How Usable is YOUR World?

Have you heard about Daniel Szuc? I had the chance to attend one of his recent talk, here in Wellington.

Topic: Sell UX

I simply loved his talk; I smiled several times
We are all working in different organizational cultures and it’s important to know in which one you are working to better understand how you should sell UX.

Challenges when you work in an Engineer-centric culture: (From Dan’s talk – slide 33)

• Tendency to deem a product usable if it is possible to do the task.
• Rely heavily on their own experience in UI design.
• Feel they are doing the right thing for the customer, even if they don’t have evidence.

Design-centric culture

• Define the UX in terms of aesthetics rather than ease of use.
• Focus on visuals rather than workflows.
• Rely heavily on their own instincts about users.
• Focus only on data that confirms their viewpoints.

Sales and marketing-centric culture

• Rely heavily on customers’ self-report and customer suggestions to assess usability.
• Disproportionately weight their biggest or loudest customers.
• Often overconfident in their ability to know what the customer needs.

These are real challenges, if you want to sell UX to upper management, you need to understand these. I have worked in all three cultures, or sometimes a mash-up of these and often, at that time, I was not aware of these challenges. It was harder to present UX and the benefits of doing user research.

Another point that stroke me was how often UX language is ugly. That’s true, we talk about heuristic analysis, card sorting, Information architecture assessment, etc
We prone usable stuff, but our lingo is not much understood across departments. What should we do?

At the end, here is his take in what sells:

• Passion - If you are not passionate by what you are doing, it will be very difficult to sell it to somebody that is unaware of your usefulness.
• Choose the right project - If you are in a big corporation and you feel alone having the goal to improve customer satisfaction/experience, try to focus on one project that you know your input with have an impact. Then, it will be easier to take it as a case study.
• Choosing the right tools – Don’t try to use the whole set of tools that we have, keep it simple to 1-3 tools that will add the most value for the current context.

Here is talk… sadly, there is no audio, but still worth flicking thru the slides.

Reference:

Daniel Szuc

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Conference by Olivier Lorrain