology. Easy to learn Like your favorite consumer products, minimal training is needed to get started. Fast & Responsive Speed matters. We balance ease-of-use with powerful features that optimize task completion with minimal time and clicks. Engaging & Playful Solve complex problems with enjoyable interactions that are an extension of customers’ everyday experiences. Smart & Powerful Make better decisions. Our products harness the power of technology and industry experience to deliver insights when and how a user needs them.
35
Align
Kronos Workforce Management

Derive UX goals from business goals
Experience Goal
Issues
Business Objectives
UX Requirements
Success Metrics
Customer is confident that TN will streamline their training management
•Users report that they often enter the same prospect multiple times, so they are called repeatedly.
•Sales isn’t aware when a course is close to full
•Courses underperform when registrants drop out late
•Administrative staff are often interrupted and lose their work
•Enable sales to sell the product based on productivity gains
•Increase the number of customer reference sites
•Reduce customer support calls
•Improve admin staff efficiency
•Enable information to be viewed in different ways in multiple locations in the organization
•Create reports for management which reflect improvements
•Create a top notch customer database
•Customer contact logs are shared by all users
•Implement persistent save
•10% reduced customer support calls
•Increase time to proficiency from 2 months to 2 weeks
•20% increase in customer satisfaction
Company: TrainingNOW
36
Align

7 Evaluation Guidelines
User Objectives and Actions
Layout & Visual Treatment
Orientation
Language & Terminology
Feedback
Forgiveness
Navigation
At Kronos,we aligned UX goals with design principles and taught product management how to critique against the goals.
37
Kronos Workforce Management
Communicate

Track effort vs impact
IMPACT
EFFORT
38
Track

Establish specific metrics
Measure
Benchmark
Timing
Ownership
Productivity improvement
Reduce task time by 20%.
Track and time current process (usability and end-users)
1.Usability test during dev
2.6 months after launch
Product Owners
UX Team
Customer satisfaction
Reduce customer complaints by 10%
Capture current survey results
Monthly for 6 months
Customer Service
Sales
Increase sales by 10%
Capture current statistics for past year
Every month for a year
Sales
Some companies like metrics, some don’t. For those who do, choose your metrics carefully. Don’t be afraid to go for non-measurable goals: “our customers report that it’s helped their work.”
39
Track

Talk it up all the time
Reduce your vision to 5 attributes that fit on one hand
Modular for quick updates
Supports multiple roles
Easy to learn UI
Enables collaboration
Seamlessly integrated with other systems
Describe the attributes during meetings and elevator conversations
40
Communicate

Show the UX vision
•User narratives, tell stories
•Conceptual prototypes
•Comics and Storyboards
•Kevin Cheng at kevnull.com
•Davy Hoornaert on Printrest
•Video
•Knowledge Navigator (1987)
•Mozilla Labs & Adaptive Path Aurora
•Microsoft Silverlight Productivity Future Vision
Knowledge Navigator: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGYFEI6uLy0
Aurora: www.vimeo.com/1347289
Microsoft www.officelabs.com/Pages/Default.aspx
Microsoft's Future Vision : Live, Work, Play 2013
41
Communicate

Building influence is change
Skepticism
Curiosity
Acceptance
Partnership
When you introduce a new approach, you’re asking your company to change
Enrlich & Rohn, 1994
User interface design and evaluation, Stone, Jarrett, Woodroffe & Minocha 2005 www.useit.com/alertbox/process_maturity.html
42

YOUR UX TEAM
Fit your team into your culture
43

The UX Team ingredients
Goals
Company
Location
Approach
People
44

People: What roles do you need?
Interaction Designer
Information Architect
Front End Developer
Usability Researcher
Writer
Content Strategist
Front End Developer
Visual designer
Application design:
Website design:
Interaction Designer
Visual designer
Usability Researcher
Writer
Business Analyst
45

UX today
Interaction design:
Navigation
Layout
Controls
Style and tone:
Visual treatment
Language
Interaction design Information architecture Development
Visual design
Writing/Editorial
Deep customer knowledge: Ongoing research and feedback Evaluation
User research
Experience analysis
Usability testing
Analytics
Technology: Opportunities/constraints Trends
Technology Responsive design, social, mobile etc.
46

Emerging roles
•Product Steward Tim McCoy
•Represent user needs and goals
•Manage product vision, framework
•Provide creative direction
•Collaborate with team
•UX Architect
•Works across program within a product/multiple products
•Reviewing designer
•Drive vision & strategy
•Lead special projects
•Typically found in large UX teams: 2 on a team of 30 designers plus 10 writers
Slideshare: Lean UX Product Stewardship and Integrated Teams
47

Make sure the team fits into the culture
Create roles your culture will accept right away
•Engineering: evaluation and needs analysis
•Design: information architecture and evaluation
•Sales & Marketing: research (by stealth) and evaluation
Recognize myths and values, change from within Build allies and demonstrate complementary skills.
•Engineering: collaborate in UI design
•Design: clear hand-off from wireframes to visual design
•Sales & Marketing: share customer research; prioritize feature lists. Invite to usability testing sessions
48

TEAM MODELS
Find a good match
49

Where should your team live?
Software
Enterprise
Creative Agency
Product Development 30%
Product Management 40%
IT Department 40% Product Management 28%
N/A
To be strategic: Locate your team where product decisions are made
Bloomer: Effective UX Teams 2013
50

UX team models
Centralised
De-centralised
Hybrid
Advanced
Typical
Range of skills applied as needed
Center of Excellence
Generalists assigned to specific product teams
Communities of practice
Specific activities centralised, others team based
Teams of specialists and generalists
51

Models to structure your team
Project
Project
Project
Project
Centralised
All projects go through the same team
Software companies Consulting companies
Pros:
Consistent approach
Cons:
Projects require different levels of effort
52

Models to structure your team
Decentralised
Project
Project
Project
Project
UX practitioners work individually
UX manager
Software companies
Pros:
UX knows their product well; works in Agile
Cons:
Lack of communication across products causes variable UX
53

UX practise models
Project
UX manager
Hybrid
Specialist activities are centralised (eg. usability testing)
Enterprises (non-software) Design Agencies
UX research UX testing
54

UX practise models
Project
UX manager
Hybrid
Specialist activities are centralised and shared
Enterprises (non-software) Design Agencies
Writing/Editorial
UI Development
Visual Design
Customer research
UX product strategy
Project
Project
For example:
Personas, Journey maps
Shared components
Research results
55

UX practise models
Project
Guild model
Project
Project
UX manager
Project
Project
QA
2 Engineers
Product Owner
UX manager
Work individually UX meets together weekly for one full day
Software companies
56

Communities of practice
Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. (Etienne Wenger 2007)
Community: engage in joint activities, help each other, share information
Practise: shared stories and experiences, shared tools.
57

Build internal communities of practice
Build relationships within your organization through Communities of Practice. Promote cross-functional collaboration. Cross-functional teams drive ongoing research, design and evaluation.
Customer research
Customer facing experience
Product Strategy
Branding
Marketing
UX Team
Product Strategy
Personas
Field studies
Analytics
Sales Stores Customer service Tech support Training
Personas
Stories
Customer feedback
Voice of the Customer
Sales Marketing UX Team Tech Support Product Development
Usability test results
Tech support issues
Release plans
58

Focus your UX design efforts
Priority projects:
UX team works directly on product team
2nd tier projects: UX team facilitates the product team’s work Provide UI standards and resources for self-serve
3rd tier projects:
Educate and facilitate: Share the outcomes of priority projects
Project
Project
Project
Project
Project
59

HIGH PERFORMING UX
How to create a team that works well together
60

The attributes of high performing teams
•Good listeners
•Listen to other points of view
•Able to relate to other people
•Strong communicators
•Make shared decisions
•Collaborative and relational
•Continuously learning
•Each project teaches something new
•Build collective intelligence
•Reflect on what works and doesn’t work.
•Teams should be launched and relaunched
•Agree on goals, challenges, roles and engagement (charter)
Amy Edmondson. www.athenahealth.com/leadership- forum/_doc/Teamwork_On_The_Fly.pdf
Daniel Pink. Drive. Book or watch this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
61

Skill Development
Soft skills
Shared knowledge
Product consistency
UXers must work within many teams
User Experience Group
Product Team
Expertise subgroup: eg. user research, testing, interaction design
Applied skills
Hard & Soft skills
Communication
Process (eg Agile)
Applied skills
Hard & Soft skills
Communication
Shared knowledge
UX practitioners must excel at working with long term and short term teams
62

UX teams include different types of people
sequential detail-driven, anal logical analytical rational, clinical, disciplined objective quantitative literal, word- and number-driven
nonlinear, random
holistic, big-picture, strategic
intuitive
synthesizing
emotional, instinctive, passionate
subjective
qualitative
visual and image driven
Emily Cohen: Managing creatives in a left-brain world
63

What is your biggest team challenge today?
Group Discussion:
•Review your team challenge from earlier
•What would you do differently with your team to address your challenge?
•Different team model?
•How the team works together?
•How the team works with product teams?
•Develop new skills?
64

UX MATURITY
Evolving UX acceptance
65

UX maturity
Skepticism
Curiosity
Acceptance
Partnership
Stop battling for acceptance
and get strategic
Ehrlich & Rohn, 1994
www.useit.com/alertbox/process_maturity.html
66

Show and include
67
Users
Business Analysts
Product Owners
Stakeholders
Product Team
Users
End users
Developers (participatory)
Stakeholders (observers)
Definition workshop
Field research
User story mapping (Agile)
Process mapping
Brainstorming
Sketchboarding
Collaborative paper prototyping
Design studio
Group collaborative walkthroughs Participatory paper prototyping Usability testing
5-9 participants
2-9 participants
1-2 participants
Group of 5-10
Discover & Analyse
Envision & Design
Evaluate & Refine
Required skill: facilitation Especially useful for teams of 1-3

Spread your value to gain acceptance
Adjacent teams
Colleagues
Allied teams
Beneficiaries
Upper management
Stakeholders
Your UX team
Other beneficiaries
Facilitate & communicate: Capture goals, thoughts and needs
Leverage & facilitate: Support their goals
Educate & collaborate: Customer support, marketing etc.
Collaborate: QA, Tech writers etc.
68

Collaborate to communicate
69

Focus your message to the audience
Increase sales Lowers support and training costs Reduces IT development costs Increases product quality Increases user acceptance Increases productivity; fewer errors by end users Decreases staff turnover
Fewer late design changes Potential re-use Shortens overall development cycle Meet goals of a sprint Increases product quality Decreases maintenance cost and effort
Greater satisfaction; less fatigue
Reduces training time and effort
Less time spent seeking support and help
Less learning required
Fewer errors; faster error recovery
Fosters focus on the tasks instead of the technology
Senior managers look at the bottom line of any investment or development.
How UX improves my costs?
IT managers are measured on ability to meet budgets and deadlines
How UX helps me make my deadline and stay within budget?
Users want better and more appropriate tools & experiences
How will this help me do my task better?
Return on investment
Performance goals
Satisfaction and use
Senior management
IT management
Users
In-house development
70

Focus your message to the audience
Increase sales Lowers support and training costs Reduces IT development costs Increases product quality
Fewer late design changes Potential re-use Shortens overall development cycle Meet goals of a sprint Increases product quality Decreases maintenance cost and effort
Increases product quality
Creates a more competitive product
Increases Net Promoter Score
Greater customer satisfaction
Aligns with the brand strategy
Senior managers look at the bottom line of any investment or development.
How UX improves revenue?
IT managers are measured on ability to meet budgets and deadlines
How UX helps me make my deadline and stay within budget?
Sales & Marketing want to have the right story
How UX helps me increase sales and market share?
Return on investment
Performance goals
Market differentiation
Senior managers
Engineering managers
Sales & Marketing
Software development
71

Some approaches
I can’t do customer research
UX doesn’t own the design
Educate Become a co-designer Facilitate Co-design/design brainstorms Share reusable design assets Communicate Demonstrate your vision Write stories, create prototypes Adapt Relocate your team to be with the decision makers
Leverage
Work with customer facing teams
Sales Customer Support Training
Market research
Customer satisfaction surveys
Communicate
Engineering
Design
Sales & Marketing
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72

MANAGING YOUR TEAM
Leading and managing
73

Management vs Leadership
“Just being able to be there for others and to listen to them is one of the most important capacities a leader can have.”
Joseph Jaworski Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership
“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."
Peter Drucker, Essential Drucker: Management, the Individual and Society
74

Making your team effective
•How your team works together
•How your team works with others
•Hard skills
•Soft skills
•Attributes: build trust and make it safe to explore designs
•Primary things we do:
•Meetings and workshops (work together)
•Design or analysis (work alone)
75

The attributes of a good manager
76
•Operational skills
•Plan and delegate
•Domain expert
•Set clear expectations
•Positive recognition
•Leadership
Necessary skills when leading both an ad hoc team, or an established team
Soft skills
•Active listening
•Empathy
•Honesty
•Humour
•Keep your cool
Be a guide, not a commander.
Martin Zwilling, Forbes

Managing user experience
77
People Assign work: communicate expectations and deadlines Avoid surprises: give feedback constantly through weekly meetings Develop skills through team reviews, paired work, mentoring
Process
Integrate UX activities with development process
Work both fast and slow
Be flexible
Build a library of common design elements
Projects Prioritise and choose strategically Don’t be afraid to say no

UX Leadership
•Working with your team:
•Build trust
•Appreciate different styles
•Give feedback; take criticism
•Mediate conflict
•Enable learning and mastery
•Build a shared vision and approach
•Working outside your team:
•Communicate vision
•Mediate conflict
•Negotiate
•Communicate, communicate, communicate
78

Spread your value to gain acceptance
Adjacent teams
Colleagues
Allied teams Beneficiaries
Upper management Stakeholders
Your UX team Other beneficiaries
Facilitate & communicate: Capture goals, thoughts and needs
Leverage & facilitate: Support their goals
Educate & collaborate: Customer support, marketing etc.
Collaborate: QA, Tech writers etc.
79

Group discussion:
What is the first thing you’ll do when you get back to work?
80

Wrap up
People
Methods
Location
Vision
Your UX Team
Your world
Culture UX Maturity Interaction
Communicate Educate Facilitate Leverage Adapt
81

Thank you
Sarah Bloomer
w: sarahbloomer.com
e: sarah@sarahbloomer.com
@boolie
82

Sample values
•We need to ‘innovate’ and make cool technology
•Pleasing senior management is good regardless of solution
•The product managers are king
•Developers are rewarded for ‘rescuing’ failing projects
•Staff who don’t ‘rock the boat’ are safe in their jobs
•Clever code solutions are applauded
•Risk is dangerous
83

Sample myths
•UI standards can’t be implemented for all the diverse needs of the user groups
•If I design for myself, it will work fine
•UX conflicts with Agile
•If developers are familiar with the interface guidelines and principles, they’ll design good user interfaces
•UX specialists are not technical enough to grasp the requirements of systems development
•Requirements are anti-agile
•Users don’t know what they want
84

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