Solutions and Methods

As mentioned, I have been a user experience innovator in both small and large companies. And in both situations, it can be very challenging to make your voice heard. At the upper levels in many companies, it is all about numbers, quotas, and deadlines. In other parts of the company, it may be about satisfying a single customer. But in my humble mind, this is all a mistake. If you want to improve your numbers, then you need to improve your products. And in current markets (especially for consumer-oriented products), user experience is slowly but surely becoming a key differentiator. In other words, if you do not focus on user experience, the numbers and deadlines may no longer be relevant at all.

Following I will go through some solutions to the above challenges faced by user experience innovators. But keep in mind that they are not bulletproof. However, I hope that you at least get some inspiration about what you can do. Every organization and company is different, and some methods may work in one company but not others. However, I have compiled the methods that I personally feel have worked best.

Use Customer Insights

You will find yourself in a number of situations with numerous people who say that they know more about what the customers want than you do. You may be submissive, which will get you nowhere. Alternatively, you should use your insights about what the users and customers actually want.

There may be other parts of your organization that know about the customers—for example, people involved with market research functions. In this case, you will want to try to team up with your market research people.

Arguing from a customer insights point of view is a very strong method to get your ideas and opinions through. There are very few organizations and companies in this world that will officially say that they do not listen to the consumers. So what you will often experience is that people will listen when you can reliably say that 80 percent of the users have problems using this or that function in your product, or when you say that 50 percent of users have a need to do this or that with your product, and so on. So you will certainly need numbers to make your point. But you may not necessarily need extensive statistical data. If you can verify that, for example, three out of five users had serious problems using a specific part of your product, that may be enough to make your point. This will depend on the stubbornness of your organization. So use your insights, and use your data. This may even convince the most stubborn people in your organization.

Invite People to Workshops

Inviting people in your organization to user experience innovation workshops may be a very effective way to basically teach people in the organization how to keep the customers in focus. You may also want to invite lead users to some of the workshops, thereby combining direct user feedback with the methods and approaches for creating user experience innovations.

Workshops also have the wonderful advantage that almost all people attending them will see the ideas that came up as their own, and hence give more traction inside the organization to actually implement the ideas in your product. Workshops often also offer a very successful method to train people in thinking like a user experience expert or innovator.

It is important when organizing user experience innovation workshops to make them different from the normal meetings that the people in your company have (see Figure 19-3). I have personally seen many meetings in large corporations where people read and write e-mails all the way through the meeting, unless their favorite topic comes up.

You want to make your user experience workshops very different. Have the workshop in a park, inside a customer's house, or in some other interesting location. Invite real users to the workshop to loosen up the people joining the workshop. It is amazing how one comment from a single real customer can change the mind of even the most stubborn people in your organization. They can reject your point of view, but they will (hopefully) never reject the opinion of a user.

Try to approach the scope of the workshop in a unique and interesting way. For example, I have seen user experience innovation workshops held as Bingo sessions, where the participants needed to come up with enough ideas or core tasks to fill a card, I have seen workshops where the main scope was to build prototypes with LEGO bricks, and I have seen meetings held in unusual settings, such as a museum.

Figure 19-3. Find alternative ways to hold your user experience workshops.

In other words, try to stand out, not only to make your workshop participants get away from their daily routines, but also to make them think differently. It is OK to stand out, because as a user experience innovator you are already seen as different.

Create Cross-Functional Teams

If you are so lucky that you are able to create a cross-functional user experience team, then you have a very good chance of breaking the barriers in your organization. Cross-functional teams can create truly innovative user experience solutions that are detached from normal company thinking. Maybe your team will find mechanical or electrical solutions to a software problem. Or maybe your team of algorithm experts will find a genuine solution to create a truly new user experience. Or maybe your market research team has identified a unique user need that no one else in the market is currently covering.

Being cross-functional or multidisciplinary may vary depending on the nature of your product and organization—for example, at a web-design company, looking at mechanical solutions may not be relevant. But then you can bring in people from different levels of software development, from marketing, and even from management.

If you are not lucky enough to be able to create an isolated user experience innovation team with multiple disciplines, there is still hope. You can basically create the cross-functional team on a per-need basis, and you can invite these people for specific workshops. Most companies today allow each employee to take part in meetings and workshops that do not relate directly to their expert area. And you will actually find that these people will often love to join such workshops.

Isolated and dedicated user experience innovation teams may become a potential problem, however, since they can be seen by the rest of the organization as an unapproachable ivory tower. This can be avoided by assuring that the team members are involved also with ongoing product development, by frequent rotation of people into the team etc.

In sum, if you are the only user experience expert and innovator at a small company, you should invite people from other disciplines to your workshops. This will not only give you valuable insights, but it will also slowly direct your company and the organization to be more focused on user needs and the potential innovations hidden there.

Provide Examples from Competition

Another approach to convincing your organization about the need to focus on user experience innovation is by providing good examples. You may want to use examples from your direct competitors—for example, in cases where they have successfully gained market share due to better user experience (similar to how I've used the example of the Apple iPhone several times in this book to describe how successful user experience innovation can be created). Your product and business may be different, so find your own good examples among your competition.

So, use your competitors, and for that matter other businesses, to make your point, and to convince the people in your organization that changes are needed.

Do Internal Marketing

Internal marketing of user experience innovations cannot be emphasized enough, whether you're working at a very large organization or a small company. To be successful in internal marketing of what user experience innovation can do for your product or business area, you will again need data from real users. This data may tell you that your current product is extremely difficult to use, or it may show that your customers prefer another product. All this data will be useful.

You may also want to set up meetings with upper management to tell about why it is important to focus on the user experience, where you basically teach them about user experience and user experience innovation. In this case, you will want to have concrete data about why your company may be losing ground to competitors, and how the (lack of) user experience innovation is contributing to this. If you can even dig up some financial data about what value it would have if you focused more on user experience, so much the better. But putting a figure on the value of user experience is generally difficult.

Deliver Great Ideas and Prototypes

Bringing truly valuable ideas into your company or organization is probably one of the most effective methods of changing the attitudes about user experience innovation in your company.

Again, I would use user data to approach this challenge, and, for example, use some of the many methods already described in this book. Give management the true story about how the users see your current product. Tell the story about what your users really want, based on facts, insights, user tests, and so on.

You will also want to show your user experience innovation ideas with prototypes, be it with animated PowerPoint slides, Flash animations, prototypes, or similar.

Let Decision-Makers Participate in Usability Tests

Another approach to convincing people in your organization about the value of user experience is to invite people to usability tests. A usability test is a great way to convince people in organizations where user experience is not yet valued at all. Seeing real users struggle with your current product is a good eye-opener for people who believe that they know how the products are seen by users.

Conduct Street Interviews

I have already mentioned street interviews as a method for getting quick insights into the user needs and desires. Street interviews (Figure 19-4) are also good for changing the attitude in an organization toward user experience. Letting people from your organization stand face to face with your customers can be eye-opening for almost everyone within your organization.

Figure 19-4. Street interview example

Street interviews may apply to certain types of products, especially consumer products, but they may be trickier for technical products for which you may not likely meet your customers on the street. In this case, you may want to invite people in your organization to people's homes, to their workplaces, and so on. If you are, for example, designing products used during surgery, then invite people to a real surgery.

Involve Yourself in Specific Products

I have myself very successfully used this method. One of the best ways to show what you can contribute to for a specific product is to actually contribute to that product. The project manager who ensures on-time delivery of your product may not be your first point of contact, because they may see you as a person who suggests innovations that may take time and resources to implement. You might instead go to a product manager or some other person with a customer or user focus. This could be a product manager or a software chief with a sincere belief in creating a great product. This will depend on your organization and company, of course.

What you want to do in this case is propose tangible and highly marketable solutions, based of course on the methods described in this book.

You may need to compromise many times during this process, but your main goal is to get more and more people accepting and respecting what you can bring to the product. And the method is—as described a bit earlier—to suggest tangible solutions that may make the specificproduct great.

Teach Internally

Internal teaching is seldom a success, unless, as described previously, you use very good examples from your consumer insights, from pain points you've identified, and from competition. In my experience, the people who would voluntarily go to a teaching session on user experience and user experience innovation are few—or they may already be part of the niche group of people inside your company who have already seen the light. So, my suggestion in most cases is to rather try to sell your teaching as something else. You may use phrases such as how to tackle our strong competition or bringing the company back onto the profit track. Yes, this sounds like marketing-speak, and admittedly, it is. But successful user experience innovation may be extremely important for your company in the very near future, so why not sell it like that? There's no need to be too academic and use dull phrasings such as user experiences are important for future products.

In my mind, too many user experience experts and innovators make the classic mistake of being academic and claiming that user experience is complex. I disagree with this. User experience innovation is not academic, and it is certainly not something that only a few select companies in the world cancan do.